Our kids like listening to music on their tablets, and we decided it's worth it to pay some money so they can make playlists and don't need to listen to ads. A family account makes sense if you're more than one person, and we ended up with Amazon somewhat randomly. I've been poking around: the personalization features are pretty terrible, and they have a major artist conflation problem.

When you first show up it asks you to pick some artists to seed your experience with. I put in the first few bands that came to mind:

I like to play multiple instruments at once, and really enjoy how this lets me create a fuller musical picture. Sometimes this looks like mandolin + foot drums + bass whistle:

I've been reading a lot of older writing, trying to understand how and why contra dance ended up with a strong and near-exclusive live music tradition when many other dance forms switched over to recorded music. One of the more interesting ones I came across is a series of three letters (1985, 1988, 1992) from Enid Cocke, President of the Lloyd Shaw Foundation, tracing the evolution in her attitude towards this question.

I've lately ended up calling a bunch of parties and I've been happy with calling mostly longways whole-set dances. These are ones that are shaped like a contra dance in terms of having two lines facing each other, each person across from their partner, but your role doesn't matter and you're not grouped into hands-fours ("minor sets"). I want to be able to teach it in a single fast-paced walkthrough, match it tightly to the musical phrase, and be able to drop out after a few times through. This means I need most of the figures to be very simple, and a low piece count.

On the other hand, if I build every dance out of the same small number of building blocks (ex: reshuffles of Galopede), dancers will start to feel "haven't we done this one before"? So I also like dances that have a "hook": an interesting figure that we don't do in the other dances. Some examples:

In 1992 Tony Parkes, one of the best-known New England contra dance callers, wrote a book: Contra Dance Calling: a Basic Text. In 2010 he published an updated second edition. I found used copies of each and read through them, interested in both what he thought, and what he thought to change.

I read the whole 1992 first edition, then skimmed the 2010 second edition with the older one open at the same time, looking for changes. My notes:

EDIT 2026-07-08: Gizmohub, despite the announcements, did not stop working on the 7th. Instead, a Verizon tech called me, and told me that they were not going to take Gizmohub down until they'd resolved these issues. They also walked me through getting set up, including getting me the 2FA code that was not coming through. Apparently delivery of 2FA codes to Google Fi has been an issue for them. After our call I saw that this 2FA code (but not the earlier codes) did actually come through under "Spam and Blocked", so if you're having issues I'd recommend looking there.

Two years ago I bought a pair of Gizmo watches for my kids (review). There's a companion app for texting and configuration ("Gizmohub"), and Verizon is moving everyone over to a new one ("Verizon Family"). But the new app doesn't work for watch-only accounts like ours yet, and they're still saying they're going to turn off the old app on July 6th. Without the app we won't be able to text back and forth, see where they are, or add new contacts (the watch blocks calls except to/from contacts).

I first got the notification that Gizmohub was going away as an email on 2026-06-10: