Senses working overtime #523

1 Autumn at Maple Grove

Seasons seem to be speeding up. Feels like, just the other day, I was doing a post on autumn.

Above picture was the view from my music room when I got home from school last night.

2 Reading: Earth To Moon - Moon Unit Zappa

3 Watching: Andor (Season 2)

I'll need to rewatch this season - I was a little lost in the early episodes but it has steadily got better and better. The attention to detail is superb (even if the AI generated sets look a little obvious at times).

4 Reading: Lost Pueblo - Zane Grey

5 Listening: Jean-Luc Ponty - Imaginary Voyage

Overtime: James Clear

"Worrying about the future is like watching a leaf fall and trying to predict where it will land. Stop trying to guess where the wind will blow and get to work."

Senses working overtime #515

1 Essential item of the week:

 

Yes, I had a head cold all week and two days off work. Bleugh.

2 Autumn

Is there any better signal for Autumn's approach than a head cold? 

Here's a post from 2015 celebrating Autumn to get you in the mood.

Me and Bazie, 2015

The post doesn't have the clip of Dylan and Cash doing Girl From The North Country but you can listen to it here as you read the post.

3 Reading: Penelope Fitzgerald - Offshore

4 Listening: Michael Nesmith - The Prison

Pretty much a perfect record. It's beautiful and certainly suited my mood this week.

5 Watching: 1883 and 1923

Especially loved 1883, both are prequels to Yellowstone.

This article on the Dutton family tree is excellent, too.

Overtime: 

Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.

Hermann Hesse

Senses working overtime #514

1 The feeling this week: Autumn is coming

Photo by Altınay Dinç on Unsplash

2 Compiling: WTWMC - Aussie Battlers

30 of 90 songs selected - check how we're doing.

3 Listening: Desert Island Discs - Ian Wright

Arsenal legend! I'm a big fan of the BBC's Desert Island Disc series. Wrighty's choices are interesting and he tells great stories.

4 Blogging: Goo Goo G'Joob

Stats for the last six months of my music blog have been insane with 34, 600 views in that time. I'm not sure why - I still do what I've always done - my own idiosyncratic views on the music in my collection. Weird.

5 Reading: Fifty box office bombs worth watching

Overtime: 

Malcolm McLaren’s headstone reads, “Better a spectacular failure, than a benign success.”

Senses working overtime #470

1 Autumn at Maple grove

Yes, a return to that tree at Maple Grove. Leaves are clinging on.

2 Reading: Maktub - Paulo Coelho

I'm trying not to read this too quickly. A couple of pages a day is enough - otherwise I won't digest the messages and I need to savor the experience.

3 Reading: Degrees Of Separation - Laurence Fearnley

After taking ages to read Bleak House and Scattershot, I'm whizzing through two books too quickly.  

4 Listening: All About Me - Mel Brooks

I am still enjoying listening to this audiobook on my daily commute. Mel Brooks! What a guy!

5 Watching: All Quiet On The Western Front (2022 German version)

I have had this on my Netflix list for ages and we plumped for it last night. I'm usually not keen on foreign language films dubbed into English (I'd prefer to watch it in the original language with sub-titles, but I knew I'd be outvoted). Didn't matter too much with this visceral portrayal of a tragic story. Haunting is an overused adjective, but it sums up the experience of watching this film.

Overtime: 

Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

Voltaire.

Senses working overtime #468

1 Autumn at Maple Grove continues.

2 Reading: Scattershot - Bernie Taupin

Yes! Having finished Bleak House and the current Mojo, I'm on to this easy read (thanks to K Simms esq for the loan).

3 Listening: Fleetwood Mac - Future Games

Rediscovered this one this week. A five-star classic.

If you want a sample of the Christine McVie magic held within its grooves, try Morning Rain.

4 Listening: Mel Brooks - All About Me

5 Listening: WTWMC True Colours

Amigo Kev has this week's choice (he's gone slightly rogue and chosen 'blues'). Watch in real time as the three amigos grapple with choosing 5 songs from the 2 billion with 'blues' in the title. Choices drop from Monday onwards.

Overtime: 

Writer and designer Edith Wharton on what causes old age:

"The producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia.

Habit is necessary; but it is the habit of having careless habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways."

(Courtesy James Clear)

Senses working overtime #466

1 Weather this week

Looks like a colour printing gone wrong right. Maple Grove today.

2 Watching: Pain Hustlers

Emily Blunt and Chris Evans on form!

3 Reading: Bleak House

Up to page 380. Over half-way!

4 Listening: Explosions In The Sky - Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Live Forever

And if you want just one track from this instrumental post-rock album by American foursome Explosions In The Sky, try final song With Tired Eyes, Tired Minds, Tired Souls, We Slept. But the whole album is great.

5 Reading: Seth Godin - The color-coded wires

Have you ever wondered what the wiring layout behind the control panels at Abbey Road studios was like?

Neither have I.

The Beatles recorded some of their best work there, and I have no idea if it was a rat’s nest of tangled wires, or if each wire was labeled, coded and perfectly aligned.

