Skip to main content

For your (Sefirah / Three Weeks) Listening Pleasure!

image

Washing dishes, scrubbing, putting p0ts and pans and haggadahs away… without a soundtrack.  How very, very dreary, compared to the lively sound of inspirational music filling our house in the weeks before Pesach!

We’re only one week into the 33-day Sefirah mourning period (some people observe different mourning periods – consult your local Halachic authority!), and this is a tough time for music lovers.

Here are a few alternatives:

First of all, if you really, REALLY can’t survive without music of some kind, there’s always acapella.  That’s right – there is a leniency that “music” without instruments isn’t really music.  You can find lots of “vocal selections” to listen to free at the Israel National Radio jukebox site here.  Caution:  non-Jewish acapella might have have instrumentals in the background, so stick to kosher tunes for the next few weeks.

Then, there’s my solution:  audiobooks!

If you’re in Toronto, there’s the library’s Overdrive site here, which gives you access to thousands of current audiobooks for free, 24/7.  Some of the more popular books have a wait list, but I usually manage to find something good.  You can sort by popularity and then just scroll down until you find one that is available immediately. 

(Tonight, I took out Barbara Walters’ memoir, Julia Child’s My Life in France, and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace… I probably won’t listen to all of them, but I like to have choices!  update:  I also just found Nora Ephron’s self-narrated I Nemember Nothing, and this will probably supercede all the other choices, since she is smart, funny and supremely easy on the ears…)

If you’re not in Toronto, your local public library may offer something similar.  (if they don’t, email them to get with the times… and then march yourself in to check out a couple of audiobooks on CD)

If you love classics, a couple of sites offer free downloads of classic books.  By “classic”, they mean public domain, expired-copyright works.  Readers volunteer their time to record the books and stories and everything is available free.  Two that I know of are Librivox and Free Classic Audiobooks.

One book that I blogged about recently, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson is available to download as an unabridged audiobook (or you can read it for FREE online).  Click here to visit his site and grab the entire book.

If you don’t want to invest the time it takes to “read” an entire audiobook, but still want something old-timey, you can also always try the shorter selections at Homeschool Radio Shows or Old Time Radio.

Happy listening!!!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

לימודי קודש/Limudei Kodesh Copywork & Activity Printables

Welcome to my Limudei Kodesh / Jewish Studies copywork and activity printables page.  As of June 2013, I am slowly but surely moving all my printables over to 4shared because Google Docs / Drive is just too flaky for me. What you’ll find here: Weekly Parsha Copywork More Parsha Activities More Chumash / Tanach Activities Yom Tov Copywork & Activities Tefillah Copywork Pirkei Avos / Pirkei Avot Jewish Preschool Resources Other printables! For General Studies printables and activities, including Hebrew-English science resources and more, click here . For Miscellaneous homeschool helps and printables, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you just want to say Thank You, here’s a

Hebrew/ עברית & English General Studies Printables

For Jewish Studies, including weekly parsha resources and copywork, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you enjoy these resources, please consider buying my weekly parsha book, The Family Torah :  the story of the Torah, written to be read aloud – or any of my other wonderful Jewish books for kids and families . English Worksheets & Printables: (For Hebrew, click here ) Science :  Plants, Animals, Human Body Math   Ambleside :  Composers, Artists History Geography Language & Literature     Science General Poems for Elemental Science .  Original Poems written by ME, because the ones that came with Elemental Science were so awful.  Three pages are included:  one page with two po

It's Heart Month: 3 days left to save lives!

Dear Friends & Family: Hi, everybody! Sorry I can’t stop by in person... you're a bit out of my area.  :-) We’re out walking up and down on our street on this beautiful afternoon to raise money for Heart & Stroke.  This cause is important to me (I won't say it's close to my heart , because that would be tacky!).  I hope you'll join me by donating online. Growing up, I watched as every single one of my grandparents' lives were shortened by heart disease and strokes, and my father had a defibrillator that saved his life on more than one occasion.  Heart disease and stroke kill 1 in 3 Canadians and are the #1 killer of women. Please click this link to be redirected to my main page at the Heart & Stroke website: http://tinyurl.com/AtlasHeart Thus ends my personal appeal.  Official information follows.  :-))) ----- Heart disease and stroke is the #1 killer of women - taking more women's lives than all forms of cancer combined. But no one is immune. Th