Disclaimer
I started blogging with Blogger in 2005 and slowed down as I reached my blogging end in 2010. I have attempted to save all the blog entries in monthly archive pages. It's quite interesting to go back and see my novice, naive enthusiasm for music making and playing, as well as for travelling. I also notice that I used a lot of exclamation marks! I must have been excited. For a while, anyway... I note that I slowed down quite a bit from 2008 onward; the momentum of my first batch of songs—written, released, and toured—had worn off. Also, I was amidst my first real bout of homesickness—I was living in New Zealand at the time.
A couple things to note. Some of my spelling is American rather than British/Canadian (I'm Canadian). Regrettably, I note that I used the word "tits" a lot—for a while—without being conscious of how senseless, unnecessary, and thoughtless doing so was. Please take what you read with these grains of salt.
Return to the root/index of the blog.
December 2007
Friday, December 21, 2007
Dear Steven and George
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Christmas sours summer Down Under
Christmas - a time of hustle and bustle, with people mashed together like potatoes in the big consumer pot, shopping and shopping and shopping to mangled festive music seeping out of store stereo systems. The pressure builds, anxiety flares, frustration lashes out.... until the big day pops... and then everyone shuts down for a week.
I have realized that living in the northern hemisphere has an advantage over living in the southern hemisphere. In the south, the Christmas epidemic runs rampant at the brink of summer, diminishing it (summer) for two weeks or more. In the north, Christmas occurs at the brink of winter, when the sun barely graces the land with its glamorous rays, and in no way affects our precious summer!
Christmas was meant to be in the winter. Sleigh rides loop through moon or star-lit snow and return to warm winter fires. Ovens floweth-over with baked goodies and hams and turkeys, warming homes and appetites. Santa Claus, who lives in the North Pole (where there is lots of snow) has a sleigh, and sleighs are meant to run in snow.
The other day I was baking some Christmas cookies in a friend's kitchen; it got so hot that when I was done I went outside to cool off and let the summer breeze and sunshine dry my shirt. It was weird.
I'm probably being an ignoramus... I just got off the phone with a Kiwi who says he knows it no other way - this is how Christmas is and should be. He doesn't "buy" the whole "snow and sleigh-bells deal" that the north propagates. Christmas, to him, is warm, long sunny days with barbeques... however, I did coerce him to agree that the north gets summer, *plus* a Christmas festive season - the south has the two lumped unfairly together.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
CD Review: Seventeen Oh-Two Oh-Six
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
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