Random Thursday: The Cute, the Chiroptera, and the Insanely Cool . . .

. . . In no particular order, as befits a Random Thursday assembled by a woman suffering from a mystery virus and buzzing from a dose of Dayquil and multiple gallons of Irish Breakfast tea.

If this is your first Random Thursday here, you’ll notice how it lives up to its name.  No rhyme or reason . . . just stuff i collected this week.

Enjoy.

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Cello Wars

When I started playing bassoon, my mother collected every bassoon-related item she could find, which couldn’t have been easy, as it’s always been the weird kid of the orchestra* and that odd tube coming out the side—it’s called a bocal, by the way, thanks very much—doesn’t make it easy for designers.

I’m having an easier time collecting cello stuff for Janie, mostly because violin, a viola, a cello, and bass viols are often indistinguishable when rendered in, say, stained glass ornaments or charm bracelets.

Besides, Mom didn’t have YouTube as a back up—or The Piano Guys:

Pure Nerdvana . . . or is that Nerdtopia?

Regardless, if you didn’t stick with this until the final credits, watch it again.  It’s worth it.

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A week ago, my husband attended an instructor’s workshop on Aerial Yoga, which appears to my untrained eye to be half hatha, half sky dancing.

Practitioners use fabric loops attached to the ceiling to help them stretch and to achieve new poses without that pesky gravity getting in the way—although some of us know that gravity is just waiting for us to try it ourselves, rubbing its hands in anticipation.

This kind of yoga is just starting to hit (no pun intended) our area, and it looks like a lot of fun for—and I can’t stress this strongly enough—other people:

 Why, yes, I am a lucky woman.

 But if my husband is happy hanging upside-down with his cranium a couple feet above a hardwood floor, I’m happy.

Besides, he’s insured

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Sunny the Cutebat has competition:

Picture three adults and two kids all staring at the same screen and saying, “Awwwwwwww!”  at exactly the same moment.  You’ll know the place when you see it:

Take that, baby sloth video!

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Modesty forbids . . . Wait, no it doesn’t

Chris Ewan, author of the Good Thief series—which I’ve only raved about once or twice—wrote a Bouchercon article for the November/December issue of Crimespree Magazine.  

Guess who he mentioned meeting there?

But the passion went beyond just that. Sarah Wesson, a librarian and blogger (https://wessonblog.wordpress.com) from north-western Illinois, bumped into me in the foyer of the convention hotel one afternoon and asked me to sign a copy of The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam. I was happy to oblige, more so when she told me she’d had to crawl under a bookseller’s table to retrieve it. But I was completely amazed when I ran into Sarah the following day and she told me that she’d not only finished my book, but had also recommended it to a number of people and blogged about it, too. Let me tell you, as fine as they are, that’s not something that’s ever happened to me at a UK convention.**

So if you came here from there—and I assume from the traffic increase that many of you did—welcome!  My own write up of Bouchercon starts here, if you’re interested.

Thanks, Chris!

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*Except for the glockenspiel, which I have to admit is a strange piece of work.  The inventors of German musical instruments are not from this planet.

**  Crimespree Magazine #44 Nov/Dec (Kindle Locations 863-868).

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