kayray.org

This afternoon I went to visit Chloe and listen to another rehearsal.  It was so much fun!  Chloe and I got to hang out, just the two of us, and talk about all sorts of things.  I want to help her manage her hundreds of tasks, so I’m going to try to make her a database of some kind.  Cross your fingers.

Wen I got home, Dan and I put in the dvd of the first season of The Office (USA version) and watched the whole thing.  It’s really odd to see the same characters but with different names and played by different actors.  They kept the script of the first episode the same, but then branched off for all the rest.  The Gareth character (Dwight) is a lot less likable than Gareth.  You could sort of root for Gareth sometimes, but not Dwight.  On the whole it’s very good and we’re going to rent the second disc next.

We just got home from seeing Casino Royale. I enjoyed it very much! Daniel Craig, the new James Bond, is the best since Sean Connery. Maybe (gasp) better. There’s nothing pretty about him and he’s quite, um, attractive :) *fans self* He seemed to give Bond quite a bit more personality than usual.

This was one of the best Bond movies I’ve seen. There were not more explosions or chase scenes than the plot could handle, though there were plenty, as expected. The dialogue was believable and non-cheesy. I loved the camera work and the grainy B&W opening sequence. Yum. The last few Bond movies I’ve seen just seemed silly most of the time. (Remember the Ice Palace? Remember the Tank Chase? Remember Bond falling FASTER than a plummeting airplane?) This one did not seem silly at all, though there were several laugh-out-loud humorous moments. It was extremely violent, so don’t take your kids :) But for 2 1/2 hours of good solid spies-and-bad-guys entertainment I recommend it!

Oh I almost forgot — the opening credits/titles/whatever they’re called (I’m too tired to think of the right name) were creative and beautiful!

Finally, photos of Henry’s Dragon costume:

It was constructed on a pair of navy-blue sweats. Henry bought the purple-and-green latex dragon head at Costume Castle. We made spines of green felt, stuffed them, and sewed them to the back of the shirt. The tail is purple felt, stuffed, with spines inserted into the top seam, and attached to a belt around Henry’s waist. The wings are leftover pool-cover material, which is basically blue bubble-wrap. We cut the wings out and just stitched them to the sleeves and sides of the shirt. Voila! A dragon!

This morning after chores Henry and I sat down with the big bag of geometry stuff that Lyndy sent home with us. (Henry was sick on Math Club day but Lyndy saved our materials for us and gave them to us on Science Club Day). We read about polygons and polyhedrons, Platonic Solids and Archimedean Solids. We built polygons with pretzel rods, and polyhedrons with gumdrops and toothpicks. We played with tangrams and pentominoes. And I think we both learned something! I took photos of our gumdrop creations, which are, of course, still in the camera… I’ll try to dump/upload/post one tomorrow.

Sally went out for a bit so the house was quiet (so funny that a 66-year old makes FAR more noise than an 11-year old) and I recorded the last 2/3 of chapter 4 of Vanity Fair for Betsie. The woman who originally read chapter 4 disappeared so we couldn’t get her to fix her truncated file. But I recorded it, and pasted both parts together, and tried to get them to match in sound quality. I think I did pretty well.

Oh! Our LibriVox “A Tale of Two Cities” audiobook is done!!! Frabjous Day! You can download it here:

http://librivox.org/a-tale-of-two-cities-by-charles-dickens/

(All LibriVox recordings are volunteer-created, FREE, and in the public domain. Please download, copy, share!)

Karate in the morning — Henry helped with the little kids’ class. I ripped out my green sock (for the fourth time) and started over in a pattern that is more fun to work. (k2, p2 around for 8 rows, then k 2 rows plain, then p2, k2 around for 8 rows, then k 2 rows plain. Cute!) The pretzel cable was beautiful, but the pattern was too complex to memorize and I got tired of needing constantly to refer to my chart. Not good if you want to knit while having a conversation or watching a movie.

