![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glindaNothing like being back in the office to restore a sense of normality to your life. It was a short shift, but a busy one, so ideal really, kinda gave the rest of the day some actual structure.
I'm due to make a writing post and honestly the answer to what I wrote this month is: very little. I started a few things but made no real progress. Between health issues of my own and the wider mileau, I just didn't have the inspiration, though actually the current situation has given me a bunch of inspiration over at the food blog so everything I did get finished was writing over there. A total of 1044 words. *pulls face*
However, I want to get back into writing regularly and April's a better month for that. I meant to look out a meme or challenge of some kind but I forgot and now it's closer to midnight than I'd like so! 250 words a day. Every day. For the month of April. I'm not going to be short of time this month, let's use it well. (I don't generally count journal posts for these things and while it won't count towards wordcount for the month they will count as having written that day because it's about habit rather than pure numbers.)
What I did achieve last month though, was finishing knitting a jumper, I got the entire front knitted, the jumper sewn up and collar and cuffs picked up, knitted and finished while I was off work. It's currently drying on the clothes horse at the moment so I'm quietly delighted with that progress. Progess.
What I've Finished Reading/Listening To
Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem was the perfect book for last week, gently fascinating, revealing all kinds of hidden histories and it comes with not just illustrations/photos in the middle, but with a whole instagram account of it's own! Organised by chapter, so you can look up all the things she talks about in the book! Just delightful.
Podcast wise I listened to Season 15 of The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry which was interesting and enjoyable but not enough so that I feel the need to go back and listen to the previous years and years worth of episodes.
What I'm Currently Reading/Listening To
I started in on Threads of Life by Clare Hunter this week, which is the other book that I got before everything shutdown, and it's also a good choice for my brain in these times. Essentially it's a history of embroidery and sewing more generally. (The author is a textile artist, as well as being an academic, and as part of that does a lot of work on public art projects and the kind of artist in residence work where art therapy is very hands on.) Gently interesting and increasingly making me want to break out the cross-stitch and work on my own projects.
I'm glad I decided to start with the second series of You're Dead to Me because having caught up, I decided to go back and listen to the first series and....yeah it takes them a while to find their feet, I can see why I would have bounced off it before. I'm definitely going to be cherry picking that series..
Otherwise I'm mostly listening to one off or two-part documentaries that I find on BBC Sounds, there was one on Kraftwerk the other day that was really quite charming.
What I'm Reading/Listening to Next
In book terms I think I'll tackled my library books next. I quite fancy the architecture book, I think that might fit the mood right now. I think I've burned out on podcasts for the moment - I have been consuming a LOT of podcasts lately, binging whole serieses - or at least non-fiction podcasts. I was thinking about trying fiction podcasts again - they were talking about Welcome to Nightvale in a documentary I listened to earlier this week and I had a hankering - but then I remembered that I'd come across a pile of Big Finish audio CDs that I'd not listened to and that one of my resolutions for this year was to listen to those so I'm going to see about tackling some of them instead.
Speaking of digging around in the archives, if you enjoy classical music - particularly modern classical music - there's some cracking concerts on BBC Four at the moment. Whole concerts of music by both Philip Glass and John Cage recorded at the Barbican a few years back and a series called The Sound and the Fury which is a great introduction to modern classical composers if, for example, you heard Twenty Thousand Hertz's episode on Cage's 4'33" and wanted a bit of musical context.
I'm due to make a writing post and honestly the answer to what I wrote this month is: very little. I started a few things but made no real progress. Between health issues of my own and the wider mileau, I just didn't have the inspiration, though actually the current situation has given me a bunch of inspiration over at the food blog so everything I did get finished was writing over there. A total of 1044 words. *pulls face*
However, I want to get back into writing regularly and April's a better month for that. I meant to look out a meme or challenge of some kind but I forgot and now it's closer to midnight than I'd like so! 250 words a day. Every day. For the month of April. I'm not going to be short of time this month, let's use it well. (I don't generally count journal posts for these things and while it won't count towards wordcount for the month they will count as having written that day because it's about habit rather than pure numbers.)
