We’ll See You In a New Year

Even during the holidays, big unexpected LIFE keeps happening. We’ll be taking a couple of weeks off to ride some big changes into the New Year. We’ll see you for sure on January 6, if not before. In the meantime, we’re sending huge gratitude to you for being part of Improvised Life, and warm wishes…

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The Festive Funk Machine: Make Your Own Holiday Music

Sometimes the crazed “festive” holiday thing has the opposite effect: bringing on the blues. If you’re feeling a bit low, we recommend the sweet, fun Festive Funk Machine. Click on any of the robots to start making your own music…add in or “mute” any of the instruments  — from violins and bells to baselines and percussion…

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Getting Ready for Christmas Day via Paul Simon

(Video link here.) Paul Simon’s ‘Getting Ready For Christmas Day‘* seems like a fitting ALT song for the run up before Christmas. It’s upbeat, secular, a tad political, full of social commentary and interwoven with excerpts from a 1941 sermon by the Rev. J.M. Gates, an influential preacher and Gospel singer. There’s also a lot of things leaping…

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Emily Dickinson: Writing on Whatever Was At Hand

We were surprised to learn that the great poet Emily Dickinson often wrote her poems on whatever scraps of paper were on hand: envelopes, a household memo, the back of a Western Union telegram. The fragments of salvaged paper that held her astonishing poems —many of them experimental work —  have been collected in the…

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Virtual Gift Cards That Do Good AND Deliver Your Best Wishes

Long ago we started to unhook from obligatory — and often stressful — holiday gift buying. We became big fans of giving money to a charity in friends’ names, instead of the usual gift that nobody needs. Every year, we send charity gift cards, VIRTUALLY, a website that allows you to design your own cards (to a degree) and then send them in a sort of digital envelope that the recipient gets to open online.

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Ever-Improvised Driftwood Cabin Somewhere in CA

(Video link here.) We spotted this lovely driftwood cabin at the great, always-refreshing, Cabin Porn; it is in an undisclosed location somewhere on the Northern California coast, there for people walking on the beach to come upon.   The cabin stands to this day and good-hearted travelers continue to make small improvements.  This video provides a…

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