Then bank, then hardware store for glue and things for Dan, then fabric store so Henry could choose cloth for a cloak for Christmas. He chose a lovely leaf-green linen blend for the outside, and a tasteful brown plaid flannel for the inside. I’ll make it reversible so he can switch it around as the mood strikes him. He says he wants a round hood, not a pointed one. Good to know.

Then home, chores, laundry, email, food, LibriVox. Then out to Bayshore for Mythology and Musical Theater. I dropped H off and went to the far-away hobby store to get more glue for Dan. A man needs the right kind of glue! And then I drove back to Bayshore and knitted my sock and listened to Loveline during Henry’s classes. Ice T and his wife were the guests. He seemed quite intelligent, actually, and I enjoyed the episode a lot. Usually I can’t listen to the rapper-guests because they say “y’know’m’say’n’?” every other word and it drives me nuts.

So — then home again. Henry played with young Colin and I taught a piano lesson. Then we looked at all the fun Geometry stuff that Lyndy sent home with us and did a couple of five-minute room rescues, and then I tried to whip Henry’s iPod into shape. It complained about being full and I had to struggle with it quite a bit to get it to empty some things out, and load on the things Henry wanted. Its behaviour was vexing and puzzling — but at the VERY end I think I figured it out — Henry had accidentally pasted his entire library, or nearly all of it, into a Harry Potter book playlist. So of course it was loading the whole library onto his iPod even though we didn’t THINK we were telling it to. Then Henry’s dad came to pick him up and I threw together some dinner and then Dan came home and ate and then we drove down to Chloe’s house to listen to a band rehearsal and hang out a bit. Very fun!!! I worked on the Tale of Two Cities project the whole time — resampling and re-encoding several files, and fixing up all the id3 tags, and adding the reader names into the validator. I still need to do a quick listen to the beginning and ending of each of the 45 files, to make sure none are truncated. Andy, the wonderful volunteer who took over the project (the original BC disappeared without a trace) and I are worried that some files might not be complete. But we’ll get it figured out.

Then home late and to bed.

Dan: I read an interview with that scientist, what’s-his-name.

Kara: The guy who was on the thing?

Dan: Yeah, that guy.

(ten minutes later)

Kara: Richard Dawkins.

Dan: Yeah.

I started making my own salsa recently.  It’s so good — I’ll never buy ready-made salsa again.  We don’t like spicy things, so if this salsa seems bland to you, add some hot peppers or something :)
You need:

• Fresh cilantro
• fresh ripe tomatoes
• an onion (you only need a little bit)
• a lime or a lemon
• dash of salt

Mince up a bit of onion, very fine.  Separate the leaves and tender upper stems of cilantro from the tough bottom stems (throw the bottom stems out).  Chop coarsely. Chop a bunch of tomatoes.  Mix all this together in a bowl or an empty cottage cheese container or something.  Add a good squeeze of lime or lemon, and salt to taste.  If it needs more of something, add more of something :)  So good, so good.   I keep a container of this salsa in the fridge at all times.

We have a few volunteers who are artistically/graphically inclined. They’ve been making CD cover art to go with some of our audio books. Wonderful designs! Tonight I finally collected all the artwork pdfs, made 150x150px thumbnail jpgs and 300×300 Album Art jpgs (I’m obsessed with adding Album Art to iTunes lately), and uploaded everything to one nice project on Archive.org, with links back to the recordings and everything. Take a look:

http://www.archive.org/details/librivox_cd_covers

Don’t those nice graphics just make you want to download a book and burn it to a cd and make a spiffy jewel-case insert for it? Why, that’d make a fine Christmas present for someone, don’t you think? :) At the bottom of the wiki page that Seth made, http://librivox.org/wiki/moin.cgi/CompactDiscCovers, you’ll find sources for library-style cd cases, so you don’t have to put a ten-cd book in ten individual cases, you know?A big thank-you to Seth and Ted, who made all this art for us AND released it into the public domain for everyone to enjoy!

By popular demand – my lasagna recipe!

