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A thoroughly gray day...
Jan. 26th, 2012 10:28 pmThe weather outdoors was not conducive to maintaining a positive, happy-go-lucky attitude, but I managed to keep my chin up and my spirits buoyed with the arrival of about 12,000 words of work.
Which isn't to say I was jumping up and clicking my heels all day long, but at least the arrival of work did improve my mood.
I've been going through a box of cassette tapes I found in the basement, and it would appear that for the most part, they are recordings of classical music—mostly piano pieces—that my mother taped from radio broadcasts. They are not labeled very well (a handwritten "Mozart" or "Liszt" is about as detailed as it gets), so I'm not quite sure what impelled my mother to go to the trouble of making the recordings. Perhaps she was waiting for something exceptional to come out of the radio? I don't know.
Also among the cassettes was a recording my mother made of my stepdad explaining to her how to use the VCR up in the den. I could not help but smile while listening to it, because my mother's almost studied inability to comprehend what was being explained eventually pushes my stepdad over the edge, linguistically, into full swearing-like-a-sailor mode. My mother—bless her—simply did not grok any technology more modern than the electric typewriter and the automatic transmission. Electronics, I recall, scared her to death, and so did computers.
I've also run across one tape of a broadcast by Carleton Fredericks, who had his own show on WOR radio that my mother would listen to any time she had a chance. Fredericks was an interesting character. Although he had earned a Ph.D. in public health, he was not a medical practitioner, and that didn't keep him from studying and reading about nutrition, chemistry, and medicine (and then relating what he had found to his audience). I enjoyed listening to the man talk; I liked his tone, timing, delivery, and language. On occasion, I even learned something.
In the "belated wishes" department, Happy Day-After Burns Day!
Cheers...
Which isn't to say I was jumping up and clicking my heels all day long, but at least the arrival of work did improve my mood.
I've been going through a box of cassette tapes I found in the basement, and it would appear that for the most part, they are recordings of classical music—mostly piano pieces—that my mother taped from radio broadcasts. They are not labeled very well (a handwritten "Mozart" or "Liszt" is about as detailed as it gets), so I'm not quite sure what impelled my mother to go to the trouble of making the recordings. Perhaps she was waiting for something exceptional to come out of the radio? I don't know.
Also among the cassettes was a recording my mother made of my stepdad explaining to her how to use the VCR up in the den. I could not help but smile while listening to it, because my mother's almost studied inability to comprehend what was being explained eventually pushes my stepdad over the edge, linguistically, into full swearing-like-a-sailor mode. My mother—bless her—simply did not grok any technology more modern than the electric typewriter and the automatic transmission. Electronics, I recall, scared her to death, and so did computers.
I've also run across one tape of a broadcast by Carleton Fredericks, who had his own show on WOR radio that my mother would listen to any time she had a chance. Fredericks was an interesting character. Although he had earned a Ph.D. in public health, he was not a medical practitioner, and that didn't keep him from studying and reading about nutrition, chemistry, and medicine (and then relating what he had found to his audience). I enjoyed listening to the man talk; I liked his tone, timing, delivery, and language. On occasion, I even learned something.
In the "belated wishes" department, Happy Day-After Burns Day!
Cheers...
