Tag: blogging

SubscribeStar Saturday: Spring Concert 2023 Postmortem

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

My Middle and High School Music Ensembles had their big Spring Concert this past Monday, 27 March 2023.  Before their performances, my little school’s Dance and Choral classes gave their performances, so it was a jam-packed night of arts and entertainment.  The visual arts were part of the fun, too, with displays of students’ artwork.

It was a long day, but extremely worthwhile.  Few things bring me as much joy as hearing my students share their talents confidently and comfortably.

In the tradition of this blog and my music program, I’m going to breakdown the evening, focusing particularly (and naturally) on my two ensembles and their pieces.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

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Phone it in Friday XXXVI: On the Road, Festival News

The Portly Politico4 Comments

I’m chaperoning a trip to Washington, D.C. for my school’s ninth and tenth graders, and we’ve been going nonstop since about 5 AM on Wednesday, 29 March 2023.  Indeed, I’m writing this blog post on the bus to our nation’s capital.  The bus is equipped with WiFi, which is one of the more decadent instances of modern travel amenities I’ve enjoyed.

After the madness (and awesomeness) of my school’s annual Spring Concert (more on that tomorrow), it’s good to hit the road for a few days.  I was not looking forward to slogging through the rest of the week after the high of the concert.  That’s not to mention the burn of it:  according to my fitness app, I burned over 1900 calories and walked a little over seven miles throughout the course of the day.

There’s been a great deal of walking on this trip, so the burn keeps going.  I haven’t been able to get in my morning run, but the perambulation to historic sites has made up the difference in terms of caloric burn.

I’ll have more details soon.  The other big event is the Lamar Egg Scramble, which kicks off this afternoon, the bulk of which is tomorrow.  I have some big (for me) news in regards to the ol’ Scramble.

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TBT^4: Nehemiah and National Renewal

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A quick blurb before today’s post:  I’ve released my second book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.  It’s a collection of travel essays I’ve accumulated over the last four years, and it’s available now on Amazon.

Here’s where you can pick it up:

Pick up a copy today!  Even sharing the above links is a huge help.

Thank you for your support!

—TPP

***

I first wrote this (admittedly) political interpretation of Nehemiah 1:1-11 back in 2019.

2019.  What a different world.  That was in The Before Times, in The Long, Long Ago, before The Age of The Virus.  I suppose we’re living in the After Times now, a strange new world that is indelibly different after two years of masked ‘n’ vaxxed hysteria.  Doesn’t it seem like we’ve woken up, groggy and confused, from a two-year nightmare?  Everyone is living in a haze of uncertainty and regret—“maybe we shouldn’t have shut down restaurants and harassed people for not wearing a mask in their cars.”

It’s also interesting how that whole ridiculous, absurd ordeal now seems like some vague afterthought, almost like we only just barely remember what we endured a scant year or two ago.

Perhaps waking up from the nightmare and recognizing it as such is some form of national renewal.  I’m not so optimistic.  I think our society has goldfish memory, and we’ll act independent and defiant until the next cadre of experts delivers the next set of restrictions that we all must adopt, otherwise we’ll be Very, Very Bad People.

Why can’t we get national leaders like Nehemiah?  He stood up to attacks, schemes, plots, and slander, and managed to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem—and his people in the process.

With that, here is 24 March 2022’s “TBT^2: Nehemiah and National Renewal“:

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Myersvision: A Very Good Discussion

The Portly Politico2 Comments

March Bigftoot Madness marches on with another post about our favorite, secretive lug.  Thanks to Audre Myers for sticking hot on the big guy’s trail.

Audre has studied hundreds—maybe thousands—of Bigfootage on YouTube, and seems to have a discerning eye for what could be real and what’s fake.  The realm of Bigfoot is a world awash in fakery and grifters, which does much to discredit the study of this potential creature.

Audre cuts through the noise well, and while I’m still not convinced—and it may very well take (God Forbid) a Bigfoot corpse to convince most folks—she continues to make a compelling case for his existence:

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Open Mic Adventures XXVI: “Sonatina”

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Last night was my student’s big Spring Concert, which I am sure I will write about soon, but because of that concert—and the busy weekend preceding it—I’m actually writing this blog a full week early.  Ergo, I’ll likely have some footage from that concert for the next installment of Open Mic Adventures.

For this one, however, I’m sticking to my recent bout of pianistic noodling videos.  This week’s installment pulls from the Alfred’s Basic Piano Library Complete Level 1: For Late Beginners book.  It’s the book my one-eyed Aunt Cheryl used to teach me to play piano, and it’s the one I use with my own piano students.

The piece is near the end of the book, and is called “Sonatina.”  “Sonatina” literally means “a little sonata,” but there is no fixed definition for what constitutes a sonatina.  They are usually light in nature, even amusing, and often meant to reinforce some technique (like an etude, which literally means “study”).

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Portly’s Top Ten Best Films: #1: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

The Portly Politico2 Comments

As far as I can tell, the very first installment of Monday Morning Movie Review—simply “Monday Movie Review” back then—was a review of The Empire Strikes Back (1980).  I wrote it on 28 September 2020, which seems like just a few days ago.  Pretty crazy to think it’s been almost three years since this blog started running movie reviews on Mondays.

