Tonight Bob and Chloe came over. I put a new zipper in Chloe’s sweater, and Bob and Dan went to Guitar Center, and Bob, Henry, and Dan played music together, and we ate candy, and a splendid time was had by all.
I decided to quit complaining about never getting enough sleep.
So, moving right along:
LibriVox volunteer and all-around awesome person Kristin Hughes discovered, a few weeks ago, that the 1923 copyright on Dorothy L. Sayers’s classic murder mystery, Whose Body?, had never been renewed — thus it was fair game (in the U.S) to be read aloud and made into a free, public domain LibriVox audio book. She graciously shared the honor of recording it with me, for which generosity I will forever be grateful. I’m not certain I would have been able to share so nicely if I were in her place :) She took the even chapters, and I took the odd.
We zipped through it in record time, with several proof-listeners helping out. Kristin cataloged the finished audio book today:
http://librivox.org/whose-body-by-dorothy-l-sayers/
This is a cracking good story! I adored recording it. I’d read it years ago but couldn’t remember the plot at all, so it was a real delight to watch the story unfolding. This is the only Sayers novel that is currently in the public domain. Her others will not rise into the public domain for decades, and then only if the horrid, restrictive, pointless new copyright laws don’t get extended again — a fact which makes me literally angry with rage. (Thanks, Disney and Sony Bono and idiot government officials!) I want to record more Lord Peter Wimsey for the world to enjoy! Grr.
Promoting Science and Useful Arts: The Growth of Copyright Since 1976
As Lessig argues, copyright is robbing culture of its lifeblood—collaboration. Truly vibrant culture requires the freedom to build on, modify, and borrow from others’ work. Copyright makes this process difficult, if not impossible. The creator must apply for permission to use each recognizable source of inspiration, and must change his or her work if denied. Copyright expansion is pushing us toward a sterile, lifeless “culture†where everyone pretends to work in isolation, afraid that others will hurl accusations of theft and sue for damages.
Imagine if copyrights were limited to, say, 50 years after publication. We could record Catcher in the Rye. We could record Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and 1984, as well as countless other less-famous works which are languishing, out of print and all but forgotten, off-limits far into the future.
I slept horribly last night and I’m tired and headachey today. BAH. And I felt so good yesterday. It’s very frustrating. Henry’s best friend, Fargo, has come for a visit and the boys are playing nicely, as usual. I took them to Henry’s Mythology and Musical Theater classes and was too tired to drive all the way home and back, so I sat in the car knitting and listening to Loveline for a couple of hours. I’ve started a blue sock for Henry and a Tubey for me! Photos soon (hahaha do you believe me???)
Dinner will be simple tonight. I’ve got an extra burger that I cooked last night, for Dan, and I’ll make that rice medley again (I think both boys will eat it) and steam some broccoli and throw together a salad. I was going to make those awesome burrito things that I learned from Hugh but that takes too much energy, so maybe tomorrow :)
Piano student soon.
On Sunday Dan and I played some Wii tennis, golf, and bowling. Tennis used to be my favorite, but bowling is really fun too. That was the first time we really played golf and I haven’t figured out how to swing the club just a little bit, so putting was kind of frustrating. I’m sure I’ll figure it out.
Did a lot of stuff today — much housework, many errands, a recording (chapter 19 of Letters of Two Brides), plus made a nice dinner and homemade cinnamon rolls. Yum! And then we bowled some more after dinner. My muscles are sooooo sore.
There was a big yarn sale at Yarning For You this weekend. I got there just after they opened this morning and it was a zoo! There was a special room in which everything was 50% off, so I picked out enough Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran for a long-sleeved sweater for me (rusty-orange-brown, cream, and brown), and 4 balls of baby wool in red and orange for, y’know, socks or mittens or whatever. When I got home I googled the Debbie Bliss yarn and found that a lot of people say it pills badly, and I had a kind of a meltdown but Dan made me feel better, and then I thought about it some more and decided that since it’s sooooooo soft, I don’t care so much if it pills. I’ll handwash it carefully and shave it if necessary. So then I went looking for inspiration and found Tubey, which actually calls for this very yarn. I found a million photos of finished Tubeys online and *most* of the time it works up really cute. And I think I see where some people went wrong — shrug part too long down the back, and too many stitches around the body. I’m going to fit the shrug part ever so carefully, knit a couple of inches of sleeves, then a couple of inches of body and make sure everything is fitting properly before I go on.
