Time was -

Time was I would spend a good hour each morning going through my email. Catching up on friends, reading the latest poetry on my e-mail lists, hearing from family, reading jokes, stuff like that. Things are changing though. I checked my email this Sunday morning and there was nothing! Well, nothing if I don't count the 40 spam emails. I have a nice new Junk folder now that I've upgraded my email client and all of the spam zips into it without my having to even look at it. How software can determine what is junk is a mystery but it took a few months of my 'junking' email and telling it that some emails are 'not junk' for the whole thing to start working so well.

Nowadays, I spend that hour in the Land of Blog. Friends blogs, poets' blogs, industry blogs, my daughters blog (catching up on the grandsons' antics), my brother's blog in Bermuda, my own blog -

and look what can be found!

On Arlene Ang's blog I found the Tinman - I've had iTunes set to repeat for days. Christopher Tin has many samples of his great compositions on his website at christophertin.com. The piece on Arlene's blog sounds faintly like two of my favourite musical pieces, the opening to Lion King and the opening to the first season of Battlestar Galactica.

On Frank Wilson's blog, we're asked to contribute to a poetic challenge, What Precedes the Poem - a challenge preceded by Frank's own fruity work. I like this blog (Books Inq) - whenever Wilson finds something of interest on the net, he posts a little snippet - sometimes many posts in one day - and links to the main articles. Following these links has taken me to some pretty interesting places.

At Poetry Thursday, you'll find a weekly challenge (completely and totally optional) and poets post their responses in the comment thread.