February 2006
February 2006
Feb 28 — Busy day! Henry helped me clean the fridge, and then we went grocery shopping and filled up the nice clean fridge with good food. I paid a million bills, and mopped the kitchen floor, and my mop broke so I had to go to Target and get a new one. The Giant Rainstorm that was predicted was a bit anti-climactic… there was some rain overnight and a bit this morning but by afternoon it had cleared up again. Typical.
Feb 27 — Have I linked recently to my completed solo book recordings?
The Secret Garden
A Little Princess
The Road to Oz
These audiobooks are free. I hope you enjoy them! My next project will be “Heidi” — I hope to get started on that this afternoon.
Feb 26 — Yawn. We stayed up too late last night (but for a good reason) so we’ve been tired all day today but that’s ok, we had a great day anyway! We went out shopping for an elliptical trainer for Dan so he can exercise without leaving the house and had a good time together, and got a good machine for a VERY good price. Dan drives a hard bargain. :) And then we had to make room for it in our room so we got rid of the giant horrid ugly oak legal-size filing cabinet that I’ve been using for a nightstand and replaced it with a piece of Quality Swedish Crap from Dan’s desk area, so I spent the afternoon sorting through four or five years of papers and threw away most of them and I can store what’s left in a small plastic box. YAY. And Dan sat on the couch and worked on his guitars while I was sorting, and we watched some of the olympics. We would pay GOOD MONEY if we could see the Olympics broadcast without any TALKING. Shut up, sportscasters, we don’t need to be told how to feel and what to think!
Feb 25 — We got up pretty early and had a really terrific day! I got my Wind in the Willows chapter recorded, edited, tagged, and uploaded, and spent a lot of time working on my librivox wiki page and also added Sound Studio to the software page. And we set up Sally’s new TiVo, which took approx 1000 years, and dan had a guitar lesson, and we sat around and watched the Olympics and stuff. We had a full and fun day together, as usual.
Feb 24 — The Rockola George Harrison Birthday Concert was tonight, and I went to the 7pm show. It was FANTASTIC. Chloe saved me a seat right in front and it was so much fun!
Feb 21 — Got my hair cut! I went to a different place and it’s much better than last time. Much, much, much better. Henry found out this morning that he gets the role of Grandpa Joe in his Musical Theater Class production of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. I think he’ll be a wonderful Grandpa Joe!
This morning when I plugged my iPod into my iBook as usual, I noticed that the settings were all wrong… It suddenly thought I wanted to manage playlists and podcasts manually, which I don’t and never have. So when I fixed that, it informed me that my iPod was synced with a different library… Um, what? I don’t HAVE a different library… So I said ok, oh well, sync anyway. Problem was, my laptop was not connected, at that moment, to the compter where I store my music… So iTunes decided that none of my music or audiobooks existed. Lovely. I fretted over it for some time, because after I connected to my music server everything still had the “I don’t exist” exclamation mark, and the only way I could figure to fix it was to double-click EVERY SINGLE FREAKING FILE. But then p3 told me to just quit iTunes, make sure I was connected to my server, then restart iTunes. Ha! Fixed. Thanks, tweenbot :)
Feb 20 — I recorded the very last chapter of The Secret Garden tonight! I’ll be able to edit it tomorrow during Henry’s theater class, and then upload it to the proof-listeners, then get the whole project cataloged etc. Then I can catch up on some of my other reading commitments (Canterbury Tales! Wind in the Willows!) before I get started on my next solo, which will be Heidi.
Feb 19 — Slept in, worked on Grimms’ Tales, edited two of my Secret Garden chapters. Dan worked for hours setting up a new server so we have a better backup/storage/firewall box. It’s quite a loud machine so it lives in our newly-clean closet. Now I have a place to store my librivox recordings so they don’t clutter up my iMac.
Feb 18 — We had a lovely long nice Saturday together. I recorded another 3 chapters of The Secret Garden and worked on cataloging Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Dan cleaned out our closet! It’s a nice big walk-in closet and it was so packed with stuff that I couldn’t get to my clothes anymore. But Dan cleaned it out and got rid of two trash-cans full of stuff, and a big give-away pile as well, and it’s so nice and clear in there now that sometimes I just go in and look around at the emptiness. And I re-organized our dresser, and got rid of two paper-bags full of stuff! We watched another chunk of Othello tonight but got too tired to finish it. Tomorrow.
Feb 17 — Started watching the Kenneth Branagh/Lawrence Fishbourne (sp?) movie version of Othello tonight. Soooooooo good!
