kayray.org

I’ve just finished cataloging my latest solo audio book recording:
A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster

As with all LibriVox audio books, this one is free for you to download, share, copy, mash-up, whatever. Enjoy!

In case you’re curious as to WHY our audio books are free and have no restrictions on their use, it’s because we record only public domain texts and release all our recordings back into the public domain. What is this “public domain” you say? From wikipedia:

Public domain comprises the body of knowledge and innovation (especially creative works such as writing, art, music, and inventions) in relation to which no person or other legal entity can establish or maintain proprietary interests within a particular legal jurisdiction. This body of information and creativity is considered to be part of a common cultural and intellectual heritage, which, in general, anyone may use or exploit, whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain, and 10 percent of all books that are still in print.

There. Now you know. An easy rule of thumb for books is: published before 1923 in the U.S. = Public Domain.

Henry and I finished making our morsbags today:

Nice, eh? Total cost: $11, plus part of a spool of thread and a fabric marker. We’re ready to give them away to friends and family, though I think we’ll keep one of each to augment our trunk-of-the-car canvas bag collection. I shop about twice a week, so I figure that each cloth bag I use keeps about 104 paper or plastic bags a year out of the environment. And I fill, oh, four to six bags per trip. The numbers are staggering.

Visit http://www.morsbags.com/html/ for more info and a simple pattern. Kristen’s really great non-verbal instructions here: http://www.mediatinker.com/

I searched flickr long and hard to find out how to make this badge, and googled, and failed miserably. Finally I asked Hugh if he knew how — and he did! He sent me to http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne (you must be logged in). However, it obviously doesn’t work (the flash version, at any rate). It should show an assortment of photos of my Finished Knitted Objects, but instead all I see is text. How about you? Awesome. Maybe the code got munged while I was copy/pasting.

Ah-HA! It does actually work here on this test page: http://kayray.org/flickrtest.html so it seems wordpress did something nefarious to the code. Let’s try again:

Huh. Still broken. Oh well, there’s no room in my sidebar for anything else, anyway.

I got a comment on my original morsbag post (scroll down) from The Fruid, who pointed me to a neat site called swapbot, which links up swappers over the internet. A user named cherrythepig is running a morsbag swap, where she encourages people to make and distribute morsbags, or, for the shy, she’ll collect and distribute the morsbags herself. Great idea!

While there I noticed a post from mediatinker, one of the founding LibriVox members! She’s created a really great, clear, non-verbal instruction page for morsbag sewing: Kristen’s Morsbag Instruction Illustration. Way to go, Kristen!

Henry and I have made 8 morsbags, with more on the way. Photos soon!

Two days ago I woke up feeling funny. Not sick, really, just funny, one of my eyes was red and watery, and the back of my nose felt odd, and I had a brand new dry cough. I told Dan I felt virusy and hoped I wasn’t coming down with something. Well, last night a sore throat struck in the middle of the night — but a very mild one, and now, in the morning, it’s nearly gone. I really wanted to finish recording A Room with a View this weekend, so cross your fingers that I don’t get any worse!

We’re still working our way though Season One of Battlestar Galactica. Last night we watched episode 4, “Act of Contrition,” in which several viper pilots are killed at the beginning of the episode and then the rest of the episode is filled with wayyyyyyy too much Starbuck. Several hundred times the Recommended Daily Allowance, actually. Also flashbacks. And not enough Cylons. The episode was pretty tedious until the last three minutes, when suddenly it got exciting, and now we have to wait for the next disk to arrive from Greencine before we can find out what happens next!

Right now I’m reading Making History, by Stephen Fry, and enjoying it a lot! Also recently read Summer People by Brian Groh, which was was sorta ok, not great, but readable. Oh, and a new-to-me Dick Francis novel, Under Orders. I thought it was a lot better than his other recent books! It was fun to meet up with Sid Halley again.

Henry and I are listening to the unabridged recording of Wolf Brother, by Michelle Paver, read aloud by Ian McKellen. The Guardian Unlimited UK is podcasting these marvelous recordings for free! The book is fabulous — beautifully written, exciting, great characters. (No wizards and dragons, for a change) Henry and I listened to episodes 5 and 6 in the car this morning and were absolutely on the edges of our seats. Having it read aloud to us by Ian McKellen is an unbelievable treat. Thanks, Guardian, and a BIG thanks to Chris Hughes, the readear, for pointing us in the right direction! (I’d like also to mention that McKellen does not “do voices,” which pleases us very much.)

Oooo just found this interview with the author at
http://books.guardian.co.uk/!

I don’t like messages in books,” she concludes, firmly. “The aim is just to tell a stonking good story,”

And she has.

