Listening to Music and going Deaf

It's Sunday, early afternoon. I got up at about 6:45 this morning, did the usual stuff, and thought I'd see if I could catch up a bit on this blog. Then I got sidetracked, as so often happens to me. This is where the time disappears to! It's so easy to lose hour after hour on the web and have bugger all to show for it!

What happened this morning was that I took a look at The Independent's website, read an article on how Britain has run out of bicycles due to the popularity of the Govt's Cycle To Work Scheme (fantastic news!) and then followed an article to their daily music playlists. They are linked to Spotify, so in the UK and other places you can listen to the music online (for a very small fee). Unfortunately I found that when I clicked on a BritPop selection nothing happened - Spotify can't have reached India yet. Then I noticed a Michael Jackson playlist (he died ten days ago) and remembered that I had none of his music on iTunes ... wouldn't it be nice to have just a few tracks, his best maybe, and I wondered if there was anything I could pull from the web... So I ended up downloading various tracks, individually, listening to them, discarding a few, and getting distracted by other singers etc. And so one by one the hours trickled away!

Well, maybe I do have something to show for my time - I do have some nice new tracks (and MJ tracks) on iTunes to listen to!

Unfortunately music doesn't sound right to me at the moment. It's all muffled, and it's not just my crappy loudspeakers - everyday speech is muffled too! I know the reason, and it's my own silly fault. Last Monday I tried drilling some angle iron to make a mitre jig for the pinboard frames I'm in the process of putting together. Only the drill bits I bought last weekend were feeble, went blunt very quickly, and then went black from the heat and became even more blunt. I persevered, pressing harder and harder, hoping that somehow the drills would make it through the angle iron, but they didn't. They made one hell of a screeching noise and had everyone in SISP's Coconut Workshop complaining. I should have stopped immediately, but I only had four 4mm holes to drill - how difficult could that be? Well, impossible with these pathetic Indian drill bits, it seems. So, with all the noise, my ears were ringing, and they've been ringing ever since. Even more than usual I'm having to ask people to repeat what they're saying to me which must piss them off - I know it does me.