crunchysteve

kalloway posted a book report / media roundup, which made me realise that I haven't done one of these in a while. The most recent I can find is from early April, which means I have four months worth of reading to annotate. *sigh*. I wish I remembered these things more frequently. This is only going to be longer works; short stories have been somewhat captured elsewhere. This is approximately in order april to august, but little attempt has been made to create an exact timeline.

I'm a little bemused to discover that I've finished 20 books in four months, even if some of them were carried over from previous and two were for uni.

( four months means a lot of notes )

Back channel, I hear that local folk musician Greg Hastings has passed away. I gather there is/was a public memorial, but I didn't hear the details. I'd gathered that they weren't well--there was a mention on stage at the Albany festival that people should go visit--but not any details.

I bought a tape of Windstorm from Greg at the Toodyay Folk Festival in about 1985 - possibly off a table on the verandah at one of the pubs. I played that tape until it ceased to function. Somewhen around 2005, I ended up chatting with Greg at the Fairbridge Folk Festival, and asked whether or not it was available for purchase. They were apologetic, but made noises about still having the master tape. And some time after that, I acquired the CD (probably also at Fairbridge, and the Festival tent). It is still one of my favourite albums.

Other people might remember Greg from Jenny's Place*, where I remember them as a regular. Also, I think, a sometimes member of the Mucky Duck bush band (although my memory could be faulty in either direction, such that was an always member, or was never a member and I have conflated two musicians). Greg also did kids shows - while our kids were in daycare, there was some kind of summer family picnic with Greg as the entertainer.

I was going to link my favourite song here, but I'm not finding it on any of the usual locations.

* folk music venue. I don't remember if it were weekly or monthly; we went intermittently. It was some kind of room around the back of the eponymous Jenny's house; large enough for a reasonable side friendly audience and a bit of space for performers. I was going in the 80s; I have no feel for how long it was running.

I'm struggling to maintain control over my reading of my dwircle. Allocating more resources to it (mostly time), not optimal. And thus I've decided that I'm going to trim down the number of communities I'm in, and the number I'm following.

Because, when I looked at my profile, I'm a member of 78, and following 147. Not all of these are highly active (and some are dormant), but there are several highly active ones I've been scrolling past and feeling vaguely uncomfortable about the fact that I'm not engaging at all (there are others, like common_nature, where I lurk, but very much appreciate what people are sharing). Today's goal is to get the membership at or below 50, and the subscription at or below 100. More than that is for future me.

I figure that throwing half an hour at it now is going to serve future me well.

Artisanat is looking at a world map colour coded by what the emergency services phone number is. Some amount of conversation, and I leaned over to look at the map, to discover that Australia, Aotearoa, Brazil, and some of the north coast of Africa are the same colour. Which, what?

When I look at the legend, it is 'has a code only used in that country'. So, for those of you not in Aus, the emergency services code is 000. It used to be that for mobile phones it was 112 but I'm not sure if that is still the case (Youngest tells me that they couldn't actually do 000 on a previous phone because that would have brought up 'characters not otherwise accessible' and not zero).