We took Henry to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix yesterday. I’m not a big HP fan (I couldn’t make it past the first four books), but Dan and Henry are, and I think they both liked it pretty well. I was most interested in the costuming. Umbridge’s tidy little pink early-1960s-inspired suits were great, plus there were lots of really neat knitted garments to examine. I wish I could have gotten a better look at the Weasleys’ Christmas scarves. Umbridge wore a little pink cardigan with a nice diamond lace pattern, and the kids wore lots of interesting hats and sweaters as well. Other than that, the movie seemed about the same as all the others. Harry is anguished, people keep things from him, there’s a lot of Menacing and Sinister Moodiness. There was a good wizard fight at the end, and, to quote Mike Nelson — “When wizards fight, who wins? The American viewing public!”

Hilariousness! Text is not entirely family-friendly.

11 Movies Saved by Historical Inaccuracy

Every year, Hollywood pumps out “historical” epics so distorted, propagandistic and self-serving, you have to wonder just how stupid they think we are. But, try “fixing” some of those historical inaccuracies and you’ll quickly realize what Hollywood screenwriters have known for years: History is lame. Here are 11 movies that make us glad no one gives a damn about trivial things like “what actually happened.”

(Thanks, Dan!)

I didn’t get to sleep till around 3am, was woken up by noise at 6am, went back to sleep, sorta, and had dreams about being woken up, and then was woken up again by even more noise at 8am. Got Henry up, took him to karate, did errands, came home, put the food away, made breakfast for Henry, did housework, dealt with electricity problems — turned out to be a faulty outlet in the kitchen. A nice old man electrician came and fixed it for me.

This afternoon Henry and I watched the Rifftrax of The Fellowship. Funny stuff, and a pleasant way to pass a tired afternoon :)

Also finished my horrid string bag modification. I’d rather not show you a photo. Let’s just put it out of our minds. Oh all right, if you insist…

Looks pretty nice laid flat:

But wretched in use:

Henry thinks it’s nice, so I’ll give it to him for a laundry bag or something. Bleah.

Argh, I have to get up earlyish and I should be asleep already but I barely had any computer time today and I really really wanted to finish cataloging Decline and Fall. Also want to blog about my busy and productive day, so I’ll do that first and do the cataloging afterwards if I still have some steam.

Student this morning, dear little 6 year old, then did some housework, then went out to take Dan’s guitar to the guitar fixit man, then to the thrift store for morsbag cloth. Found a beautiful heavy curtain with huge abstract blue flowers on it ($5) and a king-size sheet in blue-and-white stripes ($6). Then to pharmacy, then home. Then showed Sal the Family Tree (make your own at geni.com) and she got all excited and we put in a TON of info about her dad’s side of the family. Also tried to fix mysterious internet problem, but failed until advised tonight to power cycle BOTH access points. Which I totally should have figured out on my own. But anyway…

Then Henry and I made the curtain into 6 morsbags! Six great reusable cloth grocery bags for a grand total of $5! And we had a great time making them. Photos tomorrow. We took turns with the ironing and sewing. Tomorrow we hope to make a start on the sheet… I think we might get 8, 10, or possibly 12 bags from it!

Then it was time for Karate.

Then home, and wolfed down some of the pasta and sauce we made last night, yumyumyum. Then what… Oh, we watched a Modern Marvels about Barbeque Tech, which sounds boring but it was really interesting — do you know how charcoal briquettes are made and who invented them??? They showed us some hilarious gadgets, too… the Chicken Throne (don’t ask) sent Henry into hysteria. All I have to say to him is “Chicken Throne” and it sets him off again :) “Whole Pig Injector” is another one that gets a big laugh.

Then I suggested that he might like to record some of his Button-Bright lines for The Scarecrow of Oz. He had such a good time recording that he finished up all his lines! And then we got them noise-cleaned and edited, etc, so that took a long time, and then Dan called and we talked, and then it was like 11, and then I tucked Henry in and now here I am, blogging. Darn, it’s almost midnight. Decline and Fall will have to wait another day.

I signed a pledgebank pledge to tell at least ten people about morsbags.com, which is a horrible flash-based site with a great mission: to reduce the use of plastic bags. Oh, wait, they have a pleasant html version too: http://www.morsbags.com/html/! Ahhh, much better. Anyway. They ask people to make, use, and give away reusable cloth bags and offer a simple sewing pattern.

Make your own cotton morsbags and distribute them – each one has the potential to eliminate 100s of plastic bags over its lifetime.

sad fact: over 1 million plastic bags are consumed per minute globally.

gut-wrenching fact: marine wildlife mistake plastic bags for food and die.

frustrating fact: supermarkets and politicians will take years to sort it out.

happy fact: making morsbags will help, with immediate effect.

