pebblerocker

I started playing the guitar again a while ago, but then I had a hectic week and then was away from home for a few days, and now all that pain and effort is flaking off the ends of my fingers as the unused calluses begin to wear away. Should only take a few days of battering them about before they get the message to start growing thicker skin again.

It has been twenty years since I was learning those Chuck Berry riffs and finding my way around the frets and I'm amazed that some of it is still in the back of my brain, ready to use again.

I wanted to post about my best Christmas songs list because today I'm listening to all the Christmas songs thanks to jekesta's post, and also because it's warm and muggy and raining very hard, which is always what happens shortly before Christmas. The rain and the waterlogged garden and the washing not getting dry are very characteristic of this time of year.

Wizzard yay! Straight off jekesta's list because it's lovely. No slight intended on Slade, of course.

Boney M's Mary's Boy Child is one of the most memorable off the Christmas songs tape we had when I was small. It also had Snoopy's Christmas, Anne Murray's Silent Night and a truly atrocious cheesy Rudolph.

Chris Rea, whose name I didn't know before looking up the video. I'm not sure what the line "top to toe in tailbacks" means but it might be to do with snapping the ends off beans for Christmas dinner.

Cliff Richard who is sort of like tinsel and the Virgin Mary in Christmassy relevance; couldn't have Christmas without him and that's why I couldn't choose which song to put in.

QUEEN! <3

Bing Crosby and David Bowie ... how is it that their voices sound so good together? Especially since one is in a grandpa cardy and the other is from another planet.

I have the speedy internet back. How come I always desperately want to do bandwidth-heavy things when we've been throttled back to dialup?

Last.fm is giving me nothing but good music. I told them I like The Association and it gave me The Grass Roots (<3) and The Left Banke and The Lovin' Spoonful and Tommy James and the Shondelles and now The Fifth Dimension. And I've already told them I LOATHE The Association's song Windy and they'll never make me listen to it again. I'm still slightly cross with Last.fm for not being Pandora and very cross with Pandora for denying the existence of the rest of the world, but sometimes when I hit on the right thing to tell Last.fm I get exactly what I want to listen to.

Also now that I'm using it a bit more the Backstreet Boys will become just one of many things I have listened to in the past instead of the thing I listen to more than anything and that will be less embarrassing. I'm trying not to be ashamed of liking various sorts of music which may be more or less cool than other sorts, but at the same time I'm deliberately delaying posting so I can put something other than Chad & Jeremy in the box.

I don't know how to tell how much I'm allowed to listen to music online without chewing up all our data allowance. The boy said not to use Last.fm "too much", which in the absence of information I could only interpret as "at all", but it can't be that. I lack a frame of reference for understanding how much bandwidth things take in relation to how much we've got. Gigabytes aren't something I can hold in my hand.