kayray.org

I changed the link colors. Dark green for visited links and orange for unvisited, same as the mouseover color. And I added a bunch of links on the side, and my pretty chicklets.

Ok, maybe it’s time to stop fiddling with the layout. Good enough. So here’s some actual blogging.

I finished reading Dragonsinger to Henry a few days ago. He loved it as much as, if not more than, Dragonsong! I checked out Dragondrums for him to read to himself (I’m not crazy about that one. Piemur is not as appealing to me as Menolly is.) and we started By The Great Horn Spoon for bedtime a few days ago. (Note: I can’t decide which cover art is the worst on those four books. Lord.) I loved this book and read it several times when I was a child, and I was delighted to find that it’s still just as enjoyable! And the chapters are just the right length for a bedtime story. We read chapter five tonight.

I was very tired again today and I promised Dan I’d try not to work too hard. So I went out early for groceries and to mail the Nautiloid to Wastrel. Henry carried everything in for me (including all the water I bought yesterday) and, after I put everything away, I settled in on the couch to do nothing. I watched Henry play The Hobbit and worked on knitty’s petit chou (more about that tomorrow, probably), which, now that I’ve charted it out and started over for the third time, has stopped being frustrating and started being extremely fun!

Hey I haven’t tried linking a picture yet. Here’s the Nautiloid:

I found a template that looked pretty good. The really plain one, obviously. I just changed the link colors from a lavender and blue scheme to the same green and blue as my former blog. And I changed the font from serif to sans-serif. (Kept the orange mouseovers, I kinda like them!) And I got rid of most of the forced uppercase. And now it’s looking pretty good! Oh, it was really really white so I just changed the background to a pale green. Let me know if it’s hard to see.

I must say… it is nice to be able to post without ssh’ing into the server. Although I want to hit esc : wq when I’m done writing.

I was poking around on the internets today and discovered that google’s blogger will let you publish a blog in your own webspace. So I thought I’d just try it out. I’ve been fiddling with it for a couple of hours and this is the result. I’m not happy with any of the templates but this one is fairly inoffensive, for now, and I can create a better one if I decide to stick with blogger.

Reasons to switch to an actual blogging system:

• Comments (or is that a drawback?)
• xml feed (has been requested by some of my readers)
• web-based posting
• email posting
• searchable
• something new to try

Reasons to stick with the old-fashioned, hand-coded-in-vi kayray.org:

• everything is entirely under my control
• all subpages match (can I do that with blogger? Maybe if I create a separate blog for each subpage, i.e. audiobooks…)
• I’m the only blogger on the planet who doesn’t use a System. kayray.org = special

Mmkay well I’m hungry. More later maybe.

July 2006

31 — Dan had Lasik eye surgery this morning, down in La Jolla. We left the house around 8:30am and arrive a bit after 10:30am. It’s a 30-mile drive. That’s right, it took 2 hours to drive 30 miles. When do you suppose the developers will stop building new communities? Anyway… his surgery wenrt fine (you can read about it on his blog, IT Obsession. Then we drove over the Thornton Hospital for my 6-month pulmonary check-up. We got there a little bit early and hung out in the car, Dan just resting with his eyes closed, and then I went in and got examined. They say I’m doing ok. The 6-minute walk seemed more tiring than usual but my doctor didn’t seem concerned about it, so that’s good I guess. In addition to the Tracleer that I take twice a day, he wants me to try Viagra (scroll down to “other uses” heheh) three times a day to see if that will reduce the arterial pressure and *maybe* someday make it possible for them to close the hole in my heart. Stopped by the pharmacy to get my prescription filled and Howard the Dear Pharmacist said my insurance wouldn’t cover Viagra, which at $10/pill, 3x/day comes to quite a total. But he’s going to contact my doctor and see if he can convince my ins. people to cover it. I’m sure they will.

Now we’re finally finally home. What a long day. Dan’s asleep and I’ve been catching up on librivox and webstuff, but now I’m hungry. What oh what shall I eat? Oh, last night Annie pointed out that her, my, and librivox’s podcasts were on the iTunes “Featured Podcasts” page! I don’t feel like posting an actual thumbnail here, so a link will have to do: Kara, Annie, and LibriVox are Featured!

30 — While Dan and his friends played music, I worked through an online traffic school, what FUN! But it only took a few hours. Now I just have to take the final exam to a notary and fill it in in front of her. Funny. Bought Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town (used) for Dan to play on the DS, since he prefers handheld games and was dying to play some harvest moon :) Tired, tired, tired, tired, so Dan bought us a frozen pizza from Trader Joe’s and cooked it for us. So nice to have someone bring me dinner!

26 — A discussion of quilting came up on librivox, and I realized that I didn’t have any photos of the quilt I made for Dan. So, I took it out to the lawn and took some photos. And while I was at it I took a picture of the purple cotton Nautiloid I made for Baby Wastrel. (pattern at http://www.knitty.com/issuespring06/PATTnautie.html Isn’t he cute? He has a charming smile. Let’s see, what else… Oh, Dan’s Cool-or-Heat seat pad (which he sleeps on) died last night. I called the company this morning and spoke to a friendly and helpful woman about it. She’s going to send a new one out right away! Apparently there’s a known problem with the pumps, so she’s sending me one that might be fixed (so Dan can have one right away), and then if that one goes bad she’ll send us one from the next batch which will definitely be fixed. Hooray for Cool-Or-Heat!

25 — A bit little cooler today. The house was quiet (Henry’s off rock climbing) so I got a lot of librivox work done. Recorded a chapter of Limberlost and a couple of Our Island Story. In the morning I did errands, took back Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Harvest Moon: Magical Melody, checked for a used copy of HM:MM (no dice), bought groceries, picked up medication, etc. When I picked up Henry he decided to use his own money to buy HM:MM (he loves it as much as I do) so we went back out to Gamestop. Henry had enough for more than half and I made up the difference. Now we can continue farming and fishing and raising livestock! He’s courting Maria, the librarian (good taste, Henry) and I’ve got my sights set on Alex the doctor.

24 — Today was Henry’s much-anticipated first day of Karate Camp (9-3:30, no “camping” involved). Today they had a Newaza seminar in the morning, then bowling and laser tag. After I dropped him off I came home and waited for a fellow to call me for another phone interview about librivox (of course). This guy is going to pitch his article to the NY Times for Librivox’s 1-year anniversary. If they turn it down, he’ll get it published elsewhere. I’ll let you know :) He was very nice and easy to talk to, and I felt more comfortable that I’ve felt in any other interview. His questions seemed more interesting than usual, too, and were a little different from the usual questions. For instance, he asked if my husband was supportive of my librivox work. No one else has ever asked that! And of course the answer was a resounding “YES!” :)

It was hotter than ever today. So hot that even I felt a bit uncomfortable and turned on the AC in the bedroom in the late afternoon and took a little rest.

23 — Hot, hot hot, and humid too. Mostly I like it, as long as I don’t have to be out in the sun, but it makes Dan miserable. It was realy too hot to do much this weekend, but we have a great time just hanging around reading, playing videogames, trying to keep cool. I played Harvest Moon: Magical Melody for hours and hours and hours. It is a superb game. There are always so many fun tasks to work on, and a lot of choices to be made. Should I hoe up some land and plant some onions? If I do that, I’ll be low on stamina so if I want to fish afterward I’d better find some food to eat… Ok, maybe that sounds dull, but trust me, it’s a fun and charming game. I can find fault with nearly anything, but HM:MM is nearly faultless, unlike Harvest Moon: It’s a Wonderful Life, which we also rented but found to be nearly unplayable and no fun at all. HM:MM is more like a descendant of the wonderful Friends of Mineral Town. I do wish I could turn off the music but I have Known Issues with videogame music.

20 — This morning I took the boys over to the Krikorian Theater for the dollar kids’ movie, which happened to be the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Johnny Depp, Tim Burton). It was, most surprisingly, excellent! I was thoroughly entertained. Every facet of the movie was superb — casting, directing, visuals (dark and surreal, as they should be) screenplay (stuck very close to the book, added elemements were non-jarring and actually added depth to the story and characters), and especially the soundtrack. Good job, Hollywood, you made a non-sucky adaptation of a favorite book! Dropped Henry at his dad’s, drove Fargo home to Laguna Niguel, went home for a quick rest and then off to dentist to have four cavities filled. Ugh. He’s a nice good dentist, but still. I amused myself with “Fanny Hill” in my ipod. Dan was at the dentists office at the same time, for a checkup :)

I thought Dan would really enjoy Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I wanted to see it again, so we we went out in the evening to rent it :) I rented Harvest Moon: Magical Melody, too, and we got some take-out dinner because I was feeling ill from all the anaesthetic. So we lazed about and watched Charlie (which was even better the second time, and Dan loved it) and ate. Such a nice evening.

19 — The boys played all morning, I tried to catch up with LibriVox work, the little neighbor girl came over to swim with the boys. OH and I discovered an insanely useful little OS X utility: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net.
GrandPerspective is a small utility application for Mac OS X that graphically shows the disk usage within a file system. It can help you to manage your disk, as you can easily spot which files and folders take up the most space. It uses a so called tree map for visualisation. Each file is shown as a rectangle with an area proportional to the file’s size
I ran it on my iMac and discovered about ten gigs of garbage! TEN GIGS!!! Then we went to art class and looked at works from Picasso’s cubist period, then tried to emulate cubism ourselves. Tricky. But we all had fun.

18 — This morning after Henry helped with the Tiny TIgers karate class we went back to our dentist for a Braces Consultation. We saw Dr. Modi, the owner of the practice, a sweet middle-aged woman. She looked at Henry’s mouth and recommended that he get remoable appliances to expand his little jaws, so his teeth will have room to fall into place and his jaws will align properly. Sounded like a good idea so they took an impression of his mouth and gave us an order to go to a special x-ray lab for special x-rays, heh. IN the afternoon Fargo arrived for a visit, and the boys played and played all the rest of the day. while I read a book from cover to cover — “As Hot as it Was You Ought to Thank Me” by Nanci Kincaid. When I started it, I thought, hey this is really good. I should stop reading it now and buy a copy to take on vacation… but it turned out that I COULDN’T stop reading it, and read all 355 pages in one day. So, on reflection, I guess it’s good that I didn’t try to take it on vacation ’cause it wouldn’t have lasted long ;-) I loved it, obviously.

17 — Henry and Sally are swimming and playing and laughing and shrieking and having a great time :) I went to the library today and got a lovely new stack of books, and I recorded my lines for Hamlet (I’m Rosencrantz), and I did the laundry, and I read one of my new books, and I sewed a pair of shorts for Henry, and I listened to Loveline, and I did librivox work. Busy day, very fun. Dan beat New Super Mario Bros (DS) last night!

