Summer Update

So, we've passed the unofficial midpoint of summer 2012: The Fourth of July. I took a few days off of work and went down to my parents' house to hang out in their air conditioning, because it was super-ultra hot and icky outside.

Now that things have cooled off slightly, I've been trying to make myself get outdoors a little bit each week. I've been taking one of those collapsible camp chairs and a library book up to the lake a few days a week after work. It's nice to catch a breeze up there and enjoy looking out over the water. 

As a result, I've been plowing through my reading list. I finished Rolling Thunder and   The Year of the Gadfly yesterday. Thunder is part of the John Ceepak mystery series that I've been reading for a whileGadfly is something I picked up at random from a display in a CCPL branch I don't usually go to and then turned out to be really good. I'm also working my way through the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books by Laurie R. King

What else have I been up to? Oh, I figured out how to sync my iPod & iPad over wifi. Last night I was unreasonably excited to be able to transfer a playlist from the laptop in the bedroom to my iPod without having to go to the living room to dig it out of my tote bag and then rummage around for a cable.

I'm listening to said playlist now -- it was just a "recently added" playlist that included two albums I downloaded via Noisetrade: live sets from Rhett Miller of the Old 97s and Red Wanting Blue, a band that started in Athens about three months after I left town. I'd heard of them, but never really heard them. They sound okay so far — I haven't skipped any songs yet, but I haven't been impressed enough to hit "repeat" on one either. I have a hunch these are the kinds of songs that grow on you as opposed to being immediately catchy and hummable.

Conversely, I can't stop humming after I've been in the car, because I'm listening to Carole King read her autobiography, A Natural Woman. I'm at the point where she's in California, recording Tapestry and hanging out with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, so as she mentions the different songs she was working on, I start singing them to myself. I need to load them (and the songs she wrote that were recorded by others) onto my iPod so I can listen to better singers than me. Maybe I'll start working on that playlist this weekend.


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