Tuning In and Out

I love it!  I can have a personalized radio station of three or four or five..... don't get me wrong I still love KPLU for the jazz and KUOW for the regionally flavored chat and both for NPR, but I found Pandora Internet Radio.
You can create your stations in two ways that I've tried so far.

The first is to select an artist or a song and they will select music similar in nature to the work you selected.  My first selection was Jane Monheit and I got a nice selection of vocal jazz.  I created a "Bach" station as well.

Then I tried the second way of creating a station by selecting a genre that I thought I might want to hear.  I selected New Age.  The first artist the radio played was Enya and I started to relax.  I could use a little spa music once in a while.  Actually I think one of the genres was "spa" - maybe I misread and it was "Ska" - but I'm thinking it was spa.  There were a variety of genres to select from, children's, latin, reggae, R&B, rock with various categories.  I loved that the children's section had sleepytime music and I'm thinking of setting up a little latin station - maybe I'll "Zumba" at home.  While exploring how to explain this, I just created a Brazilian station - love it! The down side - it's not completely commercial free - but then I'm pretty practiced at tuning those out.  If you want to limit the ads more, you can upgrade (which I assume means shell out a little cash.)

Yea, I know Seattle has enough radio stations, but still...  It has been a long time since my brother and I spent a summer filling wastebaskets full of weeds for 10 cents each so that we could purchase a portable transistor radio.(the hemp plants that grew on the ditch bank filled a bucket and pulled easily -the "hemp" was iradicated) None of my Pandora stations sound like what we heard then. The local radio station carried the farm report and was an outlet for the State Agricultural College. Saturday mornings the local station had a call in show - people called about to say whatever was on their mind.  If they were looking for an apartment, or had something to sell, a recipe to share, or a grievance to air - Saturday at 10:00 a.m. was their chance.   We loved the stations from the state capital - more music (the Beatles had only recently had their impact on the music scene) and we felt lucky if we happened upon "Chicken Man!"  Growing up in Kansas you almost always had the radio on - listening to the basketball games or football games or in summer the tornado watches interwoven with baseball games.  We would even hear our Dad on the radio occasionally when University faculty would come on and have a conversation about things of interest in their area of expertise.  For my Father that was Dairy Food Science.  A topic for another day.

Lines in the Sand

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I was chatting with my mother a few days ago and this memory came up. She didn't remember, but I did - possibly because of the disappointment. When I was about five years old, we traveled by train to San Diego. The train trip was another vivid memory of my childhood, but is not what I want to remember today. My memories of San Diego include it's wonderful zoo and the giant tortises there. Perhaps the tortise was the most memorable animal of the zoo because we would ofen see box turtles on the road side in Kansas. We would occasionally persuade mom to stop and pick them up and we would bring them home and try to feed them. They didn't adapt well to captivity; if all the children of Kansas did what we did, the box turtle population would have been descimated in that baby boom generation... We went to Disneyland and I found it scary. I've never become a rider of carnival rides possibly because of that early experience. None of this has anything to do with lines in the sand however.

We went to the beach. We walked out on the hot dry sand, none of us in beach clothes, filling our shoes with sand. We reached the point where the waves had darkened and hardened the sand. Dad leaned down and drew a line in the sand and said, we'll go when the waves cross this line. I suppose there were many reasons why Dad might not have wanted to spend very much time at the beach. Perhaps he didn't want his kids returning to his sisters house with clothes full of sand. Perhaps there was a plan for something else later that day and he didn't want to get us all cleaned up again. I suspect it was hot; some of us sunburned easily and Barbara was a baby. Perhaps the biggest reason was that he was a non-swimmer (as were we at the time) and wasn't comfortable with water play. Whatever his reasons, the very next wave crossed his line - and he really was ready to go. We persuaded him to wait for a few more waves, but not many. Drawing lines in the sand can be disappointing, waves wash them away sooner than you think.