kayray.org

Subtraction practice
grocery shopping
karate
The Dark is Rising

Lots of reading
park day (balloon animals)
karate

I’m sitting in Dan’s Fortress of Solitude right now, editing Book 20 of The Odyssey, which I recorded today, while he plays his new Tauren Druid in WoW. Busy day, let’s see… Henry and I went out first thing, bought a toothbrush for Dan, some flour, and TP at Stater Brothers. Then we went to the library to pick up the Henry’s book, which was sent from the other branch (one of the Deltora books that he loves so much), then to the mailbox place to pick up a fistful of bills and our new laser printer toner cartridge. Then to Trader Joe’s for many many groceries. Then home, and Henry hauled everything up the stairs for me and I put it all away and started some mushroom/barley soup in the crockpit. (Which turned out kind of gluey. Too much barley.)

Um, then what… Oh yeah I installed the new toner cartridge, we did some general housework together, and then I recorded Book 20 of The Odyssey and then we zipped off to Park Day out on the far side of Vista. Henry played and rode his bike and made balloon animals, and I read my book, Match Me If You Can, and played a bit of Harvest Moon. I took a plateful of leftover homemade burritos from last night’s dinner in case we got hungry, which we did.

Zipped home again, Henry had a snack and a drink and a shower, then off to karate where I finished my book (wonderfully entertaining!) and played a bit more Harvest Moon. Bought the Kitchen and planted a bunch of summer crops.

Henry’s dad picked him up from karate to spend the night, and I came home. Dan and I ate gluey soup and french bread with herbed cheese. Went downstairs to watch the episode of House that we wrongly assumed had been recorded on the TiVo last night. Guess stupid baseball preempted him. So we watched a Venture Brothers episode instead, and a VH1 interview with Neil Peart. And now here we are doing computery things together before bed. A very nice day. Soon I will eat a nice bowl of yogurt. A bowl of plain yogurt with granola or flax seed meal mixed in, eaten right before bed, seems to help me sleep.

I grabbed “Match Me If You Can“, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, off the New Books shelf at the library yesterday.  The check-out librarian said it was really good and she was right!  I finished it this evening while watching Henry’s karate class.   Lots of fun!  Looks like she’s written several more books so I’ll be hunting those down at the library as soon as possible.

031 – Thomas a Becket

Karate (Tiny Tigers)
subtraction practice
handwriting

Happy birthday Kathy dear :) I hope you have a lovely day!

Hey, that “lasagna” planting bed sounds easy and interesting!

I didn’t enjoy The Book of Three very much, so I decided that our next bedtime book had to be something I’d love.  Not taking any chances.  It’s too grim to end the day reading something I’m not fond of. It occurred to me that, since Henry just turned eleven, and he loves dark fantasy stories, and he’s interested in Merlin and King Arthur and ancient British mythology, that The Dark is Rising series would be perfect.  So tonight we started book 2 (The Dark is Rising), my favorite.  I’ve read it many times to myself (at a guess, I’d say at least ten times, but probably more).   Reading the first chapter aloud made me realize just how awesome it is (reading aloud makes me slow down and savour the story, and notice all the little details that I might miss when reading to myself).  It was a 35-minute chapter (I’m recording it so H can listen all over again later on his iPod) but it flew past and I was sorry to reach the end.  The writing is so rich, the atmosphere so vivid.  The dialogue and characters in The Book of Three were flat; but in The Dark is Rising they are incredibly realistic and believable. I can hardly wait to read the next chapter to Henry tomorrow!

Consultation with Karen; she says we’re doing fine.
Need to learn about volcanoes and earthquakes this year to keep the State happy. Karen suggested http://aleks.com for math, so we’ll check into their free trial this week.

Went to library; Henry got a new Dragon Quest book and read it all day.
Karate

030 – Gilbert and Rohesia

Rockola had an outdoor, all-ages show in a park today. I picked up H from his dad’s house and we headed down to see them. It was nice and gray and cloudy when we got there but it got progressively sunnier and hotter through the show, and I had to take off my longsleeve shirt so I got a bit of a burn on my shoulders. And my eyes feel burned even though I wore my hat and sunglasses the whole time. Argh. But the show was great, as usual!

Finished cataloging Emma last night! It’s a wonderful recording. Go here to download it:

http://librivox.org/emma-by-jane-austen-solo/

I know I’ve been talking a lot about this recording. It’s not that it’s better than any of our other books, but Emma is very special to me, and in my opinion the reader, Sherry, did a particularly fine job. And it’s an 18-hour recording!  Also the project has been hanging over my head since March, so getting it cataloged, finally, seems like a huge accomplishment.

Bah my eyes are really bothering me and my nose hurts too. Hope we have some Solarcaine. Stupid sun. And stupid me for not taking sunscreen. Not that that would help my eyes any, though. And I hate hate hate sunscreen. I hate the way it smells, I hate the way it makes my skin feel dirty. So that’s why I mostly stay indoors all summer. I thought an afternoon show on a cloudy October day would be all right… sigh.

If you’re a Mac user, you’ve got to try Jumpcut.

Jumpcut is an application that provides “clipboard buffering” — that is, access to text that you’ve cut or copied, even if you’ve subsequently cut or copied something else. The goal of Jumpcut’s interface is to provide quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard’s history.

It’s free and extremely handy! It creates a little scissors icon up in the menubar. When you copy some text, it stores the copied text somewhere. The number of copies that it’ll store is configurable — I think the default is 40 or something. When you want to paste some copied text, click the little scissors and you get a drop down collection of all the stored copies, and you just choose the one you want. Soooo handy!