And I recorded several chapters today! I did a couple of the horrid Letters of Two Brides (I hate Louise and hope she comes to a bad end, asap), and my chapter of Heidi in German, and a chapter of my children’s history book. Woohoo!
I do probably 99% of the grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s — no fooling, really, they have just about everything we ever need, and if they don’t have it, we probably don’t need it ;-) I go to Stater Brothers for things like hand sanitizer, TP, and Swiffer thingies. But almost all the food comes from Trader Joe’s, as well as soap, cat food, laundry detergent…
Tonight’s dinner was all courtesy of Trader Joe’s. I cooked their Brown Rice Medley (brown rice, black barley, and daikon radish seeds — terrific chewy texture and great flavor) in chicken broth and served it with their roasted red pepper and artichoke tappanade, as suggested by the store’s Sample Lady. I also sauted up a bag of Chard of Many Colors, which is a mixture of chard and kale of all varieties, washed and chopped bite-size, in olive oil with a little garlic and chicken broth. YUM. So delicious, and a very nutritious dinner as well, with all the dark-green leafy veggies and whole grains. How virtuous I feel. Better have some Valentine’s candy now.
The Musical Theater Class’s abridged version of High School Musical was a great success! Here‘s a little bit of video (with a few stills at the end) that I put together at eyespot. You can find Henry pretty easily in the first number, tossing a basketball back and forth with Adam. Then he has a little solo as the “Skater who plays the cello” in the next number (tie-dyed shirt). In the last song, he’s mostly in the back row, a bit left of center. Keep your eyes peeled and you’ll see him. He’s a good dancer!
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! Hope you spent it with your sweetie.
This morning Henry and I drove down to the UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest so they could fit me with a Holter Monitor. It took longer to figure out the parking garage payment system that to actually get the monitor stuck on me! Heheh. Then, since we were already so far south, we stopped by the zoo for a little while, said hi to Sunny the Komodo Dragon and walked around the reptile area looking at Galapagos Tortoises and crocodiles and turtles and lizards and things. Then home. We took our Grammar and Math books with us and Henry did a few pages while we were driving. Um… when we got home I rested and did housework and Henry played with piano student siblings, then I taught and took him to karate, then home for dinner etc. Dan and I watched another episode of Survivor All-Stars on my laptop tonight yay! It’s the most soothing before-bed TV there is.
Driving around in Hillcrest reminded me what a very nice place to live that was.
I’m really tired so I’m lying around, waiting for it to be time to go to Henry’s show, and thinking about my next pair of socks. Going to knit some nice thick ones for Henry to wear in Canada. I want to knit them toe-up, I think, and I really liked the Round Toes on my dark green pair. I actually knit those toes in the ordinary direction, but started with a provisional cast-on, then picked up those stitches and knit the rest of the foot in the toe-up direction. But it will be easy to make those toes backwards — I’ll just do the tiny-circle cast-on of 8 stitches (like the center of a shawl) and work increases at the proper intervals instead of decreases. And then I’ll do a Dutch heel — not reversed, just normal, with the heel flap on the bottom of the foot. I don’t like short-row heels, and it wasn’t much fun to do reversed Dutch heels.
Probably.
Ok, time to go see Henry’s show!
My Jawoll Sock Yarn comes with a little tube of fine matching nylon yarn with which to reinforce the toes and heels, very handy — but the thing is, you gotta remember to use the yarn when you make the toes and heels :) I was turning the heel of my second sock today and thinking, hmm, why does this look different from the first sock? And then I realized why, heheh. So I ripped the whole heel flap back, picked up the reinforcing yarn, and re-knit the heel during Henry’s karate class.
Busy day… Dress rehearsal for Henry’s play from 10-11:30 while I went to B&N in Escondido to get a new Moleskine notebook for Dan, then over to Encinitas for Henry’s Math Club (they graphed candy, I think), then home by way of Staples, who didn’t have what we needed. Then I lay down and rested for an hour and made a salad to go with the leftover pasta I planned for dinner, then piano student, then karate, then home by way of Target to look for a pack of Valentines, but they were sold out of everything nice so we decided to make our own. After dinner we cut pretty patterned origami paper into 2×3 rectangles, and wrote Valentine’s greetings on them. We needed 34 but it didn’t take too long. Finished “What If You Met A Knight,” by Jan Adkins, for bedtime, very good book!
