Snapped some more photos of the snow, and low solstice sunlight over the last day or two.
Here’s a few of them (click to see bigger versions, as per usual) :
St. Nicholas’ Cathedral and one of my favourite lines of trees in the city:
The grounds of NUIG
They were just snapped on my HTC Desire, not anything snazzy. ;) But it’s handy to have on me when I don’t feel like carrying around a camera. You can get decent shots with it too, every so often.
This post on Edible Geography struck a chord with me. I’m definitely one of those people who sits in cafés for hours working.
Usually though, people can see what I’m doing, as I’m rarely on a laptop anymore since the death of my Powerbook G4, and I’m usually switching between a notebook (yes, actual paper one), manuscript paper (yes, more actual paper you use for writing music), and my phone (for my twitter addiction).
For example, I took this shot of my “workspace” last month while sitting in Kelly’s Bar & Restaurant, which is one of my favourite places to do some work:
I love working while in cafés and actually prefer it to working at my desk at home. I’m more productive and more focused when I’m working in a café and get a lot more work done in that kind of environment than I do pretty much anywhere else.
It’s always been that way – throughout uni, I’d get my composition assignments written in the canteen, the students union bar, or any of my favourite cafés in town. The noise and the bustle meant I had to focus on whatever work I was doing. I had to really concentrate to get the work done. That kind of atmosphere works for me. True, I may have also been using the lunch hour before the assignment was due to both eat and get the work done at the same time, but a bit of last minute pressure always helps. ;)
These days, I sit and write out arrangements for songs of mine, or for various different work that I do with choirs, or singing classes. I work on lyrics for my own songs, or write other things like this that make me happy.
I do get some strange looks sometimes, if I’m sitting with a full score out on the table while I have lunch or coffee, quietly working away writing down notes. And it’s certainly not as handy as using MuseScore (a free, open source Sibelius-like software) on my iMac at home, but it’s a bit more comfortable for me and I don’t make as good coffee as those cafés do.
I just recently switched to an Android phone – the wonderful HTC Desire, and have been playing around with the camera on it, and two different camera apps so far. I was interested in seeing how it would compare to my old iPhone 3GS which gave me some great shots, and the Hipstamatic App was good for some interesting filters and the like.
But, I’ve been mostly pleased with the Desire’s camera, though the colours aren’t quite as vibrant as the iPhone’s camera were it seems. But the RetroCamera and fx camera apps have been really fun and versatile too, and add a lot of fun to the camera.
Here’s some shots of a beautiful sunset in Salthill, Galway this weekend:
It definitely gives good lens flare (which I happen to like. I also like taking photos into the sun as I have a soft spot for silhouettes.) I’m no photographer or anything, but it’s nice to have a portable tool that can record things I see with a decent quality for me.
Parts of Björk’s Crying rather aptly describes my days lately. It’s been weird. I have to travel to Dublin to spend any time with people it seems. I don’t think I like that. I’m spending way too much time alone I think – so much so that I don’t even realise how much time I’m spending in just my own company. Most days I’ll say maybe three or four sentences to someone who’s not serving me in a shop or café or something. I guess I make up for it when I do go to Dublin and hang out with people there, but it just makes the return to Galway each time more frustrating. But I guess that’s what happens when there’s a big exodus of people from a town.
I do like my own company, and I’m very used to it, and it is making me write so much more. I wrote lyrics for a whole new song today that was sparked off by two short lines I’d noted down in my phone a few days ago. I even have a rough idea of how the melody should go. I’m at a point where I have way too many songs not recorded even in demo form – more than half of them aren’t recorded in any way at all. I need to get more on top of that.
I spent this evening post-Doctor-Who looking at tweaking little tiny things on my website, which just drives home the fact that I need a proper, better design for it, which is something I’m not able to do. Then I was doing re-takes of the demo vocals for “friday night friendships” which I’d sketched out quickly a while back with terribly off guide vocals. I’m getting more used to recording myself, but it’s still not ideal, and I’m finding it a bit of a pain sometimes when a good take is messed up by shitty recording, or whatever.
The thing I wrote today I’ll take a look at again tomorrow and see what I think of it. I’ve another two half-written lyrics sheets in a notebook, and a few more songs kinda half sketched out. I really have been on a big writing spate over the last year or so. I think I’ve written more in the last year than in the last 20! I’m not all of it is any good, but I’m gonna try at least demo everything so that I can listen to them from outside of the performer space, and see what I think.
Anyways, while I was in Dublin recently, I got to enjoy the beautiful tulips that are in the park in Merrion Sq. Dublin City Council were taking submissions to rename that park, which is currently named after Archbishiop Ryan. I don’t think I ever called it that in the first place – it was always just Merrion Sq to me. Or the park with the Oscar Wilde statue and beautiful tulips:
I took photos of my Easter chocolate this year, just for the hell of it. I was home alone on Easter morning, before going off to spend time with my brother and his family for dinner that evening. I wasn’t feeling well, so eating loads of chocolate perhaps wasn’t the best idea to be honest. Nevertheless, nothing could possibly stand in the way of me and a Ben 10 easter egg:
The kids from a show I was playing piano for bought it for me, as a thank you present. It’s possibly the greatest thing I’ve been given ever (well, in the last week anyways). But I have a feeling that the flask will go to my Ben 10 obsessed nephew instead. The chocolate in the egg itself was a bit gross, but who cares! It was a Ben 10 egg!
My sister was home for the weekend, and gave me a beautiful little Lindt chocolate bunny, which I just can’t bring myself to take out of the gold foil. It has a bell! It’s just too damn cute! So it’s still sitting on my desk beside my computer.
Lastly, my folks gave me this big dark chocolate bunny, which was absolutely gorgeous. Just delicious. I started into it at lunchtime yesterday, and finished most of it today. I’m not sure it’ll last much longer. It wasn’t the prettiest bunny to look at, but that doesn’t matter so much because it was just so damn tasty.
The other thing that arrived this past week was my prize from a random Marina & The Diamonds competition on Twitter run by Heineken Music. I rather casually answered the three questions, and didn’t expect much more from it, but it turns out that I won! And a copy of Marina & The Diamond’s wonderful debut album, The Family Jewels winged its way to me along with a lovely tshirt and tote bag. Happy out. :) So here’s a photo of the shirt: (yep, it’s backwards as I took it with photobooth on my iMac, and couldn’t be arsed switching around the image.)
So, if I’m being really honest, I guess the Marina package was the best thing I got in the last week or so.