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Dan read a funny word in some German spam today. He didn’t know exactly what it meant but he asked me and I told him it means what it sounds like, heheh. It’s a truly hilarious word. We’ve been saying it to each other all night. I need to immortalize it, here, so I don’t forget, but I’ll disguise it a bit to avoid offense to those who speak German, and to prevent innocent children from running about, shouting it: “T….nspr.tz.”! Lol.

Bah. Other than that, I dealt with various forms of tech support all day; giving it, yet (mostly) not receiving it. Tired. TV time. I think Sabrina (the old one, thank you very much, Audrey Hepburn, William Powell, and the unlikely romantic lead, Humphrey Bogart) is in the TiVo.

Karate (helping the little kids) in the morning. When we got home I recorded two sections of the poetry book and Henry kept me company and drew his comic. We found a great book at the library, Superhero Explosion, which has easy step-by-step lessons on how to draw Superheros! Well, you can imagine how inspirational that is for Henry :)

He felt crummy, suddenly, for a while so we planned to skip his classes today, but then an hour later he perked up again so we got there in time for the last half of Mythology and all of Musical Theater. The kids were assigned roles for their production of High School Musical (which we still haven’t seen yet but the music is truly dreadful). Henry plays the leader of the skateboard group :)

Helped Dan a bit with music stuff tonight. Nice to know I can still easily identify the degrees of a scale, even when half-asleep. Thanks, David Chase and Billy Hawkins, for pounding solfege into my head so thoroughly.

Tired tired tired. Not enough sleep and I think maybe I’m getting sick. We’ll see. It was a good day anyway. First to the dentist to get some help cranking Henry’s appliances, then home. Did chores and called the garbage company to ask for a new huge wheelie trashcan (we rent it from them for $18/year. Ours disappeared recently). Was astonished that the customer service woman I spoke to actually… SERVED me! She was nice! She was polite! She was helpful! They’re going to replace our wheelie can at no charge — she said, “It’s not your fault it was stolen!” What a concept.

Then played WoW with Henry — four trips to the Battlegrounds. I think I’m getting the hang of the Battlegrounds. Henry coaches me and encourages me :) Warsong Gulch was most fun, though we lost two out of three times. Arathi basin was just frustrating because every time our team took a base they all ran off to take another, instead of sensibly assigning some players to GUARD the newly-taken base against the other team. Henry and I tried to guard but the Horde was too much for just the two of us. The Battleground system is much better than it used to be, now that the Battlegrounds are cross-server. We never had to wait even a full minute to be let in.

Then after we played a while I glanced at the clock and realized we had to leave in ten minutes for the first meeting of the new homeschoolers’ math/science club that the amazing Lyndy is running. Threw some lunch in the backpack, grabbed my book and knitting and dashed off. Got there nice and early. This first meeting was a science meeting, and the boys (they’re all boys!) got to analyze and describe pastries and play with different kinds of goop. Henry loved every minute of it! He enjoyed playing with Lyndy’s son, Jason, after the meeting while Lyndy packed up and I read. Then we had to race home for my piano students. Got here just in the nick of time — we’ll leave the park earlier next week to avoid stress.

Then it was off to karate. I called Dan and asked if he could pick up H after karate and he said he would, yay, so I came home to rest and start dinner. And I managed to record a couple of tiny sections of the poetry book too. Spinach salad and quesadillas with sliced avocado and sour cream for dinner, quick and easy.

Then bedtime story for Henry (the second half of the rather long chapter of The Dark is Rising that we started last night). While i read he worked on the comic that he’s been drawing. Now I think I’ll read my book (another by Joanna Trollope!) for a few minutes before I fall asleep.