Somehow I got enough sleep last night, not sure how that happened. It poured rain all morning, very cozy. I hemmed Henry’s cloak while watching several episodes of the Antiques Roadshow, and Dan worked on his helicopter. When the rain stopped I ran out and bought groceries, and then cleaned the fridge (yuck) and the whole kitchen. Made a humongous thing of pasta for dinner so there will be leftovers tomorrow night.
I read chapter 4 of Silver on the Tree to Henry for bedtime. I guess I only read that book once, a very long time ago, because I don’t really remember it at all. I’m happy that there are several scenes about the big happy Stanton family. I wish the author would write a non-fantasy book about the rest of the Stantons!
Michael J. Nelson, of MST3K fame, has a site called rifftrax.com.
At RiffTrax.com, you can download Mike’s feature-length commentaries and listen to these “RiffTrax” in sync with your favorite, and not so favorite DVDs. It’s like watching a movie with your funniest friend. And it’s super easy to do! Just play the DVD and RiffTrax MP3 together and Voila! The Matrix, Star Wars and others just got way funnier!
I first read about RiffTrax on The Daily Bleat (Lileks and Nelson are friends) and headed right over. The only riff available at the time was Roadhouse, so I put Roadhouse in our greencine queue, and kind of forgot about it. Well, the movie arrived here last week so I headed back to RiffTrax to purchase and download the commentary, and found that there are many more movies to chose from now, including Fellowship of the Ring, The Matrix, and X-Men.
We watched Roadhouse, with the RiffTrax commentary, last night. It was wonderful! The movie is so, so, delightfully bad, and the commentary track worked perfectly and was truly hilarious. And the mp3 commentary track is DRM-free, yay MIke!
We hope to try another of the RiffTrax soon — probably Fellowship — how can we resist? If you’re a fan of humorously bad movies, and/or MST3K, I highly recommend trying a RiffTrax commentary track! At least go watch some of the samples. (Note: Roadhouse is definitely not suitable for children, good lord, no. It was almost not suitable for ME.)
Today was my 6-month checkup at the UCSD Medical Center, which I always dread. We left at 8:30-ish, got down there at 9:30-ish, checked in, got my new ID card thingy. Around 10:15 I had my echocardiogram, which only took about half an hour (usually takes closer to an hour). I think the guy really knew what he was doing. A medical student came in to observe, so they were talking about my heart functions and everything, which was kind of neat, I guess. Mostly I just listened to my iPod. Then I went downstairs for the 6-minute walk, which is a test they give people with pulmonary hypertension. You literally walk up and down a hallway, as fast as you can, for 6 minutes. You wear a monitor on your ear or finger, (always finger for me, ear never works) and a technician walks behind you and measures your heart rate and blood oxygen level and total distance covered, and asks how fatigued and breathless you feel afterward. It’s an oddly low-tech test. I covered 660 meters and felt mildly breathless and fatigued afterward, which is pretty good, no worse than last time. Then after that I saw my actual PH doctor and he said everything is stable and I can just stay on all my medication as usual. Asked him about those funny episodes I have and he has no idea what could cause them. I’m supposed to go in for another appointment for them to hook me up to a heart monitor to wear for 24 hours, but since my episodes are rare and random, it’s unlikely that one will happen during those 24 hours. Oh well.
After we got out of the hospital I was so glad to be finished! We were already halfway down to the zoo, so we went there and had a nice lunch and walked around and looked at all the monkeys and apes, and then on the way home we stopped at the yarn store and I bought red and black NatureSpun Worsted wool for a hat for Dan, and blue Lamb’s Pride Superwash wool for socks for Henry. And then we went home, all tired out.
Tonight was the first episode of the new season on Survivor, so that was fun, though it’s never that interesting until you get to know the people. Also a new episode of The Office. Also we watched last Tuesday’s episode of House, which, again, wasn’t up to par. It was the one with the gypsy kid and the parking space. Meh.
Photo time!
The finished Dark Green Socks:
The finished Scarf:
(Seed-stitch, Baby Alpaca Grande)
Both together:
The first Light-Green Sock:
(The “Child’s First Sock in Shell Pattern” from Knitting Vintage Socks, by Nancy Bush. It’s an 8-stitch, 10-round lace pattern that works up very quickly and is easy to memorize.)