Warning: this is a Kara-style, why-bother-to-measure, improvisational recipe. Find some other recipe that gives explicit instructions if you’re a new or nervous cook, and then come back and try this one when you’re ready :) You’ll use raw noodles and spinach in this recipe but don’t worry — it’ll all turn out ok!

*******************
Kara’s Lasagna

Ingredients:

• Dry lasagna noodles in a box. Not fresh, not pre-cooked — just regular.
• A 15-oz tub of ricotta cheese. This will make a generous family-size dish. Use two tubs if you want a mega-lasagna with leftovers for days.
• a bag of fresh, clean, salad-style spinach (you won’t need the whole bag, so you can make a nice spinach salad to go with your lasagna)
• a bag of grated mozarella cheese, or grate your own.
• a tub of nice fresh grated parmesan cheese, or grate your own. Please don’t use the sawdust in the green can!
• about 2 jars of good pasta sauce. You might not need it all, but better too much than not enough. You’ll probably need a third jar if you’re making a mega-lasagna. When I use a can of Roma tomatoes for some other recipe, I save the thick juice to make the sauce go further when I make a lasagna.
• an egg or two
• salt
• Italian herbs — basil, oregano, whatever you’ve got handy
• an onion, chopped
• several cloves of garlic, chopped
• Assorted fresh vegetables: red and/or green bell pepper, fresh mushrooms, zucchini, sliced carrots, whatever you like. I use a box of fresh mushrooms and a red bell pepper as a start, and add other things if I feel like it. The more you use, the bigger your lasagna will be, obviously. Chop everything into appropriately-sized chunks.
• ENTIRELY OPTIONAL: some kind of meat. I used uncooked sweet Italian sausage once, cut into chunks and cooked with the veggies. It was great! You could use ground beef or turkey, or chunks of chicken, or whatever. Just make sure your meat is thoroughly cooked before you assemble the lasagna.

Ok! Heat up some olive oil in a nice big pan. Cook your onion and garlic for a little while, until it starts to get slightly soft. Add the rest of the veggies (hard/solid things like carrots should be added before soft/quick-cooking things like zucchini). Add meat, if you’ve got meat. Add herbs, generously. Cook until it’s all done and smells most sentimental. It’s better if the veggies don’t turn to mush, of course. But make sure that meat is done. It’ll cook more in the oven but why take a chance?

Dump your ricotta into a big huge bowl. Add several handfuls of raw spinach and mix it around with a wooden spoon. Remember that the spinach will shrink a lot, so why not add some more? Add a few spoonfuls of parmesan. Dump in the cooked veggie mixture and mix it all around. Taste, and see if needs salt. I usually add several good shakes. Add an egg or two.

Ok now get your pan. I use a deep 9″x9″ casserole dish with a lid for family-size lasagna, and a 10″x14″ pan for mega-lasagna. Put a layer of RAW lasagna noodles in the bottom. Dump in about half (or a third, depending on how much you made) of your cheese/vegetable mixture. You want a nice even layer. Sprinkle on a generous layer of mozarella and a few spoonfuls of parmesan, and then a good thick layer of sauce. This is no time to be stingy! Repeat these layers until you run out of stuff. End with sauce. You want a LOT of sauce.

Cover and bake (preheat the oven!) at 350 degrees fahrenheit for an hour. Let it rest for 10 minutes or so before you serve. YUM!

****************

I love this recipe. The noodles turn out perfectly al dente and absorb all the extra liquid, so you don’t get that yucky runny juice in the bottom of the pan. And you don’t have to fiddle around with slimy half-boiled lasagna noodles and big gobs of cooked spinach oozing all over the cutting board. Freeze the leftovers. They reheat deliciously. Let me know if you come up with an awesome new ingredient or variation!

