7ToF: it's hot and I'm in a gripey mood

Black-eyed Susans
 from our garden

 1. Do you remember the months when I was griping about how cold it was and when would the weather ever get better? Yeah, well, now it's hot and I'm griping again. Dean says I have a two-degree range of comfort temperature-wise, and I suspect he's right.

2. A few weeks ago, when the weather finally got nice, there were a bunch of movies that I wanted to see, but it was so beautiful out after that long winter that we couldn't stand to spend our precious summer hours in a dark movie theater. Now that it's beastly hot and I would actually enjoy sitting in an air conditioned theater, there's nothing I want to see. Darn it.

3. I'm completely opposed to piracy of music, movies, books, and any kind of art. Use it legally. Pay for what you want to read or watch or listen to, or rent it or borrow it from a library. I've said it here before, and I'm saying it again.

4. But you know what makes me gripey? The assumption on the part of people who are outraged about piracy that every time someone illegally reads a book or downloads a movie or a song, it's a lost sale for the artist. I don't know that I've ever illegally downloaded anything, but back in the dark ages when we were making mix tapes on cassettes and passing them around, I wouldn't have bought that music. If I didn't have the tape, I would have just not had the music. I couldn't afford to buy that stuff. Sometimes I even recorded things off the radio, and I would be so mad when the DJ talked over the beginning or the end of the song. But I wouldn't have bought it. A pirated copy isn't always a lost sale.

Can you see what Sadie is staring at?

5. Speaking of legally listening to music, my kids convinced me to abandon Pandora and move over to Spotify. It's way better, mom, they told me. So I cancelled my Pandora membership and transferred over to Spotify. And I tried to like it, I really did. But either I never really figured out how to use it (entirely possible), or I am just a Pandora person. So I am back on Pandora.

6. Pandora lets you start a channel of music by choosing an artist or a song that is in the style you want, and then it magically plays other similar songs. If it plays one that you don't like, you press "thumbs down," and if there's one that you especially like, you press "thumbs up." So over time, Pandora learns what you like, and really it is kind of astonishing the way it chooses music to suit the channel you've created. For example, I have a channel that I started with James Taylor and Bonnie Raitt that plays 70s/80s soft rock, one that I started with the Oasis song "Wonderwall" that plays all my favorite 90s music, and one started with Lorde's song "Royals" that plays a really surprisingly good mix of music from when MadMax was in high school. #Pandoraforthewin

View through the binoculars

7. Back in the 80s, independent coffee shops and sandwich shops were springing up in college towns and tourist towns and it was something new and different. The menu was always on a chalk board, and there were quirky things on the menu that you'd never tried. Now that kind of place is practically a cliché, but once upon a time, they felt cutting edge. Anyway. Once in about 1985, we were at a café in the mountains in Vermont, and the chalk board menu described a sandwich called the "Four Fat Sandwich" that had bacon, cheddar cheese, avocado, and mayo. Possibly the best sandwich I've ever had. Thirty years later I still think about it --although now I would sub deli mustard for the mayo. #foodmemory

Huh. Well, that was a strange mix of stuff. What weird things have you been thinking about? Have a great weekend!