My New Virtual Bookshelf

Books!

Ok, I've added a new spiffy feature to my blog! In a blatant display of procrastination, I was doing one of my periodic web surfs through the web pages of my favorite authors. Most of the time I just do this to see if there are any new announcements of upcoming releases. But this time I noticed several of them had blogs or other pages to post writing advice, news, and random musings. Well, on Gail Dayton's blog I noticed she had a cool bookshelf thing. I had noticed something like it on someone else's--Jacqueline Carey's maybe?--page too; but Gail Dayton's stood out more because she uses the same exact blog site as me. And I thought--If she can stick this up on her blog, then so can I...somehow. Now in both cases, one of the fascinating things had been the fact that right up at the top of these bookshelves were books I knew and loved! So of course that (and the fact that these are authors I respect anyway) made me all the more interested in the books I didn't know.

Anyway, I soon tracked down the Shelfari site and got signed up and figured out how to put it on my blog. So here it is!! Well, adding things to it is also a bit of work and procrastination could only last so long. So some of my favorites are up, and anything that happened to turn up in the searches for my favorites that I've also read. So, as things occur to me, or as the need for procrastinatory activities strikes, I'll expand the collection.

Music!
My last performance with the Madrigirls was last week. It was great fun, as usual. We performed in the Kibble Palace in the Botanical Gardens as part of the West End Festival in Glasgow. We sold out! And the people running it said we had a record number of pre-sales (Ron being one of them). It was a very pretty venue, though I have to say most of the churches we've performed in had nicer acoustics; not bad though. Perhaps because of the venue, or the summery feel, or the fact we were all still recovering from all the excitement a week and a half back, this concert had a somewhat informal feel to it, at least to me. This was definitely increased by the fact that the serious readings from the Life of St Kentigern from the tour were replaced by our director's very funny summaries of the same ("And next St Mungo went to Wales...I don't remember why. Oh he wanted to see St David. Or was it St David that wanted to see him? *looks back at choir for guidance* Anyway, he went to Wales and....was there anything else? *hint from our ranks* Oh yes, he met St Columba too. That might have been after Wales. But we have this lovely piece of chant about St Columba." ...ok, so that's not a direct quote, and hopefully it won't get me killed if someone from choir reads this blog, but I think that was a fair impression. ;)

Anyway, the last concert was fun. Though I'm very sad it's all over now. They've promised to send me CDs or a DVD of the movie when it comes out if I can't see the movie in the States. I'm very very glad I decided to join. Amazing where volunteering to help out with the role playing table at Fresher's Fair led to eventually!! If I hadn't been promoting gaming, I wouldn't have seen the information about the choir tryouts on the table kinny-corner, and thus wouldn't have tried out, and thus wouldn't have had all this fun singing with an awesome choir this year.