From their pattern page:

If you have a spare half hour or so, make yourself a morsbag! Better still, organise some friends to come round and make some together as a “pod”.

Use an old bedsheet or curtain and follow the downloadable instructions by clicking below.Then marvel that even if you have made just one, you have saved the world from another 80 monsters per year clogging up the ecosystem.

I keep 6 canvas bags in the trunk of my car and use then for EVERY shopping trip. And if Henry and I buy a book or a few items from the hardware store, we always refuse a bag and carry our stuff to the car in our hands. I can’t remember the last time I used a plastic shopping bag.

When you’ve read this and visited the morsbag site, please leave me a comment! And consider sewing or knitting (and using) your own reuseable shopping bags. There are a number of great free patterns for knitted string bags on the internet. Here’s a nice one, and I’m working up a variation that’s knit in the round — no sewing up necessary.

Remember — after you’ve unloaded your groceries, return your bags to the trunk of the car ready for the next shopping trip. This takes a bit of remembering at first but becomes second nature soon enough.

Thanks a lot for helping :)

Edit: Ok, that’s four people who’ve commented so far. Also told my mom, Chloe, and Henry, so that makes seven already. Oh, and Michelle makes eight! And a new comment from Jennifer makes nine! And one more comment from The Fruid makes ten, plus I told Dan, so that’s eleven. Yay, goal met and exceeded!

Have I mentioned lately how much I love Pandora.com? I listen to my pandora stations for hours most days. I’ve got my favorite stations tuned pretty well, and it’s like listening to the best commercial-free radio stations on the world. If you’ve not tried pandora yet, I beg you to give it a try. Or if you messed around with it for a few minutes and gave up because you couldn’t figure out how to get a good mix on your stations, heed my advice and try again! It does take quite a bit of tinkering to get your station tuned the way you like it, but it’s easy tinkering.

Here’s how I built my favorite station:

I started by building a station on folk singer and political activist Pete Seeger and singer-songwriter, satirist, and pianist Tom Lehrer. Right away it started playing me and assortment of folk/protest/civil rights music, and satirical stuff. I had to do a LOT of thumbs-downing at first, getting rid of goopy pseudo-folk music and hideous sappy piano stuff. And I did a little bit of thumbs-upping but not much — that’s key! I generally only thumbs-up when I hear an artist I really REALLY like, and I’ve pretty much stopped thumbs-upping now that my station is satisfying. Don’t do too much thumbs-upping or your station will drift off in unknown directions. If you want it to drift around, thumbs-up to your hearts content. But I’ve found that I have better luck keeping the thumbs-upping to a minimum but being hard-nosed with the thumbs-downing.

So here’s an assortment of really great songs I’ve heard this evening:

• Dust Bowl Pneumonia Blues (Woody Guthrie)
• Links on the Chain (live, Phil Ochs, AWESOME song, artist I never heard before Pandora)
• Galway Bay (Johnny Cash — I’ve discovered that I just love Johnny Cash’s folky acoustic guitar/vocal songs)
• Born 10,000 Years Ago (Cisco Houston — never heard this one before!)
• Little Turtledove (Ed McCurdy — never heard this one before either)
• Destroyer Life (Oscar Brand)
• We Will All Go Together (Tom Lehrer)
• Draft Dodger Rag (live, Phil Ochs)
• Mad Dogs and Englishmen (Noel Coward — Hilarious! Pandora decided I’d like this one a few days ago and it’s come on nearly every day since)
• Red Iron Ore (Bob Gibson (Not the Bob Gibson who broke the piano at Palomar College…) — never heard this one before!)
• Don’t Want No More Of Army Life (Leadbelly)

Take It From Day To Day (live) by Stan Rogers just came on — lovely song, another artist I’d never heard of before Pandora.

In case you don’t know it — Pandora lets you bookmark songs/artists/albums so it’s easy to remember the good stuff and track down CDs to buy. (You can see my bookmarked songs in the sidebar on the right and down a bit) I’ve bought several cds since I started listening to Pandora. Before Pandora I almost NEVER bought cds ’cause I never heard anything on the radio that I liked enough to want to own.

Long live Pandora.com! Did I mention that it’s FREE (if you don’t mind seeing some ads in your music player)? I splurged on the $36/year subscription to get rid of the ads. An incredible bargain, considering the pleasure and entertainment pandora provides me.

I finally bought a pro flickr account. Dan found a utility, FlickrExport, that exports from Aperture (or iPhoto) to Flickr. My photos just got a million times easier to manage.

It was cloudy and cold in the morning so we played some Wii sports, and then I worked on cataloging a big messy awful librivox project while the boys watched Modern Marvels (all about cheese!) but the sun came out later so the boys swam and swam and swam. After dinner Henry and I taught Fargo how to play Settlers of Catan. He caught on really fast and we all had a lot of fun. Henry said it reminded him of fun times in Montreal.