16 — Lovely Sunday. Dan had some friends over to play music and I sewed three more pairs of green velour underwear while listening to Annie’s Huck Finn and Loveline. Now Dan and I are hanging out in the cool bedroom. We watched a Robot Chicken and a Family Guy, and now he’s playing New Super Mario on the DS and I’m catching up on my blog. And we’re listening to Loveline. I adore Loveline. It’s so soothing. I’m pleased with Stryker as the new co-host. He’s not trying to be Adam! When I rented Pirates yesterday I took a quick look at the Gamecube shelf to see if there was anything new and interesting. I saw a new Harvest Moon game called, I think, Magical Melody. I loved “Friends of Mineral Town” but “Another Wonderful Life” left me cold. So I did some googling today. MM gets great reviews, and I think it would be fun to try! And I also found out that there’s a Harvest Moon game for DS coming out in August. So that’s very tempting, more tempting that the gamecube version. Portable is good. So here are the DS games I’d like to own: Princess Peach, Harvest Moon, and of course Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (when it’s out).

15 — Henry’s with us today! He and Dan ran ethernet cable up to his computer so he’s got wired instead of wireless internet access now and the microwave won’t knock him off anymore. It was a big job and they had a drill a hole in the house, very exciting :) And of course they took a lot of breaks to sit in the bedroom and cool off in the air conditioning. While they were working, I went to the fabric store to see if I could find fabric for some more pants for Henry (I recently made a pattern for elastic/drawstring-waist pants with nice deep pockets for him, and made him two pairs already which he wears every single day). The fabric store had all the clearance fabrics at 60% off (so I only paid $.80/yard for some of it, and $1.20 for some!!), so I found some good and very cheap stuff! Got two nice plaids for Henrypants, some strawberry-print flannel for comfy pants for me, and some lovely ivy-print lightweight cotton for my stash. Maybe a blouse? Also got lots more elastic for more underwear for me and for the waists of Henry’s pants.

And Dan and I cleaned the bedroom today! Well, Dan did most of the work but I helped get him started. We filled Canny the Helpful Trashcan half full with bedroom garbage! And our room is all nice and uncluttered now, So peaceful and nice. After dinner we all watched Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (or whatever it’s called). Henry’d seen it a hundred times but Dan and I never had. It was entertaining enough, but long, jeebus. Lots of eye make-up and skeleton swordfights. Too many skeleton swordfights for my taste. But it was fun anyway :) I don’t understand the appeal of Johnny Depp. Whatever.

14 — More lovely quiet today, mostly. Sal taught piano lessons all day but now Dan’s computers go to sleep when they’re not being used so our bedroom is quiet enough for me to record in! So I recorded the first letter of two brides, which was long, long, long and contained a lot of French. Ugh, I’ve never studied French and I find it very difficult to deal with. Just from being observant and watching foreign movies I have an idea of how it should sound, more or less, but I’m terribly insecure and I know I pronounce things very badly a lot of the time. Give me German. No silent letters, everything is pronounced exactly how it looks :) Well, I did my best, and i posted the file in the Help Wanted section to see if a French speaker would check it for me and give me some tips. And I finished the last few chapters of Our Island Story and started the big upload! Jim wrote me a great little summary, too. Oh, and all my underwear is old and wearing out (I made it all about two years ago, after I got my Pfaff) so I found the perfect pattern I made by cutting apart my favorite store-bought pair and cut up an old pair of green velour pants to make some new ones. Love that Pfaff!

13 — Henry had karate this morning, and afterwards his dad picked him up so I went home and had the whole house all to myself! I did a lot of LibriVox work. We’ve finished the Pride and Prejudice podcast so I set up the xml file to send Country of the Pointed Firs out next. I’m nearly finished with the first half of Our Island Story (54 chapters) so I put the completed chapters up for proof-listening. Should be able to record the rest tomorrow! Dan and I have been watching Survivor Africa every night before bed. So very very entertaining!

12 — Our World of Warcraft guild held a meeting tonight on a branch in Darnassus. They’ve been planning it for some time and Henry was really looking forward to attending but they scheduled it at a time when he’s usually at karate, so I let him stay home from karate this evening. Our guildies are really nice, and they know he’s a youngster so they look out for him. One of his RL friends is a new guild member (one of the items on the agenda was to promote him from newbie member to real member) so Henry phoned him to invite him to the meeting, and he showed up! Fun :) (Yes, I know it sounds nerdy, and not every parent would let a kid skip karate to attend an in-game guild meeting… but our guild members are a pleasant bunch and the meeting was very important to Henry. So, y’know, once in a while…)

11 — The little kids didn’t show up to class this morning, so Henry had a half-hour private lesson. Pretty nice! And then we went to the dentist to have his cavities filled. He survived. Very nice dentist. In the afternoon we watched The Sound of Music. I wanted him to be familiar with the music for when we go see it live at the Moonlight, so I was prepared to fast-forward the boring talky bits, but he really liked it so we watched the whole thing.

Goodbye, Roger Keith Barrett.

10 — A guy who writes for Wired called me for an interview about LibriVox. We must have talked for an hour. Look for our article in the October issue!

08 — Last night Dan and I took our two Nintendo DSs to bed and played 40 rounds of Tetris against each other! Not 4, not 14, — 40! It was so much fun!

06 — Henry and I went to a new dentist. It had been a few years since we went, so we were pretty nervous, but he and his staff were really nice! Henry has three cavities and I have four. So it could have been a lot worse.

05 — We were just about out of water so I loaded up all the bottles and bought more (28 gallons), came home, Henry and piano student Laura helped me unload them, then I drove down to the fairgrounds to pick up our Fair exhibits. Traffic was horrid, surprise surprise, but I had Loveline on my iPod so the time passed pleasantly. I really enjoy dropping off and picking up exhibits from the fair. Driving around on the fairgrounds, watching the workers setting up or tearing down, it’s really neat. In the afternoon Marcos took a look at one of my recordings and advised me as to the best post-processing techniques! Yay! And some of the librivoxers decided to do Pirates of Penzance and I grabbed the part of Ruth. Heh. Not at all sure if I can sing it well enough but I can sure try! And Henry wants to be in the Pirate Chorus.

04 — Marcos came back for a few days and Kirsten had the day off, so we all hung around. Henry and Marcos swam in the evening, and then we went out to the beach to see fireworks. Stopped at Los Tacos for delicious picnic food, yummy yum yum, then over to the beach by about 7. Sat on our comfy chairs (which Henry and MArcos carried for us), ate, read. Henry found a nice out-of-town family to play with, who shared their noisemakers and glowtubes with him :) There weren’t as many illegal fireworks as last year (sigh) but there were some, and we were able to see the official show being shot off near the end of the pier at 9.

03 — Dan took the day off! YAY! We hung around and did not much :) Very nice. I recorded two more chapters of Our Island Story (41 and 42), and asked Jim if he wanted to split the second half of the book with me — and he said yes so that’ll be really fun! Reading “Dragonsinger” to Henry for bedtime. He seems to like it as much as I did at his age (and still do).

02 — Dan and I started watching Survivor Africa (3rd season) tonight. Did I mention that we watched the first season over the last couple of weeks? It was entertaining but pretty rough and low-budget, not the slick helicopter-shot-filled show we’re accustomed to. But Africa feels more like “real” survivor. It’s edited better so there are no boring bits.

01 — I got my hair cut! I got my hair cut! i called Vanity Salon, or whatever it’s called, and Dee had an opening this afternoon. She did a great job as usual. I love my shortyshort hair! Henry came home for a while this afternoon so we played our mages for a long time. His, Teldarin, is only lvl 10 but mine, Glorin is lvl 16, so Glorian helped Teldarin with a lot of quests in Elwynn Forest. Fun :) Dan and i went grocery shopping at night, which was really nice. He carried everything and it was pleasant and cool outside. Oh, and then before bed I took my laptop onto the porch and recorded a couple of chapters of Manfield Park. Very luxurious. Did I mention that yesterday I watched the last dvd of The Forsyte saga? Irene finally ended up happy, thank goodness.

June 2006

30 — Henry finished Eregon last night, so this morning Kirsten and I took the boys to the bookstore so Henry could buy the next book in the series (Eldest). He was tremendously eager, but it turned out that they didn’t have the book in stock, due a reprint problem of some kind. Henry was most upset. We put his name on a list for when they do get the book in stock, also called the library to put his name on a list for one of their 8 copies (all of which are out). Went home and let the boys swim til Henry’s dad came to pick him up at noon, and then I drove Fargo home. He planned to lend Henry his own copy of Eldest but couldn’t find it… Henry called at 9:30pm to let me know they’d finally tracked down a copy of the book in San Diego! Yay!

29 — Kirsten and I took the boys to the dollar kids’ movie at the Krikorian this morning. We got there nice and early and got the perfect seats. The movie was Wallace and Gromit: the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, very adorable and funny.

28 — Henry was busy reading when it was time to go to art class, plus he was tired. So I went by myself :) Also I recorded two more chapters of Byways Around San Francisco Bay this morning. And this evening Fargo came for a visit! He’s staying until Friday morning. The boys are having a wonderful time swimming and playing and reading.

27 — Tonight was Preview Night for family/friends of the cast and crew of Seussical, at the moonlight Amphitheater in Vista.. Henry and I went and had a great time!

23 — Here’s a lovely blog post outlining all the reasons you should not use Real Player: Real Obnoxious. I bumped into it when looking for an alternative to Real, so I could view some stuff on the BBC’s website. No luck, though. Anyone know an OSX alternative? I can’t bear to install the disgusting thing on my lovely macs.

22 — Kirsten and Marcos arrived sometime in the middle of the night last night, so we had a great time hanging out with them today! I wasn’t feeling very well (still didn’t get enough sleep, also anxiety) but after I did some absolutely necessary errands, I spent the rest of the day on the couch. Dan stopped off and got groceries after work. My hero! :)

21 — Rather difficult day. I woke up at 3:30am, and lay there til 5 before deciding to take some benadryl and try to get something like enough sleep. So then i slept until after ten and had a hard time getting my act together in time to leave for Bayshore and Art at 11:30. Couldn’t find the acrylic paints I’d bought, so had to stop and get some more. Grr. Then we went to Bayshore and picked up Henry’s yearbook, and hung around with the kids while everyone signed yearbooks. Nice :) Then to Art, which was really very fun. We looked at Peter Max’s dreadful artwork and then made posters inspired by his style. Henry did a terrific one of fruit laid out on a purple checked background with “Eat Your Fruit!” as a message. I did a librivox promotion, with an open book in the forground and a Peter Max sunset behind it. Looks nice, actually. I’ll try to get our posters scanned in chunks and stitched together soon so you internet people can see them. Henry came down with a headache while we were there and felt all droopy, poor boy, so when we got home he lay on the couch and watched cartoons for the rest of the day. And I felt pretty crappy and not-enough-sleepy too. Bleah.

