kayray.org

I picked up my glasses today! I love them.
Here’s a crappy Photo Booth photo:

I’m sure I can get Dan to take a more flattering photo soon :) These are my first glasses. I’ve already noticed that my eyes feel more relaxed, if that’s the right term for it, while I’m knitting and using my computer.

In other news, our audiobook of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, by Howard Pyle, is finally finished! A volunteer named Glovis started the project on Jan 13, 2006. I signed up to be his “MC” (Meta-Coordinator, a LibriVox term for a sort of project overseer and eventual cataloger). Glovis disappeared last spring (hope you’re ok, Glovis!) and took the already-submitted recordings with him, so when I took over, the project was a real mess. Missing files, missing readers… Well, I finally tracked down a number of the already-finished recordings, found some readers who were willing to re-record their chapters, and parceled the orphans out to fresh readers. Yesterday Lucy completed our last outstanding chapter! Anna proof-listened it, and I did minor edits on some of the other files (volume boosting, adding a bit of silence to the end, fixing the sample rate, etc.), and cleaned up the ID3 tags on all the files. This morning I did the Big Upload to archive.org and created the catalog page — and LOOK! It’s finally ready to download and listen to!

http://librivox.org/the-merry-adventures-of-robin-hood-by-howard-pyle/

I am embarrassed by the relatively poor quality of my own recording (Chapter 9, I think). I recorded it back in Jan 2006, when I was still using a crummy microphone. Bah. Oh well, it’s good enough :) Hope you enjoy!

Oh, the first and last chapters are read by Alex, who actually lives near Sherwood Forest :)

Look what I found while googling:
Deluxe Sock Collection Kit (scroll down)
Sock Collection Book = $10
Three skeins of yarn =$52.50
total value of $62.50

Special Deluxe Kit price is
$60.00

add $5.75 shipping

Look at those socks, just look at them! Imagine the warmth and beauty of that stranded Icelandic yarn! As the Yarn Harlot says, it’s such a bargain that it would be irresponsible and foolish NOT to buy it. However, I don’t have $65.75 right now so if you feel like surprising me with a really awesome present, feel free :)

From Hugh, i got tagged. Shuffled iTunes, to see what song plays as the background to various scenes in the movie of my life:

Opening credits:
Rat Patrol – They Might Be Giants

First day of school:
The Fool on the Hill – The Beatles

Falling in love:
Schtille di Nacht (Polish folksong) – Pete Seeger

Prom/Grad:
Dona Nobis Pacem – LibriVox Christmas Carol Collection

Mental breakdown:
Sweet Lorraine – Nat King Cole Trio

Flashbacks:
Oedipus Rex – Tom Lehrer

Getting back together:
You Shook Me – Led Zeppelin

Wedding scene:
I Feel Fine – The Beatles

Final battle:
One Fine Day – The Chiffons

Death scene:
Baby it’s Cold Outside – Brian Setzer/Ann Margret

Funeral scene:
You Really Got A Hold On Me – The Beatles

End credits:
Birds Fly – They Might Be Giants

Finale:
Ain’t She Sweet – The Beatles (awww, what a nice ending to my soundtrack! :)

***********
Um, who will I tag… Who reads this? How about Kathy, Kri, and Chloe?

Oh, Henry wants to play too!

I’ve had headaches and mild nausea on and off since my eye exam. Strange. Yesterday the nausea was relatively unpleasant and I just lay on the couch and listened to loveline most of the day. Today it didn’t hit me till the afternoon and wasn’t very bad. Played a bit of LOZ:TP this morning after I did a bunch of housework/laundry/etc and got the Big Key in the Lakebed Temple (is that what it’s called?), but got horribly lost in an underwater maze and warped back to the entrance. Ready for the Boss tomorrow! Henry worked on his new Erector Set clock kit. He loves it so much! And the I took him to his Math Club meeting and he learned about probability while I sat in the car and knitted and listened to more loveline. Then home, more laundry, piano students, dinner prep, karate, dinner, and now I’m just lying around resting. Pretty tired, haven’t been sleeping well again, sigh.

I’ve been borrowing Henry’s scarf all winter, but when we go to Canada I’ll need my own, so I splurged at Noble Knits on Thursday and bought two skeins of Baby Alpaca Grande. It’s the Softest Wool Ever. I started my scarf in a fancy lace-and-cable pattern, but I ripped it out and decided to go for a simple and elegant seed-stitch. The seed-stitch pattern shows off the sheen of the yarn very nicely. Here’s my progress as of yesterday:

And I’m nearly done with my dark-green toe-up socks, after changing my mind and re-starting them four times! Just working up the leg of sock #2:

No, they don’t really match perfectly but it doesn’t bother me. I promise to write down my round/stitch counts at I go next time! :)

Why yes, I am rather fond of green.