At night Dan and I watched the first episode of the first season of BSG and I started knitting a Judy Gibson string bag:

I took the boys to see Ratatouille today. We all liked it a lot! I was so pleased that there were no wise-cracking animals or crude in-your-face humor (unlike the very disappointing Charlotte’s Web). The story is warm and funny — not world-changing, just pleasantly entertaining and very enjoyable. The animation was breathtaking. There’s virtually no violence (near the beginning, an old woman takes a shotgun to some rats but of course she misses every time). There’s a gentle and subtle romance between two of the main characters and a very sweet kiss that made some of the kids in the audience go “ewwww!” lol! There are several touching moments; when the critic took his first bite of ratatouille, I got a bit choked up. You’ll see why :) Highly recommended!

Hugh’s pledgebank pledge was a success, as was mine. Annie’s now started one up, collecting money for Meniere’s Disease research. Y’know, at first I thought pledgebank was kind of cheesy… like, “I’ll only do this good thing if some other people will do this good thing” almost sounds kind of selfish. But, hey, it was Hugh, so I figured what the heck, might as well give it a try. Now I see that sharing charitable ideas and goals makes it more fun, and, hey, I got an extra $75 for kiva that they might not have gotten otherwise, and maybe more if my three fellow pledgers become regular kiva lenders… And I would never have thought of making a little donation to the Meniere’s people, so I’d say that pledgebank is a Good Thing.

I do wish their wording was different. Instead of “I will do [charitable deed] but only if [X] other people will do the same.” it could be “I will do [charitable deed] and encourage [X] other people to do the same.”

Annie lent to Nghuon Morn so I lent to her as well. She still needs more lenders, so please feel free to join us!

This morning we drove up to Laguna Niguel to pick up Henry’s very best friend in the whole world, Fargo. He’s a year and a half younger than Henry but mature for his age and a great reader, loves to draw, loves Led Zeppelin, Rush, Journey, Foreigner (lol, could be a lot worse), loves dragons and adventure and Naruto and pretending and books books books. He and Henry are two of a kind. They’ve been friends for, gosh, three or four years I guess. We used to live in the same apartment complex, but even now that his family has moved up north we still get to see Fargo several times a year.

When we got home the boys spent a couple of hours swimming, and then played in the house for a while, and then swam, and then we went to Karate, and then they swam until bedtime. Heheh. Our living room looks out on the pool through a sliding door, so I can sit in here indoors and knit and make sure they don’t drown. That pool is an expensive pain in the butt most of the year, but for the two or three months that it’s warm enough, it makes great kid entertainment.

I’m still recovering from a slight sunburn I got on Saturday so I didn’t get much done today, but I did catalog two more free audio books for LibriVox:

The Dhammapada, tr. by F. Max Mueller
Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll

Also made potato-cheese soup for dinner, yum! And Dan and I finished the BSG miniseries tonight. Mmmmmmm good sci-fi! We’ll start Season One tomorrow, most likely. Oh, but there should be a new Foyle’s War in the TiVo so that might take priority!

We started watching Battlestar Galactica last night, the new one, not the 70s one. We loved it! Neither of us had even seen the original series so we didn’t know what to expect. What can I say, it was fantastic! Great characters, great acting, great story. I really like the percussion-only soundtrack behind the space battle scenes. Really unusual and awesome. I can’t wait to watch more tonight! We watched about half of the miniseries (about an hour and a half, I believe). Got to the part where Someone pushes an EMP button and Someone does a light-speed jump. Trying to avoid spoilers heheh. We’re supposed to think that Someone died but, plotwise, it wouldn’t make sense so I know they’ll be back.

pledgebank.com: Tell the world “I’ll do it, but only if you’ll help me do it”

Here’s Hugh’s:

And here’s mine:

I spotted this cute pattern on Ravelry (sorry, still in beta but public soon!) yesterday, dug up my leftover Cascade Fixation, and whipped one up. I love it! I skipped the pocket. I don’t really need a pocket on my head, heheh.

Quick instructions:
use a STRETCHY yarn like Cascade Fixation. Cast on 15. Work in garter stitch, or use a simple lace pattern. I used a Gull Wing pattern as suggested by Ravelry user BethBlueRoom. I worked 22 reps of the lace pattern, then bound off as follows:

Put the cast-on edge behind the left-hand needle. With the right needle, knit the first stitch along with the first loop on the cast-on edge. Repeat with the second stitch, then lift the first newly-knitted stitch over the second. I figure this will be easier to undo than sewing if the band stretches out over time and needs to be shortened a bit.