May 2013
2 posts
2 tags
Dwariko Von Sommaruga: A Reminiscence
This morning I broke out the tarot cards. I had not done so in a long time for various reasons. I read the cards for myself. It is a special deck of tarot I have though I also have two other tarots- the Rider-Waite and the Sybilla oracle [the latter is not a tarot perse]. I chose this morning to use > Songs For The Journey Home /a>
Then I looked up the website to find that a friend of...
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Reading for May
This month I have been reading much stuff about psychoanalysis and listening to lots of different stuff.
Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic thought
Classical Music: A novel by Joy Cowley - a children’s writer who had at the time of publication of the novel in 1999 written 8 for adults.
The Orphan Master’s Son: A novel of North Korea by Adam Johnson....
April 2013
3 posts
3 tags
Judy Collins: Watching from afar
On May 1, 1939 in Seattle, Washington, the world first heard the beauty of a voice. Her name was Judith Marjorie Collins and she would go on to introduce the symphony to popular music and bring such artist as Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell to international acclaim. Collins, in the 60’s had a reputation as “the singer’s singer”.
I first wrote Judy Collins in 2000. She...
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Some News
Got an email yesterday saying that the movie is finished. This is great news but more on that later.
I have just discovered that Joanne Harris [author of Chocolat etc] has a tumblr. What’s more she has interesting things to say on it. check it out at Interesting news is coming from her corner - was just looking at her website.
Weather is growing colder which means the darker months...
1 tag
Reading For March/April
I have been very busy with Uni and stuff. Nonetheless always reading.
A Monk Swimming - Maliki’s McCourt’s memoir. He’s the brother of Frank [Angela’s Ashes ] who comes out a lot more virtuous. M. just whoers and drinks all the time. catching The Current Jenny Patrick’s prequel to her Denniston novels. Is okay.
Perspectives on Personality - had to read...
February 2013
3 posts
1 tag
Reading for February
Too much music to talk about in brief this month but here’s what I have been devouring this month.
The Percimon Tree: a novel Bryce Courtney’s last RIP.
The Fellowship Not a religious book at all but a bio of Frank Lloyd Wright and his times and all the people associated with him.
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English explores the idea that the...
3 tags
Braille All The Way!
“You’ve got to learn braille but you have to really concentrate.” So four-year-old me was told by a preschool teacher. This moment of idealism was magically caught on video. I still have the videotape [yes, it’s a REAL video!]
I want to tell everybody how important Braille is in my life. When I began school there were not any electronic Braille writers [well there...
1 tag
On Airline Toilets
Well, I didn’t come back in a box from America. Had so much fun I didn’t want to come home.
But this post is a bout airlines. We all know that they are not very interesting and the food leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes we don’t think about the fundamentals of life -
I want to talk about airline toilets. It’s zoo hard going to the pooh on a aeroplane. It was so...
January 2013
2 posts
4 tags
200 Words of Bullshit!
A wee while ago Noelle McCarthy, an Irish broadcaster and columnist for the Herald here in New Zealand, published a 200 words of nothingness in the newspaper. So now it’s my turn.
Not much is happening right now.. Seven more sleeps before I get to California! I am very much looking forward to my trip there and will blog about it and make
The aforementioned Noelle Mccarthy was on the...
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Reading and Listening to for January 1 2013
This year I have decided to publish once a month what I am reading and listening to. I will do it about the 1st of every month.
Listening to
Britten - A Ceremony of Carols/Friday Afternoons, 1995 Naxos
Poulenc - Gloria/Stabat mater One of the 1000 classical recordings to hear before you die
Jewel - Pieces of You, 1995 Quite nice. Reading
CCity of Women by David Guilan about hiding...
December 2012
9 posts
3 tags
Why the hell I have multiple things in my internet...
In 2007 I started blogging under the pseudonym of Gudrun Miller on this wordpress blog I’m surprised it’s still up there. I just decided to leave it there.
A few years later I made a LiveJournal which is full of stuff that might be of interest to some people one of these days. I also have an audioblog>/a> [another post entirely on that] and twitter, FaceBook and YouTube...
4 tags
https://2012.twitter.com/en/golden-tweets.html →
So, the most popular tweets were as above. Enjoy them, all my tumbler followers.
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Elusive iPhoto
I have spent the past two days grappling with iPhoto. iPhoto is very good on the whole - gives lots of feedback with VoiceOver. But, there’s always a but, the exporting capabilities don’t talk so well - not as well as they could.
They did talk before so I grappled with my Mac. They didn’t talk to me. Then… I found something cool!
I found flickr export which is easier to...
The Camera
So I did buy a camera. But oh the amazement when I went shopping for it. “Have you got a basic point-and-shoot that records audio as the photo is being taken?” They shook there heads.
So the nice man at JB HiFi found me an easy-to-use camera. It’s really great! You can see some of the photos from it on this flickr page
Now to decide which photo sharing service I am going...
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1 tag
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The Elusive search for a blind friendly camera
I want a camera so badly. Want to tie better pictures that look good and put them on TwitPic. At the same time I want a cheap, basic camera with one special thing: I want it to record audio as the picture is being taken.
I have been surfing the web the past few days. You can get a pretty good camera for under $100. I have read many guides on what to look for in a digital camera. I have...
4 tags
My Photography
I have always been interested in taking photos. When I was a little girl my Grandma had an old camera in her toy box and I would take great pleasure in pretending to shoot photos of people with it. Then when I was eleven my parents gave me a camera for my birthday- it was a red cokacola camera. I loved it! I took lots of photos of things and people.
