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Helen’s Babies by John Habberton, Part 9

Helen’s Babies, Part 9

Read by me!

(Impatient? Get the entire audio book here: http://librivox.org/helens-babies-by-john-habberton/)

I made a little quilt-top yesterday:

The white-ish fabric is leftover from the regency dress that I made for Chloe many years ago. The red and green is flannel leftover from pillowcase Morsbags, and the purple is a scrap of velour. (WordPress doesn’t think that “velour” is a word, heheh) I set up a nice sewing area on the back porch, under the overhang, and sewed it all together while listening to old (2002! 2003!) episodes of Loveline with Kathy Griffin as the guest. (Oh Kathy Griffin we love you SO MUCH! Can’t wait for season 5 of D-List!)

Anyway, got the quilt top pieced, and then pieced together odd scraps of batting from Dan’s Monkey Wrench quilt and sandwiched the whole thing with a large scrap of mom’s hydrangea/raspberry curtains for the backing. Ready to quilt!

I don’t even really know why I’m making this… I just had an urge to use up some scraps and make a little quilt. Go figure.

Yesterday we spent the whole day with Bob and Chloe and Celia again! We played Wario “Smooth Moves” on the wii (such a fun and ridiculous game) and lots more multiple solitaire for hours and hours. We fixed salad and pasta for lunch and then Bob and Chloe took us out to the Studio Diner for dinner! What a treat! After dinner we all went over to their house for a couple of hours. Dan, Bob, and Henry played Uno Extreme until it was time to go home. It was such a great day, and so nice to be able to spend hours and hours having fun with my wonderful family!

Right now I have a wretched headache but I got some good recording done today — two more chapters of The Adventures of Sally, one episode of a history podcast that some students in England wrote and asked me to record for them, and 100 word/sentence combinations for a Brazilian fellow who’s creating a computer program to help teach English to adults.

Oh, and Annie and I decided to record Emma as a duet, alternating chapters. I did my first chapter already — fun!

Oh, hey, my birthday is next week! Here’s my wishlist :)

In my family, the card game of choice for get-togethers is what we call Double Solitaire, only it’s usually triple, quadruple, quintuple, or more. We’ve played with up to eight players but it gets pretty crazy at that point. Chloe, Celia, and Bob came over yesterday afternoon and we taught Bob and the kids how to play. It’s regular Klondike (turn three cards at once, no limit on the number of times you can go through the deck), only each player has his own deck and you sit on the floor so the players all face each other in a big triangle, square, pentagon, etc. If you have a lot of players, you need a lot of floorspace!

Aces are played into the area in the middle so all players can see and reach them. Anyone can play to any ace. For instance, Henry can play his two of hearts on my ace of hearts, and then Chloe can put her three on top of that. A good game can get quite competitive and crazy! When everyone is stuck, count up the cards in the middle. The player with the most cards in the middle wins. Or if it makes more sense to count the remaining cards, the player with the fewest is the winner, of course. If everything works and you “go out” (all cards played onto ace piles, nothing left) the player who slaps down his last card first is the winner.

We played for hours, and I hope they’ll come back soon and play some more! I’ll try to get a photo of a game in progress if they do.

Helen’s Babies by John Habberton, Part 8

Helen’s Babies, Part 8

Read by me!

(Impatient? Get the entire audio book here: http://librivox.org/helens-babies-by-john-habberton/)

I’ve been listening to wonderful LibriVox recording of Patricia Brent, Spinster, read by Anna Simon (lezer, on the forums). She’s Dutch and has such a sweet accent! Here’s her summary:

A romantic comedy, written in 1918, but with a modern feel to it. Patricia Brent one day overhears two fellow-boarders pitying her because she “never has a nice young man to take her out”. In a thoughtless moment of anger she announces that the following night she will be dining out with her fiance. When she arrives at the restaurant the next day, she finds some of the fellow-boarders there to watch her, so, rendered reckless by the thought of the humiliation of being found out, she goes up to a young man sitting alone at a table, and asks him to help her by “playing up”. Countless complications and adventures ensue…

It’s a splendid book, very modern and witty. Highly recommended!

Thursday night we went to the Starlight to see My Fair Lady! It was a wonderful show. I don’t know why I always go to Starlight shows expecting mediocrity, but at least I’m always pleasantly surprised. Dan was busy so we invited my mom to come along and she loved it too. We had excellent seats and no tall people sat in front of us, even! (Our seats would ordinarly have been $45 each but a wonderful homeschool mom got them for us for $15!)

