This and That

[hrj]

I got all the new plants into the ground on Sunday and it conveniently has rained ever since, giving them a good start. But hope glimmers: the long-range forecast seems to think that after this weekend we'll have sun for a couple weeks, and a couple weeks is as good as summer at this point.

The tax people gave me the draft returns for the partnership and my estimated extra tax to pay. It hardly seems fair that I have to pay income tax (actually capital gains tax) on hypothetical money that I only received on paper. Now I have to make sure that I have enough rental-related expenses to recoup a good part of it.

For half of the last year my gym iPod listening has been audio-book versions of the Unfortunate Series of Events stories. But, alas, the available volumes (although not the series) have run out and I've turned to exploring pod-casts. I'm no longer in danger of missing "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me", and the Onion snippets are fun but not particularly filling. There's a fun BBC "experts talk about some historic or literary topic" show -- I forget the name at the moment. And yesterday I discovered a site with "langsam gesprochene Nachrichten" (news spoken slowly (in German)). I've been meaning to try to brush up on my German a little. (Maybe eventually I'll get up the nerve to speak German to some of my German co-workers.) Now if only I could find a similar site for Welsh. I ran across a music/talk show in Welsh (but with only a couple of installments) but it's too non-linear and colloquial for me to follow very easily. I really need training wheels for my language practice.

Somewhat peculiar SCA happenings: I've been asked to serve on a court. Now that's something that doesn't happen every day. I said, sure why not?

Comments

[callistotoni.livejournal.com]

Are you joining the rest of us cool kids on R&Y's court?

Oh, and I like Wait Wait as well. Someday I think I'll have to break down and get an Ipod.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Nah, the other one. (Does that make me an uncool kid?)

[callistotoni.livejournal.com]

Nah, that's just a *different* set of cool kids. Some overlap, though; I believe ermine_rat and mad_duchess are serving on both.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I've been on vacation a month, and because of all the rain I still haven't played golf yet. Harumph!

[filkergem.livejournal.com]

Podcasts are wonderful - I've been having fun listening to many different ones, including "The Naked Scientists" and "Slacker Astronomy" for keeping up with some types of science news. One especially interesting source of freely available audio is LibriVox - an all-volunteer project with a goal of putting all public-domain texts into free audio format. They have several dozen books available already, and are always glad to have proof-listeners to verify that newly-edited files are ready for public release. If you want to check them out, they are ar http://www.librivox.org