Here's What's Up

I recently got a smart phone. And, yes, I've already made the jokes myself about how my telephone has more intelligence than I do so you can save yourself the effort.

Said phone is currently my only access to the Internet unless I venture either to the nearby public library or farther north to my parents' house. Yes, there are also numerous cafes with WiFi but if I wanted to pay $5 every day to log on, I'd just go ahead and get Verizon FiOS. And I need to spend less time online, not more.

I mention this to explain my lack of regular updates here on the blog. Well, that and not having a lot to report. Especially now that I've shared the smart phone news.

Yes, I could thumb-type little missives on my phone but I don't get a sense that anyone is holding his breath waiting for my next entry. If I did, I'd send that person an e-mail directly advising better use of his lung capacity.

I will brag about completing my annual mission to avoid junk food and to work out every day in January. This marks five years in a row I've accomplished this. Granted, some (OK more than some) of the workouts lasted less than ten minutes but at some point I pulled out the weights and did some work with them. Every day. All month.

With hit-or-miss freelance work now tilting more to the miss side, I added two more aspects to the New Year's challenge. I also played at least some guitar and piano each day of the month. Again, we're not talking hours of practice, here. Even I can stand to listen to myself play for only so long before nausea sets in.

This would explain why my high school friend Jamie doesn't e-mail me any more. Through alignments of planets and stars that would baffle Stephen Hawking, she may be the only person who has subjected herself to hearing me perform music in person twice. She is probably doing all she can to ensure that she has heard the last of me. Literally.

That doesn't count Mrs. Schneider, the teacher of the four piano lessons I had when I was 17. She was paid the princely sum of $4 per lesson and, by golly, she earned all of it. It also doesn't count my brother Jim, who listens to anything I post here but that's recorded and — through a generous amount of computer enhancement — sounds almost like music.

I did have a story I wrote about the Venice Gondoliers Barbershop Chorus air on WEDU last week. The station doesn't have video online that I can embed here but you can click here to watch the episode. My story comes about 14 minutes in.

Don't worry, that's not a request. I just put the link there to prove I wasn't making that up. You can watch the show's end credits if you don't believe me. Or you can just continue not believing me. That might be easier.

Last Friday, I did interviews for another WEDU story. Riverview High School in Sarasota (not to be confused with Riverview High School in Riverview) has a marine biology program. It even got a license from the state to operate a fish farm right in the classroom. Grants funded construction of the tanks, adapted from concrete burial crypts!

That reminds me. I should be transcribing the interviews instead of writing on a blog.