I’m seriously considering ripping my red BPT sweater out entirely, instead of just removing the hood and knitting a new neck, and making a new and completely different sweater out of the yarn. I’d like something longer and slightly looser with better neck-shaping. But first I need to make socks, mittens, and scarves for Canada!

I’m listening to my wonderful CD “Across The Western Ocean.” I highly recommend it if you like non-slick real-sounding historical folk music.

Today I had an eye exam with Dr. Sherman, the guy who did Dan’s pre-and post-Lasik exams. Dan really likes him and recommend I get my checkup there. He’s super-nice! My vision has actually been frustrating me for several years — I could tell it was slowly degrading, things in the distance getting slightly harder and harder to see — but my last two exams turned out perfect. So I was actually happy when Dr. Sherman said I needed a slight prescription. I look forward to better vision when my frames arrive! (in 5-10 business days, sigh) I picked these in light brown.

Pretty tired today but I recorded two chapters of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

A new episode of the LibriVox Community Podcast appeared today! I just finished listening to it, and enjoyed it so much. This was a calm, slow-paced episode created and hosted by Alan (Cloud Mountain) and featuring David (Earthcalling) and Annie (LibraryLady), just talking about their roles at LibriVox, what they enjoy about it, etc. I’m not so good at putting LibriVox’s wonderfulness into words, but these two certainly are. Listen!

LibriVox Community Podcast 19

Yesterday I cataloged the poetry book! It’s all done! Hooray!

For those of you who don’t know it already, I’ve been recording a book for LibriVox called Poems Every Child Should Know, an anthology of poetry for children, edited by Mary E. Burt and published in 1904. It was divided by http://dailylit.com into 81 short sections, some with several short poems, some with just one long poem. The finished book is 8 hours long and contains nearly 200 poems.

I’ll start podcasting this one soon, but if you just can’t wait and you want to hear the whole thing now, go for it:

http://librivox.org/poems-every-child-should-know-edited-by-mary-e-burt/

I’m always on the lookout for wonderful public domain children’s literature. A while ago I discovered The Baldwin Online Children’s Literature Project: http://mainlesson.com/.

They have a great collection of classic children’s literature, all laid out for you to read online AND you can buy lovely inexpensive reprints of their books. I recorded Our Island Story from their site as a solo project (audio here: part 1 and here: part 2), and I’ve just recently started The Story of the Middle Ages. I emailed Lisa, who runs the site, thanked her for providing the texts, and invited her to link to any of our free audio versions of the books on her site. She very kindly offered to send me a print copy of any of her books, to make it easier to record them! So I asked for the Story of the Middle Ages and it arrived today. It’s a beautiful softcover facsimile of the original book, about 6×9, with all the original illustrations.

Thank you so much, Lisa, for your generous gift! It will indeed make it easier and more fun to do my recording :) Reading from a screen is ok, but there’s just nothing like a real book.

Please support http://mainlesson.com/ — buy a book and help them keep scanning in these literary treasures.

We are having crazy cold weather here in Southern California, along with the rest of the country I guess.  When we drove home from San Diego last night the car told us it was 35 degrees out, and our bedroom was 59 when we went to bed.  Brr!   I wore my wool sweater and scarf and fingerless gloves and hat, and two pairs of wool socks, all day today (in the house) and was still chilly.  We don’t have central heating right now because we’re waiting for SDG&E to come out and tell us if it’s safe or not.  Even when we DO have it, it really only heats one room of the house, heheh.

Recorded the last five sections of the poetry book today, but still need to edit/proof them.

Today, while Dan was at the helicopter field and the house was quiet, I recorded/edited/proofed five more sections of the poetry book. Now I have completed 76 of 81 sections! It’s amazing! And I also beat the horrible caravan escort quest in LOZ:TP, and am ready for the third dungeon. This evening we went to B&C’s house so Dan could finish their complicated new computer set-up. We always have the best time with them! Bob and I surfed around on my laptop and watched old music videos and classic Sesame Street clips on youtube (Capital I, Lower Case n) while Dan and Chloe did computer things, and then we all watched an episode of SNL hosted by Jerry Seinfeld, which was relatively funny, except for the one-joke sketches that dragged on and on.

