Musings of an Internet Axolotl

So once again I was reminded that this site exists, and that I have an account here. So here is my irregular proof of life.

Moved over here. It's nice and roomy, and not infested with Russians.

Instead I'm sitting at home drinking Throat Coat tea by the quart as my sinuses are draining pints of goop in both directions. I think I may be contributing to deforestation with my tissue use as well. Sigh.

Andrew Jackson, leading a motley band of pirates, militia, and loyal Native Americans, saw off a numerically superior force of British soldiers in the bayous south of New Orleans.

(Unfortunately, the peace treaty with Britain had been signed two weeks earlier, in the Belgian city of Ghent. Darn those slow nineteenth-century communications!)

Slept through two sub calls this morning. Guess I needed the sleep, but I need the work too.

So Facebook is increasingly Not The Thing - it's cluttered, it's spammy, it's obnoxious.

I've seen an uptick in LJ postings this last week, as well as people hopping on the Ello bandwagon.

It will be interesting to see how this all pans out. Facebook's ubiquity may be its downfall.

Woke up this morning to the sound of rain on the roof. It's a start. We still need more.

If it rained every day in February and March, we *might* be somewhere close to normal.

Santa Cruz County has one of the 17 communities that went on the list published a week ago of places that had an estimated 100 days of water left.

Despite growing up as the child of two Bay Area hippies, there wasn't a lot of Pete Seeger's music in our house when I was a kid.

We had one album - the Children's Concert at Town Hall, recorded in 1963. Had it on reel-to-reel tape which later got dubbed to cassette when we got a new car and my father spent a ridiculous amount of money (for those days) to put a Radio Shack combination tape player/AM-FM radio in it. (We never had a car with an eight-track player in it - I missed that bit of the '70s as well.) Other than that, my mother would occasionally sing "Little Boxes" as we drove through the vast expanse of Doelger homes in Daly City on the way to San Francisco, and we occasionally saw him on shows on PBS.

It wasn't until I got to college and started dating a girl whose mother was a serious folkie that I started learning more about Pete the activist, Pete the conservator, Pete the man who'd sung with the Weavers (who I'd also never heard before that) and Woody Guthrie (ditto). I was fascinated. Plus, I learned that songs I'd sung at summer camp or heard performed by many other artists had been either written or arranged by Pete Seeger. "If I Had A Hammer" had been a particular favorite at my camp - the camp songbook had a very energetic arrangement.

Then I learned more about his family - how his father had been an ethnomusicologist who was particularly interested in regional songs of the United States. How his siblings had also gone into music, with varying levels of popular success.

Given his background, I don't think he could have been anyone other than he was.

So long, Pete. It's been good to know you.

(Photo of the Seeger family in 1921 - Pete's the curly-headed kid on his father's lap.)

So a package that I've been waiting for for a while arrived in San Jose Sunday night. It left San Jose at 9:52 yesterday morning...

and according to USPS's online package tracking, it's now in Fresno.

Fresno is *not* on the way to Santa Cruz from San Jose.