I added Jumpcut to my login items. It’s easy to do this:

Hit the blue apple in the upper left corner of your screen and choose System Preferences

Choose “accounts”

Choose your account and then hit the “login items” tab. Click the little Plus sign and find Jumpcut in your applications directory.

Presto!

Woke up at 6:20 this morning which was too late to take my getting-back-to-sleep Lunesta (I decided it was stupid to take it at night, since I rarely have any trouble falling asleep — it’s staying asleep that’s the problem.  So if I wake up before 5:30am I take one then), so I listened to Loveline for half an hour and then got up.  Uploaded photos from Aperture to my gallery, then did a couple of blog posts about socks. You can find them in the handmade section if you care about socks.

I did not have to DRIVE anywhere today, yay!

Henry tried out a couple of recipes from his new cookbook after we sat and read through it together.  He made a fruit-and-yogurt smoothie for breakfast and loved it. (Perfect — I like to make fruit salad with yogurt most mornings, and he won’t eat it.  So now he can throw it all in the blender and drink it happily, heehee!)
And then he decided to try to bake bread!  There’s a recipe for simple white bread near the back of the book, and he found all the ingredients and did almost all of the work himself.  I sat at the table, ready to lend a hand if needed.

While the bread dough was rising, I recorded a chapter of some book about Pirates.  As an experiment, I tried hooking my mic and USB interface to my macbook instead of my iMac, and the mysterious clicks went away!  So it’s not an audio equipment problem after all.  Dan says he’s pretty sure he can make my iMac stop clicking, but even if he can’t I can always just record to the laptop. (in case you’re curious, yes, I tried rebooting, defragging, and reinstalling drivers on my iMac)
Tired.  And Dan’s home yay!!!

Several pages of math
baked bread
handwriting

029 – The Story of King Stephan

Green Jawoll sock yarn, needles size 1.25mm (0000). Toe up. Cable pattern “Pretzel Braid” from Barbara Walker’s 3rd treasury of knitting patterns.

64 st. Round toe done from temporary cast on. White strings mark round 1 of 32-round cable rep. Instep gusset starts beginning of 3rd rep.

Notes to self, so the second sock is the same: Work instep gusset to round 20 of cable chart.  Then work little heel flap on 12 stitches, for 12 rows.  Pick up stitches on both sides of heel flap and work in rows, decreasing gusset stitches with ssk on right-side rows and p2tog on wrong side rows.  Dec to 72 st. total — I think I’ll need these extra 8 stitches in the leg.  Start working in rounds again on round 21 of cable chart.

I finished these socks a couple of weeks ago. They’re toe-up socks, and for fun I worked two different kinds of backwards heels, which is why they don’t match exactly.

Close-up of heels:

The left sock shows an ordinary Dutch/German heel (my favorite heel) worked just as usual, but of course starting on the bottom of the foot. You can see how the heel flap ends up under the heel.

The right sock shows a much more elegant solution — “Denise’s Reverse Dutch Heel” — a heel worked literally backwards. First, work instep INCREASES, then work a tiny flap which represents the bit you get when you turn a heel, then pick up stitches around the sides of the little flap and work the heel flap, getting rid of a foot stitch at the end of every row. Then meet up with the rest of the foot stitches and continue the leg. Sweet! Better instructions here: http://www.socknitters.com/toe-up/lessonfour.htm

I probably won’t make cotton socks again.  I prefer the resiliency of wool, and when it’s barely cool enough to wear socks at all, thin wool socks are more comfy than cotton anyway.

Dropped Henry at his classes, came home and did Actual Work for Librivox. We’ve got Howard Pyle’s Adventures of Robin Hood in the works. It was started by a fellow who disappeared before it was finished and cataloged, taking the completed files with him. Since I’m the top of the chain-of-command for that project (the “MC” or Meta-Coordinator) I took on the unpleasant job of tracking down the completed files and chasing down readers who had claimed chapters but hadn’t yet submitted them. The project has been stagnating, about 3/4 completed, for months. So today I sent emails and PMs around to all the readers with outstanding chapters, to see where we stand and try to ascertain whether I should parcel out any abandoned chapters to other, more eager readers. I’ve already heard back from most of the readers, which is encouraging! I’m sure we’ll get it completed and cataloged within the month.

We’ve also had a nearly-complete solo version of Emma sitting around waiting to be completed since May. The wonderful soloist seems to have gotten too busy with Real Life to finish the few little edits and things that needed to be done before the book can be cataloged, so I took it upon myself to re-read the two too-quiet chapters and find an editor willing to re-edit the few little glitches here and there. The lovely and talented Starlite volunteered to help with the edits, and I already recorded those two chapters, so I feel confident we’ll get this wonderful nearly-solo Emma cataloged Real Soon Now! Maybe even next week. I’ll post a link when it’s up — Sherry did a fantastic job reading and any Jane fan will enjoy it.

Raced over to the dojo at 4 to exchange Henry’s too-large new Gi for a size smaller, raced home and got it washed, dried, and hemmed in an hour and 15 minutes, in time for his evening class. Amazing. We listened to Tom Lehrer all day. Lol.

I made Chicken Parmesan for dinner and both Henry and Dan loved it! It’s rare for BOTH of them to like any given dinner ;-)

Art class — watercolor landscape
Science — air-powered rockets
Spanish — colors
Read more about Ancient Celts — House and Home, Food and Farming, Feasts and Celebration, Religion and Ritual
Karate class
Piano — playing along with Tom Lehrer

028 – The Story of the White Ship