Musical Coincidence

 As I tend to do when I have time off, I was just scrolling back through old posts here. It's nice to see what I was up to, say, 10 or even 20 years ago (which reminds me, the 20 year anniversary of this blog passed by unremarked earlier this year), and coincidentally enough, I just noticed that I listened to the same 3 CDs in the same sequence almost exactly 20 years ago. To wit, Mekong Delta "Pictures at an Exhibition", Mercyful Fate "Return of the Vampire", and Metallica "Garage, Inc." The observant among you may have noticed that all of the band names start with the letter M, which is due to my habit of periodically relistening to music in the order it has been shelved. 

Yuletidalwave

 It's Christmas Day, and we're still hours away from celebrating our secular version of the holiday. Much of the country is currently being blasted by arctic winds and snow, but I see mostly blue sky out my window. Rain is forecast for tomorrow night, and is likely to linger for the rest of the coming week. 

Typed to the tune of: Loreena Mckennitt "Under A Winter's Moon"

Like Letters Never Sent

It's not a drought-breaker, but it has been raining all day. The trees I can see from my window have been dancing, a few gulls have lazily circled underneath a gray sky, and a soggy neighborhood cat crept along the fence earlier. I do love looking out the window at rain.

I'm having a nothing day, where I laze around the house, listening to music. I also watched a DVDr of Conor McGrady's somewhat abstract Entering the Forbidden Zone, featuring a foreboding soundtrack by Nurse With Wound, put some clean dishes away, and put some batteries in the charger so I can take my blood pressure later.

But mostly I listened to music.

I've been spending time with a regular group of people most Sunday mornings, going out birding. We're heading out tomorrow, despite the chance of lingering showers. I'm toying with the idea of focusing on writing about these excursions here, but I don't know if that will actually happen. It would provide a much-needed focus to this blog (yeah, I know that blogs have passed their sell-by date by a decade or so... but keeping one is still better than the wading through the shitshow that is social media). 

I have one more week of work this calendar year (but still much of the school year to go). As usual, I'm late with holiday gift shopping.

It just occured to me that these posts are sort of like letters never sent. I don't usually tell people about this blog, and I don't know of anybody who reads it (kind of hard to keep interested in a blog with such long gaps of silence), so in all likelihood this will go unnoticed and unread, until it fetches up on somebody's beach like a bottled message.

I hope this message finds you well, hypothetical future reader.

Snapshot In Time

 Nearly 20 years ago, when I started this blog, I didn't have any real idea what I wanted to do with it. I still don't, although I occasionally find myself scrolling through old entries and finding moments that otherwise would have been entirely lost. We never remember as much as we think we do. 

So, I'm breaking my silence to provide a current snapshot in time. 

It's raining for the first time in what seems like forever, although the drought will not be broken by this paltry drizzle.

A pair of Mourning Doves have built a nest on a convenient outdoor shelving unit which is inconveniently located at eye-level a couple of feet from our door. The male, his job done, has essentially buggered off, and the female has proven to be a lackadaisical caregiver. She hasn't been on the nest since sometime yesterday. We do have a local Cooper's Hawk, so it might not be entirely her fault. I hope she has survived and that she comes back to finish her job.

I'm currently listening to the first of 45 (or so) cassettes I received in the mail yesterday from Bulgaria. Most of them are by pioneering Bulgarian electronic musician Simo Lazarov. This is going to take awhile.

I just watched the late seventies Australian occult horror film, Alison's Birthday, which is part of Severin Films' massive folk horror Blu-ray boxset, All the Haunts Be Ours. I think I'm more than halfway through the set now. Lots of interesting films that I missed the first time around, plus at least one absolute favorite (Clearcut) made this a must-purchase for me. 

I'm currently reading Inhibitor Phase, by Alastair Reynolds, which is set in his Revelation Space universe. Within its pages, things look mighty bleak for humanity. Reynolds provides a more realistic take on space travel than that seen in a lot of other contemporary science fiction (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.), probably due to his PhD in astrophysics. 

My phone died a little over a week ago, and I mostly don't miss it, although I'll get another one sometime soon. It is a handy tool to have, after all. 

I've seen 183 species of bird so far this year, but who's counting? Hyperfixation is a thing.

Currently watching on TV: Star Trek: Voyager (season 3), Picard (season 2), and The Walking Dead (season 11, part 2) 

We're actually short-staffed at work, although multiple people are in the process of being hired/trained. Face masks still need to be worn, but in most other respects, things are slowly getting back to pre-pandemic normal. There seem to be new changes every week or so. The latest is having field classes be a mix of genders again (up until last week, cabin groups were also field groups, which made contact tracing easier in cases of Covid transmission). 

That's all for the moment. I predict I'll post again three or four months from now. 

Lengthening the Poem

 At least 100 crows just commuted by overhead. I saw somebody mention online that they roost somewhere nearer to the bay. Just now, they were headng southeastward, and in the evening they will be on their way back. Somebody is going to have to add some lines to the old crow poem. Maybe I will. In fact, I'll make that my new year's resolution.

Yet Another Year Rears Its Head Above the Horizon

 The first bird of the year for me was, fittingly, a crow. Three of them, actually. I consider that a good omen, even though the old crow poem indicates that three crows either means "a wedding" or "a girl," neither of which seem appropriate to my life situation at the moment (I'm married and I already have a daughter).

This just in - my continued perusal of the internet reveals that it could also mean "a letter" or "a celebration." Intriguing. 

At any rate, happy new year to all who read this, and to all who don't. If you count yourself among the latter, you will never know I wished you happiness. Such is life - an endless succession of missed connections.

Bring it on. Maybe this will be the year where everybody will finally learn to use apostrophes correctly.