20 — Henry’s Karate DemoThe fair, the fair! Henry and I got up early and left the house before 9:00. Got to the fairgrounds at about 9:45, and, since we had a performer pass, were admitted before the fair officially opened at 10. Fun to be there before the crowds! We strolled through an animal barn and saw guinea pigs, calves, rabbits, and a little pen full of baby chicks and ducklings. By then the fair was open for real, and there were a lot of school groups, since Tuesday is Kids Get In Free Day. One kids spotted a dead duckling in the pen, and suddenly that was the most popular exhibit in the barn. Nothing cooler than a dead duckling. Henry and I preferred the large furry cow with the red tag in his ear. :) So we made our way to the Ralphs Stage in the infield, and took a look in the Kids’ Best tent (right next door) where Henry’s Purple Knitted Belt was on display with its blue ribbon. Yay Henry! We also spotted Brooke’s lovely painting of a Blue Chicken, which also won a blue ribbon! Way to go, Brooke :)

Henry’s purple knitted beltThen at about 10:30 all the kids started showing up, so Henry helped me choose a spot to sit in the audience where I’d have a good view, and went to mill around and warm up with the rest of them. And at 11, the demo began! The kids (and adults) did a wonderful job. I think it was better-organized than last year. It went very smoothly, and was very entertaining! They didn’t have a dedicated photographer so Michelle asked parents with cameras to take as many pictures as they could. I filled up my sd card and killed my battery, pretty much, and got several very good photos. Henry was in the middle of the group so it was hard to get a clear shot of him in action, but I got a terrific photo of Sensei Michelle tossing Sensei Paul through the air, also of Jackie and Blake in midair kicks. Henry did a wonderful job, of course. After the demo, we found a place for him to change into his regular clothes and went off to enjoy the rest of the fair. We looked at goats and dairy cows, sat in the shady arena and watched the horse show through the hottest hours of the day, and drank lots of lemonade from the lemon-shaped “Squeezers” stand (refills are only $2.50 so I brought along the cup Dan and I bought last weekend heheh). We spent some time looking at slicer-dicers and things in the big commercial buildings. I bought a miracle fiberglass ironing board cover. Well, our old one was shredded anyway :) Henry is SO much fun! We had a blast watching the pitchmen giving their demos. We also saw the gemstones display and especially enjoyed the dark room filled with flourescent minerals! When we walked through Design in Wood, we stopped to talk a nice old gentleman, Wendell, who was demonstrating woodcarving. We admired his wooden chains (finished, and in progress) and he gave Henry a little stylized carved owl! Henry was ecstatic. And then we bought some Mackinack Island Fudge (a box of chocolate with nuts for Dan, and a box of Plain Chocolate for ourselves) and headed home. Boy were we tired. But we had a wonderful day at the fair together!

Oh, yeah, Dan brought home two Nintendo Ds Lites and a handful of games to play. We’re all enjoying them a LOT!

19 — Henry’s Karate Demo at the Fair is tomorrow, so, after his karate class tonight I thought I’d better wash and iron his uniform all nice. So I tossed it in the washer with… the green plaid pants I made him. Which had already been washed TWICE in hot water. You guessed it… his gi turned an interesting pale lime green. GAHHHHHHH. This was at about 9 at night. Dan ran to the store for bleach while I hunted up Henry’s old, outgrown gi and washed, dried, and ironed it, just in case I couldn’t get the green out. When Dan got back with bleach (after the little gi was finished in the washer) I put the green gi in with rather more than the recommended dose of bleach. *nervous waiting, time passing* When it was done washing it looked more yellow than anything, but after going through the dryer it looked *almost* perfectly white again. And after ironing it looked fine, if just a trifle “off”. *Whew*

18 — Tired and headachy, blah. Watched the second DVD of The Forsyte Saga. Great stuff, nice and soapy, but with substance. We had a sudden problem on LibriVox but Dan came to the rescue and fixed everything for us. I started a book called The Mennyms, which I found in the children’s section of the library, and it was so good I read the whole thing by bedtime. Looks as if the author has written more about The Mennyms, hooray!

17 — Saturday. Karate rehearsal for Henry at 9. Cleaned the upstairs bathroom and kept Dan company while he cleaned his wood shop (huge job), making it ready to be a guest bedroom next week. I think the sawdust got in my eyes and lungs or something ’cause i started feeling really bad right after we were done. We went out and got a pizza and ate while watching House and The Soup. Also tried to watch Sleeping Murder, which is one of my favorite Marple mysteries, but the writers butchered the story. Um… Helen was not an ACTRESS. Dr. Kennedy was not Gwenda’s mother’s brother!!! I gave up before it was over and decided to re-read the book instead, casting Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple in my mind, of course :)

16 — Recorded chapter 11 of Ulysses… it was long so I divided it into 25-page chunks — the first was 45 minutes and the second was 55. So then my voice was too tired to record anything else.

15 — Busy day! Took Henry to the ice rink for Brooke’s 10th birthday party. The kids skated for almost four hours, round and round and round. I read and did sudoku and listened to Loveline on my iPod. What was I reading, you ask? “The Christmas Guest” by Anne Perry. Not, um, my style of mystery, but better than nothing. After skating, Henry and I picked up a couple of burritos and headed for the Moonlight Amphitheater in Vista to meet up with some more Bayshore friends and watch the kid’s performance of The Wizard of Oz. We got a great parking space and hiked down to the gate, met up with Stacie (science teacher, she set up the group), waited around a bit for the gates to open, then charged down and staked out a great spot for everyone to sit. The Moonlight provides low lawn chairs for the people with lawn tickets now, very luxurious! So we sat and ate and waited for more Bayshore friends to show up — Tawni and Raven and Brooke and Adam – and then the kids ran around and waited for the show to start. Oh and Sal came too! The show was excellent, excellent, excellent. So many talented kids! Dropped Henry off at his dad’s after the show, then came home to Dan. <3

11 — International USB Condenser Microphone Research Day. I read every review of the Samson C01U that I could find, and in the process bumped into a mention of the Blue Snowball mic, another USB condenser mic. So, I read dozens of reviews of each. The Snowball costs a bit more but looks infinitly cooler. Also, it seems to get fewer negative reviews. Also, the manufacturer, http://www.bluemic.com/ has a support forum where they seem to actually answer questions and help solve problems. Also worked today on EQing the dozens of “scratchy” sounding files I’ve recorded with my Logitech headset. The trick is to lower the three highest frequencies, dragging the highest one down furthest, in a sort of curve.

10 — Opening Day for the San Diego Fair! Dan and I went and had a great time. It was super crowded! We had to park in the middle of nowhere in a dust farm, but there was a nice tram to take us to the gate :) First we sat in the blazing sun and listened to the Dixie Hasslers — a wonderful band of old men who’ve been playing at the fair for 52 years. Seriously. Then we walked through one of the slicer-dicer buildings (nice and cool in there), then went to the Home and Hobby building to see if my shrug was nicely displayed (I wasn’t expecting a ribbon) and when we found it, we saw that I’d won third place in that class (hand knitting, women’s slip-on sweater with sleeves)! What a nice surprise! It’s very loosely based on knitty’s “I Do” shrug… I did use the same lace pattern and general proportions, but other than that I changed it a lot. Anyway, then I looked at every single thing in the Home and Hobby room while Dan rested his feet. Then… let’s see… I think we went to look at animals, and then over to the arena to watch sheepdogs herding sheep! We sat there for ages, and then we went to see the hypnotist. Then looked at the Design in Wood building, and then headed home. Oh yeah, and in between all that we ate fair food and got Dan his special lidded lemonade cup that he’s been waiting so long for! When we got home we were BEAT and collapsed on the couch and watched House. Oh, House, wonderful House.

09 — Microphone misery today. I finally got fed up with that “scratchy” or “prickly” sound that my logitech headset makes. Grrrrr. So I spent hours online researching alternatives. Dan suggested an Mbox (USB audio interface dealie) and a regular old condenser mic. I REALLY like using my headset, but I guess I’ll have to go back to a desk mic to get the better audio quality that I long for. But I can’t buy anything right now, so Dan fiddled with one of my dozens of “scratchy” files and showed me who to use the 10-band equalizer to make them sound about a million times better. I was soooo frustrated before, but after EQing my files they sound Good Enough that I don’t feel I need to record them all over again with a better mic, thank goodness. But I still think I want a good condenser mic. Anita suggests the Samson C01U. I’ll have to do some research.

08 — Today was Henry’s last Bayshore Day until next fall. Like last week, he decided to stay the whole time (9-1), so I came home and recorded chapter 50 of Sense and Sensibility — had to record it twice, actually, since I guess my mic wasn’t plugged in properly the first time and I got a crackle through my entire file — then edited and uploaded 49 and 50. And signed up for another two (37 and 38). And then I went back to pick up Henry. He had a great morning, and told me all about the things he’d done — bottle rockets in Science, signature and memory books in Writing, and an accordian-book in Art! Oh, and he took the artwork he did yesterday at Margaret’s to show to his Bayshore Art Teacher and she knew right away that he’d been inspired by Mondrian, so he was very happy :)

Then I took him to his dad’s house to spend the weekend, and I came home for MORE lovely quiet! I recorded chapter 37 of S&S but somehow my input got turned all the way up so the whole thing was peaky and nasty, so I’ll do it again tomorrow. Tonight Dan and I watched the first dvd of the 2002 miniseries The Forsyte Saga. It was AWESOME! I loved every minute of it. Dan was also playing Civ IV, but I think he enjoyed what he saw of the Forstyes, too :) Pretty funny — I recognized a great many actors from other wonderful British literary adaptaions: Mister Robert Martin, from the Kate Beckinsale “Emma”, Aunt Gardiner, from the BBC “Pride and Prejudice”, Miss Browning, from “Wives and Daughters”, and of course sad-eyed Anne, from “Persuasion.” I can hardly WAIT to get the next DVD from Greencine.

07 — Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog! http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/. Alex linked to it in our Canterbury Tales thread. I nearly fell out of bed this morning, I was laughing so hard at the TOPPE FACTES AND DEEDES CONCERNYGE THE MIGHTI KYNG RICHARD (step aside, Chuck Norris!) Whoever writes this blog is brilliant! In between chores this morning I managed to read a bit of Idea for a Poeme of the Tales of Canterburye and fell apart laughing again.
“-The Wyves Tale of Bath: stele sumthynge litel from Boccaccio? None of the chambre knightz and merchauntz do reden of italien ficcion, so ich am soooo yn the clere”
BSL, all the comments are in the same style. O wonderous internette! Thank you, Geoffrey, for the blogge!

Art Class at Margaret’s today! Very very fun. We had barely gotten started when Henry told me he was already looking forward to next week’s class :) We looked at some of the works of Piet Mondrian, then created two art projects — first using cut paper squares and thick black markers, then using primary color acrylics and simple shapes. It was extremely fun and relaxing.