It’s Sunday night now. I’m really tired, but I had a great weekend! Henry stayed with us all weekend, which was really nice. Yesterday we played quite a bit of WoW together, questing in Ferelas, and cleaned up the back yard too. I took a dustpan and scooped up all of Sally’s dog’s disgusting cow-bones. UGH. And we swept up and threw away trash and all kinds of junk. It was nice to have the energy to do that! And I finished “Second Honeymoon”. So good, so good. Last night I made chicken parmesan for dinner, which both guys love like crazy. Here’s how:

Put one slice of dry bread in the blender and make it into crumbs. You can do this with fresh bread if you didn’t plan ahead. Mix the crumbs with a few spoonfuls of parmesan cheese, some salt and pepper and whatever good herbs you have around. I usually throw in some basil and oregano. Mince a couple of cloves of garlic and mix with some olive oil in a different bowl. Dip chicken breasts in the olive oil/garlic and then coat with the crumbs/cheese mixture. Put the chicken in a baking pan and dump the leftover crumb mixture on top. Lay some slices of cheese on top — munster is nice — or a couple handfuls of grated mozerella. Or both. Dump a jar of good spaghetti sauce on top. Bake at, um, 375 for about 45 minutes. Make sure the chicken is done before you serve it. Cook some pasta (I like Trader Joe’s spinach & chive fettucini) and serve the chicken and sauce on top. Even Henry asks for seconds!

Today I got lots of librivox work done and even some recording. Hugh pointed us to http://dailylit.com and while I was poking around there I discovered a book called “Poems Every Child Should Know” and signed up to have it delivered into my inbox in tiny sections each day (which is what dailylit does). Then I realized that those ready-made tiny sections would be ever so convenient for recording. So I recorded a few of the sections, enjoyed them ever so much, and decided to read the whole book as a solo project. Got five sections done already (they’re only 5-6 minutes long). Fae is proof-listening for me. (You can get a sneak preview here) And I also recorded chapter 4 of Wives and Daughters while Henry and Dan were out getting the car washed. They took Henry’s handwriting book along and Dan helped him with it.
Henry and I dashed to the library when they opened this afternoon at 1 and I found another book by Susan Phillips and another by Joanna Trollope. I was happy to see about 6 Trollope books on the shelf but I only took one, gotta space them out so I don’t run out too soon.

Now Dan and I are on the couch watching The Odd Couple (movie, not sitcom). But it’s 9 already so we’ll probably go to bed soon. Yawn.

Henry and I played World of Warcraft in the morning, as soon as chores were done. We took Animala and Zinny to Feralas. Did the Lord Shalzaru quest and the Zapped Giants, and part of the Water Elemental Core one. Lots of fun, Henry’s a great teammate.

We went out to run a couple of errands, including Barnes and Noble for Henry to spend some of his birthday money on the next two Dragon Quest books (both together in one hardbound edition). He a good shopper — called ahead of time to ask them to set the book aside.

Whyen we got home he made himself a “reading shrine” on the side of the hill and sat on a towel and read for hours, while I did two recordings — section 8 of This Side of Paradise, and chapter 3 of Wives and Daughters. The Fitzgerald chapter was disappointingly dull, compared with the other two sections of that book I recorded already, but W&D was lovely.

Oh, also we tried out the demo at http://aleks.com/ , which Henry actually enjoyed. He took the placement test and was so proud of his personalized pie-chart that we asked Dan print it out in color at work. And I wrote some letters nice and large on the whiteboard for him to trace over. I think maybe if we work in very large scale, it’ll be easier for him to form nice letters.

Henry’s dad dropped him off after his early-morning dental appointment so Henry and Sally could go bicycling together. They ran off to Guajome Park for an adventure, and I recorded the chorus of The Furies. Eventually, a few other women will read the Chorus too, and then a clever editor will overdub us so we sound like a proper Greek chorus. Neato! Henry went back to his dad’s house in the afternoon, and we played WoW together. Took our Tauren Hunters to Silverpine.