Posting some links to the awesome Sesame Street clips we found last night, plus some others I just found:

Capital I:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vCyupsecJc

Lower case n:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGZ9aWBWLUU

The Penny Candy Man (8):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxYxEEMNcEQ

Ten Tiny Turtles on the Telephone (ignore elmo at the beginning of the clip):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADP9e7rDEuw

The Ladybugs’ Picnic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTuU0bwy79I

Number NIne Cutie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fsdji0HmoRk

Flying on an Eagle (E):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5FBY-y1IeQ

The “O” Song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLqKmsRC2_g

I made Really Good Soup for dinner last night. I always crave soup when it’s cold.  I usually improvise soup, but this one turned out so good I decided to write it down:

Chop up an onion and cook it slowly in a big stock pot in a nice lump of butter and a bit of olive oil, until it is soft.  Add three diced potatoes (Russets, of course) and a couple of stalks of celery, chopped.   Cook everything around in the butter for a while, and then add water or broth.  I used frozen turkey broth that I made from our Christmas turkey — about 1.5 quarts, I think.  Open a big can of Italian tomatoes and add them and their juice, and chop up the tomatoes into bite-size pieces. Add a bit of salt and pepper and paprika.  Cover and cook slowly until the potatoes are soft enough.  Drain a can of kidney beans and add them to the soup.  Serve with a spoonful of sour cream stirred in.  Oh LORD it’s good.

Kelly asked what I filled my backpack with when we went to the library on Monday, so here’s a list:

For me:

• Typing time (CD-ROM)
• Prep : a novel    Sittenfeld, Curtis. (Finished – excellent)
• The lost art of keeping secrets : a novel    Rice, Eva, (3/4 finished, excellent)
• On Yoolis night [sound recording] : medieval carols & motets    Anonymous 4 (lovely)
• Unnatural selection    Elkins, Aaron J.
• London is the best city in America    Dave, Laura.
• The cultured handmaiden    Cookson, Catherine.
• The Penderwicks [sound recording] (Very disappointing.  The story seems very good but the reader is dreadful, so dreadful we had to turn it off after a few minutes.)

For Henry:

• Life in the Middle Ages. The castle    Hinds, Kathryn, 1962-
• Magical melons : more stories about Caddie Woodlawn    Brink, Carol Ryrie, 1895-1981
• The secret of Pirates’ Hill    Dixon, Franklin W.
• Cathedral: the story of its construction    Macaulay, David.
• Draw your own manga : beyond the basics    Nagatomo, Haruno.
• Dragon rider    Funke, Cornelia Caroline.
• A medieval castle    Jarrow, Gail.
• The further adventures of Hank the Cowdog    Erickson, John R., (Henry says this is very good)
• Midnight magic    Avi,
• The sun    Miller, Ron,
• The history of counting    Schmandt-Besserat, Denise.
• Math missions (CD-ROM) (Henry likes this game, although there’s WAY to much talking and he has to keep hitting “escape” to get to the actual math)

So there you go :)

Mom took me out to try to find jeans today — my Christmas present. I finally found two pairs of normal-looking jeans in some little store. They’re just plain straight-cut boy jeans (literally. all the girl-size jeans were so low-cut it was ridiculous). They didn’t have very many in my size (28×30, which is a little big but perfectly comfortable) but I found two pairs. Now I can throw out my worn out awful jeans, yay! Really tired again today, sigh, I guess my streak of good sleep is really over. Oh well, those were a nice three days. Didn’t get much done, but helped Henry make his cheesecake (he didn’t need much help) and read a lot. I’m reading “The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets” by Eva Rice, which is amazing. Got a new Anonymous 4 cd at the library on Monday: “On Yoolis Night; Medieval Carols and Motets.” Listening now, it’s lovely.

The lovelinearchive.com guy says he’s not going to do the new-shows podcast anymore, darn it. He doesn’t like Stryker. I LOVE Stryker! I can download the shows myself but it’s not the same as a nice rss feed shoving them automagically into my iPod. Sigh.

If you haven’t listened to our wonderful LibriVox community podcast yet, you really must. I love it. One of the really nice things about it is that there’s no standard format. The show varies in content and style depending on who happened to create it that week. Take a listen to some of our recent episodes and tell me you’re not charmed and entertained! http://www.archive.org/details/librivox_community.

Had a nice trip to the library today, filled the backpack and then some. Felt good all day. Tired now but I did a lot of stuff. We just watched the first episode of the second season of Green Wing. Bizarre and entertaining, hope they’re making a third season. Oh, just looked it up, they’re not, oh well :)

Somehow I got enough sleep last night and I felt good all day and got a lot accomplished! I wish I knew why I slept well so I could recreate the conditions and sleep well on other nights. Not only did I sleep well, but instead of waking up suddenly way too early, wide awake with no chance of falling back asleep, I woke up slowly and drowsily around 9:30. So that was a very nice way to start the day. I made a nice late breakfast for Dan, and then he went off to the RC aircraft field and I stayed home to get things done! I did two more LibriVox recordings and got all four recent ones edited, proofed, tagged, and uploaded AND got Joy’s 43-file collection of English Fairy Tales cataloged, AND did the Wii fitness test for the first time — fitness age = 57, lol. And I practiced baseball for a while too. I stink at Wii baseball.

