a day behind and stuff...

I did go out rapier fencing on Sunday.

I've been doing the weight exercises the coach recommended, and while my arm was certainly tired at the end of 3 hours, it didn't feel like it was falling out of its socket, so I'd say that's an improvement! I was also better able to control the point and actually scored a touch or two. Go me!

Yesterday - lower body workout (link somewhere in last week's archives - no time to look it up now) with slightly lighter weights so I'll be able to walk this week :P Also rows, using the footstool as a bench - these hurt some but I'm not suffering too much this morning.

Got a busy day/week ahead - picking up car this evening (yay!), must get books for class and clean house a bit. Pictures of latest sewing projects forthcoming at some nebulous future time.

music meme

This one was too good to pass up:

• Go to musicoutfitters.com
  
  
• Enter the year you graduated from high school in the search function and get the list of 100 most popular songs of that year
  
  
• Bold the songs you like, strike through the ones you hate and underline your favorite. Do nothing to the ones you don't remember (or don't care about).

( results with commentary )

No underlines - so many 12" under the bridge since I graduated that I'd be pressed to say which was my favorite then vs. what is my favorite now.

I don't know many of these because by senior year of high school I'd given up on most top 40 and was feeding off a steady stream of mixtapes from UK penpals. What I remember:

808 State's "Pacific" - got the 7" single for Xmas '89 along with Morrissey's "Ouija Board, Ouija Board" and though it took a couple of hearings, this was the single that destroyed my indie-kid identity forever. I about burned a hole in it until the album came out stateside, and was ached for raves which gratefully started taking off while I was in college.

Shamen "Move Any Mountain" - got the "En-Tact" import cassette (yes! We were still listening to cassettes then) out of curiosity and I remember listening to it in my beat up old Walkman on endless walks around the block.

Happy Mondays "Hallelujah" EP/ Inspiral Carpets "Life" - poisoned by Madchester on a family trip to England the summer between junior and senior years. Pressed these and 808 State on my school friends with an evangelical fervor.

Looking back I notice that often times I wasn't put off so much by the music itself as I was the fans involved - Cure fans seemed just so much cooler than, say, R.E.M. fans who were just a bit too mainstream for my 17 year old music snob tastes, especially when "The One I Love" went top 40 in the late 80s. This cut me off of a lot of stuff I might have liked otherwise.

notes on Katrina

I deliberately don't watch news on weekends, so when D. mentioned he was sorry he never took me to New Orleans because it wasn't going to be there anymore, I genuinely thought he was exaggerating.

Until I read the headlines Monday morning :(

Jesus - what a mess :( And not just New Orleans, though I admit I've always wanted to go to the French Quarter - the few photos I've seen on various news sites make it look like a war zone, or worse. Add to that the stuff you can't see - like the pollution and microbes in the flood water - and the entire Gulf Coast is going to be uninhabitable or at least very dangerous for months after this slips from the papers :(

another for jlsjlsjls

Read Renaissance and Early Modern festival books on your desktop now. "View 253 digitised Renaissance festival books (selected from over 2,000 in the British Library's collection) that describe the magnificent festivals and ceremonies that took place in Europe between 1475 and 1700 - marriages and funerals of royalty and nobility, coronations, stately entries into cities and other grand events."