Tag Archives: #best09

best of 2009: music

December 10, 2009

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

Today we come to December 10 — Album of the year. What’s rocking your world?

There’s an implication that I should be writing about music that was released this year or failing that, music I discovered this year. Trouble is, I haven’t been listening to new music that I can name. Sure, I’ve heard new songs this year, and some have been great, but I have very poor memory for music and artists and I can’t name them now.

Recently though, I rediscovered and renewed just playing music and that is rocking my world.  Last month, I finally installed an MP3 package (aka Amarok) on my work system and I’ve started putting my CD collection on the machine.  And I’m playing it.  I’ve also started listening to more albums in the car.  This might all seem like nothing to you, but it’s a change in my world and it’s a good one.

The music is mostly old.  But if  you must know, the albums I’ve started with are: True Stories by Talking Heads, Life’s Hard and Then You Die by It’s Immaterial, The First Songs by Laura Nyro, Everything’s Different Now by Til Tuesday, The Bobby Darin Story, and a lot more.  I have a lot of CDs to convert to MP3.  But no worries…getting there is more than half the fun.

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best of 2009: moment of wonder

December 8, 2009

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

Today’s prompt is December 8 — Moment of peace. An hour or a day or a week of solitude…The state of your mind? How did you get there?

There are a few deer who frequent my backyard off and on during the year. They live in the woods that are around the houses here. One is a lame doe (she manages very nicely on her three good legs, thank you). who brings her offspring around each year. I Iike to watch from the kitchen window, and sometimes I try to photograph them, though I generally can’t get very close or they run off. They seem more tolerant of Juliet-kitty, so I also have to watch out that she doesn’t wander too close. Juliet is getting very brave with the visitors and has started moving slowly towards them a few times, especially when there is only one in the yard.

One afternoon in October, a young deer was in the yard along with Juliet and I was watching from the side stoop, trying not to startle it. But Juliet was curious about the visitor and edging closer. I moved out slowly and spoke softly, trying to entice Juliet to come back to me and also hoping not to run off the deer. Juliet ignored me, but the deer looked up and watched me. And it remained in place. I never got right up to it, but I did get fairly close. Then afraid to spook it, I stopped and we looked at each other for a few seconds. My moment of wonder…this was not a tame tenant of a petting zoo, but an animal of the wild. And I’m a city-raised kid and kind of clunky and clutzy…I never get near to the wildlife in my yard. I felt a bit of awe getting closer to its sphere. Then I retreated carefully, slowly, gently so that it would stay, which it did a while more, before it moved off back to the woods and wandered on.


This is Juliet and one of the deer, not that day. I was nearer to the deer for our encounter, probably as close as Juliet is here.

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best of 2009: best of 2009

December 6, 2009

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

December 7 – Blog find of the year. That gem of a blog you can’t believe you didn’t know about until this year.

I modified this prompt a bit to be about just one blog post, the one that started all this:

Gwen’s post is truly a gem for me, because it’s pushing me to write. I put up a post a couple of weeks ago about wanting to write more and not coming up with posts I was happy with. Along with a review of the year to find the good that was there, entering this challenge has helped me write, just write. I have topics to get me started and as I push myself to write these entries, I’m learning that each one doesn’t have to be the perfect post to have merit. I’m not saying I want to be lazy in my writing, and I’m not being that. I work on these notes for hours just to put up a few paragraphs. But I used to start writing and then junk it, or just not start at all. Now, at least I’ve put up a few entries and will keep going all month. I won’t post every day: I skipped the previous two days because I had nothing to fit the topics. But I will continue this challenge. And I’m writing publicly, too. I’m shy, and before this challenge, I never announced my posts to anyone but a couple of friends. I hadn’t even told my family about the blog, except mentioning one post to one brother. Now I tell the world (well, the world on Twitter) about these entries. That might be the norm for everyone else, but it’s a big step for me.

Something else is happening here, too; the challenge is working for me in another way. By thinking in terms of finding the good things from the past year, I find I’m relaxing and getting a little cheerier about life in general and more optimistic about the coming days.

Thanks, Gwen!

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best of 2009: devoted reading

December 4, 2009

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

Ever since I saw the list and started just thinking about trying this challenge. I’ve been wondering what to say for today’s question:December 4 – Book. Gwen fleshes this one out by asking: “What book – fiction or non – touched you? Where were you when you read it? Have you bought and given away multiple copies?

I read for pleasure, to relax, not specifically for inspiration or insight. Even the occasional non-fiction book I read is for fun (math can be fun, people). That doesn’t mean I don’t connect with my reading material, but it’s not my goal. So what this boils down to is that I’ve picked a book I think is great, but that’s not because it moved me on some deep level. It’s because it was a pleasure to read and I was sorry when I finished it.

I’m a big fan of the TV series Dexter, about a serial serial-killer killer. At some point, a year or two ago, I learned that the show is based on novels by Jeff Lindsay. This spring I read the first three books of the series: Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Dearly Devoted Dexter, and Dexter in the Dark . The middle book is my best of 2009.

The first book is very good and was exciting to read. I like the book on its own and also enjoyed comparing it to the show. But the second book was a thrill to read. It’s very dark and very disturbing, which is not what I usually like, but it’s so well done, I didn’t care. I don’t think I was inspired or enlightened by this book (if I was, I need help :-), but It isn’t just mind candy, read and forgotten immediately. It stuck with me a while, as a good book should.

You know….just writing this post makes me think about reading it again.

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best of 2009: not high art, but …

December 3, 2009

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

So today we have: December 3 — Article.…. Gwen asks for the one that “blew you away.”

Gotta confess: I don’t read that much onscreen. It feels wrong and bothers my eyes a lot…plus I don’t like to read sitting up most of the time and I don’t have a computerly setup to use to read lounging around. I read news stories and work related sites at the office and I look at links sent by friends for fun stuff. But I don’t travel the web a lot, going from site to site, blog to blog. I’ve been doing it more and more lately, but still not a lot.

I thought of a few articles that stood out this year, inspiring me, making me think and act and laugh and cry, but they just weren’t the single standout webpage find of 2009.

The one thing that did blow me away was finding a video of something I think about often, but hadn’t seen for way too long. It’s the opening credits of the TV show Cupid, the original version starring Jeremy Piven and Paula Marshall. I loved that show. I know it’s not high art and these days I don’t think it’s the best show ever made. But I enjoyed it; no, I savored it, and to this day I miss it. I bought the Pretenders album Viva el Amor! and memorized the song Human which was used in the opening. And one day at work this summer, I was looking at a Youtube link someone had emailed and in a moment of inspiration I searched for and found Cupid. Ahhhhhh. Now if they would just collect the series on DVD, I’d buy it in a second.

Here’s the link to the page on Youtube, though you might not enjoy this as much as I do :-):

Youtube - Cupid - Intro

Youtube - Cupid - Intro

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