I did a lot of stuff today. Hmm, let’s see… Well, after the normal morning stuff, (feeding people, morning chores, email, etc) Henry and I went out to buy turtle food. We had a list of other errands to do, but then I remembered that I had a make-up lesson to teach at 10, so we went home. After the lesson I did more housework and Henry played his guitar and bass for a long time. He worked more on “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” (on guitar), and “The End” from Abbey Road (on the bass). And then when he was ready we went to the hobby store for Dan, then back to Trader Joe’s for ricotta, ice cream, eggs, vitamin water, etc. Then to Stater Brothers for straws and prescription stuff.
Then home. We put everything away and grabbed a bite to eat and then played World of Warcraft together for a couple of hours. He played his level-14 night elf warrior, Naronda, and I played my level-14 dwarf Priest, Kayrayovac, and we did Darkkshire quests. You know, the Red Crystal, the Cliffspring Sample, killing the rabid bears, talking to that dude up north across the bridge, etc. It was lots of fun to do those lowbie quests that we already know by heart :) We both leveled, too.

Then I did 4 recordings — a chapter of The Middle Temple Murder, a chapter of How To Speak and Write Correctly, and two sections of poetry, and then I did moree housework and made a lasagna for dinner. Maybe I’ll post my recipe tomorrow. It’s really easy — you don’t bother to cook the noodles or the spinach and it turns out just fine.

Last night Dan showed Henry how to use his amp setup and everything, which sounds much than Henry’s setup, and Henry got all inspired and started to learn “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”.  This morning he practiced for about half an hour, and then at 10 we left for our meeting with Karen.  Handed in our “work samples” and discussed all the fun stuff we’ve been doing together.  Very pleasant.  Henry brought his guitar along and played for her :)

Then we went straight down to Chloe’s house to listen to the band rehearsal. Traffic was hellish — two separate accidents on the freeway and everything clogged up for miles.  We got there an hour and a half after they started playing, heh.  But what we heard sounded good!  Henry played Gameboy with Chloe and I ripped cds and knitted and stuff.  When rehearsal was over we stayed and had more fun.  Henry played music with Bob and Chloe and I listened and talked, and then we just goofed around some more.  Nice.  I had planned to try to leave before rush hour but I missed the window of opportunity (if there was one yesterday) so we stayed until nearly 6.  Listened to My Man Jeeves all the way there and back, too, which made the drive as pleasant as a rush-hour freeway drive can be.

So tired.

Henry and I went to the zoo today! We left at about 10:40 and zipped down there — almost no traffic, amazingly — and got there are 11:20 or so. First we walked through the reptile house and visited the komodo dragon (Henry’s favorite today!) and then through the lovely new monkey exhibit, which was built last year to replace the ancient monkey house. It’s one of those beautiful modern exhibits, with two levels of walkways between large airy mesh enclosures, so you can see what’s going on at the top of the forest as well as the bottom. It feels lush and spacious, and the monkeys have huge natural-looking homes filled with live trees, branches, climbing ropes, hiding places, rock pools, etc. We spent a long time watching a family of Wolf’s Guenons. The little one was performing amazing feats of acrobatics while the mother worked and worked to try to crack open a walnut. After about 20 minutes it slipped out of her hands (or maybe she dropped it in disgust) and the father sprinted for it and grabbed it. He took it away to the top of a tree and eventually got it open. They were wonderful to watch.

We wandered through the new exhibit and reached the Gorillas, and spent a lot of time there. Saw two gorilla moms with little infants riding on their backs :) Then down to the bonobos, and then Chloe called (we’d invited them to come and meet us) and we headed back to the beginning of the monkey trail to meet them. Meanwhile they headed down a different trail to the gorillas to meet us :) But we finally met up, and walked all the way back through the monkeys, taking the lower trail this time and encountering lots of interesting wild pigs on the forest floor. Then we popped back to visit the kkomodo dragon again, then took the Sky Buckets over to the polar bears. We watched them for ages. One was rolling around, and the other was chewing on carrots. Arctic carrots, I guess.

Then we went down the hill and past the raptors to the pandas, and watched the 15-month-old cub cavorting with his mom. Because the pandas are so rare and secial, they have a zookeeper sitting near them all the time. She fills the crowd in on their personalities, histories, behaviour and other interesting facts. Neat.

And then we headed home at about 3 to try to beat the rush-hour traffic. It was slow for a while but wasn’t all THAT bad.