I had a bowl of mushy apples hanging around, so I baked an Apple Cake for dinner, and it turned out great. I got the recipe from allrecipes.com, Amazing Apple Cake, but here it is again:

• 1 1/4 cups white sugar
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 cup chopped walnuts
• 5 1/2 cups chopped apples

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C).
2. In a medium bowl, stir together the sugar, flour, cinnamon, and baking soda. Add the eggs, oil and vanilla, mix well. Add the nuts and apple, mix until all of the apples are evenly coated. Pour into a 9×9 inch pan.
3. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes in the preheated oven. Serve warm or cool.

I baked mine at 300 degrees for about 65 minutes, because I used a glass pan. Also I skipped the nuts. Nuts are yuck. The batter is shockingly dry, so dry it doesn’t seem like you’ll be able to incorporate the apples, but just work at it a bit. The finished cake is moist and yummy! We’ve already eaten half of it.

Tonight Dan and I watched last night’s South Park episode, which featured the boys playing World of Warcraft and eventually defeating an in-game bully. They used screenshots of real WoW characters and locations. It was hilarious, the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long long time. Hearing Cartman’s and Kyle’s and Stan’s and Kenny’s voices coming out of WoW characters was marvelous. Good job, Matt and Trey! Oh there was a mention on boingboing, here.

Omg here you can watch it online, until it gets yanked down: http://www.younewb.com/index.php/2006/10/05/full-video-of-new-wow-south-park-episode/

So good, so good.

I’m sitting in Dan’s Fortress of Solitude right now, editing Book 20 of The Odyssey, which I recorded today, while he plays his new Tauren Druid in WoW. Busy day, let’s see… Henry and I went out first thing, bought a toothbrush for Dan, some flour, and TP at Stater Brothers. Then we went to the library to pick up the Henry’s book, which was sent from the other branch (one of the Deltora books that he loves so much), then to the mailbox place to pick up a fistful of bills and our new laser printer toner cartridge. Then to Trader Joe’s for many many groceries. Then home, and Henry hauled everything up the stairs for me and I put it all away and started some mushroom/barley soup in the crockpit. (Which turned out kind of gluey. Too much barley.)

Um, then what… Oh yeah I installed the new toner cartridge, we did some general housework together, and then I recorded Book 20 of The Odyssey and then we zipped off to Park Day out on the far side of Vista. Henry played and rode his bike and made balloon animals, and I read my book, Match Me If You Can, and played a bit of Harvest Moon. I took a plateful of leftover homemade burritos from last night’s dinner in case we got hungry, which we did.

Zipped home again, Henry had a snack and a drink and a shower, then off to karate where I finished my book (wonderfully entertaining!) and played a bit more Harvest Moon. Bought the Kitchen and planted a bunch of summer crops.

Henry’s dad picked him up from karate to spend the night, and I came home. Dan and I ate gluey soup and french bread with herbed cheese. Went downstairs to watch the episode of House that we wrongly assumed had been recorded on the TiVo last night. Guess stupid baseball preempted him. So we watched a Venture Brothers episode instead, and a VH1 interview with Neil Peart. And now here we are doing computery things together before bed. A very nice day. Soon I will eat a nice bowl of yogurt. A bowl of plain yogurt with granola or flax seed meal mixed in, eaten right before bed, seems to help me sleep.

Happy birthday Kathy dear :) I hope you have a lovely day!

Hey, that “lasagna” planting bed sounds easy and interesting!

I didn’t enjoy The Book of Three very much, so I decided that our next bedtime book had to be something I’d love.  Not taking any chances.  It’s too grim to end the day reading something I’m not fond of. It occurred to me that, since Henry just turned eleven, and he loves dark fantasy stories, and he’s interested in Merlin and King Arthur and ancient British mythology, that The Dark is Rising series would be perfect.  So tonight we started book 2 (The Dark is Rising), my favorite.  I’ve read it many times to myself (at a guess, I’d say at least ten times, but probably more).   Reading the first chapter aloud made me realize just how awesome it is (reading aloud makes me slow down and savour the story, and notice all the little details that I might miss when reading to myself).  It was a 35-minute chapter (I’m recording it so H can listen all over again later on his iPod) but it flew past and I was sorry to reach the end.  The writing is so rich, the atmosphere so vivid.  The dialogue and characters in The Book of Three were flat; but in The Dark is Rising they are incredibly realistic and believable. I can hardly wait to read the next chapter to Henry tomorrow!

