Poets Day

I have been out a fair bit in the past week, going out to a variety of meetings in different places, so it has been a bit erratic when I have had a chance to get something decent to eat. Probably as a side effect of that, I seem to have been getting a lot of headaches, which becomes a little self perpetuating. Once your head is a bit fuzzy, your judgement is a bit fuzzy, and you do tend to lose a bit of perspective.

Slightly weird on Friday, when I could not focus my eyes for about half an hour. Certainly disconcerting at the time. This growing older has little to recommend it.


All told it has been good to get out and see some new people. I think in our nature of work it is incumbent on people to be accessible and get out, though whatever you do, is only the merest scratch of the surface. Some very impressive thinking and practice going on, which I would like to draw on.

Got a chance to visit a new Apple Store - wow/hmmm - wow in the sense that it was very impressive, hmmmm - in the sense that it was very clearly a premium sort of place, no cheap end of lines to be had, big tables with lots of the same model, which you could just play with for a while. Quite a simple idea, but useful, as it allowed me to try out the new aluminium keyboard, which seems okay, but I'd like the keys to have a more positive action, and to look over the laptops, I think that the small white laptops just look more laptop sized, so I would probably just go for one of those. Some software, but not a vast selection. A lot of people around, but it was that sort of place, it needed to have folk milling around, or it would just be a big empty barn. The staff seemed friendly and helpful, which is good, as otherwise it might be a bit daunting.

Not too sure what I did yesterday, nothing too much, but after a long week, I am not going to OD on doing nothing much.

• a bit of reading the papers, I do like the Times on a Saturday - not sure I will ever read it cover to cover, but a good read, with some very good regular columns. One of my daughters is even starting to get into reading it. She also came home from school shocked, telling us about how dreadful the Nazis were to the Jews and did we know about it! Pointed out to her that we did actually know about this, and Stalin and Mao were equally appalling.

• Having bought four Mountain Goats albums and two EPs, I now have enough of their music to just play it on shuffle whenever I am out iPod-ding. But always good to add to it, though less good to be buying it at the rate of an album every week or more. Accordingly delighted to come across various Mountain Goats music available for free download.

I should of course point out that this is all via 'official sources' namely
http://www.themountaingoats.net/wiki/doku.php?id=mp3s:home

I am particularly impressed with the live music recordings, I guess that they will be pretty variable with some being absolutely dreadful in terms of sound quality, but the ones I have listened to so far, are pretty okay for sound quality, and the good natured joshing with the audience more than makes up for that. In fact quite a few of the songs sound lighter and brighter live, with the recorded versions being a little austere. Although the subject matter can be quite dark, there is always a sense of humour at play. These are songs of self-dramatising characters, and always border on the absurd.

So I have downloaded various rarities to my ipod, and a few concerts, which I will add to. It is a little tricksy, getting the stuff into iTunes, but double clicking on the downloaded MP3 seems to work best.

The forum on the official Mountain Goats site also looks to feature less spelling mistakes than most, and more thoughtful/amusing comment.

• Also yesterday, did a trip to get some last brambles. However on checking up, we have now passed Michaelmas, 29 September, so according to tradition, the devil has either spat on, or urinated on the brambles, and they should not be picked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackberries

Although some were a bit mouldy looking, and there were less with that wonderful sheen of a really good berry, it was a good picking, and the dixie was filled reasonably quickly. Took them home, crushed them up, decanted the juice into a pyrex to sit, and we can add it as a jus to ice cream. I firmly believe that we need to be emulating the diet of a hunter-gatherer, so the more berries the better.

• Also steadily putting more stuff onto iGTD which is one of these task management tools. Not sure that I have quite got the hang of it yet, but starting to get there. Once set up with recurring tasks, it should imply chug away reminding me of what I need to do.

I am slightly in two minds about work, I suspect that we should be more ambitious in what we are attempting, but I am not sure that it is within my means to do this. As ever long walks with the dog are always beneficial in figuring out where you want to go with things.

Finally - poets day on Friday - piss off early tomorrow's saturday. Came up with an opening line for a poem -

its good to be a dog

now to write the rest of it