So tired now, so tired. But it was worth it! We had a perfect day :) And I have a tub of Trader Joe’s Pfeffernuesse here that needs my attention.

Whoa, I just noticed that our Zoo has little guided-tour podcasts for some of their exhibits! Each episode tells about one of the animals or plants. Check out this link to the podcast for Monkey Trails! http://www.sandiegozoo.org/podcast/monkey_trails/monkey_trails.xml

You can paste that link into your podcatcher and learn about our Flamingo Lagoon, Mandrills, Wolf’s Guenons, Wild Pigs, Bog Garden, and more! So cool. We’ll load some guided tours into our ipods for our next visit! Here’s their main podcast page: http://www.sandiegozoo.org/podcast/

It’s hot, 89 degrees Fahrenheit in Oceanside right now.  And dry, too. Bah.  Where’s winter?

Got up, fixed oatmeal with raisins for everyone, took Dan to his eye appointment, came home and got our voting stuff, went to the polls.  I made them give me an actual fill-in-the-bubble paper ballot, but Dan says the Diebold electronic thingy was better than last year (well I mean the way he described it sounded better than the machine I used last year, which was wretched). It printed out a paper slip showing his votes. The machine kept the slip, but at least he got to see that it was recording his vote correctly.
Came home, fetched Henry (he’s recovering from a sore throat so we stayed home from Karate this morning) and went grocery shopping.  I wish I could say I “did the marketing”  or that I “went to the market”  but I was raised saying “grocery shopping” and it’d be weird to change.  One of the guests on Loveline the other night was talking about “going to the market” and it just sounds so nice and old-fashioned.

Anyway, did the shopping, got the mail (new Macworld, yay, and the car insurance bill, boo), came home.  Henry hauled the groceries in and I put them away, and then we did  little bit of subtraction together and started writing out a big multiplication chart.  Then I made lunches for people, then I read for a little bit, then I drove out to pick up a package for Dan that had been delivered to his work.  It was nice to get out by myself for a bit.

Then home, more house chores, email etc.  Then piano student, who seemed actually to have practiced last week! Yay!

It’s hot.  I really need to vacuum the whole house but it’s too hot, so I’ll do it later when the sun goes down.

Chloe invited me to go to a band rehearsal on Thursday so I’m all excited about that!  I hope I don’t get Henry’s sore throat before then.

Last night as I was getting ready for bed Dan said he had found the most awesome website ever. I hurried to see, thinking he’d found some hilarious video or something. What he showed me was http://kiva.org. Although it is not hilarious, it is truly amazing.

From their “about” page:

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

But this is a very dry description and doesn’t convey the happy feeling of working with Kiva. When you go to their site and click the “Lend” button, you’ll be taken to a list of entrepreneurs in developing countries who need a small (and I mean small) loan to help improve their businesses. For instance, a fellow in Mexico might need $500 to improve his grocery store. You can sort through the businesses to select a certain kind of business, or a certain country, or whatever. You’ll see a photo of the business-person, and a description of his or her plans for the loan. You’ll see how much money has been donated toward the goal, and how much is still lacking. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see the names and locations of people who’ve helped with that loan.

Click the “Lend” button and you can pick an amount to lend (as small as $25) through PayPal. PayPal does NOT take a cut! This is the first non-profit to get this special treatment from PayPal.

You’ll create an account with Kiva, and you’ll have a portfolio showing what you’ve lent, when it will be paid back, etc. You’ll also have a Lender Page, like ours, that can be viewed by other Kiva participants. If you click Carolyne‘s name at the bottom of our page there, you can see that we were the first to lend to her business last night. By morning, the entire amount of her loan had been raised! As we were browsing around on the site last night, we kept an eye on her page and it was so exciting to see other lenders joining us to help her!