Rockola had an outdoor, all-ages show in a park today. I picked up H from his dad’s house and we headed down to see them. It was nice and gray and cloudy when we got there but it got progressively sunnier and hotter through the show, and I had to take off my longsleeve shirt so I got a bit of a burn on my shoulders. And my eyes feel burned even though I wore my hat and sunglasses the whole time. Argh. But the show was great, as usual!

Finished cataloging Emma last night! It’s a wonderful recording. Go here to download it:

http://librivox.org/emma-by-jane-austen-solo/

I know I’ve been talking a lot about this recording. It’s not that it’s better than any of our other books, but Emma is very special to me, and in my opinion the reader, Sherry, did a particularly fine job. And it’s an 18-hour recording!  Also the project has been hanging over my head since March, so getting it cataloged, finally, seems like a huge accomplishment.

Bah my eyes are really bothering me and my nose hurts too. Hope we have some Solarcaine. Stupid sun. And stupid me for not taking sunscreen. Not that that would help my eyes any, though. And I hate hate hate sunscreen. I hate the way it smells, I hate the way it makes my skin feel dirty. So that’s why I mostly stay indoors all summer. I thought an afternoon show on a cloudy October day would be all right… sigh.

If you’re a Mac user, you’ve got to try Jumpcut.

Jumpcut is an application that provides “clipboard buffering” — that is, access to text that you’ve cut or copied, even if you’ve subsequently cut or copied something else. The goal of Jumpcut’s interface is to provide quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard’s history.

It’s free and extremely handy! It creates a little scissors icon up in the menubar. When you copy some text, it stores the copied text somewhere. The number of copies that it’ll store is configurable — I think the default is 40 or something. When you want to paste some copied text, click the little scissors and you get a drop down collection of all the stored copies, and you just choose the one you want. Soooo handy!

I added Jumpcut to my login items. It’s easy to do this:

Hit the blue apple in the upper left corner of your screen and choose System Preferences

Choose “accounts”

Choose your account and then hit the “login items” tab. Click the little Plus sign and find Jumpcut in your applications directory.

Presto!

Woke up at 6:20 this morning which was too late to take my getting-back-to-sleep Lunesta (I decided it was stupid to take it at night, since I rarely have any trouble falling asleep — it’s staying asleep that’s the problem.  So if I wake up before 5:30am I take one then), so I listened to Loveline for half an hour and then got up.  Uploaded photos from Aperture to my gallery, then did a couple of blog posts about socks. You can find them in the handmade section if you care about socks.

I did not have to DRIVE anywhere today, yay!

Henry tried out a couple of recipes from his new cookbook after we sat and read through it together.  He made a fruit-and-yogurt smoothie for breakfast and loved it. (Perfect — I like to make fruit salad with yogurt most mornings, and he won’t eat it.  So now he can throw it all in the blender and drink it happily, heehee!)
And then he decided to try to bake bread!  There’s a recipe for simple white bread near the back of the book, and he found all the ingredients and did almost all of the work himself.  I sat at the table, ready to lend a hand if needed.

While the bread dough was rising, I recorded a chapter of some book about Pirates.  As an experiment, I tried hooking my mic and USB interface to my macbook instead of my iMac, and the mysterious clicks went away!  So it’s not an audio equipment problem after all.  Dan says he’s pretty sure he can make my iMac stop clicking, but even if he can’t I can always just record to the laptop. (in case you’re curious, yes, I tried rebooting, defragging, and reinstalling drivers on my iMac)
Tired.  And Dan’s home yay!!!