In case you don’t remember, I am...
November 2012
2 posts
3 tags
I Discover Freegal
Feels so great to be free of AUT [sighs deeply.]. Now I have more time for other things like planning for my California trip.
But today I wanted to talk about Freegal Itt stands for free and legal and is downloadable Mp3’s from the Sony catalogue.
One can download 3 songs a week. Ask your local library about it.
October 2012
1 post
3 tags
Where have I been all this time?
Dear Readers,
You may ask where I have been. Here’s a small sample.
Reading
The Man who Broke in to Auschwitz
Peaches for Monsuier La Curate: Chocolat Book III
A Land mMore Kind Than Home
Uni
Writing portfolio for co-op and study for exam on November 2.
Listeng to
Bryn Terfel - The Vagabond and Other Songs of Vaughan Williams
Judy collins - Times Of Our Lives
...
September 2012
1 post
2 tags
Why FaceBook Smells
Jingle bells FaceBook smells Tumblr go away
MySpace yuck Foursquare Sucks
Twitter all the way!
I have already talked about why I like Twitter but the above silly parody of a christmas carol made me think about FaceBook. I send my tweets and my tumblings to Fb because I know people who follow me there want to know what I’m up to and they like to see photos. Most of the world is on FB not...
August 2012
3 posts
5 tags
Deep In The Bowels of GarageBand
For the last few days I have been playing very intensively with GarageBand, Apple’s recording software. It’s been great fun manipulating myself and playing piano and keyboard strings and singing songs that I love.
But something really bad happened. It kept freezing up and I had to force quit it.
I didn’t know what had happened to my song. I was so frustrated that I...
Listen
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Oh wow!!!!
oh wow!! I knew you could connect almost anything !a Mac but this is too cool!!!!>
For the past week or so I have been fiddling around with my BrailleNote trying to get it to pair with my Mac via bluetooth. Today it finally worked! I don’t know what I was doing wrong but it didn’t want to connect for some reason.
I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to be writing...
July 2012
16 posts
Bird song and stuff
Bird song and stuff (mp3)
3 tags
People who change their Skype names
Woke up this morning to discover a stranger on my Skype list. Leastways I thought it was a stranger but it wasn’t. Somebody had changed their Skype name.
It’s bad enough when somebody puts quotes around their Skype name so they appear at the top of the list. At least that way one knows who it is. But changing the Skype name altogether? That’s crazy.
I know it is possible...
At AUT
At AUT (mp3)
Buying lunch
Buying lunch (mp3)
Blind and psychotic?
Blind and psychotic? (mp3)
1 tag
Two Cool things
I have discovered two cool things in the past week:
Pandora radio is available in New Zealand
Bookshare.org is available in New zealand, finally What does this mean? Pandora is customisable radio. You type an artist and it searches its databases based on the musical features [DNA] of that artist. It’s really cool! I have found some new music already.
Bookshare.org is an online...
At AUT
At AUT (mp3)
And another from an online reference. →
Entry on music therapy from the Encyclopedia on... →
Country sounds
Country sounds (mp3)
In tk
In tk (mp3)
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Going on Holiday
Today I am going on a little Holiday to Tk which is a bout an hour south of here. I am going to stay with Ann and we are going to a concert tomorrow.
The show is by a group called Operatunity. They are singing songs from the 60’s and 70’s.
I am reading Society’s Child: My Autobiography by Janis Ian. She writes well, succinctly though a bit bits.
Queen street buying cookies
Queen street buying cookies (mp3)
On writing and why Michael morpurgo is so cool
On writing and why Michael morpurgo is so cool (mp3)
My 1st audioboo
My 1st audioboo (mp3)
3 tags
What the...Another audio blogging site?
Everybody who is blind has been telling me about audio boo. It’s this thing on which you can record audio clips and it uploads ‘em to the internet and keeps them on its servers.
It’s kinda like But with shorter recording times and more ways to post stuff. It even links to Tumblr! So I have jumped ship from Ipadio and am trying this new thing. This audioblog will be more...
June 2012
17 posts
Listen
3 tags
Mara Kelland Music
Okay- I did it! I have made myself a FaceBook page as a musician. Hope it will go somewhere.
If you like what you heard on SoundCloud, please “like” my FB page too. I will put all the new vids etc there.
Of course I will still blog on tumblr but am trying to organise my life a bit more. So if you like, do like my page on FaceBook.
Thanks very much,
Mara Kelland.
3 tags
On Playing for Older People
On Monday afternoon I do a good deed for the week. It’s so much more than that. If you want a term for it it is music therapy but I am not a music therapist, I am just a folksinger/pianist.
At Fraser McDonald on Monday afternoons I sit at there really old, honky-tonk sounding piano and I sing and play folksongs and popular tunes from the 40’s forward. Sometimes I might sing an...
Look what I just found on SoundCloud:...
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A Reminiscence
Perhaps I am a little too young to be writing like this. But…
[whose cool website you’ll get to if you click on the link] says I should write my autobiography. I have had many requests from friends over the years to write it. But I don’t think I have much to say in that regard. Let me tell you one story-the story of a song.
I was a few months short of my 21st birthday when I...
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Music Education II: The Kodaly Method
This method is a natural extension of being a folk music buff as the learning material is drawn, in the early years at least, from folksong.
When I was about 15, my singing teacher at the time introduced me to a method of writing called tonic sola. I had only heard of this in fun before [who hasn’t heard that do is a deer a female deer?] This lead me to investigate an discover Zoltan...
