I haven’t been updating you on my yearly word count goals like I should be and that’s because I have a bunch of new eyeballs on the site thanks to NaNoWriMo and I wanted to build on that momentum by writing intelligent posts and not about yammering on about potatoes.

NOT THAT I EVER DO THAT, NEW READERS!! Whatever you’ve heard is a LIE! Ahem.

But, seriously, I’m really trying to focus the blog more so that you don’t have to be a regular reader to know what I’m talking about in any given post. And I’m trying to pepper these posts about my writing between more useful “article” type posts. Mostly, I want people to feel like they know what to expect when they come here (like they do when they visit The Whine Seller) which hasn’t always been the case. I’ve been working on this for most of the last year and since readership is up… I’m assuming it’s working!

So, anyway, where were we? Oh, yeah. Word count. Continue Reading »

I have a lot of music. I used to listen to the radio just about 24/7 but now we live next to this big hill that prevents us from getting a radio signal (seriously, it’s really annoying). Working from home, alone, I really need to listen to music at all times in order to properly function. I download indie artists I’ve never heard of when they offer their albums for free. I download the free songs on Amazon. I ripped every CD in this house to MP3 (and we have a TON). I’m not picky. I just like music.

I do  listen to internet radio a lot as well. But I can only hear the same commercials on Pandora and Yahoo Radio in a row before I want to kill people. Also, there are many times during the day when I cannot spare the bandwidth for internet radio because I’m doing something  online that needs it all.

But, as I’m sure is a common issue for the iPod generation, I started to run into a problem with how to listen to all this. See, I’m one of those people that obsessively listens to their favorite song of the minute  over and over and over again and, while this makes me happy, it meant that I really didn’t listen to most of my song collection. I enjoy the random thrill of a song I used to love in high school popping into the playlist between my new favorites but true random shuffle wasn’t working for me because it was repeating songs and also giving me stuff like Christmas music that I don’t want to hear year round. I also felt like there were some songs I never ever heard.

It took me several years of tweaking, but I finally found a way to play my music to my satisfaction.  Continue Reading »

So, for posterity, we had a freakish out of season snowstorm on October 29th. Because there were still leaves on the trees, the snow pulled down many, many branches and whole trees. If you aren’t in the area, it’s really hard to explain just how massive the damage was and how, over a week later, it’s still not even really cleaned up. It’s like, it’s just snow, what’s the big deal, right? Many areas look like a tornado ripped through. Trees are snapped in half, big branches down everywhere, whole trees have fallen into the road and… just left there. Driving in some areas is… interesting.

But many trees down meant many power lines down. We lost power between 3 and 4 PM on Saturday, October 29th. We didn’t get it back until the evening of November 3rd. Our neighborhood of 400 homes was completely dark for 5 days. It was very freaky looking. (What deity has it out for Denville, man? Our poor downtown was completely trashed by the Hurricane Irene flood and this time we were the top town in NJ with number of houses without power.) Continue Reading »