March 20, 2010 at 10:50 pm
· Filed under Blog
Permalink
March 19, 2010 at 7:50 pm
· Filed under Blog
Switched on the radio on the way to fetch Henry from Kung Fu tonight and caught the middle of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I’m not a big Vivaldi fan, but a couple of facts floated up out of my subconscious to the surface of my thoughts: red-headed priest, music master for girls at an orphanage in Venice. Don’t know why I remember that from long-ago music history classes, but I checked wikipedia after I parked and it’s all true.
Brenda Montiel, you were a good teacher!
Permalink
March 18, 2010 at 10:50 pm
· Filed under Blog
Permalink
March 18, 2010 at 9:56 pm
· Filed under Audiobooks, Blog
My recording of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is all done. I’ll be adding it to my podcast feed, but if you want to hear it right now, here it is:

http://librivox.org/alices-adventures-in-wonderland-by-lewis-carroll-4/
(As always, all LibriVox audiobooks are in the public domain and free to download, share, remix, whatever.)
This was so fun and easy that I got it done in record time.
Permalink
March 18, 2010 at 12:50 am
· Filed under Blog
Permalink
March 17, 2010 at 12:50 am
· Filed under Blog
Permalink
March 16, 2010 at 12:50 am
· Filed under Blog
Permalink
March 15, 2010 at 9:45 am
· Filed under Blog, Recipes
Yesterday (3/14) was Pi Day, so I baked a pie. We loved the apple-blackberry boysenberry pies we bought in Julian last weekend (did I tell you we drove up to Julian in the pouring rain and walked around and had lunch and bought wine and pie and had a lovely time?) and I wanted to make something similar but couldn’t find fresh or frozen blackberries boysenberries so bought raspberries instead.
I made the pie similar to my regular apple pies but left out one apple, added an entire bag of frozen (thawed) raspberries, and skipped all the spices.
So: five apples peeled and chopped, one bag of raspberries, mixed with a cup of sugar (this made a VERY sweet pie, could probably cut back on the sugar), a half-cup of flour, a half-teaspoon of salt (or so).
Pour into pie crust (I use a Trader Joe’s frozen crust). We like crumb topping: 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1/2 cup flour, a bit more than an 1/8th cup cold butter. Cut everything together as if making pie crust; sprinkle all over pie.
Bake at 425 F for 15 minutes, then for an hour at 350. Cover with foil towards the end so it doesn’t burn.
It turned out AMAZINGLY delicious.


Permalink
March 15, 2010 at 9:34 am
· Filed under Audiobooks, Blog
Permalink
March 15, 2010 at 12:50 am
· Filed under Blog
Permalink
March 13, 2010 at 11:50 pm
· Filed under Blog
Permalink
March 12, 2010 at 11:50 pm
· Filed under Blog
Permalink
March 11, 2010 at 11:50 pm
· Filed under Blog
Permalink
March 11, 2010 at 5:46 pm
· Filed under Audiobooks, Blog
I’ve had such a hard time picking a book to record next. I’m still in the middle of the giant kids’ US history book, but I wanted to do some fiction at the same time. I finally decided on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (in English this time), and I’d like to do Through the Looking-Glass as well, and then maybe Tom Sawyer after that. Yes, we already have a few versions of each in the librivox catalog, but none of them are read by me, plus I love all three books and would just really enjoy recording them! :)
So today I got my Alice project set up (well not quite all the way, but it’s in the database anyway) and downloaded a copy of Alice into Stanza on my iPhone. And then I recorded the first three chapters. And just now I sat down to start editing them and got to the part where Alice doesn’t want to drop the empty marmalade jar for fear of killing someone underneath her… except the part about not wanting to kill someone wasn’t in my recording. So I double-checked against the text — had I imagined that part? No, there it was in the version I had been looking at on the web. But it seems that I had put an abridged version on my iPhone! It doesn’t SAY that it’s abridged anywhere, but it clearly is. Sigh. So that’s three chapters wasted. I thought they seemed kinda short…
Now I’ve got the proper unabridged version in Stanza so I’ll start over tomorrow.
Permalink
March 10, 2010 at 11:50 pm
· Filed under Blog
Permalink
March 10, 2010 at 8:26 am
· Filed under Audiobooks, Blog
Permalink
March 9, 2010 at 11:50 pm
· Filed under Blog
Permalink
March 9, 2010 at 10:08 am
· Filed under Audiobooks, Blog
Hooray! In only about two weeks we at LibriVox.org achieved our goal and can now shut down our fundraising campaign.
http://librivox.org/2010/03/09/funding-goal-achieved-thank-you/
We raised $23,000 from 433 donors, in 13 days, averaging $1,769 in donations from 33 people every day. We had a couple of big donors, who gave a few thousand dollars each, and many more smaller donations which all add up to: everything we asked for.
A big thank you to everyone who donated!
Permalink
March 8, 2010 at 11:50 pm
· Filed under Blog
Permalink
March 8, 2010 at 9:13 pm
· Filed under Audiobooks, Blog
Our own Adrian Praetzellis was just the subject of a very nice article in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat:
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20100306/LIFESTYLE/100309770/
Way to go, Adrian!
Permalink