Dropped Henry at his classes, came home and did Actual Work for Librivox. We’ve got Howard Pyle’s Adventures of Robin Hood in the works. It was started by a fellow who disappeared before it was finished and cataloged, taking the completed files with him. Since I’m the top of the chain-of-command for that project (the “MC” or Meta-Coordinator) I took on the unpleasant job of tracking down the completed files and chasing down readers who had claimed chapters but hadn’t yet submitted them. The project has been stagnating, about 3/4 completed, for months. So today I sent emails and PMs around to all the readers with outstanding chapters, to see where we stand and try to ascertain whether I should parcel out any abandoned chapters to other, more eager readers. I’ve already heard back from most of the readers, which is encouraging! I’m sure we’ll get it completed and cataloged within the month.

We’ve also had a nearly-complete solo version of Emma sitting around waiting to be completed since May. The wonderful soloist seems to have gotten too busy with Real Life to finish the few little edits and things that needed to be done before the book can be cataloged, so I took it upon myself to re-read the two too-quiet chapters and find an editor willing to re-edit the few little glitches here and there. The lovely and talented Starlite volunteered to help with the edits, and I already recorded those two chapters, so I feel confident we’ll get this wonderful nearly-solo Emma cataloged Real Soon Now! Maybe even next week. I’ll post a link when it’s up — Sherry did a fantastic job reading and any Jane fan will enjoy it.

Raced over to the dojo at 4 to exchange Henry’s too-large new Gi for a size smaller, raced home and got it washed, dried, and hemmed in an hour and 15 minutes, in time for his evening class. Amazing. We listened to Tom Lehrer all day. Lol.

I made Chicken Parmesan for dinner and both Henry and Dan loved it! It’s rare for BOTH of them to like any given dinner ;-)

Today is Henry’s birthday, yay! He spent the night at his dad’s house last night but will be home soon, and we’ll have a fun day together — no piano students today, no activities planned, so we can do whatever we please.

On a totally unrelated note, the amazing Gord Mackenzie showed us a neat google trick that lets you find LibriVox recordings by your favorite reader. Paste this into google:

“Kara Shallenberg” “read by” -“previous topic” site:librivox.org

Replace my name with any oher reader’s catalog name (not forum name nickname, of course). Neat!

Today was very educational, heheh. First we went to the dojo so Henry could help teach the little kids. Then we zoomed out to San Marcos to the Palomar College Planetarium for a fabulous homeschooler field trip! It was so much fun! Then over to our charter school for Henry’s Mythology class and Musical Theater class. He took his Aboriginal Boomerang to show the mythology class. I knitted my green socks (photos soon I swear) and played some Harvest Moon. My plan is to build a Mushroom Shed or a Bird Shed next, when I have enough lumber or rocks saved up. I unlocked the blackjack-dealing sprite but poker is a lot easier to win big at. Then we came home, and I taught a piano student. Then Henry’s dad picked him up and Dan and I went out to do a little grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s. It was really nice having Dan along for company, and he carried all the heavy grocery bags for me, even though he’s a bit under the weather! Bought a cherry pie for Henry’s birthday dinner tomorrow.
Yawn. Tired. Salad and quesadillas for dinner, with homemade salsa. House is on tonight!

I got enough sleep last night!  Woohoo!  After getting only 4 1/2 or 5 hours the night before, and staying out relatively late at Chloe’s house, I was so tired that I managed to sleep soundly from midnight to 8:30am, and then doze on and off until 9:45am.  Lovely.  If only I could get 9 or 10 hours every night.

Earlier today I recorded/edited/tagged/uploaded chapter 5 of The Getting of Wisdom, and now I’ve just recorded Adventure 2 of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — The Red-Headed League.  It was 1 hour and 6 minutes long unedited, but I’ve just trimmed out all the goofs and it’s down to 59 minutes.  It’s 11pm now, though, so I’ll leave the proof-listening until tomorrow.

