what I did on my birthday

[kip_w]

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I goofed off around the house. I thought at first I might go out and see the Sponge Bob movie, but after a morning of puttering, I decided I needed an afternoon of puttering. I did some updating of backups and decided to scan a book of standard songs (folk songs through hits of the late teens). After I'd scanned a few pages, I decided to save post-scanning time and adjust the scan settings. That made things oodles faster. As long as I got it straight on the scanner, a scan needed no additional work beyond saving and naming the file. I gave the files names that gave title info as well as the page number, so that was even better. I was pretty happy with it, all in all.

I also thought I'd be looking online and at LJ more, but for some reason, I just didn't. It was kind of unusual.

A few days earlier, I increased my opera and vocal holdings considerably by harvesting some stuff I'd had for eons. A co-worker gave me all these sampler CDs. There were a couple of opera 'best of the year' disks from '93 and '94, samplers from Sony and RCA, and a whole pile of the CDs that came with Classical CD magazine. Usually, I scorn these, with their excerpts from movements, but with opera, these little chunks can be very entertaining. I ended up with almost a CD worth of mp3 files -- about 650 MB of them -- so I've been dipping into strange operas and enjoying it; finding new stuff.

When I was scanning, I put some of it on, and it helped the work go by faster. Then right at the end, when I'd scanned about 90 pages in a row, and the computer found a clever new way to dump them, it helped me re-scan 90 pages in a half hour in order to go pick Sarah up a little early and try to go to a playground. I say 'try' because Sarah dawdled and we lost a few precious minutes of daylight, and then she insisted on going to the playground that was farther away. It was so cold when we got there, I don't know that it would have made a difference anyway. I wish we had a nice indoor playground to go to.
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Comments

[armoire-man.livejournal.com]

Sadly, Maya has outgrown the giant-plastic-breakfast-food playground at a local mall. "There's too many little kids here," she grumps, and refuses to leap off the enormous banana onto the little banana slice nearby. Heck, I remember the good old days, when she was too small to even climb up on the bacon, let alone leap from waffle to waffle.

Operas are like musicals - it's really okay to just listen to the songs. But symphonies and concertos and stuff, nah, ya gotta have the whole thing.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

We've tried some of the fast-food playgrounds. One problem is they say you have to be three. Heh heh. Other than that, though, if there's other kids there, she gets shy and hangs back. Sometimes she feels like playing on them, but more often she doesn't. Lately, she's been raking for entertainment.

Yesterday I left work early to go pick her up in time to catch some daylight. Lucky for me she had her gloves, or it would have been over pretty quickly, with all the equipment being cold. It was over quickly anyway, as I miscalculated when I was hoisting her over a ladder and bonked her head on a climbing loop that I didn't see.

I agree about it being okay to listen to opera excerpts, not surprisingly. Mostly agree on the other, though there are one or two chamber pieces where I'll listen to out-of-context movements. The theme and variations from Schubert's "Trout" quintet are comfort food and always welcome (though now I have the whole thing available, and usually listen to it entire). There's a rondo movement in Rimsky-Korsakov's quintet for piano and strings that is a sheer delight, and I still listen to it without the rest sometimes.

When I sit down to the piano, my traveling sheet music (the black book and the white book) contain individual movements from stuff, and even a couple of pieces where I have a couple of pages out of something. To work on.

Just call me... FLEXIBLE MAN!!