Many, many years ago, my two younger sisters decided to record themselves playing piano, violin, and singing Christmas carols for our mom. I guess it was for Dad, too, although I don’t really know, since I wasn’t there for whatever reason (yeah, I was probably about 14 and way too cool to record cheesy songs for my mom). Anyway, the piano was L’s suh-weet elctronic keyboard, the kind that can do various sounds, not just boring old piano sounds. The synthesizer effects that they used were chosen, no doubt, to highlight the beauty and timelessness of the carols they played. Mannheim Steamroller didn’t have anything on my little sisters, no way.
Anyway, for all of your listening pleasure, Seth transferred the cassette to a more, ahem, shareable form, and I’ve posted it here today. Enjoy!
I’m having a sort of crappy day. Nothing particular has happened to make me feel so crappy (well, okay, the diet is not going so well. By not so well, I mean I’ve had a few days of staying the same and this morning I was up about a pound. I realize that this isn’t really so bad - overall, I’m still down, and my moving average is still going down. But it still sucks. I have a hard time removing myself from the frustrations of the every day fluctuations. I know this is why people tell you not to weigh yourself everyday. I know this, and I ignore this, and then I fight the frustrations that are to be expected. Bother.), but there it is all the same. I’m having a really hard time concentrating on anything, too, which is doubly frustrating, and I feel crappy. Nothing specific, just generalized crapitude.
There was a time, when I was little, when I thought that snowing was finished by the end of January. My logic (I’ll get to that in a second), though flawed, made perfect sense to my kindergarten mind. See, think about calendars. More specifically, think about the calendar motifs used around little kids. October? Pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns. November? Turkeys. December? Christmas trees and Santa Claus. January? Snowmen. February? Hearts. March? Shamrocks. April? Showers (for those May flowers, of course). Do you see? The only month that is devoted to snow is January. I expected snow before that, too, though. I’d heard White Christmas enough to know that I could expect snow then, too. But after January, the calendar focused on holidays that don’t necessarily have snow associated with them. Hearts! Shamrocks! Umbrellas! Fun! It only took 4 or 5 years of miserably snowy Valentine’s Days for me to realize that the calenders were not telling the whole truth. Oh! The dastardly things, leading me to think that January was the end of winter!
(Um, okay Lisbeth, so what?)
So, even though I know now that the end of January != end of snow, I do know that usually by March it’s more or less gone. And I know that since April was always the month that highlighted umbrellas, a rainy day (or week, whatever) is bound to occur. And, I even know logically that if there’s rain on a particularly cold day, the possiblity of the rain morphing into snow is not impossible. And yet.
Today is April 14th. There is snow on the ground. And I’m wondering where I can go to lodge my complaint.
I have some new Sega CDs to try out later. Three games in a torrent of, I think 98, finished while I was sitting at work with nothing happening. Yay, Underground-Gamer! I can hardly wait to get home, fire up Gens, and have my mind blown by the coolest thing the early 90s had to offer. Man, I would have killed for this stuff in Junior High. Maybe not Snatcher, I didn’t even now about it then, but now it’s one of only a handful of Sega CDs that I think of as legitimately good. It was the first game that ever managed to keep me playing until sunrise, and that’s quite an accomplishment considering I was 23 at the time. Up to then I’d never been so captivated that I lost time to that degree. Unfortunately I never did finish it, after I fell asleep the moment was gone. I think I’ll have to do the whole game in one shot. I’ll dedicate a caffeine-heavy weekend to it someday.
Also, I recently acquired a number of TurboGrafx CDs, and oh-my-god-are-they-ever-bad. It Came From the Desert is pretty cool, largely due to the fact that it was camp to begin with, and camp doesn’t generally fade. Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is like the Sega CD version, but with somehow magically worse video, and everything else was forgettable enough that I actually don’t remember them.* I’ll probably try them again later, either out of fairness, or self-loathing, or if I find a good way to capture the video from them** to put together a show, which is a post for another day.