What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

I spent a lot of time working on getting ready to study Portuguese without a teacher. I tried Pimsleur, but I am too advanced for the part that is in European Portuguese. So, I'm not going to use it. Instead, I just have to keep plowing through podcasts, trying to get better at comprehension. It worked with French, eventually, so I'll keep at it. I'm going to see if speaking Portuguese to Claude.ai via the app on my phone works. I'm not comfortable with the idea of doing this, but I can go through the partner exercises in my textbook with it. It can't talk back to me, which is okay. Self-voicing with a computer voice that is using California English is so painful to listen to when it is trying to pronounce Portuguese.

The podcast deadline is looming, and I told a promoter that I would put two of their label's songs in the next episode, because they sound good together, and I've been meaning to get the first song they sent me into an episode for a while. However, the sound is quite right for anything I have. I did find a song by a Japanese band that I really like (and had permission for) that will fit. And finally, after a few hours of trying to find the right songs, I came up with two more from a couple of different labels that should work. I'm so glad that is finally moving forward.

I'm not going to get all my paintings done by this weekend, but I drew out a fairly good looking X-Wing for the Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader painting that I'm doing (the trench run from the first Star Wars movie). I would love to have gotten more done, but I don't want to push myself and end up even more stressed.

Oh!!!! We came up with a solution to the scooter/bike problem. Yesterday, I rode the scooter again, and it was a lot of fun. However, it definitely doesn't have enough power to get up the hills. So, I 100% will need a new one. And Joel's bike is _still_ not working (company sent a replacement part, which didn't fix the problem, so the bike will have to go back to Spain again). Joel is looking to buy another bike. If we buy another scooter for me, then we would have two scooters and two bikes, needing to sell one of each. However, the other thing I discovered with the scooter is that I will have to ride the breaks down any hill. One of the big reasons for the scooter was that it was supposed to have a speed limiter, which would mean that I didn't have to deal with that. If I am going to have to ride the breaks down all the hills, I might as well be on a bike. I can just ride it really slowly. If Joel buys a new bike and gets the old bike fixed (again), then I can ride the slightly smaller new bike for my one trip into town per week, and Joel can ride the old bike on that one day. The rest of the time, he can ride the new bike (which we think he will like more). Then, we would only need to get rid of the scooter, which we will need to get rid of anyway. Having two bikes in the yard is way less annoying than having a scooter in the living room. So, anyway, that is the plan.

I give my podcast episodes names based on what is in the episode, like "A Lady Leads The Band" for female big band leaders or "Yet Another Pop Punk Episode" for when I was really excited about pop punk (I still am, but I have focused less on downloading those songs). The problem that I find is that while all the songs sound good (or good enough) together, often at least one of them doesn't fit whatever theme I thought I was using. In the last episode, I had all different kinds of -wave songs (darkwave, chillwave, coldwave, etc), but one of the songs was dream pop. In this episode, I was going for a singer-songwriter/less electric feel than in some of the previous episodes. However, there were some clearly electric guitar bits in one of the songs. So, instead of just saying "Mostly X", I decided to ask ChatGPT. It, of course, puked up the most boring sounding titles imaginable. I gave it all the background info and song lyrics and asked again for help with an episode title, and it gave me a really similar list of awful, boring titles ("Echoes and Reflections", "Winds of Change", "Songs of Solitude and Society", "Contours of the Heart", "Rhythms of Resilience"), but it also said, "Given the diversity of themes and emotional undertones in these songs, your podcast episode title could encapsulate the essence of navigating through changes, challenges, and introspective moments." Instead of using one of its awful titles, I went for "changes, challenges, and introspective moments". Next time I can't come up with a title, I may give it the list of all 187 titles so far and see if it can match my (somewhat bare bones) style. (Nope. It came up with "Reflective Echoes", which is still too poetic and not descriptive enough. After telling it to make something more descriptive, I got "Challenges and Echoes", which would have worked.)

Last night, a mosquito in our room kept waking me up. Plus, I went to bed late. On top of that, having done too much recently also finally caught up with me. And then, this morning, I tried to think about a spacial thing, and my brain caught on fire. I finally picked up by dinner time (after listening to a bunch of cool songs a friend sent to me), but I still wasn't really doing great. I think I should be fine after getting some sleep, though, so I will still go to tai chi tomorrow.

For those who might be interested, these are my favorites of the songs my friend suggested:
Uns vão bem e outros mal - Fausto
Mal por Mal - Deolinda
From Angola - Mona Ki Ngi Xica - Bonga
From Brazil - Águas de Março - Elis Regina
O Anzol - Rádio Macau
Alfama - Madredeus
Verdes Anos - Carlos Paredes

Today was about errands. I successfully got the dirt sent out to the dirt analysis place and also picked up two boxes of our deliveries from Amazon at Mailboxes Etc. However, there was a third box they couldn't find. I'm going to have to go back and see about that but not soon. I would also have liked to have taken the non-working SSD hard drive that I have to a tech recycle place, but it was out of the way, and I wasn't interested in doing any more.

At home, I did some cleaning, some prep for tomorrow, and started preparations for my 2023 favorite songs ranking. It isn't really a shock that I love hearing songs that I love, so I felt much happier after working on that. I don't have a lot of new songs (11, I think), although I did take some others off. As has happened in previous years, I realized that I had the wrong song on my list on one spot (a less than favorite version of Totentanz by Liszt), so I will go back through my old lists of favorite songs and update them to use this version.

We are heading up to the new house early tomorrow to be there for a bunch of deliveries and internet installation, so please keep your fingers crossed that everything shows up at the right times.