The cast was incredibly strong, the costumes were beautiful, the backdrops were masterpieces of trompe-l’oeil. I couldn’t wrap my brain around the fact that they were actually flat! The actor who played Alfred P. Doolittle was a hearty round-bellied gentleman with little tiny twinkling feet and a big wonderful voice. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. Eliza, Mrs. Pierce, Colonel Pickering, Professor Higgins, Mrs. Higgins, Freddy, all the servants and flower sellers and costermongers, I was just blown away by all the talented people. Thank you, Starlight Theatre!

Even though I had a long day of much driving (took Henry to Vista to play with friends, then to Escondido for D&D) I felt good enough this evening to go to the local game store’s Board Game Night at 7pm. It was great! We played Amyitis, a nicely-balanced Euro-game. Two of the fellows had played it before, and another fellow and I had not so they taught it to us. Lots of fun! Hope to go again next Tuesday if I’m not too tired.

And when I got home, Dan and I watched our new dvd of The Guild :) :) :) Good stuff!

Oh, and I just got email from Amazon — some kindly LibriVox fan named Mark N sent me a $30 Amazon gift card! What a sweetie! I have no way to contact him, so I’ll thank him here and hope he stops by and sees this. Thanks, Mark! Mmmmmmmm books!

Helen’s Babies by John Habberton, Part 7

Helen’s Babies, Part 7

Read by me!

(Impatient? Get the entire audio book here: http://librivox.org/helens-babies-by-john-habberton/)

So! A few weeks ago I finished the art book, then recorded a short and dear little cookbook, and then started looking around for another long-term project. I wanted something funny, so I finally chose The Adventures of Sally, by P.G. Wodehouse. I’ve recorded two chapters so far and it’s great. The chapters are long, though, boy oh boy. The second chapter weighed in at 52 minutes — and that’s after editing. The unedited file was about an hour long, and took much longer to record because I live in a flight path and that day was a busy one at the airport. The planes flew over my house every couple minutes, so I had to keep pausing. But that’s ok, Wodehouse is fun to read and it’s a good story, so I don’t mind those long chapters. Follow my progress here, if you like: http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14995. (But please don’t re-post the temporary “listen” links.)

Also, Shell Crandall and I have started a marvelous children’s history book, The Story of Mankind, as a duet, alternating chapters. I found it by checking wikipedia for books published in 1922 (the cut-off date for public domain in the USA). On that page was a mention that The Story of Mankind won the Newbery that year so I looked into it a bit and we decided to go for it! It’s super well-written and very readable. You may follow our progress here: http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15113. Again, please don’t re-post the “listen” links! I’ll let you know when it’s finished and then you can post to your heart’s content.

Betsie (thistlechick of LibriVox) sent me a surprise package in the mail! What a sweetie. She sent a big 96-gram ball of homespun yarn, a book that she read and enjoyed and thought I might like, and a jar or her home-hived honey!

Look at that pretty yarn! It reminds me of strawberries and cream. It’s a very soft merino/hemp blend, and there’s plenty for socks or mittens or a hat, or one of those neckwarmers that cross over and button… Thanks again, Betsie! :) :) :)

Henry decided to dye his hair red today:

We got stuff from the health food store so he wouldn’t get brain cancer. I was surprised at what a nice strong color he got! What a cutie-pie.

While the dye was soaking into his hair, I showed him Dr. Horrible. He loved it, of course, and is now watching all over again. I found a page of lyrics: http://imaekgaemz.com/?page_id=52 and a fansite: http://www.wonderflonium.com/ (found that when @wonderflonium followed me on twitter!).

Oh, goodness, look at my wrist, I gotta go.

Helen’s Babies by John Habberton, Part 6

Helen’s Babies, Part 6

Read by me!

(Impatient? Get the entire audio book here: http://librivox.org/helens-babies-by-john-habberton/)

First of all, did you know that you can still watch all three acts of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog on http://hulu.com? And, although hulu usually lets you view their programming only if you live in the states, I hear you can watch Dr. Horrible from anywhere in the world! Hope that’s true. We can hardly wait until the dvd comes out!

So they say he saved her life
They say she works with the homeless
and doesn’t eat meat
We have a problem with her
(This is his hair!)

Yesterday Bob and Chloe came over in the evening and we had the best time talking and hanging out! We played with the new Check Mii Out channel on the Wii — voted on some contests and made a Surfer Dude to enter in the Surfer Dude contest. And we watched a few episodes of Spaced, and all of Dr. Horrible (which I enjoyed even more the second time through).