06 — At Bayshore today my beloved Zire 71 slipped out of my purse and hit the carpeted floor. It has a sturdy aluminum case, so I wasn’t too worried, although it hit hard enough to knock the SD card out of its slot. At the grocery store (trying to use Minder to record my purchase) I realized it wasn’t accepting screen taps — ugh, I thought, frozen. Needs a soft reset. Got home, did the soft reset — still not recognizing screen taps. UGH, I thought, ok, time for a hard reset, good thing BackupMan does a backup every morning. Did the dreaded Hard Reset. Got the “Please use your stylus to tap the screen” screen. Didn’t recognize stylus taps. So then I thought somehow that impact knocked the digitizer connector loose, or something. Emailed Dan, who said he’d look at it when he got home — maybe he could take it apart and reconnect whatever got disconnected. But when he got home and picked it up to see how it came apart, he noticed that SQUEEZING it made it act as if the screen had been tapped. HMMM. Digitizer not broken after all. So, brilliantly, he peeled off my screen protector — and the problem was solved! All back to normal! WHAT YOU SAY??? Yes… somehow an edge or corner of my vinyl screen protector got wedged under the edge of the screen, causing great confusion for the poor digitizer. We restored from BackupMan, carefully re-applied my screen protector, and my little Zire 71 is back to its normal cheerful self. And so am I. :)

05 — I noticed that sections of Denny’s “Good things to Eat” project were going fast, and it looked like fun, so I signed up for the “sauces” section and managed to record, edit, tag, and upload it today! Yay me! Maybe I’ll have time to record my last two chapters of Sense and Sensibility tomorrow. Henry’s Zire 22 arrived today and he is overjoyed to have his OWN little pda! He spent hours loading demos of Astraware games onto it and of course playing them. I went out to the fabric store for screen-protector vinyl and found some more lightweight cotton plaid stuff on sale for $2/yard so I picked up enough to make Henry another pair of pants, so I can finally wash the ones I made for him last week. He never wants to wear anything else. I invented a new dinner for Dan and he loved it! (chicken, red bell peppers, grated cheese, sour cream) also had time to work a couple of sudoku puzzles. I’m sure they’re good for my brain. I’m way better and faster at them than I used to be. OH! After Karate we stopped at the bookstore and Henry used a mystery Barnes and Noble giftcard that he found under his desk to buy the new Junie B. Jones book — Aloha-ha-ha. He read it until bedtime, and then I read the first two chapters to him all over again for his bedtime story, and then he took it to bed with my booklight. I’m sure he’s finished with it by now. We love Junie B. Jones! Another wonderful day in the Happy Life of Kayray :)

04 — Henry played Grandpa Joe in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” today. He did great! Remembered his lines, spoke up loud and clear, sang and danced so nicely :) I took lots of photos which are still in my camera. Yay Henry!

03 — A few days ago I read a review on Julie’s site of the Macally FM Cup, an FM transmitter for iPods. I read several other positive reviews of it, and decided to splurge and get one for my Scion XA so Henry and I can listen to our iPods while we drive around. Dan and I went to Fry’s today to get one. Tested it in the parking lot and all the way home, and it works really well! I have an iSkin case, so I just kind of pull the case up around the bottom of the pod and it works fine that way! The sound is nice and clear, works great even though we’re in a city with a radio station on almost every frequency, AND it charges my iPod while I’m driving.

02 — Rockola played at a parish festival down south somewhere. Dan and I went and had a great time! It was so nice to see Chloe again.

01 — Julie shipped Henry’s z22 today, so he should have it in a few days. He’s so excited!

May 2006

31 — We’re finally having normal, June-like weather — gloomy mornings which burn off to clear and sunny afternoons. Just lovely, not too hot yet. Henry and I went to the thrift store to find a good Grandpa Joe costume (He’s going to be Grandpa Joe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on Sunday) and we found him a red sweater vest and a blue dress shirt, just perfect with his old man pants. Turns out Julie does still have that z22 that she reviewed and is selling it to Henry for a VERY generous price :) He’s so happy!

30 — Henry’s last rehearsal (before the final run-through on Sunday). He knows his lines! After class we went to Fry’s to look at the Zire 22 in person. Henry fell in love. It’s so tiny and adorable! But the model at Fry’s wasn’t actually working (just had a screenshot pasted to it, LAME) so then we went to Circuit City to see if they had an actual working demo model and they did! Jeepers, though. Last time we went PDA browsing, the PDA counter was in the front of the store, right in full view, easy to find, loaded with various PDAs and accessories. Now the PDA section is a floor-level locked cabinent, about 2.5 feet wide, in the furthest back corner of the store. Sigh. But a nice clerk unlocked it for us and Henry got to test an actual working z22, and he fell more in love than ever. Here’s a review, courtesy of the-gadgeteer.com. Hmm… I wonder if Julie still had that z22… Migraine tonight. Ugh. H8N.

30 — I helped Henry set up Palm Desktop on his computer, and showed him how to install new apps on the IIIc. He’s delighted! but it’s kind of annoying how many developers no longer support antique PDAs like the IIIC (no Bejeweled!!) Henry decided he wants to buy a new Palm of his very own. We checked out the current crop at palm.com, and the Zire 22 looks like a great choice for a boy with limited income and small hands, who doesn’t need his PDA to play mp3s, take photos, or talk to the internet. So he’s planning to save up for one :)

29 — Henry and I cleaned the Sitting Room (which is what he named the room off the kitchen where his computer, my sewing area, and the printer are) this afternoon. We actually had lot of fun, and got it all tidy and nice. Now that my comfy rocking chair is downstairs, there’s room for the ironing board to live in front of the window in the Sitting Room, so we can leave it up permanently. And my sewing area is so much cleaner and nicer that I can actually SEW again!

Henry found the charger for the IIIc (my former PDA, now his) and charged it up, but alas, it had gotten so dead that it forgot everything it ever knew.

26 — Headachey and tired all day, bah. Henry and I went out early and bought tickets for the 6:10 showing of X-3 (the third X-men movie, whatever it’s called). We prefer the newish Krikorian Mulitplex in Vista. It’s very clean and every theater has stadium seating, so Henry can always see over whoever is in front of us, and comfy seats with rocking backs and liftable armrests. Henry and I pretty much lay around all day, watching Mister Rogers and doing sudoku puzzles until Dan came home. Then a quick dinner and off to the movies! Weve all been looking forward to this movie so much! Dan dropped us off so we could get good seats while he parked, and we got PERFECT seats, center, a couple rows back from the front aisle. And Dan managed to park and find us before the movie started, though he had to park pretty far away!

Previews: Some dreadful thing about a ghostly motorcycle rider. Some dreadful thing about a guy trying to break up with his superhero girfriend. Some dreadful remake horror movie. A Kung-fu movie that might be rentable. And ONE review for something that actually looked worth seeing — a new Superman movie! We are excited about that one.

Now a few words about X-3. I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who haven’t seen it so I’ll be vague. I enjoyed it very very much! Lots of tragic moments which, amazingly, hadn’t already been given away in the trailers. Nobody, but nobody, kicks ass like Magneto. The scene of him and his band of mutants striding over the Golden Gate bridge was quite thrilling. Um… not much I can say without giving anything away. If you liked the first two movies, you should like this one too :) We certainly did. There’s a HUGE GINORMOUS FATAL plot flaw… but if you just sorta ignore it it goes away and the movie is thoroughly enjoyable :)

Today was Dad’s birthday. I miss him so much. I think about him every day still. It seems as if every day I read about something that I’d like to talk about with him, or see a cool show on PBS that he’d have enjoyed. I know he’d love Sudoku. We used to sit on the couch together and work Picturelogic puzzles and cryptic crosswords. MIss you, Dad.

25 — Henry found the charger for my old IIIc, which became his IIIc when I got my Zire 71 a few years ago. Alas, the IIIIc died so thorougly that it forgot everything. So I helped Henry set up Palm Desktop on his computer, showed him how to find and download apps or his palm. He’s so happy and excited! but a little bit bummed because the IIIc is so very old that it won’t run some of the new versions of his favorite games, so he’s thinking about saving up to buy a new Palm of his very own. My wonderful geeky boy.

While we were poking around on astraware I noticed a sudoko game for palm. And suddenly I remembered that I’ve been hearing about the addictive fun of sudoku puzzles for quite some time. So I installed Astraware’s sudoku on my palm and fell in love. It’s $20 to register so I tried a few other versions just to make sure I found the very best. Astraware’s has the best interface, but TopSudoku is pretty good also. Clunky interface but once you get used to it, it does the job ok. Also I found a really great version for Mac OS X: unisudoku. Excellent interface, sleek and simple. I’ll be registering this one for sure. SUDOKU!!!

24 — House. House, M.D. Best TV show since Foyle’s War. The season finale aired last night, and we figured out what was going on before the ending. If you saw it, you know what I mean. I generally have a problem with “dream sequence” shows but there was a good reason for this one, and it was extremely well done, with just the right touch of surreal creepiness. Also they didn’t leave us hanging in dreamland until next fall or whenever the new season begins; we know all the nuttiness wasn’t real and that he hasn’t lost his mind. Now we must content ourselves with watching the first and second season — hardly a consolation prize. We enjoy it so much that we have a hard time stopping after one episode and usually end up watching two or three or four until it gets just too late.

Henry had lunch today with some of the Bayshore faculty and all the kids who submitted designs for the yearbook cover. I dropped him at the restaurant and spent a happy hour wandering around in Fry’s all by myself. Lovely, and Henry had a great time at his lunch, won a tie-dyed t-shirt, and ate plain noodles and applesauce. Henry food! :) Also he learned to dive today (Sal taught him)!

20 — Library this afternoon, then to the guitar store for strings and then to Dan’s Place of Employment for a little while. I got a book off the New Books shelf, “Family and Other Accidents,” which is soooo good. I read most of it already. We watched Lost in Translation again this evening (excellent movie) and took another late-night walk on the beach. A very nice day :)

19 — Henry and I went to the Wild Animal Park again for a while this afternoon. It’s been gray and gloomy here on the coast (May Gray and June Gloom is typical here) but it was warm and sunny, with a pleasant breeze, at the animal park. Very nice, though a little hot for us since we’d worn jeans! We rode the tram first, then had Haagen Daas ice cream bars (oh well, all purchases support the conservation efforts ;-), walked through the Lorikeet exhibit, then up through the conifir forest to Cat Canyon, where we saw a pair of lions sleeping in the sun. The lions have a huge canyon to live in, and lots of bushes to hide in so it’s rather rare to get such a good look. Oh, and when we rode the tram, we watched the male lion strolling up the hill to join his mate in a clump of bushes. What a treat! And it was extra lucky for us, because Henry really wanted to see lions today. (Maybe because we watched an episode of Nature about lions recently?) This evening I tried out my new headset mic. I think I’m getting a bit more noise that I got with my desk mic, but it is so very convenient. I was able to take my laptop into another room for recording without having to build a stack of books to get my mic up to the right height. In the evening Dan and I took a 2-hour walk on the beach! I had to rest a lot, but still got a lot of good walking and fresh air. And Dan carried me up four flights of stairs to street-level on the way back to the car :)

18 — Everyone was GONE for 1.5 hours this morning so I got a ton of recording done — 6 more chapters of my chidren’s history solo project! Pediatrician appointment for Henry this afternoon. When we got there he decided against having the wart on his thumb frozen off, so Dr. Wood suggested over-the-counter stuff and duct tape. And as long as we were there she looked and his throat and listened to his lungs etc (he’s still mildy sick) and said there’s nothing to worry about. Just a bug. This afternoon I did MORE recording — O! Joy! — one more chapter of history and two of Sense and Sensibility. Tonight after dinner we all three watched X-2 together. Fun movie. We’re pretty excited about X-3, which comes out a week from tomorrow! Whoopee! Oh, and I finished (the the third and final time ;-) my green shrug! I wore it around for a while and I am completely satisfied, at last. Just need to wash and block it and deliver it to the Fair next Wednesday. It’s sad that I won’t get to wear it again until I pick it back up in July, but I enjoy contributing to the Fair anyway.