Indeed, in the interest of saving time (today is my school’s big Spring Concert, and I’m chaperoning a trip to Washington, D.C., later in the week, so time is at a premium), I’m quoting extensively from that original review.  Work smarter, not harder, eh?

Growing up as a chubby kid in the 1990s, I was a huge Star Wars fan.  That was long before the new trilogy retconned/soft-rebooted everything and destroyed the legacy of classic Star Wars, and even before the prequels made the flicks even more cartoonishly ridiculous.  I’m not even a huge critic of the prequels—they were never going to live up to the perfection of the original trilogy—and I enjoyed some of the fun world-building and thorny trade blockades of Phantom Menace (1999; although that’s all a bit too technocratic for a space opera).  But the magic of the original trilogy is more than the sum of its parts, and it’s based on rich storytelling and exceptionally strong character development, with nearly every major character growing and evolving over the course of the three films.

So it is that I would argue that The Empire Strikes Back is not just the best Star Wars film, but the best film of all time.

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Lazy Sunday CXCV: Arizonan Sojourn, Part II

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

A quick blurb before today’s post:  I’ve released my second book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.  It’s a collection of travel essays I’ve accumulated over the last four years, and it’s available now on Amazon.

Here’s where you can pick it up:

Pick up a copy today!  Even sharing the above links is a huge help.

Thank you for your support!

—TPP

***

With the release of my second book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures, it seemed like the ideal time to post the second half of the six essays that make up the first section of the book (apologies for that confusing sentence of numbers and ordinals).  These three essays are Chapters 4-6 in the book, and were originally published on my SubscribeStar page, and cover my trip to Arizona with my older brother:

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures PDF

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

A quick blurb before today’s post:  I’ve released my second book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.  It’s a collection of travel essays I’ve accumulated over the last four years, and it’s available now on Amazon.

Here’s where you can pick it up:

Pick up a copy today!  Even sharing the above links is a huge help.

Or, you can subscribe to my SubscribeStar page at $5 a month or more and get access to the PDF right now!

Thank you for your support!

—TPP

***

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  Most Saturday posts are accessible with a subscribtion to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

However, for this Saturday only, subscribers must be at the $5 level or higher.  Why?  Because I’m posting a PDF of my new book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.  That’s a $20 value, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for a $5 a month subscription—do you?  There are perks, after all, to paying a little extra—ding!

For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

I finally released my second self-published book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures, and as a reward to $5 and higher subscribers (and as an inducement to my $1 a month subs to upgrade), you can get access to the PDF!

There’s not much else to say.  Subscribe for $5 a month, and get access to the full book (as a PDF), plus Sunday Doodles and a bunch of other goodies.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $5 a month or more.

Phone it in Friday XXXV: My Second Book is Live on Kindle!

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

In case the daily reminders at the top of every post this week weren’t reminder enough, I’ve released my second book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.  It’s a collection of travel essays I’ve accumulated over the last four years, and it’s available now on Amazon.  The Kindle version went live today, so if you pre-ordered, you can now read the book!

I’ve been eager to release a second book ever since I published The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot back in March 2021, but various time constraints always seemed to interfere.  Ironically, maintaining the blog—even with help from good friends—is one such hinderance, while also serving as the source material for this book!

Blogging daily (today marks the 1545th consecutive day of blogging) is great fun, but it takes time.  Longtime readers will probably have noticed the increase in guest posts (especially from Audre Myers and Ponty), as well as lighter posts from yours portly.  Those lighter posts are partially out of necessity—in order to maintain my busy work and private music lessons schedule, I have to write some fluffier posts here from time to time.

No worries—I have not given up on political writing entirely, nor have I abandoned writing seriously about music, faith, art, etc.  Sometimes, I just need to upload some pictures of a LEGO set I built and call it a day.

That said, blogging daily is also the source of Arizonan Sojourn, as blogging daily will likely be the source of my next book (topic to be determined).  Pulled from four years of travel essays, with a particular focus on the six-part trip my older brother and I took to Arizona in December 2022, the book regales readers with tales of my not-so-outrageous exploits.

So, I found myself last week with a modicum of extra time because Middle School students were taking some horrendous standardized test, after which they were dismissed for the day.  That removed my duty to teach Middle Music Ensemble for a few days, and that extra fifty-six minutes each day, along with the lack of private music lessons with Middle Schoolers, enabled me to complete the compiling, organizing, and edition of Arizonan Sojourn.

Unlike Inspector Gerard, I also made sure to proofread and revise Arizonan Sojourn much more carefully this time.  I cannot guarantee it is free of grammatical errors—I found one as soon as I published the book (it is now fixed)—but it should be substantially less embarrassing in this regard than Gerard was.

That’s all to say that you should buy it.  I’ll also be uploading a PDF manuscript of the entire work to my Subscribe Star page for $5 and up subscribers tomorrow.

Of course, it’s much better to have a physical copy, no?

Here’s where you can pick it up:

Happy Reading!

—TPP