I think one of the most important aspects of Kiva is that it’s so much fun. Dan and I stayed up WAY too late last night poking around on the site, choosing businesses to lend to, clicking the profiles of other lenders. That’s how we found our second lendee (is that a word?). We clicked on the profile of “Jim“, the second lender to Carolyne. We saw that he’d lent to Peter, and that that loan was not yet fully funded, so we lent to Peter too. There’s a nice sense of community. Also instant gratification — the amount you lend is reflected immediately. Also the pleasure of being able to see a photo of the person you’re helping — a real live person, not some impersonal faceless charity — and to feel that your small donation can really make a huge difference!

The site is a little bit slow right now. Frontline did a story on Kiva a few days ago, and the resulting rush of lenders took their servers down :) They’re still working on improvements to handle the increased load. Here’s a link to the Frontline page, http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/uganda601/video_index.html

And an easy guide to getting started with Kiva: http://kiva.org/app.php?page=about&action=how

(Or just look in my sidebar for the Kiva banner and click the photo!)

More info: Wikipedia: Kiva

Dan went out to his friend’s house tonight to do helicopter stuff, and I stayed home and worked on LibriVox stuff.  We just finished the “Princess of Mars” podcast so I had to set up a new book in the xml file.  I decided to send out “The Importance of Being Earnest” next week and then a delightful-looking book called “Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town” by Stephen Leacock.  Somehow I missed out on recording any of it, but I’m really looking forward to hearing it!

Dan brought home Chinese food for dinner so I didn’t have to cook.  We’ve been watching the money lately so we haven’t been eating out at all, so it was a nice treat.  Except I should have followed Dan’s advice and ordered broccoli beef instead of veggie lo mein.  My veggie lo mein was just sort of dryish naked noodles, with one hunk of broccoli in it.  Not much “veggie” involved.  Sigh.  Not very good, and I was really in the mood for a big pile of yummy Chinese vegetables. Oh well, at least it was food that someone brought to me and that’s always nice :)

While we ate we watched last Tuesday’s episode of House, and then Friday’s The Soup, which was a fantastic episode.  We were cracking up!  Highlights were Tyra Banks screaming “PANTY PARTY!!!” and a super-psycho-freakout from a tele-novella.  Lol.

There’s an election coming up on Tuesday. I just spent a long time doing online research on the candidates and issues. I found http://www.smartvoter.org/ and http://www.igs.berkeley.edu/library/ to be very helpful resources, particularly for the various Propositions. Propositions make my head hurt, but I think I was able to come to a good decision on most of them. Being able to see which organizations and individuals contributed to some of the campaigns made it quite easy — for instance, Prop 86, a tax on cigarettes to fund healthcare programs, was supported by the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and the American Cancer Association, and opposed by Philip Morris and The Retail Tobacco Dealers of America. Tough call, eh? Ha. But most of the time it’s difficult to decide how to vote. I don’t want to make things WORSE. Often, as in the race for Senator, I feel I just need to choose the lesser of two evils. As much as I disagree with Dianne Feinstein, I think I’d better vote for her in order to prevent Mountjoy from coming to power. Bah. What a system. I feel pretty good about Phil Angelides for Governor, though.

One of our butterflies hatched out a few days ago.  When he started crawling around his box and flapping, we decided it was time to let him go.  Henry took him outdoors and he flew away!  Beautiful. The other butterfly is a “special needs” butterfly.  Her wings developed oddly.  They’re sort of rolled to one side and funny-looking, and she can’t fly.  We took her out to let her go and she just fluttered down to the ground.  We decided she doesn’t have a ghost of a chance in the wild and that we’d better keep her in her box, so yesterday Henry and I bought her some nice cantalope to live on, so she can have a nice indoors life anyway.

The time change is still messing me up, so last night I stayed up late and took 2mg Lunesta in an attempt to get back on schedule with the rest of the world.  It worked!  I slept until 8:30 or so and I don’t feel that time-change disorientation anymore.

Today I helped Henry practice writing numbers and we did some math, and then we played WoW for an hour or two.  We took Zinny and Animala to Tanaris to slay ogres. Fun :)  Then I took him to his dad’s house and stopped at the grocery store for molasses and sour cream and things.

