Updating again

Time doesn’t stop for anyone or anything, as we all know. The subjects of posts on this blog have changes, but most of them go unnoticed (not the least because most aren’t all that important). Still, there are regular readers who are along for this ride, and for them it may be useful to know when something has changed so the story this blog paints makes sense.

Back in 2015, I began a series of posts to give those sorts of updates, mainly to posts about my life and things I’ve been doing. I figured that posts about stuff in the news are easy enough for readers to check on, if they want to, but that’s not true, or as easy, for some posts. The Update states were meant to take care of that kind of post.

I have no idea why, but I stopped doing that after only four posts, the last in May, 2016. As it happen, there are two updates to that post: The first item is something that I stopped using not all that long after writing about it, going back to hair dye. The second item talks about things that haven’t changed much since then, except that I now also use Apple’s Reminders App because it sends alerts to my phone and watch.

But this post is actually about updates to much more recent posts.

Let the music play

About a week and a half ago, I wrote about the loss of our free-to-air video music channel (near the end; the link goes directly to that part). At that time, I had no idea where I’d find out about new music, let alone the videos for the songs. I have part one of a solution for that.

I had a hunch and clicked on the link for “Official NZ Music Charts” in the “In New Zealand…” section of the righthand sidebar (near the bottom). There they have a number of official Top 40 pop music charts, along with—and this was my hunch—a Spotify Playlist of the songs for that week (in this case, the Top 40). This gives me a chance to listen to the most popular songs in New Zealand—with the occasional ad, usually for Spotify Premium).

In some ways, this is a huge improvement because I hear songs that wouldn’t be played on the old music video channel. The web page often has direct links to the video for the song, but I can also double check myself (if I like it well enough) when I know what the song is called and who it’s by—two things that aren’t always obvious to me. In the past, I usually noticed the video if I liked the song, although sometimes it was the other way around. In that sense, this method isn’t all that different.

On the other hand, I don’t think I’ll be doing this every week, because it’s a lot of extra work to listen, and then search for the video, and then decide if I like it enough to share (and, generally speaking, that often took several views in “the old days”). Even so, I can see opportunities to mix it up a bit when I prepare one of those posts.

In any case, the next Weekend Diversion post will have one of the leftover videos I mentioned in that post a week and a half ago, plus others I didn’t write down before the video channel shut down. Whew!

Still teatotalling

Back in June, I talked about how I was teatotalling to try to reduce the risk of liver damage, which one of my prescription drugs, amiodarone, can cause. It turns out that I basically stopped having it after that post, but for a simple reason: Calories.

People don’t drink wine or other alcoholic beverages just for the taste, even if that’s one reason. If we’re truly honest, most people drink it—at least in part—because of the pleasant effects that come from it. However, those drinks are also empty calories, providing little or no nutritive value. The alcohol-removed wine I tried is the same—empty calories—but without the payoff of real wine. I never really thought about the empty calories before, and it took this substitution for me to do so. I’ll still have it for social occasions, of course, but I’m now aware of the empty calories as I never really was before, and so, I’ll have less of it.

Meanwhile, the café nearest to our house has now added the brand to their offering. That means that if we go there, I can have a glass of that while others have their real wine. I like that.

• • •

As I said in my last Update post more than three years ago, “That's it for this update. Maybe the next one will be sooner—or, not…” So far it’s been “not”, but maybe that’s just changed?