The beginning of the second Light-Green Sock:
We all woke up bright and early, feeling pretty good. And it was a lovely sunny breezy day. Henry’s dental appointment was cancelled, so we decided to go to the zoo. Henry made us some PB&J sandwiches, traffic was light, and we got to the zoo about 10:45. First we visited the Komodo Dragon for a while (Henry’s current favorite animal) and then we watched the dear little Sea Lion show. Then visited the Hummingbird house and the Komodo Dragon again — found out that his (?) name is “Sunny.” Then we took the Sky Buckets over to the other side of the zoo and watched the polar bears for a long long time. The keepers threw some vegetables and fruits into the deep end of their pool, and one bear jumped in and was swimming all around and playing. They’re HUGE and so graceful underwater. Then we looked at some more arctic animals, then walked down the canyon to the pandas and saw both pandas out and eating their bamboo. Then up the walkway to the monkeys, out through the new Monkey Trails exhibit, and then to Sunny for one last visit.
Henry carried the backpack for me the whole time and we went nice and slow, but I still had one of those funny episodes when we got to the car… it happens sometimes, I feel like there’s not quite enough air, my head feels hot, and I feel generally “funny” in an unpleasant way. Sometimes my heart races like crazy. I’m seeing my doctor again on Thursday and I’ll tell him about this again and see what he thinks… he wasn’t concerned last time I told him about it. But it’s very frustrating.
When we got home, I rested for a bit and then taught a student, then rested some more, and then Dan drove us to Henry’s karate class, and then took us out to dinner at Anita’s so I didn’t have to cook :)
We’re all feeling more-or-less healthy again, with coughs, though Henry and I go through funny tired phases from time to time. I read the first two chapters of Silver on the Tree to Henry this morning, and another long chunk of Beowulf tonight (the Seamus Heaney translation). The part we read tonight contained the battle with Grendel — wonderful stuff! I went searching for audio of the original Old English and found a few short passages here: http://www.beowulftranslations.net/benslade.shtml !!! So beautiful. I finished the first light-green lace sock today while Dan and I were watching last week’s episode of House (not a very good one, too much out-of-character talking and not enough vasculitis). Photo of the sock soon. (I keep saying that…)
Henry and I slept late and then went to the library and jammed the backpack full of books, and ran a bunch of errands. At the library, Henry got a copy of Beowulf which he is in love with so far. I got three knitting books, but there’s nothing interesting in any of them! We both felt pretty good until the afternoon when we both all of a sudden got terribly tired and just went and lay down for the rest of the day. He’s up in his bed listening to audiobooks and watching LotR on my laptop. Dan’s sleeping (still very sick). I’m in my bed listening to audiobooks and resting. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
Poor Dan is still really sick, but for some reason Henry and I haven’t caught the horrible virus yet. I felt mildly sick for a couple of days, and my chest is a little tight and I cough now and then and am tired, but other than that I feel fine, better than yesterday. Good thing I felt ok today ’cause I had to do million things. Got the mail, FedEx’d something to somebody, bought a few groceries (smoothie ingredients, Vitamin Water, and grapes especially for Dan to munch on, nice and soft for his sore throat), bought 29 gallons of water, took Henry to his Science workshop. I sat in the car and knitted and listened to Loveline, and Henry dissected a frog. Eww! But he had a great time as usual (Lyndy is amazing, amazing!!) and brought home a spare frog and his dissecting tools.
Came home, got a quick shower, punched a hole in the top of a Vitamin Water bottle cap so Dan could sip through a straw, taught two piano students, took Henry to karate (knitted!), bought more cold medicine for Dan, also hand sanitizer (Henry and I are practically bathing in the stuff), came home. Henry fixed quesadillas for dinner and we had some canned pineapple with them. Did two loads of laundry. Read another chapter of The Grey King to Henry for bedtime while he played his bass.
Our LibriVox Weekly Poetry last week was Jabberwocky, in honor of Lewis Carrol’s birth month. We had 34 submissions! That’s almost an hour of Jabberwocky :) Here are all 34 versions for you to download for free:
http://librivox.org/jabberwocky-by-lewis-carroll/
I’m still just a little bit sick — tight chest, slight cough, sniffly nose, tired — and Dan’s a lot sicker than I am, which is very unusual. Usually I’m the sicker one. I hope it doesn’t hit me hard in a few days or something. Lots of WoW today. My Druid hit lvl 49 and my new little Warrior hit 11. Since I’m so boring, here’s an interesting article for you to read:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
We actually do pretty well following the guidelines at the end of the article.
Ugh, Dan’s rather sick and I’m a little bit sick. We just hung around all day coughing and playing WoW and watching tv and stuff. I finished my dark green socks yesterday and will take a picture soonish. Also finished the dark-green scarf. Started light green socks, but I think I need to make them smaller.
