Books and songs and not crashing

Family shot from a recent session. Totally unrelated to my blog post.

I wanted to do a grateful post the other day but, you know, forgot to. And got distracted and stuff. But here we go, now that I have other work to do and am procrastinating about, I am blogging ;)

On Wednesday afternoon, I was almost rear-ended by a very fast-moving 4WD (and I was at the tail end of a line of cars waiting for a slow truck, so it would have started a pile up) but wasn't. The 4WD went into the oncoming traffic lanes to avoid hitting me, and ended up overtaking everyone (very dangerously, as there was a car coming the other way). When I did slowly get to continue up Glenfern Road, however, I saw that the 4WD had had an accident and destroyed his car just minutes (or seconds?) after passing all of us, hitting a stobie pole at the Glenfern Valley Bushlands car park. I've done a photo shoot and a workshop there, some of you might know it. The guy who had been driving (no passengers) was sitting on a rock next to the car and seemed fine, though shocked. I felt grateful that he didn't hurt anyone else at least.

1. So, grateful not to be in a car crash. Every time I drive. Some people on the road just shouldn't be, and I'm grateful that I haven't gotten in their way lately.

2. Libraries. With some pretty lovely travel plans in the works for Sienna and I, I've stocked up on guides and books from the local library. I go online and place holds for all the books I want, at all the libraries around about, and then get an email when they are ready to pick up from the library I've chosen. Very handy, and I have rather a big stack to get through now!

I tend to pick up a novel or two for myself while I'm there, Sienna has a pile of spy-related selections and an entire series of Pirate Patch readers is sitting on the coffee table for Ash to read. It's also been good for the kids to realise we don't have to buy things to keep, as they've always done libraries at school, and sporadically with me, but still tend to default to acquiring things. I still buy a handful of kids books most months, but we're getting a bit of both worlds now.

3. I'm grateful for songs. Songs are awesome. I'm enjoying listening to spotify.com when I'm working lately, though I confess I actually listen mostly to albums I already own, but which are buried in a box under the house somewhere. They were digitised at one point, but were lost in the great harddrive crash of 2006. OK, it might not have been 2006, but it was definitely awhile ago. I've just never been motivated to get them out again, but have been loving listening to a few nostalgic albums as well as discovering more recent releases and similar artists. Nostalgic for me means:

• Counting Crows - first few albums. At the moment listening to Recovering the Satellites.
• Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes mainly
• Bjork - Debut and Post (I have later ones but love those best)
• Sarah McLachlan - Surfacing (Kell was given this album by a Canadian who worked in Glenelg years and years ago, and loved it straight away. So it's kind of her thing but I've always really liked it too)
• Frou Frou and Imogen Heap

The other funny thing about songs is that Kell got me playing (with her, and now a couple of other people) a mobile music game called SongPop. I'm really not very good at it, and it is particularly the modern "today's hits" type genres that I have no idea about! I just don't listen to the radio, or watch regular tv. So I have a narrow band of musical knowledge, LOL. Still, it is fun.