Today I poked around around at the new Nintendo Channel, watched a ton of game previews and downloaded a couple of demos for the DS. Crosswords DS was fun — but even “hard” wasn’t very hard, kinda like a NYT Monday puzzle, and there were a lot of stupid clues. Not sure if the full game has a more challenging level. The interface rocks, though. I’m pretty excited about WiiWare, but I want to read a few more reviews before I decide on a game to buy :) Magnetica looks fun (I love Zuma) and the Dr. Mario Online one looks great too, and maybe My Life as a King, LostWinds, Toki Tori, and of course Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People (which is supposed to be released in this month). Any opinions, fellow Wii-owners?

Edit: I just did a little research and found that there are two different Crosswords games for DS – “Crosswords DS“, the one I tried today, and also “The New York Times Crosswords”. Yep. That’s the one I want to try next!!

I’ve been in love with Dover Publications since I was a little kid. The coloring books! The cheap reprints of classics! The antique needlework guides! The cut-and-makes! The paper dolls, oh, the paper dolls! I just found out that Dover has an online sampler service. Just give them your email address, and every week you get a link to a webpage full of sample book pages to download and print out. Today I got two coloring pages, one from a stained glass coloring book and another from “Art Masterpieces to Color”. If I had a color printer, I could have printed out a page of post-impressionist postcards and a page of fruit-crate labels. And if I liked Tom Tierney I could have printed a page of one of his paper doll books. There are also pages from a book of poetry, a book of mazes, a book of butterfly crafts, etc., etc.

Go here to sign up! http://www.doverpublications.com/sampler/

Inspired by WALL-E, Henry and I tried to watch Hello Dolly yesterday but we gave up partway through. We love a good musical (The Music Man, My Fair Lady, Into The Woods, Guys and Dolls, The Sound of Music) but Hello Dolly just didn’t do it for us. I didn’t think any of the characters were at all appealing, and the country-bumpkin thing got old really fast. Barbra Streisand is just plain annoying. So we sent that disk back to greencine.

It’s really rare to read a piece like this in which the author understands LibriVox so completely: Of Books & The Audio-Phile: An Alternative Approach.

A short excerpt:

Nothing Like Reading
No doubt, there is no pleasure quite like reading. Quite like seeing those words on the page for the first time. And no effect quite like it when it comes to altering the brain and expanding it in preparation for the next collection of black ink on a white page. But we must also remember that the oral/aural tradition came first—and listening to those very same words has its own special powers. Somehow it seems more social, more like you’re sharing with someone else, even if that someone is only the person narrating the story. Besides, it’s not such a strain on these aging eyes.

Thank you, Michael of http://descant.ca/blog/!

Helen’s Babies by John Habberton, Part 5

Helen’s Babies, Part 5

Read by me!

(Impatient? Get the entire audio book here: http://librivox.org/helens-babies-by-john-habberton/)

Apple apparently fixed something in one of the recent OS updates, and now I can use my USB audio interface again! (I had to use Dan’s firewire interface for the last few months, because using any of my USB mics created horrible artifacts in my recordings) Anyway, now I’ve got my USB setup working again and everything sounds right and works as I expect it to, and I figured out that I can record in comfort sitting on the sofa with the mic on a TV-tray next to me. So I finished up the children’s art history book, “The Book Of Art For Young People”, and also recorded a dear little cookbook, “When Mother Lets Us Cook”. You can download both audiobooks legally and for free from librivox.org:

http://librivox.org/the-book-of-art-for-young-people-by-agnes-ethel-conway-and-sir-martin-conway/

http://librivox.org/when-mother-lets-us-cook-by-constance-johnson/

And I’ll be podcasting both books eventually, as well. If you want to see the color plates from the art book, go here: http://www.archive.org/details/Book_of_Art_Illustrations_lv. Googlebooks hosts a scan of the little cookbook, which has charming illustrations: When Mother lets Us Cook.

In case you were wondering, I finally got my lab results back (2 weeks later) and what I have is, indeed, shingles and not some incurable mystery disease. Yay. I hope you, whoever you are, never, never, never get shingles. It is not serious, but damn, it hurts like hell.

I don’t remember if I said this already, but the first sign I had that anything was wrong was a feeling like a bad sunburn on my thigh. This peculiar pain proceeded to travel up and down the right side of my body, here one day, somewhere else the next, until it hit my scalp and the sole of my foot — and then it traveled back the other direction and spent a lot of time on my stomach and upper arms (both of them, not just the right). The blisters and rash only ever appeared on the back of my thigh (and other areas nearby).

Anyway, the rash is a lot better now and is mainly itchy. It still hurts, but not like before and it’s quite bearable. The sunburn-esque pain shows up now and again but is no longer constant. I’m tired all the time but that could be caused by any one of my assorted health issues, not necessarily the shingles :)

So that’s the end of the State of Kara’s Health update for today!