Sunday, December 27, 2009

Merry Christmas. I think my lack of blogging in the past couple of months has switched most followers off so perhaps I should commit to blogging more often as a New Year's resolution.

We are in Nelson for Christmas and relaxing as we always do here. There is some snow here but not as much as last year so our journey up on 22nd was a lot quicker. The scenery was just as spectacular though. The snow covered mountains were beautiful and the rivers and lakes partly frozen but with the absence of brilliant blue skies we didn't experience the same sights on the way up as we did last year. On the last trip the partly frozen rivers were bright blue as the sun shone through the thick snow covered ice. This year we had cloudy skies all the way up so the variety of colour was missing but it was still spectacular.

For the first time in years I didn't get any CDs for Christmas but I've been buying enough in the charity stores recently to make up for it. I did buy The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall on Christmas Eve in a second-hand record store in Nelson. I have it on cassette in storage but I'm gradually trying to replace my tape collection with CDs as I find them. I might struggle with a few of them though and end up having to buy a second-hand cassette player in a charity store for $10. There's plenty of options for these machines and I suspect that most of them actually work pretty well but for $10 I can afford to try a couple until I get one that works.

I'll have to buy a hif first though. I bought a hifi magazine last week and depressed myself at the price of the various boxes you can buy. Record players have taken off again as the music business has embraced this old technology again. Most bands are releasing their material on 180gm vinyl so the hifi companies are developing the technology to keep up. But from the evidence in that magazine, it comes at a price. I'm sure you can buy the equipment in the hundreds of dollars instead of thousands but it would be great to b able to afford the quality and have a room to house it and the rapidly growing collection of CDs. There's even more vinyl in the charity stores so I will have fun wen I eventually buy a hifi.

In the meantime I will have to rely on the iPOD and the cheap machines that they plug into. Either that or we buy a quality iPOD stereo and make do until we buy a house. I think I will have to continue dreaming for some time to come.

Tracey bought me the complete Monty Python box set for Christmas. This is all the TV shows, a couple of live performances in the US and a couple of documentaries. I also bought the box set of the recent Monty Python documentary that was shown on the TV in Canada in November so I have a lot of comedy to watch...if I get the chance. A friend of ours leant us a DVD set of House, Series 4 and I watched that in a few days, driving Tracey crazy at the same time so I will have to watch Monty Python in sections I think.

I finished a course on speaking in public recently and one of the assignments was to give a couple of persuasive speeches. One of mine was to encourage the class to listen to different bands instead of the mundane piffle that the majority of the world seems to be listening to. I listed the following to teach them:

1. Marvin Gaye's What's Going On
2. New York Dolls first anonymously titled album
3. London Calling by The Clash
4. Velvet Underground and Nico
5. Three Feet High and Rising by De La Sol
6. Bryter Layter by Nick Drake
7. Nod's as Good as a Wink by The Faces
8. Super Ape by Lee Scratch Perry and the Upsetters
and of course
9. The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall.

I wonder if any of them will listen to any of this selection or will continue listening to Lady Ga Ga. Sadly I think the latter.