Rocking Fridays

My team at work has started using this online service called “Turntable” where you can create a room, invite people into it, and anyone can be DJ for however long they like (or until someone kicks them out). They started talking about this a few weeks ago and since music isn’t always my ‘thing’ I hadn’t checked it out yet. But today when people started complaining that noone was in there I thought I’d go take a look. It’s been a lot of fun.

You can just search for artists or albums you know/like (for me I never remember the names so it takes me awhile to get going) and build up your ‘song list’. Then if a spot opens up you can PLAY MUSIC where you get to play whatever song is at the top of the queue when it’s your turn. We’ve had some great songs, some totally LAME songs and a good majority somewhere in the middle. But the conversations and comraderie in the room are GREAT!! It’s been a perfect example of a social app that’s fun to play around with and doesn’t get in your way. If you don’t want to DJ you can just hang out and listen to what everyone else is playing. You can vote on songs you like or don’t like and you can see your little avatar dancing away when you’re rocking out.

It’s a small thing, but it’s made my day go by quite quickly and it’s also given me a good distraction when I needed a break for a few mins. But the background sound track has also allowed me to get a crap ton of work done today. I forget sometimes that even if I don’t know much about music, have any real talent for it, or have any desire for the ‘music trivia knowledge’ to take up space in my head, I really do ENJOY music and love having it in the background. What’s been great about today is that there is only one other person in my office and I don’t need my headphones…. the volume is low enough that you can only hear it when you’re standing right at my desk. I don’t often listen to music all day because having headphones in my ears all day generally hurts my ears and I end up with a killer headache.

I think the plan is for our team to have ‘turntable tuesdays’ (which may get expanded to more days during the week) but any time they are in there I think that I will join in and just leave the music on in the background. It’s been a great day.

Losing Steam for this

So if I am honest, I am definitely losing stem for this daily writing project. When I missed 5 or 6 days in August I said that I would do everything I could to not miss any more days until the end of the year. Now here we are on the 13th of September and I’ve already missed about 6 days. Sure there has been lots of stuff going on but it really only takes me about 15 minutes to write something each day. There is no reason at all why I shouldn’t be able to find that time. I think the TRUE answer is that in starting to slack off it has gotten easier to just keep slacking off and to NOT write every day, or worry if I miss a day.

Now, all of that said, I still fully enjoy my little daily writing exercise on the days that I have something interesting to write about. For example, on Saturday it was therapeutic to talk about the memorial service for my friend and all that was involved with that. Yesterday it was a good release to get out all the ‘drama’ that surrounded my BFs move. Today all I can think to write about is how tired I am and that I have a headache, am hungry and REALLY REALLY want to climb but think I may just fall asleep on the wall. Personally I don’t find my complaining to be of that much interest to anyone else… except maybe my mom and she doesn’t read this blog.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about if I want to continue this project once the year is up and if I do how I might add to it or change things. I’ve been thinking that I might pull back from the daily 500+ word post and just write however much or little I feel like sharing – even if that’s just a link to a recipe or article or book or movie or something. I may even try and come up with some new ‘pages’ for this blog that will collect relevant stuff – like all the posts about recipes I’ve made and like, restaurants I’ve eaten at and enjoyed or ones I want to try.  I think that if I can take some of the ‘structure’ out of this I might manage to continue with my posting each day. And some days I might even post more than once. But first I need to figure out how to add multiple pages that can aggregate specific topics but still have a ‘home page’ that lists all the posts I’ve created. Perhaps there is some technically savvy friend out there who is interesting in helping me out – post your resume’s in the comments – the pay sucks (or doesn’t exist) but the appreciation will be plentiful!

And that’s it for today folks… to tired to think about anything else… going to go climb and try not to fall asleep on the wall.