17 — Henry’s still a little bit sick — juicy cough — so we’ve been skipping all our activites this week. So no park day this afternoon, no karate tonight. Don’t want to spread the bug around. He and Sal worked for hours cleaning up the back yard.

16 — Happy birthday my sweet Dan :)

12 — Henry woke up with a sore throat poor boy, and I’ve been horribly tired all day. I spent hours lying in bed listening to loveline on my iPod, and Henry spent hours watching cartoons. Dan’s coming home tonight, late. YAY!!!

. 11 — Save the Net NowRight now Congress is pushing a law that would abandon the First Amendment of the Internet — a principle called “network neutrality” that preserves the free and open Internet. Congress needs to hear from you today or they will hand over control of what you do online to companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. Politicians are trading favors for campaign donations from these companies. They’re being wooed by people like AT&T’s CEO, who says “the Internet can’t be free.” Sign this petition to tell your elected representatives to protect Internet freedom now. Click the image and sign the petition!

09 — I love it when listeners send me feedback and fan mail! I received such a sweet email tonight, from Patti of South Dakota:
Greetings! I am dropping you a note from chilly South Dakota. Since I am the one who downloaded the Secret Garden to listen to at work (all my friends are fighting over who gets to listen to it next!) I volunteered to write and tell you how much we are enjoying your efforts. It is wonderful! I work for Wells Fargo Processing here, hundreds of us in numerous buildings all processing and taking care of our customers. Someone has to change all those names when people get married, or sadly divorced! We listen to alot of audio books, and trade from cubical to cubical. We have decided your voice is lovely to listen to, and you do such a good job with each character. I thought you might enjoy something that is happening, the people who are enjoying it the most, are the ones who have immigrated here as adults. They love the story, the simplicity, and of course how it is presented by you. It is so understandable for some of them, their English and comprehension is minimal sometimes. So thanks again from all of us in Name and Title at WFB, keep up the good work, and we are looking forward to Heidi! (yes, I read a bit of your blog!) Oh yes… I am a foster parent, and you can bet that all the children that pass through my door will get to listen to these wonderful audios, along with their reading.
(I hope you don’t mind being quoted, Patti!) The wonderful Anita wrote me a great summary so I was able to finish cataloging Heidi today: http://librivox.org/heidi-by-johanna-spyri-solo/. I started working on my next solo project this evening, a History of England written for children (“Our Island Story”). The 110 chapters are short, so I recorded the first four already!

07 — Dan flew away to Georgia this morning, to learn Python at the Big Nerd Ranch. I miss him already but I had a nice semi-quiet day on my own (Henry’s still at his dad’s). Too many piano lessons going on to allow me to record, but I chose a new solo project — a History of England intended for children, in 111 short chapters. Mercy. Also finished my green shrug (loosely based on knitty’s “I Do” shrug) while listening to librivox’s collaborative “Pride and Prejudice” which rocks, of course.

06 — Heidi is finished! I recorded the last chapters yesterday, then edited them today, and our fabulous proof-listners checked them over so now all I have to do is upload them to archive.org and make the catalog page etc. Hooray! Now I need to choose a new solo project. And I suppose I ought to start a new collaborative children’s book also.

Dan and I went to the Wild Animal Park again today, specifically to tride the tram since we missed out on that last time. Today they weren’t doing the lame “pay extra and get priority boarding” thing so the regular line moved extremely fast and we were on the tram in no time, looking at baby mouflon sheep and rhinos, wild cattle and elephants, sage brush and mule deer. It was lovely, as it always is.

After we got home I checked the mail and found THREE movies — two from greencine and one from The Film Connection. I put on “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” which was ok. Nothing to write home about, but pleasant enough to watch once. Interesting premise, anyway, and good acting. And then at night we cuddled up in bed with the entire first season of House. Ah how we love House! We watched the pilot, which had moments of hilariously obvious exposition and not-yet-developed characters, but was overall very entertaining and better than the average pilot I’d say. Ahhhhh HOUSE!

05 — New obsession: Zoo Tycoon 2. It runs on both my macs and is so much fun! Golly. I worked through the tutorials and then started the campaigns. I expected that they’d be difficult and frustrating and planned to move to Sandbox Mode, but the campaigns are actually simple and fun, and least the easy level ones. I bought some penguins and put them in with my polar bear (who didn’t eat them, thank goodness) and the zoo guests seem to like that a lot. Henry loves to watch me play and gives good advice.

I’ve really enjoyed listening to the recent Loveline episodes in which Joel McHale is the guest, so tonight we watched “The Soup” (his show) for the first time. Very very funny! Hey Dr. Drew, I suggest you hire Joel as your permanent co-host!

02 — Karate this morning, then home for a few minutes, then off to musical theater rehearsal. We planned to go to Legoland this afternoon, but when we got there we discovered that they’re closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, whoops :) We thought it was Wed and Thur. So we ran back home, got Henry’s bike and my book, and went to that new little park in Carlsbad (just east of El Camino off Carlsbad Village Drive). He biked around on the winding paths for 2 hours and I read my Gerald Durrell book (Marrying Off Mother). Our library has disappointingly few Durrell books. Sigh. Also finished Betsy and the Great World this morning, so that’s two books in one day, heheh. I hope I can find some QUIET soon so I can finish recording Heidi for librivox. I only have another chapter and a half to go!

01 — Checkup for Henry this morning — he’s just fine of course. Then we went to the library to pick up the books we’d sent for from the other branch, then to the mailbox place to get the package with Sal’s ipod case in it. (Her shuffle was stolen, so we found a nice factory refurbed silver 4g iPod Mini at powermax, which arrived last Wednesday while she was out of town. I ordered her a purple iSkin case to go with it.) Then, uh, housework and librivox work and students and dinner and more housework etc… Got Black Beauty cataloged finally! And we started reading Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang for Henry’s bedtime story. Very entertaining and as good as I remember! I think I had my very own copy when I was little and read it over and over.

April 2006

30 — We went to the Wild Animal Park for a little while today! It was really crowded… I’m spoiled because Henry and I usually go on weekdays. Dan dropped me off at the gate so I wouldn’t have to hike up the parking-lot hill. We strolled around, looked at the gorillas, and watched the new bird show, which we all really like! We miss Lolita and Bruce Nadell and Clarence and Maxwell, but the new birds are wonderful too. Then we got in line for the tram but it was tooooo crowded and the line moved too slowly so we came home for some nice quiet time. Bob and Chloe came over in the evening and we ate pizza and talked, etc. Very fun.

29 — Busy stressful day.

28 — Library in the morning YAY! Got a huge stack of books and picked up a flyer for a new park that just opened in Carlsbad, so we headed over to check it out. Sweet little park and very close to home, with a great big play structure and lots of winding paths. We’ll go back with Henry’s bike soon! In the afternoon we went to Nathan and Laura’s park day at Poinsettia Park, another park we’d never been to before. We took Henry’s bike and were happy to find that there was a big loop to bike on, with some fun bumpy hills at the top. Henry has been enjoying his bike very much lately, wants to ride every day. And we live in an impossible neighborhood for biking so it’s good that we’re discovering some good bicycling parks.

25 — Alarm went off at 9, karate at 9:20 — so I hd ten minutes to wake up, wake Henry up, get us both dressed, put toast in Henry and coffee in me. And we made it to the dojo on time :) Tired tired tired. And you’re tired of hearing me say how tired I am. Then it was back home to check email, then out to Bayshore for Musical Theater. It’s going to be an adorable play! I helped Henry learn his Grandpa Joe lines yesterday, so he was all prepared. Tonight after dinner, while Dan was playing Oblivion on his laptop on the couch and Henry was lying around, I put on chapters 2 and 3 of Dracula for proof-listening. Laura read ch. 2 and Gord read ch. 3 and both sounded so good! Very impressive. Henry wanted to hear more but by then it was past bedtime, so I told him we’ll listen to some more tomorrow.

24 — Yawn. Never get enough sleep, never never. Uh… typical Monday except I was too tired to do the usual housework so the house is looking pretty gross. Maybe tomorrow. Henry and I watched “1776” which we both liked a lot! And I taught three piano students and took H to karate and all the normal stuff. Boosted the volume of a bunch of Black Beauty files which are too soft. Just waiting for the last four to be recorded and then I can get started on the next phase of the cataloging process, so we should have that one done eventually.

23 — Woke up before dawn, so I was pretty tired all day. I lay down for a bit of a nap at 4:30 and slept on and off til 6. I’ve been craving loveline lately. I’ve tried listening to Adam’s new show but it’s just not so good. Adam is still funny but his co-hosts, or co-radio-personalities or whatever they are, are just obnoxious. Since our friend Eric got fed up with no-Adam loveline and stopped providing us with hot fresh podcasted episodes every morning I haven’t heard a single show. I went looking for other downloads today and found an awesome page with not only new episodes in podcast form, but a huge archive of older shows. I’m allowing myself a few old shows at a time, kind of rationing them, heh. And now at least I’ve got new Dr. Drew to listen to.

18 — Henry and I went to the Wild Animal Park this morning and stayed til 2:30. It was kind of crowded, but of course the Animal Park never really FEELS crowded. Lots of open space. We wandered around, walked through the temporary butterfly aviary (it’s only there for three weeks or so ever year), looked at the orchid display, saw the new Bird Show (it’s quite different from the old show, but very good!), and walked on the hiking trail for a while. We had a wonderful time together!

Dan and I have really been enjoying “House” — a TV doctor show starring Bertie Wooster, I mean Hugh Laurie. The plot is pretty much the same every week. Someone shows up at the hospital with bizarre symptoms. He will die in less than 24 hours, no on can figure out what’s wrong, there’s some bickering among the staff, House limps around whacking things with his cane, making snide remarks, and figures out the diagnosis at the last minute. But it’s very very entertaining, and often poses ethical and moral questions with no clear answers, and it’s fun to try to guess the diagnosis, or at least guess which clues the writers drop actually mean something.

17 — Tired, tired, tired. I wonder if my thyroid hormone levels are off again. Or maybe it’s just because I did a million things today. We bought water at the water store, then went to Stater Brothers for Household Necessities — TP, paper towels, razor refils, kitty litter, etc. etc. Swiffer pads now come with a new and improved Scrubbing Strip(tm). What will they think of next. I wonder if they considered adding the Scrubbing Strip(tm) to the original product, but then decided to hold off until later when sales needed a boost. What delights are in store for Swiffer users in the coming years? It’s not like I care either way; it’s not like my buying decision was swayed by the awesome power of the Scrubbing Strip(tm). I didn’t even notice until I was cleaning up the orange cheese stain left by Sal’s macaroni and cheese wrapper, which usually ends up on the floor for some reason. After the errands were done I washed and hung out two loads of laundry, watched Henry swim, let the turtle play in the wading pool which we found on the curb down the street (Henry dragged it home), cleaned up, cooked meals, taught three piano students, helped Dan and Henry move Sal’s bedroom furniture, cooked more meals, cleaned up more messes. Gah, no wonder I’m tired.