Hey, Rockola is going to perform the entire Rubber Soul album (plus more Beatles) on November 25th, at the beautifully restored Steven and Mary Birch Theater in North Park!  If you’re a Beatles fan you MUST buy tickets.  They always put on an amazing show, and the Revolver show a few months ago sold out!  So buy tickets early!

I made Stuffed Peppers last night for dinner, and Dan loved them.  I kinda made up the recipe, so I’d better write it down:

 Stuffed Peppers

• 1 Package (a pound?) fresh ground turkey
• 2 cups cooked brown rice
• An onion, chopped
• 2 stalks of celery, chopped
• two or three tomatoes, chopped
• 1 tablespoon paprika
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1/2 tsp dijon mustard
• 4 to 6 red bell peppers, depending on size

Heat a little oil in a nice big pan.  Cook the onion and celery until it starts to soften, then add the turkey.  Cook until the turkey is done, then add the rice, seasonings, and tomatoes and cook everything a little while longer.  Cut your peppers in half lengthwise, scrape out the seedy parts, and cram them full of the mixture.  Bake in a tightly-covered baking dish for 40 minutes at 375 degrees.  Serve with sour cream or plain yogurt.  Yum!

Yesterday morning Mom was telling me about the concert she heard on Friday — The Australian Pink Floyd. She raved and raved about how good they were — which was relatively hilarious to hear from a woman who didn’t think Rock and/or Roll was music until a few months ago, when she suddenly discovered that some of it is — and wanted to recommend them to Kirsten, so I googled them to see if they were playing up in SF. They’re not — but it turned out they were going to do a show at The Grove in Anaheim that night! Dan and I emailed back and forth about it, and I told him I really wanted to go and that Henry would be trick-or-treating with his dad and then spending the night, leaving us free to go out, so he bought tickets! A spur-of-the-moment decision that didn’t actually kill me!

I took Henry to the Bayshore Halloween party, I mean “Harvest Festival” lol, in the afternoon, which was nice. Lots of cute costumes and friendly people and fun and games.

I tried to rest when we got home but I was too excited about the concert! Dan got home and we ate dinner and then left for Anaheim, which is about 60 miles away. Got to The Grove a little after 7, wandered around and found our seats and waited. They were playing this bizarre C&W Pink Floyd cover band over the sound system.

The show was AMAZING. The band was superb, strong and powerful and note-perfect. I don’t even know how to describe it. They played all of Dark Side of the Moon and everything was perfect. They used samples for some of the sound effects but they did the creepy talking and laughing themselves. The woman who sang Great Gig in the Sky was marvelous, unbelievable. The bass player (Ian), who did a lot of the singing, sounded exactly like Gilmore AND exactly like Waters, when necessary. I don’t know how he did it. There were lights and lasers and fog, and projections on a huge circular screen behind the band.

After Dark Side they took a short break, and then came back and filled up the 3-hour show with more and more and more Floyd. Um, let’s see, they played Shine On You Crazy Diamond (with a huge photo of Syd on the projector at the end), a couple of songs from The Division Bell, one from Final Cut, a few from The Wall, Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, Fat Old Sun, Sheep — Oh My God this was awesome, you know the sustained notes at the end of each phrase that sort of become electronic? (“wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dreaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmmmmmm…”) Well I don’t know how they did it but they did it perfectly.

We’re hoping they’ll come to San Diego again next year so we can take Henry!

Sometimes, on the LibriVox forum,  we get posts like this:

Hello from kenneth in the uk . may i just say thank to all who put the books on the site . and a very big thank you to Miss Joy Chan. best wishs and thank you all. i thought the days of me reading were over. But thanks to this site i have found books again …… kenneth ( the old man )

Now doesn’t that just warm your heart? Kind words like that make all the work and effort more than worthwhile.

Our Searchable Catalog System is coming along nicely.  Volunteer “Data Entry Drones” (as Catharine calls them :) have been entering all our completed projects into The System, and there are nearly 400 total, counting the in-progress projects.  Unbelievable.  Go play with it and let me know if anything breaks:

http://librivox.org/newcatalog/visitor.php