Opening the New Year

     Music is helpful to do homework by. So I've built a lot of playlists on my Spotify channels. Putting them on "shuffle" mode, going by station, the first songs played this year were the following: from the lengthy Story Songs collection it was Brad Paisley's "Part Two", from the 80's it was "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" by Guns N Roses, while the first song from the 90's/2000's playlist was Eli's "Stand", CHRISTMAS was playing Love Handel's version of "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" and StayAwake was playing Owl City's "Speed of Love".
     Pandora stations, CHRISTMAS! featured Brad Paisley's rendution of "Silver Bells", Comedy and Laughter played Andy Griffith's wonderful monologue "What It Was, Was Football", Michael W. Smith's "Breathe" was the first dose of Decent Christian Music, while the DJ over at Everything 93.5 played Scotty McCreery's "See You Tonight", Family Road Trip Radio had the Temptations singing "Ain't Too Proud to Beg", and Movies and Musicals was playing Owl City's "Hello Seattle" for some reason. Boston's autobiographical "Rock and Roll Band" was heard when flipping the dial over to Sports, "The Dance" by Garth Brooks was heard on Square Dance!, Study Aids was playing MercyMe's "I Can Only Imagine", and the folks at This is Country Music were playing "I'm Already There", by Lonestar.  
     The titles of my Spotify channels are much more practical and boring, as compared to the names of the Pandora stations.

     Glory was the first cat to decide to pounce on my bed to take a nap; then helped type those above paragraphs. And then she and Rags and Darcy got into a big fight last night. Rags helped me finish this post.

     Watched the NHL's Winter Classic yesterday afternoon; the Canadiens pounded the Bruins 5-1 at the Patriots' stadium. But hockey is Canada's game, so it wasn't too big a deal. Besides, I never have much liked Boston, anyway. Dad listened to the Sugar Bowl on the radio as Ole Miss destroyed OSU.
     Caleb went to the gun range with Mom and Dad, they all had a good time.

     Courtney, Trevor, Dad and I went to go see The Force Awakens finally  Star Wars is very much its own thing, so I'm not sure what how to classify it. Courtney and Dad loved it.
     The new movie chronology renders most of the novels nonexistent, which is irritating, because some of them were pretty good. (There's one by James Luceno that is simply tracing the history of the Milennium Falcon.) But anyway, you get a rough idea of what happened to everyone, and then - blam! Erased away with Episode VII. Technically, they now take place in an alternate universe, which seems like a flimsy copout, but whatever.
     Glad to have watched it now, since Star Wars is basically the pop-culture version of the Super Bowl.