16 — Tired, oh so tired. Yesterday I had stress in me so I didn’t sleep that well last night. One of the librivox forum members has always been a giant PITA, and yesterday he reached the Limit of my Tolerance so I’ve decided not to read his posts anymore and let the other mods can handle him. Luckily 99.9% of our members are awesome! We’ve invited three of the regulars to be mods and they’re doing a fantastic job.

15 — I think I’ll make Mom a knitted, felted purse to replace the one that was stolen. I just got Stich ‘n’ Bitch Nation from the library, and the Candy Stripers purse is pretty cute! I asked Mom is she’d like it and she said yes, in a solid color. So I went to the yarn store this morning and bought 4 skeins of lamb’s pride bulky in a beautiful purple. I knit a square swatch and felted it and it turned out really cool, so I think Mom’s purse will be really awesome. I found some photos online at craftster.org in the “stitch’n’bitch” section of the same purse. So I’m confident it’ll turn out nicely. This afternoon I cut apart a pair of Sally’s old velour pants and made Henry a pair of nice stretchy shorts with pockets. Henry and I played World of Warcraft for a while after dinner, and completed four quests!

14 — And today it’s raining raining raining. But I like it. All too soon it’ll be hot and dry for months on end. There is a seriously funky smell in the living room. Sort of a cat-food smell, but of course there’s no cat food down down here… what can it be? Sorry I’ve been kind of lame about blogging lately, have just been really busy with librivox… Did I mention that I recorded Caedmon’s Hymn? That was super-fun!

13 — Absolutely beautiful spring day! I washed the sheets and hung them to dry in the sun. The sky is clear, the birds are singing, the breezes are cool. Recorded chapter 11 of Heidi, and chapter 2 part 6 of the History of England. Mom’s car was broken into while she was hiking. Ugh. We tried to cheer her up tonight with pizza, ice cream, and Survivor. Yay Survivor! But I’m bummed that they voted Austin off. I kinda liked him. Shane is clearly insane. I hope Terry or Sally or Cerie wins the million.

09 — *yawn* lying in bed, just finished reading “Everything Bad is Good For You” by Steven Johnson. Fantastic book, highly recomended. The author suggests (and conclusively proves, in my humble opinion) that popular culture, overall, is NOT getting dumber and dumber over time, as is the common myth, but is actually, in general, growing more and more complex, challenging, and mentally stimulating. In one section, he compares the plot outlines of an episode of Dragnet (one plotline, beginning to end), Starsky and Hutch (one main plotline with a secondary comic plotline thrown in at the begining and end), Hill Street BLues (several plotlines), and The Sopranos (many plotlines, overlapping in intricate ways). I’m simplifying, of course. I got the book from the library but I think I’ll actually go BUY a copy to keep! It’s that interesting. I’d like to re-read it and lend it out.

07 — Happy Birthday Kirsten!

Henry decided that soccer is just Not His Thing, so we didn’t have to go anywhere today, yay! So we went to the library and got a HUGE stack of books. Henry found one full of little crafty project ideas all relating to KNIGHTS so he got all excited about making a sword. We cut a couple of swords out of cardboard, but when Dan got home he suggested making some wooden swords, so he and Henry worked on that for the rest of the evening. They got Henry’s sword finished and are working on one for Fargo, who, we’re hoping, will come visit next week.

05 — Still raining, on and off. Margaret held her parkday indoors, and Henry had a fine time playing games with the girls, and I had a fine time knitting.

04 — After Henry’s rehearsal we went to the Wild Animal Park and had a great time. We had some lunch and then rode the tram, then walked around a bit. They have a new little water play area, and Henry played and played until he was soaking wet. It was windy and he started to freeze, so we headed home. I love the Wild Animal Park. I hope we can go again soon! On days when we’re at Bayshore anyway it’s only a half-hour drive east. On the way home it started to just pour rain! It rained and rained and rained all the rest of the day, and I think we even had a bit of lightning at night!

02 — I hate the time change. I hate it.

I’ve been longing for a new knitting project, so I’ve been searching through knitty.com for ideas. It’s still very cold so I’m tempted to make something thck and warm, except that it’s sure to warm up any day now. Last night I realized that If I unraveled the scarf I made out of the leftovers from my BPT sweater, I’d have the perfect yarn to make knitty’s coronet hat. And I need a hat anyway. So that’ll be a small quick project that I don’t even need any supplies for. I ripped out the scarf last night while we were watching Antiques Roadshow and prepared the yarn for re-knitting. But I also want a more intricate and interesting project, so I finally settled on the I Do lace shrug. It’ll be nice to wear when I’m reading in bed and the chilly air freezes my shoulders, and it’ll be good even in summer over tank-tops and little dresses! I went to Common Threads today to choose some yarn. They have a truly hideous website but a wonderful store packed with luscious natural-fiber yarns. I was there for about an hour and a half, considering this yarn and that… finally settled on a 89% cotton/20% merino wool called Cotton Fleece in a pale green called “peridot” (probably color 44 on that page). I knit a swatch in the store, to see if I’d need different-sized needles, but it worked up to nearly the same gauge as the pattern yarn, close enough anyway. I charted out the lace pattern tonight, cast on a sleeve and knit the first 3 rows.

01 – Henry is staying with us this weekend, YAY! He and Dan did lots of woodworking together, and went to the hardware store for supplies so I had enough quiet time to record my last section of Fanny Hill. Sal’s out of town so the upstairs is quiet and lonely for Henry, so we worked out a good compromise. He has his bedtime as usual, and spends an hour or two in his own room, reading or listening to audiobooks, and then when Dan and I are ready for bed, Henry moves down to our part of the house to a little cozy bed on the couch. So Dan and I have some nice quiet time to ourselves, but Henry gets to sleep down where he feels safe and happy :)

March 2006

Mar 30 — Unbelievable, the FlexBar team released an update today and it works just fine! I registered at their forums just to say “thanks.” I helped Henry get Trelane’s Wand from the Ogres, and then we joined a group to go get the Azure Agate from the OTHER Ogres. No one in Azeroth takes care of their stuff… it’s always being stolen by ogres or trolls or raptors… Recorded Chapter 10 of Heidi last night, and edited it today during Henry’s science class (er, the science teacher was sick so it was a Spanish class instead). Henry and I are proof-listening The Little Lame Prince.

Mar 29 — WoW is back up, but the patch broke some of my add-ons, argh. Did I ever list my favorite add-ons? I’m not going to bother linking them… you can google and find a download site.
Auctioneer — A must-have if you want to make Big Bucks at the Auction House
Auto-Repair — Never forget to mend your stuff again (even stuff in your bags)
EquipCompare — Mouse over an item and see how it compares to what you’re currecnly wearing/using
FlexBar — Adds infinitely configurable extra button bars. I can’t live without FlexBar.
Gatherer — Helps you remember where that patch of Kingsblood was, or that Tin-Mine
GuildAds and GuildAdsPLayerTracker — Lets your guild members know what materials you’re looking for or have extras of… besides a lot of other cool features!
MapNotes — Adds notes to your map (so you can remember where the Greenwarden is)
MOnkeyQuest — Pop-up questlog, see all your quests all at once, or choose the ones you wish to see
Shardtracker — Keep track of your soul shards
Titan — Helpful bar showing free bag slots, coins, ammo, loot type, lag, honor, location, etc. etc.
Itemized Deductions — Titan plugin, shows the most worthless item in your bag (for those times when you need to drop something FAST)
So anyway, my MonkeyQuest broke, but I was running a very old version — installing the newest version fixed it right up. And FlexBar broke. :( No update yet…

Mar 28 — Bayshore photo day. Henry wore his hand-knitted stripy pants and his shiny blue stretchy diving shirt and looked adorable. After that it was Musicla Theater rehearsal, and then home. Big WoW patch today (1.10) — they’ve added weather effects and we’re eager to see them… except the servers were down all day so we haven’t had a chance to actually SEE the weather yet :)

Mar 27 — We’re defragging my desktop tonight! YAY! It’s super-fragtastic so I’m really happy that we’re taking care of it. Henry and I went to LegoLand today, cold and crowded but very fun :) Henry is the best little boy in the world. And Dan is the best husband. I am lucky! Oh hey I got two cool extensions for FireFox today — DownThemAll and Fuzzy Time. No time to make links here, go google them and install, very handy.

Mar 22 — Henry and I played World of Warcraft for a long time today (after chores, grocery shopping, and handwriting practice) and we took Zinny and Animala to the Badlands to find some guy there and deliver a message. While we were there, and annoying high-level dwarf came riding up on his stinky ram and pestered us — bounced around on top of us while we were trying to kill bad guys, and drew even more monsters over to where we were fighting. Animala died. On my run back from the graveyard I said, in party chat, “idiot dwarf” and Henry said “I am almost livid!” His vocabulary is better than mine ;-) We had a great time playing togther, as usual. He hit level 39 so he’s all excited!

I haven’t given you any awesome links lately, but that’s about to change. Dan and I have been watching eposides of the Channel Frederator podcast — think Festival of animation in the palm of you hand, and for free, and on demand. Anyway, one of my favorite cartoons is Joel Trussell’s “War Photographer”. I really can’t get enough of this one. Love that BS&T remix! Vikings, roadies, a marching band, and a Japanese-style giant robot fight! My other favorite is “Skippy” by Amanda Spalinski. Can’t find a link to that one online so you’ll just have to go the the Channel Frederator website and watch Episode 11. It’s a little more than halfway through that episode. Charming is an understatement!

Mar 21 — Henry, Dan, and I watched The Hunt for Red October tonight. We explained a lot of the plot to Henry ahead of time, so he wouldn’t feel mystified. He LOVED it and said afterward that it was one of his favorite movies. We didn’t tell him that the cook was the saboteur, but after the movie was over he said he had noticed that the cook was listening when Ramius took both keys. I didn’t even notice that until tonight, which was about the 3rd time I’d seen the movie. He’s a smart little monkey.

Mar 18 — Dan worked with power tools all day so no quiet recording time for me. But I had fun playing World of Warcraft and there might be a chance for me to do some recording tonight a little later. I’ve just signed up for a section of Fanny Hill and I’ve got to record it before Henry gets home tomorrow, heheheh, it’s on the racy side, to say the least…

Mar 17 — The house was quiet for hours this afternoon so I recorded three chapters of Heidi and one of The History of England. Then I listened back and discovered that my mic is having some kind of a problem and I’m getting a peaky distortion sound all over the place but my levels weren’t actually peaking. Very very frustrating. I don’t know when I’ll have that much quiet time again and it’s horrible to know I wasted it. Dan came home early and we had dinner and then we built a fire in the big teaching room and sat in tehre together in the quiet for hours. Dan played his guitar and I read more of my Barbara Tuchman book, “A Distant Mirror”. I’m glad I live now and not in 14th century France. And then once again we stayed up too late talking :)

Mar 16 — Tired, tired. Dan and I stay up far too late talking every night. We could talk or not talk for hours. Henry and I bought crickets for The Turtle, and a new lightbulb for her to bask under. Librivox got a nice write-up on redhat.com! http://www.redhat.com/magazine/017mar06/features/librivox/

Mar 15 — Busy morning: we cleaned Turtle’s tank and sorted out Henry’s clean laundry, then went to Worst Buy and traded in the lame single-dvd Goblet of Fire movie that we bought by accident on Saturday for the 2-dvd Special Edition with deleted scenes and other extras. And picked up pills from Howard the Pharmacist, who very kindly printed out a list of all the stuff we’ve bought this year so we can fill in our HSA forms. Yay. And then we had time to play WoW together for ages. Henry’s Hunter, Zinny, and my Druid, Animala, have been questing in Strangelthorn Vale together for the last few days. Today we finished up the singing blue crystals (had to kill 238597857203 basilisks), and the whatever-it-is that the Geologists drop, and the Shadowmaw Panthers, and got started on the Stone of Tides and the Troll Legends, and handed in a couple of chapters for the book quest. We ran up and down the road between the Hunter Camp and Boooty Bay soooo many times :)

Mar 13 — Henry helped me clean the whole house all nice — he did the vacuuming while I mopped and de-cluttered. Yay for the Helpful Boy!