Just as I have no idea if Eliot Peper writes his novels in Scrivener or Word.

Yes, of course, for sure, it helps if your tools are properly arranged and maintained. Yes, it saves time and effort to embrace mise en place and get your workspace right.

But making it even more right, alphabetizing the pencils and making sure your servers all have the right names–that’s simply stalling.

Overtime: Marcus Aurelius

Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust or lose your sense of shame or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill-will or hypocrisy or a desire for things best done behind closed doors.

Senses working overtime #461

1 The feeling this week

Photo by Vlad Patana on Unsplash

2 Reading: Mick Jagger - Philip Norman

3 Listening: WTWMC - True Colours

The three amigos latest playlist on Spotify is in its early stages, but is destined for greatness. We've done pink, now watch it unfold with orange this coming week.

4 Watching: Boy Swallows Universe

I really enjoyed the book, but the jury is out on the Netflix show after one episode.

We'll hang in there for another one.

Kylie Northover reviewing the series for The Sydney Morning Herald rated the series as five stars out of five, "As in the book, the mood is a tightrope walk between despair and childish optimism; the brothers’ lives are shaped by trauma, but this sprawling story is infused with humour and great warmth, even for the adults who have let them down." 

5 Reading: How risky are repeat covid infections?

Overtime: Seth Godin

Where are you?

When you’re reading a good historical novel, you might be there and then.

When you’re checking your email, you are in a conversation between and among, over there, not here.

When you’re imagining what went wrong in that conversation yesterday, you are living in yesterday.

And when you’re scripting the next conversation you’re going to have, you’re in tomorrow.

Time travel and teleportation have never been easier or more common.

What happens when we are here and now?

Senses working overtime #311

Home for the end of term holidays!

This week has all been about catching my breath, getting part 1 of the Covid-19 vax, reading books, listening to music, writing blogs, fixing fences, mucking out horse paddocks, picking up bags of pinecones (some help from Jade and Asher on this one), chasing chickens out of Jacky's gardens...basically getting school out of my system - it always takes 3 or 4 days to do that!

So - here are 5+ photos that sum up the impact on my senses this week.

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Overtime:  

Senses working overtime #307

1 The first week of autumn

Teigan Rodger on Unsplash

Mixed bag this week as I was sick and off work for two days, spent one day at school. one day at our Regional Athletics meet, and one day inducting a new Principal in Palmerston North.

Through it all, I read a lot, watched and rewatched some Juliette Binoche movies (when sick), bought a 14 CD set of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour of 1975, and struggled to keep up with my emails! 

All this and it was the start of my favourite season!

Here then is my week:

2 The Paris Architect

I struggled a bit to finish this off - too many implausibilities and I didn't ever warm to the main character.

3 A Spool Of Blue Thread

I love Anne Tyler novels - this is another great example. Three quarters through this one.

4 Not On Top

Listened to this a couple of times - an album by Herman Dune (a band). It's the latest album featured in the MNAC (Monday Night Album Club). It's growing on me.

5 The Rolling Thunder Revue 14 disc set

Overtime: Non-Fiction

Senses working overtime #252

1 Autumn

Autumn has arrived in New Zealand. Finally! 

For many of us, THIS is the best of seasons, with the change of colours, the cooler days, the rain (finally) after the Hawke's Bay many days of drought, the changing leaves in the vineyards as I pootle homewards are fun to follow, the shorter days/longer shadows combo, and yet it's not yet cold enough for fires or special heating and the extra layers of clothing are not quite yet a necessity.

I love autumn!

2 Seth's message for the week

Wasting it

When you bought your first smartphone, did you know you would spend more than 1,000 hours a year looking at it?

Months later, can you remember how you spent those hours?

When you upgraded to a new smartphone, so you could spend more hours on it, did you think about how you had spent so much of your ‘free’ time the year before?

If we wasted money the way we waste time, we’d all be bankrupt.

3 Poetry corner

Spiderweb From other angles the fibers look fragile, but not from the spider’s, always hauling coarse ropes, hitching lines to the best posts possible. It’s heavy work everyplace, fighting sag, winching up give. It isn’t ever delicate to live. Kay Ryan (2010)

4 The Immortal Jukebox

Great piece on Ry Cooder's version of I Think It's Gonna Work Out Fine (from Bop Till You Drop)

5 Brevity is great in an email

Photo by Webaroo on Unsplash

I'm winning the email war (for now - don't get cocky Wozza) thanks to this article.

Overtime: Extra Seth

The paradox of selfishness

Often, we choose to be selfish because we feel insufficiency.

“I don’t have that much, how can I possibly share it?”

The insecurity that comes from feeling like our foundation is weak or our future is uncertain can cloud our instinct to be generous. Like a drowning person, we cling ever tighter to the life buoy.

You see where this is going…

The single best way to find sufficiency and confidence and trust and forward motion is to do precisely the opposite of what our instincts might tell us.

In an economy based on connection, trust and attention, the posture of generosity is not only the highest-yielding strategy, it’s also the right thing to do.

Ideas shared go up in value. Doors opened turn into new opportunities for all.