I’m getting quite excited: at the end of the month the Milford Wanderer will be our home for 6 nights as we sail round Rakiura.
Designed along the lines of a traditional sailing scow, she has old-world charm combined with modern facilities and the latest in safety equipment.
How to maintain your speaking voice
As I get older I’ve become a little concerned about my voice. Sometimes when I try to call the dogs on the beach my voice ‘cracks’ and even disappears. Sometimes when I talk with people I think my voice isn’t reliable and can be a bit creaky.
I went in search of helpful videos and found a whole swag on YouTube from County Durham & Darlington NHS Foundation Trust. Unfortunately they hadn’t made a playlist, but I worked through the videos yesterday, ignoring a couple of duplicates and ended up with this wonderful list of 28.
Some videos are slightly longer; some are less than 60 seconds. Most are just a couple of minutes.
One hilarious thing for me is that I just can’t do something most babies probably do without effort: a lip trill, where you put your lips together and blow through them to vibrate the lips: Bbbbb. Nope, no can do!
I hope by practicing these various warmups and techniques I can strengthen my voice, making it smoother and more reliable.
Have fun!
- Warm Up Exercises
- Dynamic Stretches
- Vocal Function Exercises
- Pitch
- Resonant Voice
- Breathing Exercises
- Lax Vox
- Silent Laugh
- Whine
- Sob
- Creak
- Stifled Yawn
- Yawn Sigh
- Volume and Projection
- Accent Method
- Silent Inspiration
- Tongue Trill
- Tongue Roll
- Lip Trill 2
- Voiced Fricatives
- Glides
- Hmmm
- Pops
- Plosive Consonant Closure
- Smooth Onset
- Breath Before Tone
- Glottal Onset
- Siren 2
Our new splashback installed. It’s a colour called Resene Koru to match our feature walls. Tricky with reflections… Really gives the kitchen a lift though and we could never properly clean the wall behind the stove.
I love these little cuties. More waxeyes at the bird feeder.
Get! Scram! Clear off!
This is a ‘before’ of our oven and wall and rangehood. Soon there should be an ‘after’.
Aha: an explanation of the planes: RNZAF carrying out low-flying around Manawatū, Rangitikei & Whanganui | NZDF
tactical flying exercise … a Hercules training activity used by No. 40 Squadron … provides crews with a range of flying training
We live not too far really from a military airfield (60 Km direct). I happened to be taking photos of the birds at the feeder, heard a noise, looked up and these two huge very low flying C130-H Hercules were heading straight for me. They banked behind us and flew off.
Sometimes at the supermarket I see workers with big trolleys assembling customer orders for delivery. This approach is utterly astonishing: How many robots does it take to run a grocery store?
In Ocado’s grocery warehouses, thousands of mechanical boxes move on the Hive.
I think this is my third night in a row of restless and broken sleep. I’ve been having a good run of sleep lately after working on it, so this is annoying. Not sure what’s going on. 😴
Sexual Harassment is a bit of a problem by Sharon Murdoch.
This started well, became a bit suss and then by 66% through was annoying: Last Call (The Janet Black Mystery Series Book 1) by Libby Kirsch 📚
I read to the end just to see the explanations really.
Fascinating: Who’s eating New Zealand?:
New Zealand produces enough food to feed about 40 million people but given our population is just 5 million, who are these people we’re feeding and what are they eating?
Answer: people in other countries.
NZ exports … 95% of its dairy…
Today’s International Breakfast was Drop Scones/Scotch Pancakes. I had problems — I had the griddle too hot (the recipe didn’t specify) and we had to use way more milk. Also used half the sugar. They were OK but could be better next time. We ate them with butter and jam.
Watching line dance tutorials. I can understand why the instructor wants to face the camera, but then I get very confused: I need to move in the opposite direction. I much prefer the tutorials where they turn their back to me. CopperKnob is a great site.
Someone gave me 18 header images for our community website but at 2400x560 instead of the 1200x280 I needed. I copied all images to a new folder then ran this one Terminal command on the folder. A moment later all were correctly resized.
sips -Z 1200 *.jpg
✔️
Rabbit ears.
Hmm, I read The Uniform (Detective Helen Carter Book 1) by Jodie Lawrance. 📚
Set in Edinburgh in the 1970s the relentless grimness makes this a bit hard going: every single page contains dirt, grime, overt sexism, smoking, excessive drinking, poverty, tenements, slums, winter…
Wall decal dots are very cool — I have several in different sizes on the walls. We’re investigating a community art project for summer that would involve these. Today I took one of mine and roughly tested whether it would stick to a variety of surfaces. It did well!
I enjoyed Lowcountry Box Set (A Liz Talbot Mystery) by Susan M Boyer. 📚
I’m not usually into ghosts but this was an inoffensive plot device much like hacking skillz or martial arts expertise. I skipped a few pages of the hetero-romance gory details too.
Set in South Carolina.