Mar 11 — Rain, hail, and freaking COLD weather! I went outside to drag the trashcans up to their little home in the driveway (we have this odd little trashcan pen — don’t ask) and I thought I’d get frostbite. Jo went home today, wasn’t feeling well, poor thing. We’ll miss her! She’s really fun to hang around with :) Dan and i dropped Henry at his dad’s house and then went to get key copies made at the Best Store in the World – True Value Hardware. They have everything, absolutely everything, and genuinely helpful employees. And then we came home and I played World of Warcraft until my eyeballs bled, and Dan built his new bandsaw in the livingroom with me (on account of the rain and hail).

I wonder if I’ve mentioned my HUGE OBSESSION with the Teaching Company’s lecture series on the History of the English Language. I have all 36 lectures loaded into my ipod and both computers AND on an mp3 cd in my car. I listen to some of it every day — driving, cooking, going to sleep, waiting around, playing WoW, etc. I’ve been listening to it for several months, and I’m only just now getting to the Modern English part. Old English and Middle English were so fascinating that I’ve listened to every lecture several times, some of them over and over and over. The lecturer, Seth Lerer, reads lot and lots of examples of Early and middle English literature and it sounds so beautiful, so very beautiful. I highly recommend this course. It’s ridiculously inexpensive if you want to purchase it as an audio download — only FIFTY BUCKS for 18 hours of wonderful lectures… you can’t beat that.

Mar 10 — Rain, rain, rain. The fingerprint-recognition doorknob fell apart so H and I went to get a regular old key-lock doorknob at True Value, and I installed it without a hitch. And then we sat in the teaching room in front of the fireplace and I read him a few chapters from our history book, about Alexander the Great and the Rise of Rome. Dan and Jo and I stayed up WAY too late watching fun tv. :) She got us hooked on CSI and House!

Mar 08 — Henry heard a Scary Noise last night, poor boy. We think it was our neighbors having late visitors, but to sleepy Henry it sounded like knocking and loud voices on _our_ porch… he was shaky and all upaset, so Dan took him on a walk around the house with a flashlight, to check for Bad Guys, and they didn’t find any. And then we made him a cozy bed on the couch right outside our room, and I put a soothing audiobook (my recording of The Secret Garden) on my iMac, and then he fell asleep and was ok for the rest of the night.

Henry and Sal played racquetball this morning, and then Henry and Jo and I ran a bunch of errands (my blood tests, hardware store, music store, mailbox, and Trader Joe) and then I worked on the Beatrix potter project and played a bit of WoW :) Dan’s new MacBook Pro arrived at work and he brought it home for us to admire. It’s luscious and lightning-fast.

Mar 07 — Took Henry to his Charlie rehearsal and got chapters 2 and 3 of Heidi edited. Northanger Abbey is in the “Proof Listening” phase, but should be ready to catalog soon. Beatrix Potter is still waiting for Marlo to record the Tale of Pigling Bland. I suppose I should start up a new collaborative children’s lit project soon… maybe some more Nesbit. I’m tired, tired, tired. Henry and Jo and I got pizza for lunch and lay around and watched The Sting together all afternoon.

Mar 06 — Jo helped me clean the whole house! It was wonderful. And then Henry and I sewed a “Winged Kariboh” toy. Here’s a photo. He’s made of brown stretchy fleece with felt wings and feet, and black button eyes. He’s soft and cuddly and Henry loves him! I made the pattern by looking at one of Henry’s Yu-Gi-Oh cards.

Annie released another chapter of Huckleberry Finn! YAY! I listened to part of it last night but fell asleep right when Huck washed off the raft, so I’ll start in the middle tonight and find out what happened next. Today I recorded “The Emperor’s New Clothes” for Librivox’s Hans Christian Andersen project. I picked that one because I knew it wouldn’t make me cry.

Mar 04 — We watched a suprisingly good movie tonight: “Airport” (1970). I told the tivo to get it for us, thinking it would be a typical all-star 70s disaster movie but it was really actually good, very entertaining, compelling, not 100% predictable, and fun to watch.

Mar 03 — Field trip in the morning to a Visual Arts studio, a little family-run business that makes movies and stuff. We had fun seeing all the equipment and watching one of their short films, which stars two of the kids from Bayshore! Henry was supposed to start in a homeschool soccer team today but they got rained out. He was really disappointed, poor boy. We got to the field and it was just pouring… So we came home and hung around with Dan and Jo (Dan took the day off today!) and Dan played guitar with Henry until it was time for me to take him to Karate. Oh, and Henry and I went to the fabric store to get material for a new little Yu-Gi-Oh monster that he wants me to make, a Winged Haribo, or something.

In the evening we watched Survivor — Bobby got voted out, yay! And then an episode of The Office, and then Best In Show. :) And after Jo went to bed I got my chapter of Ulysses recorded!

Mar 02 — It was “Read Across America” day at Bayshore, in honor of Dr. Seuss’s birthday, and they had some special activities planned so Henry stayed for the whole morning. So I went home and recorded a chapter of Heidi. And at night we all went and picked up Dan’s mom, Jo, at the airport! She;s here for a week, at least, and maybe longer. She needs to get away from the NY winter for a while and soak up some sunshine. So of course we’re expecting rain tomorrow, argh.

February 2006

Feb 28 — Busy day! Henry helped me clean the fridge, and then we went grocery shopping and filled up the nice clean fridge with good food. I paid a million bills, and mopped the kitchen floor, and my mop broke so I had to go to Target and get a new one. The Giant Rainstorm that was predicted was a bit anti-climactic… there was some rain overnight and a bit this morning but by afternoon it had cleared up again. Typical.

Feb 27 — Have I linked recently to my completed solo book recordings?
The Secret Garden
A Little Princess
The Road to Oz
These audiobooks are free. I hope you enjoy them! My next project will be “Heidi” — I hope to get started on that this afternoon.

Feb 26 — Yawn. We stayed up too late last night (but for a good reason) so we’ve been tired all day today but that’s ok, we had a great day anyway! We went out shopping for an elliptical trainer for Dan so he can exercise without leaving the house and had a good time together, and got a good machine for a VERY good price. Dan drives a hard bargain. :) And then we had to make room for it in our room so we got rid of the giant horrid ugly oak legal-size filing cabinet that I’ve been using for a nightstand and replaced it with a piece of Quality Swedish Crap from Dan’s desk area, so I spent the afternoon sorting through four or five years of papers and threw away most of them and I can store what’s left in a small plastic box. YAY. And Dan sat on the couch and worked on his guitars while I was sorting, and we watched some of the olympics. We would pay GOOD MONEY if we could see the Olympics broadcast without any TALKING. Shut up, sportscasters, we don’t need to be told how to feel and what to think!

Feb 25 — We got up pretty early and had a really terrific day! I got my Wind in the Willows chapter recorded, edited, tagged, and uploaded, and spent a lot of time working on my librivox wiki page and also added Sound Studio to the software page. And we set up Sally’s new TiVo, which took approx 1000 years, and dan had a guitar lesson, and we sat around and watched the Olympics and stuff. We had a full and fun day together, as usual.

Feb 24 — The Rockola George Harrison Birthday Concert was tonight, and I went to the 7pm show. It was FANTASTIC. Chloe saved me a seat right in front and it was so much fun!

Feb 21 — Got my hair cut! I went to a different place and it’s much better than last time. Much, much, much better. Henry found out this morning that he gets the role of Grandpa Joe in his Musical Theater Class production of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. I think he’ll be a wonderful Grandpa Joe!

This morning when I plugged my iPod into my iBook as usual, I noticed that the settings were all wrong… It suddenly thought I wanted to manage playlists and podcasts manually, which I don’t and never have. So when I fixed that, it informed me that my iPod was synced with a different library… Um, what? I don’t HAVE a different library… So I said ok, oh well, sync anyway. Problem was, my laptop was not connected, at that moment, to the compter where I store my music… So iTunes decided that none of my music or audiobooks existed. Lovely. I fretted over it for some time, because after I connected to my music server everything still had the “I don’t exist” exclamation mark, and the only way I could figure to fix it was to double-click EVERY SINGLE FREAKING FILE. But then p3 told me to just quit iTunes, make sure I was connected to my server, then restart iTunes. Ha! Fixed. Thanks, tweenbot :)

Feb 20 — I recorded the very last chapter of The Secret Garden tonight! I’ll be able to edit it tomorrow during Henry’s theater class, and then upload it to the proof-listeners, then get the whole project cataloged etc. Then I can catch up on some of my other reading commitments (Canterbury Tales! Wind in the Willows!) before I get started on my next solo, which will be Heidi.

Feb 19 — Slept in, worked on Grimms’ Tales, edited two of my Secret Garden chapters. Dan worked for hours setting up a new server so we have a better backup/storage/firewall box. It’s quite a loud machine so it lives in our newly-clean closet. Now I have a place to store my librivox recordings so they don’t clutter up my iMac.

Feb 18 — We had a lovely long nice Saturday together. I recorded another 3 chapters of The Secret Garden and worked on cataloging Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Dan cleaned out our closet! It’s a nice big walk-in closet and it was so packed with stuff that I couldn’t get to my clothes anymore. But Dan cleaned it out and got rid of two trash-cans full of stuff, and a big give-away pile as well, and it’s so nice and clear in there now that sometimes I just go in and look around at the emptiness. And I re-organized our dresser, and got rid of two paper-bags full of stuff! We watched another chunk of Othello tonight but got too tired to finish it. Tomorrow.

Feb 17 — Started watching the Kenneth Branagh/Lawrence Fishbourne (sp?) movie version of Othello tonight. Soooooooo good!

Feb 15 — Look what the amazing Annie made for us: http://librivox.org/poetry-story-index/ — now it’s easy for listeners to find specific poems! Yes, our catalog is still hand coded, though I think some kind people are working on making an automated database-driven catalog system for us. So this page was a lot of work for her to make and will need to be updated by hand every time we get new poems submitted. Awesome, Annie!