Dan took me out to dinner at Anita’s, a nice casual Mexican place down on the coast. I had a great thing made of corn tortillas layered with cheese and beans and chicken with sour cream and guacamole. Usually I just have a few sips of Dan’s margarita, but tonight I ordered my own — not fruity, not blended, the way I like it. Except I’ve never drunk an entire restaurant margarita before and I really felt it, bleah. I need a child-size one next time ;-) It was a lovely dinner! I couldn’t finish, as usual, so I brought half of mine home so I can finish it before bed.

And now we’re watching TV while I compute and Dan works on his helicopter — last Thursday’s episode of The Office (Michael is back from Jamaica). Oh how I love that show. And the Soup Awards episode, very entertaining as usual. And a dull episode of South Park. And now a re-run of the Office, “The Convention” (for the third time, heheheh, that show is good over and over and over).

Oh my god, we’ve been watching Survivor: Australia on my laptop in bed at night — it’s great relaxing bedtime TV. Last night was the episode where Michael fell into the fire and was airlifted out. Man. We really liked him, too. How can you not like a man who chases down a wild pig with a knife and stabs it to death to feed his tribe?

Now I’m nice and sleepy and Dan is going to bring me my leftovers and then we’ll go to bed and maybe if I’m very lucky I’ll sleep well again. Cross your fingers.

Dan took this photo of me a couple of weeks ago:

Shows off my enormous teeth and knobby nose to great advantage. :)

If you were watching TV commercials in the 70s, you probably remember this wonderful stop-motion Levis commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBYgbeT6ciI

(I’d really like to embed that video but youtube’s “embed” code breaks my blog. Can anyone give me a hint?)

The song has been popping up in my head every so often ever since I was a child. I remembered every note; the visuals not so much, but they’re still familiar, especially the bit with the tag travelling around the pocket seam. Is it odd that watching a 30-year-old commercial fills me with so much joy?

Woke up before 6, couldn’t get back to sleep, so it was a tired day and I didn’t get much done.  But I read two chapters of Story of the World to Henry, and encouraged him to do a bit of math.  And beat the second dungeon in Twilight Princess (I have 6 4/5 hearts!).  Henry’s got a little sore throat.  Dan’s tired too so we’ll watch an episode of Survivor Australia and go to bed early.

Vacation is over — back to Regular Life :) Normal busy Tuesday morning — fixed yogurt-banana-strawberry smoothies for breakfast, got Henry up, got to Karate in time, then over to Bayshore for our consultation with Karen. We told both Michelle and Karen all about our Wii, heheh. It’s the most awesome console ever! Forgot to mention that on New Year’s Eve we visited Bob and Chloe again and took the Wii with us so we could all bowl some more. Bob’s parents showed up right before we left and Bob got them bowling and playing tennis and they were laughing and having a great time. That’s one of the amazing things about the Wii — middle-aged non-gamers are able to jump right in to the sports games with a minimum of explanation and demonstration, yet it’s still tremendously fun for us experienced gamers (I played tennis against the AI for quite a while yesterday, two kayrays against two random players, heheh). And Twilight Princess is good beyond belief. I worked my way to the miniboss in the second dungeon today and was constantly amazed by the creative new twists I ran into. I’m taking it kind of slow on purpose — I don’t want the game to end. Hooray, Nintendo!

Yeah so anyway on the way home from Bayshore we stopped at the Mailbox place so Kevin could notarize my request for a new copy of Henry’s birth certificate. Not taking any chances when we head back to Canada. Got home, sifted through the bills, fed Henry, read email, fixed librivox problems. Then we called Grandma (my Grandma, Henry’s Great-Grandma) to chat and thank her for the present she sent — one of thoe felt roll-up puzzle-keepers, very handy. I took snapshots of Henry on the phone with her, and then we went down to Kinkos to get a print made and tucked it into a package with a little late-Christmas gift for her — a copy of LibriVox’s “A Girl of the Limberlost” on 10 audio cds (which I made yesterday while the guys were at the flying field), then mailed that to Grandma and an embarrassingly-late Christmas card to Hugh and Christine (which was actually meant to be a thank-you card after our last visit. Talk about embarrassingly late…)

Then home again and time for some Zelda! Henry watched and advised me. Then I made a simple but tasty pasta dinner — stirred chunks of leftover New Year’s Turkey into the sauce. And now I’m blogging while Henry plays his guitar and Dan takes his bike apart and puts it back together :)