A well read little sissy gurl

In a world where to be honest I have not been feeling too good apart from listening to a bit of music softly while taking tablets my thoughts were on other things.

I have a bit of an fascination for oldish compilations of short stories usually written by the top authors of the day not least for the quality of the stories with believable characters and rich language that is so much the polar opposite of today's obsession with 'accessible language' that rather than stretching your knowledge of words and means actually holds it back.

They also tend to have a clear idea as to who their audience is, tailoring the topics very much to them so a compilation like this is clearly aimed for and around the interests of girls of that era with lots of adventure.

Girls stories aren't all romances and odes to Pony Club.

Books like these are just what sissy gurls like me need badly to connect our sense of adventure and zest for life with our feminine inner selves.

I love being a frilly sissy gurl as that was what I was always meant to be

Summer fun

We're officially into Summer  as much as it doesn't seem so long ago that we'd entered a new year.

That means going away for a break where I can explore things, make things in craft sessions and play in the sun.

Here I am being that little sissy gurl dressed  in a juniors black  boxy pinafore dress, black gym knickers and grey long socks with pretty bows on them playing croquet

One thing I have been doing is reading old annuals  not least comic ones and there's a kind of storyline in them you don't see in today's versions.

No that's from November 22nd 1952 which I might is before I was born but it's a comic strip where wrong doing gets swift punishment - whacked with Biffo's skipping rope but this kind of ending was common place when I was (allegedly) growing up and actually in the 1975 Beano annual I did have this year there were a few like Rodger the Dodger getting a spanking.

That may seem incomprehensible to a modern child which may be a reason why it doesn't feature - it could alarm some - in the way that for us it was everyday life wherever adults ruled so it was seen as normal if unpleasant. 

lt is an indicator of how over time society changes.

A new computer for Tammy

Computing with me has come on from the old days of big tower units with separate monitors and keyboards that were hard wired into your internet to the longing for more mobile working fitting in with my life rather than being it.

Recently I bought a new, simpler kind of a laptop computer that fits more into this life I live.

This is a Asus C202 in white l that has a 11.6 inch screen with a unspectacular but adequate 1366 x 768 resolution which is fine for general usage or watching anything from the BBC iPlayer on.

It has 32gb of memory but that's expandable to whatever you want using a SD card and 2gb of RAM which unless you've got absolutely heaps of tabs open is fine with the Chrome Os which is a kind of Linux in a browser system that doesn't suck processing power unlike Windows.

It comes in nice white trim and like practically all of the species has a built in video cam should it be needed.

Unless you're doing anything that requires a program running in the machine it's fine and today many things can be run as Apps from the Chrome browser, even basic photo editing.

Hopefully it won't be long before it arrives and be quickly set up.

Mozart Sonata's - new set

This week we're back to music and looking at Sonata's.

What is a Sonata I hear you ask?

A Sonata a composition for an instrumental soloist, often with a piano accompaniment, typically in several movements with one or more in sonata form.

One composer who wrote an awful lot of them was Mozart, who if you're familiar with this blog (and it's bigger companion) you will know is a composer I've always had affinity with to the point of buying over twenty recordings in 1991, the two-hundredth anniversary of his death which included a few sonatas.

Music of this era is very much in the firing line of the battle between traditionalist and those who believe in 'historically informed performances' with replicas of older instruments and looking for clues to how originally they were performed.

The young lady on the left may be familiar to some blog readers as she's the acclaimed baroque violinist Rachel Podger who started a long running survey of Mozart's sonatas in 2004 with the pianist Gary Cooper.

This disc covers four, KV 6, KV 379, KV 547 and KV 378.

This was followed up with KV 303, KV 7, KV 301, KV 30 and KV 481 in 2005

In 2006 they recorded volume three that covered  KV 454, KV 28, KV 402, KV 404, KV 8 and KV 380.

 Volume four came out in 2007 which took in K 302, K 9,K 304, K 29 and K 526

At which point you are probably saying and what's with this "KV" number?
KV happens to be  an abbreviation in German for Köchel Verzeichnis. 

 It is indeed a register for all the compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), not only the symphonies. K stands for Köchel, the last name of Austrian publisher and collector Ludwig Alois Ferdinand Ritter von Knöchel (1800-1877).

All Mozart's  music is catalogued in order using this notation which makes things simpler.

These performances and others in the series I'm slowly picking up, are widely regarded as the finest modern ones and the smooth effortless reproduction  the super audio format allows for sounds most natural, as if you were in a room listening to a recital.

Personally I just love the playing.