Feb 15 — Look what the amazing Annie made for us: http://librivox.org/poetry-story-index/ — now it’s easy for listeners to find specific poems! Yes, our catalog is still hand coded, though I think some kind people are working on making an automated database-driven catalog system for us. So this page was a lot of work for her to make and will need to be updated by hand every time we get new poems submitted. Awesome, Annie!
Feb 14 — Henry made me a Valentine and presented it to me with a great flourish this morning, and Dan came home early from work and brought me a lovely pot of flowers and a whole BOX of my favorite chocolate — Scharffen Berger 60% Dark Chocolate. Yum :) I got two more chapters of The Secret Garden edited during Henry’s Theater Class this morning. And Henry and I read a chapter in his history book about Crete and the Minoan civilization, and we did the Insane Druids quest in Ashenvale together! So it was a good day. Oh and we watched the olympics for a while tonight.
Feb 10 — Oh! Forgot to mention that the new season of Survivor started last week. I realized this yesterday, so I set the Tivo to record the rest of the season and Dan acquired the first episode for us, which we watched on his laptop in bed last night. And we watched last night’s episode tonight :) Ahhhhhhhh Survivor… so soothing, so entertaining, so trashy! Stacie the Science Teacher held a little beaded jewelery workshop at Bayshore this morning and Henry and I had a great time making things with beads and wire! And this evening I recorded my section of Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary” (letter G). Now I’m going to set up librivox’s next podcast. Woohoo!
Feb 09 — Henry had fun at Bayshore this morning, and decided to stay for the Computer and Art classes after Science and Creative Writing, so I went home for a couple of hours and finished editing my chapter of The Origin of Species! Go Team Kayray! If you want to hear it before the entire book is finished, you may: Variation Under Nature. This afternoon Zinny helped Animala with a few quests in Ashenvale. Ten-year-olds are fun :)
Feb 07 — Remember a few weeks ago when Cyrus Farivar interviewed me for “The World” on NPR? The story aired today! I sound totally nerd-tastic, but oh well, the piece was good and we’ve got a swarm of new forum visitors and volunteers! Here’s a link to a Windows Media file of the 4 minute story: Librivox on PRI’s “The World”. SO. TIRED.
Feb 04 — Hugh was interviewed on the CBC: Librivox Interview on the CBC. Nice interview! Since the CBC doesn’t make their programs available for download, Hugh recorded that snip himself — so sorry about the static.
Feb 03 — I started reading Barbara Tuchman’s wonderful book “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century” a couple of days ago. It’s very very good. The book has been in my family as long as I can remember. I supposed it was Dad’s. Anyway, when I was little I used to read the chapter about the Black Death, but I never read the rest of it, so I took it with me the other day when I took Henry to his favorite Homeschooler Park Day. I can’t put it down!
Dan and I watched the last episode of Foyle’s War Series 2 tonight. The episode was “The Funk House” and it was extra-good! I hope PBS will run the first series soon. And I hope series four is in production… hmm, the internet could probably tell me… Oh my, Series Four has already aired in England and they’re working on Series Five!!!! This is good news indeed!
Feb 02 — Here’s what I like: “Aperture”, Apple’s new software for digital photographers. I hated iPhoto and never used it, but relied on graphicconverter and photoshop to manage my digital photos. Aperture is amazing. Amazing, I tell you! It’s extremely easy to use yet very powerful. It keeps your original photos untouched, while you crop, straighten, white-balance, etc. etc. to your heart’s content on a version of your original. You never have to save — it just remembers your changes on the fly. If you want to go back to the original photo, it’s still there. If you want to try some different changes, you can just make a new version. I took 94 photos of Henry’s karate class the other day, when he was awarded his Purple Belt. I used my camera’s “burst” feature to ensure that I got several good photos in between the camera shake and action blur. Aperture allows you to make stacks of photos which have been taken within a certain amount of time — so it was very easy to compare photos within a stack and discard most of them, then edit the remainder so they look better. Now all I have to do is export the best ones and upload to my gallery.
Feb 01 — Yesterday Xeni Jardin interviewed me on the phone for a little story about podcasted audiobooks on the NPR show “Day To Day”, which aired today. Here’s a link: Amateur Audio Books Catch Fire on the Web. There’s a “Listen” link but I haven’t tried it… Henry and Sal and I listened to the show on the actual RADIO, believe it or not. It was a good little piece.