What I did achieve last month though, was finishing knitting a jumper, I got the entire front knitted, the jumper sewn up and collar and cuffs picked up, knitted and finished while I was off work. It's currently drying on the clothes horse at the moment so I'm quietly delighted with that progress. Progess.
What I've Finished Reading/Listening To
Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem was the perfect book for last week, gently fascinating, revealing all kinds of hidden histories and it comes with not just illustrations/photos in the middle, but with a whole instagram account of it's own! Organised by chapter, so you can look up all the things she talks about in the book! Just delightful.
Podcast wise I listened to Season 15 of The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry which was interesting and enjoyable but not enough so that I feel the need to go back and listen to the previous years and years worth of episodes.
What I'm Currently Reading/Listening To
I started in on Threads of Life by Clare Hunter this week, which is the other book that I got before everything shutdown, and it's also a good choice for my brain in these times. Essentially it's a history of embroidery and sewing more generally. (The author is a textile artist, as well as being an academic, and as part of that does a lot of work on public art projects and the kind of artist in residence work where art therapy is very hands on.) Gently interesting and increasingly making me want to break out the cross-stitch and work on my own projects.
I'm glad I decided to start with the second series of You're Dead to Me because having caught up, I decided to go back and listen to the first series and....yeah it takes them a while to find their feet, I can see why I would have bounced off it before. I'm definitely going to be cherry picking that series..
Otherwise I'm mostly listening to one off or two-part documentaries that I find on BBC Sounds, there was one on Kraftwerk the other day that was really quite charming.
What I'm Reading/Listening to Next
In book terms I think I'll tackled my library books next. I quite fancy the architecture book, I think that might fit the mood right now. I think I've burned out on podcasts for the moment - I have been consuming a LOT of podcasts lately, binging whole serieses - or at least non-fiction podcasts. I was thinking about trying fiction podcasts again - they were talking about Welcome to Nightvale in a documentary I listened to earlier this week and I had a hankering - but then I remembered that I'd come across a pile of Big Finish audio CDs that I'd not listened to and that one of my resolutions for this year was to listen to those so I'm going to see about tackling some of them instead.
Speaking of digging around in the archives, if you enjoy classical music - particularly modern classical music - there's some cracking concerts on BBC Four at the moment. Whole concerts of music by both Philip Glass and John Cage recorded at the Barbican a few years back and a series called The Sound and the Fury which is a great introduction to modern classical composers if, for example, you heard Twenty Thousand Hertz's episode on Cage's 4'33" and wanted a bit of musical context.
no subject
Date: 2 Apr 2020 08:17 am (UTC)Oh, which ones?
no subject
Date: 2 Apr 2020 08:35 am (UTC)I also have the first season of Gallifrey (one of their website sales where everything's a fiver if I remember right) and the two Excelsis stories.
Before I got into audio drama podcasts, Big Finish were my main source of audio drama, so I had been fairly cracking through them for a while. I can see where I got into podcasts in a big way because my Big Finish consumption just stops dead! :S
no subject
Date: 2 Apr 2020 08:46 am (UTC)I'm very slow with audio because I can only listen to little bits in certain circumstances so podcasts are impossible (there are always so many neverending episodes!) but I do enjoy having something to slowly go through, so I usually have a BF or a radio thing somewhere.
no subject
Date: 2 Apr 2020 09:44 am (UTC)It's odd, over the last decade or so I've essentially stopped watching television as audio has become my primary medium. I do know what you mean about podcasts with neverending episodes, one of my favoured things about audio drama podcasts is that they require so much work on the production end that you mostly - unless you're WTNV do those guys never take a holiday - get reasonably short series of maybe 10 or 12 episodes that I can mostly keep on top of. It does make me nostalgic for a good Radio 4 adaptation where you get three or four tightly plotted episodes and that's that. But yeah, the Big Finish audios are ideal for that in that the stories are generally self-contained you can just listen to one and they mostly work out of order.
no subject
Date: 2 Apr 2020 01:17 pm (UTC)Yeah, that's what I've always done, and I'm behind even in that - usually Eight generally, Six and Evelyn and some Seven stuff.