How is the COVID-19 coronavirus affecting you?
OFF TOPIC discussions
This started out as a response to what @dusty turtle said, but then the floodgates opened and much more spilled out, some of it even musical! Since that's what mainly is of interest here I did a Cut of the computer-related information that came 1st, planning on re-pasting it at the bottom. Got busy putting in the links to 3 members here & accidentally deleted it 
! That segment is where the bulk of my time has been spent, so in the interest of at least some honesty will be attempted again near the end.
@dusty turtle said:
hummingbirds, bluebirds, and bees
frolick among my citrus trees.
were it not for these
and the frest spring breeze
I'd be panicked about
this dreaded disease.
Dusty, I'm so glad to hear it as those pollinators are critical, also butterflies.
I have dulcimer songs I've played to keep advancing. It includes the June theme we might actually get to use at our local folklore group, assuming we're meeting by then. May is already canceled by the place where we meet. It's a tricky jig combining Little Liza Jane & Old Joe Clark in an arrangement by Larry Conger. The theme was Youth to Old Age. There's no way I can play Old Joe Clark at the pace of my banjo playing husband, so this 6/8 jig time does exactly what I need. My own version of this is, after playing 1st LLJ, then OJC, I bring her back & softly play the melody string of LLJ as I figure she wants the last word! I'm also working on my plain Jane TMB (thank you, John Knopf ) the song to the tune of Yankee Doodle naming the presidents -- it goes up to Hoover, but I use it only up through Wilson as it's part of a one-room school teacher program I do. I've got one scheduled for September, but do the program often enough I really need to learn the song. I asked John to make something very basic a teacher might have carried. This was after getting hooked on the TMB by the lovely, but too beautiful for this use, TMB I bought from Irene after admiring it last year at the Berea Gathering. I'm also playing the parody of The Sloop John B that I mentioned here. It's called the Sloop John A & I'm sure the folkies at our local group will catch the sly humor. My biggest problem is getting the parody words right as I played the original apparently way too often on my guitar & tend to give the original. Love calypso rhythms (I'm also playing Jamaica Farewell just for my own amAsement), so it tend to creep into whatever I play after that.
My solo rehearsal of songs, dances, & lines from the 2012 version of Godspell -- a much more complicated vocal version -- should be happening, but knowing the show's been re-scheduled for mid to late July hasn't been very motivating. (I switched from Alto to singing Tenor with the guys as the Alto arrangement had too many high notes to sing constantly. I can reach them, but knew it was asking too much for too long.)
Fortunately shelter in place doesn't forbid my every other day hikes with my beautiful Beast. I posted pictures of him at the end of my weekly blog . Last Saturday, March 28, I also included my gradually petered out attempt at singing a pre-chosen Song of the Day -- a local radio station posted the selections and maybe it would have worked in a suburban area, but not in this place of acreage with few people close enough to hear anybody else. Didn't want the Italians to have all the musical fun. I guess for this group I should revise ever so slightly the parting message on last week's blog to read: If you self-quarantine for your family's safety, please be smart. I can't afford to buy 15 musical instrument baby shower presents in December.
As for my computer projects, it's like cleaning up the sands on a beach, they never end. Of course the death of my very old computer (WIN7 upgraded to 10) at the end of last year didn't help. I'm a "belt and suspenders" type of person, using automaGic online backup from Carbonite + an external hard drive. The only problem is original programs are something techies tend to back off from installing and getting running again because they might not do it right. A perfect example was my AzzCardfile program. I have well over a 1000 folktale anthologies on it (can you tell I'm both a librarian and a former indexer?), but when I discovered I now had a program missing the purchases of the last several years, I started re-inputting (those suspenders I mentioned came in handy for knowing what was missing). The only problem was I kept doing dumb things that made it crash! AARGH! Miss working regularly in a library where techie teens could give suggestions. (Nowadays I just sub in a library . . . at least when it's open.) O.k. back to the inputting, crash, re-do it until finally I got the bright idea to check that external hard drive & found MY COMPLETE FILE! Decided the more recent inputs were worth incorporating. Learned how to put that information side by side on the screen. It's now the renamed (to make me know which is the improved version) catalog which includes some of that improved information on contents.
I also have Thunderbird as an email program where I archive my email to help me find past venue information & potential gigs; an email list for storytellers (yes, it's available elsewhere, but, in the past, when a host dropped it abruptly it showed how a personal archive could help); other family information; various other stuff I'm not ready to lose. The problem was in the past several years I started using the webmail provided by the host for my website while on the road. The only problem was it had a data limit -- high, but not the unending archival limit found by storage on my computer. I eventually had stopped going over to Thunderbird & making use of my folders. The last several years have now been somewhat filed & I discarded what has no obvious need to be stored. Is there more I should do? Dunberidiculous!
As for home-related projects. . .I'm mainly putting things off until I can open windows. Can't breathe dust and I long ago freely confessed to dual church membership where I am the Chief High Prophetess of the Church of the Unholy Mess.
As for storytelling, since I do "run my mouth for fun and profit", right now this has switched to my weekly storytelling phone calls to a family member's two daughters ("Who are these children and why are they calling me Grandma?"). I let them each choose a type of story I will tell & then we also make up a story together. Long ago I also became a Talking Book to my husband while we're on the road, so now it's being read in place. I usually try to alternate a modern setting with a historical mystery. We just finished one of the Lady Ginger Gold mysteries set in England during our own Prohibition era (she's just moved back to England from being raised in the U.S.), so I read one of the tons of e-books waiting for me to him. This was a novella about a detective solving a case involving a valuable missing bubble gum baseball card. I had pre-read it & knew how to do it justice as my husband had enjoyed the wisecracking style of the Golden Era Hollywood detective, Toby Peters (hate it when an author has the nerve to die so the series ends!), & Elvis Cole (the author started getting too gritty eventually). Looks like this new series will work, so it's 1st full-length book waits while we read more about turn-of-the previous century New York with a mid-wife & NYC Irish police detective, a series with tons already read, but even more waiting on the shelf or yet to be purchased. I've purposely skipped vital information about authors as the librarian in me would love to hook you on something new to read. I hope you know that, whether from your library's own online book provider or by your buying them, there's good reading available.
Like most others I know, I've been in various web meetings; have prowled Facebook; checked here.
That's way more than you probably cared to know and I promise it doesn't really say everything .
As a storytelling friend likes to end her emails: There's always a story, it'd be a shame not to tell it.
I did enjoy writing those blog posts.
. My typing is interesting today...I spelled "does" as DUES!...Telling ME if I want to feel good I got to pay my DUES and play music ( and again, in my case, draw and paint)
