Well, my life doesn't seem to be completely eaten. I've found time for a few other activities. Made some more bookmarks, cleaned a little, cooked a little. Caught a cold. Stuff like that.

The cold isn't too bad. I'm just going to confine myself, rest and drink fluids in hope of being over it in time for us to leave on vacation Sunday.

I also made a retail display for the bookmarks. Thinking about it, I decided it wasn't impossibly daunting to ask around and see if any local bookstores would be interested in offering them for sale. I may just give it a try. Though at current expenses and time to make them, if they do sell, I'll only make the equivalent of about $3 an hour for them. Well, it would keep me in paper and stickers.

Long time readers will be aware that I have a serious yen for paper. As collecting manias go, it's mild and inexpensive. At least until I decide to go to Japan and buy direct from the source.

It's nice that I will have time for things other than buying online music. It turns out that 200,000 songs, as currently offered by the Apple Music store, still leaves out a lot of music I would be interested in owning. I expect the inventory will continue to grow. And I'm very interested to see if they begin offering more independent musicians. I'd appreciate more local and unusual choices.

I can only think of two problems with adding more music. One is that it may be harder to search and find what you're looking for. But if Google can search the entire web, searching a music database is certainly a solvable problem. The other is having to write more small checks to send royalties to more small record companies. This looks solvable, too. With electronic payments, the added effort of more and smaller payments should not unduly increase costs.

So, online music still has a good chance of eating my life. It's just not there yet.

Well, that's it for my life. The rest of it will be devoted to listening to samples and buying music from the Apple Music Store.

This is almost like first surfing the web. I've listened to online samples before, but it was always a chore. Now I'm learning odd facts like that I like almost all songs with the word Creek in the title. Hmmm...

I am trying to fill my Hoedown playlist. If you have any suggestions for uptempo acoustic dance music such as Cajun, bluegrass, early acoustic rock, traditional Celtic, etc., by all means email me a pointer so I can listen to a sample of it. The usual address, annaparadox@mac.com, applies.

Good luck and good listening, Anna