Rolling Hills Radio

Last April, I auditioned to be the announcer for the local, live-recorded radio show, Rolling Hills Radio. The former announcer, the most awesome Jason Sample, was stepping down after being part of the show since its inception. I hadn't done anything regularly on WRFA-LP in several years and thought it would be a cool way to get back into doing some on-air work in addition to getting to hear some great music every month.

Apparently I still had the vocal chops, as I've been with the show now since the end of April 2015. It's been quite a ride! Most people who know me know I'm an alt-rock kind of girl. I sure love my electric guitars and drums! At the same time, I also like some singer-songwriters and have been more open-minded when it came to other styles of music since I took History of American Pop Music as a freshman at Baldwin-Wallace (College) University.

Over the summer, the semi-annual Chautauqua Institution show featured Michael Gablicki from Rusted Root. Being able to be the Donna Pardo for this gig was the stuff of dreams. I had a damned hard time not fan-girling all over the stage as I sat feet away from the one of the guys responsible for providing the soundtrack to my senior year in high school through my early college years.

One of the other cool things about Rolling Hills Radio is the stories. I love hearing our host, Ken, draw out the stories from featured musicians about why they write, how they got started, and other fantastic tidbits.

Tonight I get to hear some more. Podcasts of all the shows are available on WRFA's website along with the link to where you can buy tickets to future shows too. Maybe I'll see some of you there sometime.

Carpool Karoke

My latest obsession/spirit animal is James Corden and his Carpool Karaoke sketches. Here's the latest one with Sia:

If it wasn't for YouTube, I'd never get to see this kind of fun stuff that comes out of Late Night TV. My night owl tendencies I had as a baby went dormant at some point and 10pm is my bedtime lately.

Book Duels

I'm having a stare-off with a pile of unread books on my coffee table while some e-books wink at me from the Kindle app on my phone.

We're more than halfway through February and I've completed just 2%, or 5 books behind, of my 2016 Reading Challenge on GoodReads.

I lowered my goal for this year to 45 from last year's ambitious goal of 50 books. I was 3 books shy of meeting my goal once December 31st rolled around, so I thought I'd be slightly more realistic about how 2016 would go. Honestly, that's still a pretty crazy goal given that I hadn't come anywhere near reading that many books for many years. There were some years where if I read 5 books, that was a lot. I'm at a point where I have one or two books that have been waiting for years to be read. I know at least one of them was on the coffee table when I wrote this post. 

If you're on GoodReads and want to link up or just see what I've been reading or want to read, you can find me here.

Bloggery (a repost)

I wrote this on another site:

Perhaps I'm too old for the reveal-all-confessional type of blogging but reading claw marks lately makes me want to start blogging again to at least expand upon the thoughts I wouldn't otherwise write out in a Facebook post or vague tweet.
 A couple of years ago, I took the month of February off from Facebook under the premise that the time I wasn't wasting on Facebook could be channeled into other things. I blogged quite a bit, I read a few books, got out a little, and generally tried to avoid looking at anything on there. It wasn't perfect, by far. A fair amount of friends still use Facebook to communicate about social events and general happenings, so I was out of the loop on all of that, thus defeating part of my goal to be in better touch with hanging out with them. Weird how that shit works.
 Ultimately, I think I want more conversation. The introvert in me loves social media because it allows me form a complete thought and reply to what I'm reading. In the early days, blogging allowed me to write long essays of my thoughts. Now? I share links and a couple lines of dialogue. It's not much different than my in-person interactions. The obvious problem is whether anyone actually wants to listen or read and if they have to patience to even interact in a thoughtful way in response. Maybe I don't give people enough credit.
 So going back around to my first paragraph, I would like to blog more but I just don't know if I can. I don't have anonymity on my current blog. This post is friends-only public. I don't necessarily enjoy the idea of having to start a new blog from scratch to try to have a certain kind of anonymity but there are a lot of things I wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable talking about on my current blog. I don't need to jeopardize my job or relationships. Not that I am doing horrible things or plan to say horrible things, but when you live in a small city you do have to be careful who you target if you want to spout off about something. Self-censorship is a real, daily occupation.

My best friend had this to say when I debated about whether to just post from here or start a new blog and ohmygodwhatifIoffendanyone,

"you're a big girl now
 a real, grown-up woman with her own thoughts and opinions
 you're going to be 40 this year, for crying out loud"

So that's that. Stay tuned...