Also wrapped a pile of presents for an upcoming 11th birthday!

Woke up around 4am, despite having taken 2mg Lunesta last night in the never-ending Quest for Enough Sleep. Lay in bed and listened to an entire episode of Loveline (Seth Green was the guest), realized I just wasn’t going to get back to sleep, and gave up trying. Time crept slowly past and it was eventually time to make breakfast (my favorite, well, the only breakfast that ever seems tempting: fresh fruit salad — banana, nectarine, strawberries — with plain yoghurt and granola mixed all together).

Then Henry’s dad picked him up, then I went with Dan to the dentist. Worked on my new green socks; ripped out my 3rd attempt (a twist-stitch pattern that I decided I didn’t like) and started a cable pattern instead. After dentist we ran a couple of errands, came back for lunch, which was leftover homemade burritos from last night. I learned how to make them from Hugh.

Then we headed down to Chloe’s house for a nice long visit! Dan fixed broken things and I installed Firefox on Chloe’s computer so she can see the Quicktags in her WordPress Write-a-Post, and we watched hilarious cat videos, ate pizza, talked, etc. Also watched part of Team America which was obscene and very very funny, though it got late and we didn’t quite get to the end. We love visiting them soooo much. Wish we could get together more often.

I decided, instead of starting a new solo project right away, to help with some of LibriVox’s collaborative projects.  Since I’m a huge fan of The Great Gatsby (which was, alas, published just a bit too recently to rise into the public domain) I decided to help with our production of This Side of Paradise, which I’ve never read.  The Book Coordinator has divided the rather long chapters into nicely-sized sections.  I read a half-hour chunk yesterday, and a 40-minute chunk today.  Though I’ve only dipped into the beginning in a couple of places, I’m really enjoying it, and have signed up for yet another section.  This afternoon, as I was proof-listening my second recording (which described Amory’s life at college, the car-wreck in which one of his friends died, and his first kiss with Isabelle), Henry came downstairs to work on a new cardboard sword and shield (Zelda-style) so I unplugged my headphones and let Fitzgerald pour into his brain.  He said he really liked it, and asked if I’d recorded any more chapters, so afterward I played the first section that I’d recorded.  Wonderful.

A few months ago I installed a nifty Firefox extension called Google Browser Sync on all my computers. The premise is wonderful — the extension (theoretically) syncs passwords, cookies, history, and bookmarks between browsers on different machines. And most of the time, it works. However, on all three of my machines (an iBook, an iMac, and a Macbook Pro — all running the latest Firefox and the latest version of OS X) Google Browser Sync occasionally gets completely stuck and just sits there, claiming to be syncing but in reality permanently frozen. Or, sometimes it’ll claim that my upload is too large and that I should disable some components. Well, that’s fine, so I disable history and bookmarks and cookies, thinking that not having to remember my passwords is good enough. Nope, still it sticks and freezes, using up 70-90% CPU while it’s sitting there spinning. I solved this problem in difficult and round-about ways several times (deleting my Firefox profile, then copying over bits of it a little at a time worked once, I think) but it’s just broken AGAIN on my iMac and I’m fed up.

So long, Google Browser Sync. Become more stable and I’ll gladly reinstall you.

UPDATE!!
I found a bookmark syncing extension that actually WORKS:
Foxmarks

YAY!

After hearing a lot of good things about Murderous Maths, I ordered a copy from Amazon UK (not available in the US for some reason). It arrived yesterday, and Henry and I read several chapters this morning. It’s just as good as all the reviewers say it is! Stories and neat facts about math, told with humor, are much more fun for Henry than boring old worksheets. (Which do have their place, but having some fun with Math is great!) Highly recommended!!!

Here’s the official Murderous Maths site: http://www.murderousmaths.co.uk/

Looks as if the author has lots and lots of other books for us to look forward to!

Update! Murderous Maths books ARE available in the US! http://www.fun-books.com/books/murderous_maths.htm