Fall TV

Posted on By Tom 1 Comment on Fall TV
Entertainment

Watching television used to be so simple. You got three, maybe four channels from which to choose. Then there were the shows themselves. Each episode could stand alone. There were none of the these long story arcs where you would be lost if you missed an episode or so.

I completely understand the logic behind long story arcs. You get your audience hooked, then they want to see what happens next. The idea of a cliff hanger is not new, by any means. However, these can have negative effects, too. If a view misses too many shows, they may give up on it. If they come to a show late in the game, they may not want to get started with it, fearing that they don’t have enough back story.

I’ve certainly had that happen to me. Lost, 24, and several others looked interesting, but I never got started with them. I started watching Heroes, but missed an entire season, and haven’t watched it since because I don’t know what’s going on, or how the last story arc got resolved. This fall season I’m giving several new dramas a try, and I’m already running into problems keeping up.

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Music

St. George Ceiling

In case your Cyrillic is rusty, the title of this post is from Psalm 104, “Praise the Lord, O My Soul”, and is one of the pieces that make up part of Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil. This weekend we performed the piece with the Greenville Chorale on Sunday afternoon at First Baptist Church.

This was a real challenge. The music itself wasn’t so hard, but there was so much of it. We did in an hour what we normally stretch out over two, when you add in soloists and orchestra. Throw in a layer of very difficult language, and you have a nearly impossible task.

I had done parts of the Vespers before, so I was somewhat familiar with the music. The sixth movement is the “Hail Mary” section, and I had done it several times with both the Latin Ave Maria text and the Russian. Even so, I found myself stumbling over music and text, even in the final performance.

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Paddling South Carolina’s Rivers

Posted on By Tom 22 Comments on Paddling South Carolina’s Rivers
Geocaching and Maps, Paddling

South Carolina Rivers

File – Paddling South Carolina Rivers (KMZ, 1.5 MB)

Google Earth has been one of the best resources for planning river kayaking trips, especially on new routes with which I’m not familiar. I’ll scan the route, locate put-in and take-out points, and put placemarks for certain landmarks such as rapids, powerlines, bridges, tributaries, or other interesting locations along the way. I would then use GPS Babel to convert my Google Earth files to GPX files then upload the data to my GPS so I would have it with me on the paddling trip.

Pretty soon I had a nice little collection of river trips in Google Earth. I began to wonder if anyone else was doing this. It seemed like it would be an excellent resource. There are some excellent books out there, such as Able and Horman’s Paddling South Carolina, and while the maps in these resources are fine for giving driving directions, there is no GPS information. SCTrails.net has started putting Lat/Long coordinates for some of their paddling trails, but not for all of them. So, I decided to make my own collection.

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Autumn Paddle on the Enoree

Posted on By Tom No Comments on Autumn Paddle on the Enoree
Paddling

Heading downstream

Kayakers – 3

Weatherman – 0

This makes three trips in a row where there was an iffy weather forecast. In each case, if we had followed The Weather Channel’s advice and canceled the trip, we would have missed out on a fantastic day of paddling. You’ve got to pay attention to the weather, but a 60% chance of rain doesn’t necessarily mean a bad day on the river.

Following on the heels of our last successful Enoree trip, David and Rick wanted to paddle another stretch of the river. They had done some scouting, and found a stretch starting at Whitmire that had great river access points. Add to that the fact that David had a new kayak to try out, and we had to put together another trip.

This was going to be a much smaller group than last time. Since the paddle route was longer, this just made sense. We would be joined by Dave W, a good friend of Rick and David’s, bringing our number to four.

Paddling Crew

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Scenes from a Whitmire Truck Stop

Posted on By Tom 4 Comments on Scenes from a Whitmire Truck Stop
Restaurants, Things Overheard

NOTE: This restaurant has closed. I headed out early for my kayaking trip on the Enoree River this morning, with the intent that I would get breakfast in route somewhere. I didn’t have to meet my fellow paddlers until 9:30, so that gave me plenty of time. I knew there were several Waffle Houses along … Read More “Scenes from a Whitmire Truck Stop” »