Feb 14 — Henry made me a Valentine and presented it to me with a great flourish this morning, and Dan came home early from work and brought me a lovely pot of flowers and a whole BOX of my favorite chocolate — Scharffen Berger 60% Dark Chocolate. Yum :) I got two more chapters of The Secret Garden edited during Henry’s Theater Class this morning. And Henry and I read a chapter in his history book about Crete and the Minoan civilization, and we did the Insane Druids quest in Ashenvale together! So it was a good day. Oh and we watched the olympics for a while tonight.

Feb 10 — Oh! Forgot to mention that the new season of Survivor started last week. I realized this yesterday, so I set the Tivo to record the rest of the season and Dan acquired the first episode for us, which we watched on his laptop in bed last night. And we watched last night’s episode tonight :) Ahhhhhhhh Survivor… so soothing, so entertaining, so trashy! Stacie the Science Teacher held a little beaded jewelery workshop at Bayshore this morning and Henry and I had a great time making things with beads and wire! And this evening I recorded my section of Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary” (letter G). Now I’m going to set up librivox’s next podcast. Woohoo!

Feb 09 — Henry had fun at Bayshore this morning, and decided to stay for the Computer and Art classes after Science and Creative Writing, so I went home for a couple of hours and finished editing my chapter of The Origin of Species! Go Team Kayray! If you want to hear it before the entire book is finished, you may: Variation Under Nature. This afternoon Zinny helped Animala with a few quests in Ashenvale. Ten-year-olds are fun :)

Feb 07 — Remember a few weeks ago when Cyrus Farivar interviewed me for “The World” on NPR? The story aired today! I sound totally nerd-tastic, but oh well, the piece was good and we’ve got a swarm of new forum visitors and volunteers! Here’s a link to a Windows Media file of the 4 minute story: Librivox on PRI’s “The World”. SO. TIRED.

Feb 04 — Hugh was interviewed on the CBC: Librivox Interview on the CBC. Nice interview! Since the CBC doesn’t make their programs available for download, Hugh recorded that snip himself — so sorry about the static.

Feb 03 — I started reading Barbara Tuchman’s wonderful book “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century” a couple of days ago. It’s very very good. The book has been in my family as long as I can remember. I supposed it was Dad’s. Anyway, when I was little I used to read the chapter about the Black Death, but I never read the rest of it, so I took it with me the other day when I took Henry to his favorite Homeschooler Park Day. I can’t put it down!

Dan and I watched the last episode of Foyle’s War Series 2 tonight. The episode was “The Funk House” and it was extra-good! I hope PBS will run the first series soon. And I hope series four is in production… hmm, the internet could probably tell me… Oh my, Series Four has already aired in England and they’re working on Series Five!!!! This is good news indeed!

Feb 02 — Here’s what I like: “Aperture”, Apple’s new software for digital photographers. I hated iPhoto and never used it, but relied on graphicconverter and photoshop to manage my digital photos. Aperture is amazing. Amazing, I tell you! It’s extremely easy to use yet very powerful. It keeps your original photos untouched, while you crop, straighten, white-balance, etc. etc. to your heart’s content on a version of your original. You never have to save — it just remembers your changes on the fly. If you want to go back to the original photo, it’s still there. If you want to try some different changes, you can just make a new version. I took 94 photos of Henry’s karate class the other day, when he was awarded his Purple Belt. I used my camera’s “burst” feature to ensure that I got several good photos in between the camera shake and action blur. Aperture allows you to make stacks of photos which have been taken within a certain amount of time — so it was very easy to compare photos within a stack and discard most of them, then edit the remainder so they look better. Now all I have to do is export the best ones and upload to my gallery.

Feb 01 — Yesterday Xeni Jardin interviewed me on the phone for a little story about podcasted audiobooks on the NPR show “Day To Day”, which aired today. Here’s a link: Amateur Audio Books Catch Fire on the Web. There’s a “Listen” link but I haven’t tried it… Henry and Sal and I listened to the show on the actual RADIO, believe it or not. It was a good little piece.

January 2006

29 — Henry’s Musical Theater class had their performance of “Seussical” this evening! It went soooo well, and was very adorable.

27 — I feel a bit better but still sort of crummy. Might be a touch of the flu or something. I did manage to get three more chapter of The Secret Garden recorded!

26 — Bayshore Day this morning — Henry wrote a really cool sort of spy story in Creative Writing. I’m going to encourage him to type it up into his blog. I started feeling crummy this afternoon, bleah.

24 — Henry and I did a lot of stuff today! The power was off for several hours this morning, so we cleaned his room all nice and found several things that had gone missing — his wallet, his Harry Potter book, and his Duel Disk. We went to his rehearsal at 11, and while he rehearsed I had my meeting with Carolyn, which went well as usual! She issued Henry a report card, with my OK, and we decided he had earned “A”s in everything :) And really, he’s made progress in all his “subjects” and put in some effort, so I think that’s fair. He takes once-a-week classes for science, writing, and theater and his teachers had written nice comments. He’s very proud and showed it round to everyone.

On the way home we stopped at Target to look for costuming stuff for his performance. He has to wear yellow and black, so got him a nice inexpensive yellow shirt which he can wear with some of his black stretchy pants. And while we were there we looked at storage containers. We’d just read the chapter in The Unofficial Lego Builder’s Guide about sorting and storing LEGOs to make them a lot easier to work with, and Henry got all enthusiastic about the prospect! YAY! So, we bought six nice shoebox-sized plastic storage containers on sale for a dollar each, and picked up a package of sandwich-size ones too.

After we got home I had to check on the librivox forum for a couple of hours (since the power was out all morning I hadn’t checked yet and there was a lot of work to be done) and then we dumped Henry’s giant Bucket O’ Legos onto a blanket on the floor and set to work. We filled one conatiner with 2xN pieces, one with plates, one with 1xNs where N > 2, one with technic stuff, one with slopes, doors, windows, and arches, and one with Larger Uncategorized Pieces. In the little sandwich size boxes we put 1x1s, 1x2s, tiles, minifigs + accessories, and Tiny Uncategorized Pieces. It was REALLY fun, belive it or not, and Henry’s all inspired to build now that he doesn’t have to dump a giant bucket out to find the tiny things that sink to the bottom. He built a nice spaceship while I was reading his bedtime story (Knight’s Castle, for a change). Oh and after dinner I recorded my chapter of Robin Hood and Henry listened and played with legos very very quietly. And now he’s in bed, Dan’s playing his guitar near me, and I think it’s time for me to go! G’night.

23 — Happy birthday wonderful Mom!

Last night Dan and I curled up in bed with some Mud Pie and a new (to us) episide of Foyle’s War — The one where Sam goes undercover at the fuel depot. We love the Foyle shows SO MUCH, and that was an especially good one. While we’re watching, we’ll often pause the TiVo and discuss the plot, and try to guess the outcome. Rex’s secret took us totally by surprise — but it all made perfect sense. Praise and glory to the writers and creaters of Folye! The plots are dense and tangled, yet they always make sense in the end, with rarely even a tiny hole or loose end. The acting is superb. The atmosphere is amazing, and every tiny detail seems just right. Kathy, you got us started with Foyle — a million thanks!

In contrast, we watched an episode of Miami Vice on Saturday. Yes. Yes, we did. One hour of bad acting, bad directing, bad writing, no plot to speak of, an appalling sound track, more pastel menswear than anyone should ever have to see, and a ten-minute speedboat race. Guess who won? I think we’ll stick to Foyle :)

22 — So tired, so tired. Henry’s got a bit of a cold so I’ll probably get it too. I broke the librivox podcast xml file this morning but Dan came and rescued me like a knight in shining armor. A capital “T” in an itunes tag can really screw things up. Yipe.

21 — Edited all four new Secret Garden recordings, yay! And did my little roles for Richard II. And played a lot of WoW. And lazed around with Dan :)

20 — Recorded FOUR chapters of The Secret Garden today, so that makes 10! I still need to edit some of them, and fix the tags, etc, but still, I think it’l be ok to start podcasting them on MOnday. That’s three weeks worth — sure by the time three weeks have passed I’ll have most or even ALL the rest of them done.

16 — Did millions of chores today. Woohoo. I really wish we had some of that fabulous Mud Pie from Trader Joe’s but we finished it off last night. I don’t like the crust but I love all the other parts — even the nuts! Discovered that I had the wrong date on the last six or eight episodes of my “A Little Princess” podcast — I had them marked Dec 2006 instead of Jan 2006. So now they are floating at the top of the list in the ITMS and I suppose they won’t be in the right place until next December, even though I fixed the xml file. SIGH…

15 — Well! The LA Times ran a great article about Librivox! Here’s a link to a my gallery page, where you can see a scan of the print article (including a very good photo of me) and the text of the online article (which is the same as the scanned text, but a little bit easier to read): Librivox’s LA Times Article and Photo

14 — Slept really badly, blah. The journalist who wrote the Wired.com article about librivox, Cyrus Farivar, came down by train from LA today to do a little interview with me for NPR’s “The World” — I’ll post a link when the show airs! Managed to get a bit of recording done on The Secret Garden and edited my chapter of A Princess of Mars. Also handed in my Pridewing Venom Sacs, collected Sida’s Bag, collected nine Flints, and bought the first aid manuals from Stromgarde.

13 — Well, here I am again! Not off to a very good start blogging every day this year, am I? librivox.org has been growing outrageously fast and it’s been practically a full-time (unpaid) job to answer questions, help re-organize the forum, manage projects, talk to reporters (!), catalog finished projects, and even get a little recording done from time to time. I’m working on The Secret Garden as a solo project, and have recently recorded a couple of Aesop’s fables, two chapter of A Tale of Two Cities, three chapters of The War of the Worlds, a chapter of The Prince (Machiavelli – great fun!), and a chapter of Beyond Good And Evil (Nietzsche – not particularly fun). See our catalog page and marvel at the number of completed works!

The LA Times is planning to run an article on librivox in the BUsiness/Technology section this Sunday (Jan 15). A very nice reporter interviewed Hugh, Alex, me, and maybe some other volunteers, and, since I’m the nearest to Los Angeles, sent a photographer here this morning to get pictures of me reading. So check the LA times on Sunday — both print and online, I believe.

I’ve been feeling mostly better lately — still not quite normal, but pretty good. So don’t worry about me. We went to our first Bayshore Day of the year yesterday, and Henry had the Best Science Class Ever — he got to dissect an owl pellet and dig out the bones of tiny animals! He’s brought a baggie of little bones home and a chart to identify them.

04 — Feeling a bit better today but I’m still just lying around, mostly. Took care of editing my Dracula chapter, and recorded the Weekly Poem for librivox. I got the nicest comment on the forum:
I have just finished listening to your wonderful reading of A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett! It has inspired me join this forum just so that I can post here to thank you. I will recommend this site, and your reading of this book in particular, to my family and friends, many of whom have little daughters. I am uncle to two of them and was delighted at some of the parallels, “the rich, bachelor uncle”. Well, bachelor anyway, heh.

I tutor young people, particularly those who are struggling with learning English. I was looking for web sites that had stories that could be read and listened to at the same time for their benefit when I stumbled upon Librivox. Perhaps in time I can contribute to this beautiful effort in some way.

Again, thank you, and I look forward to more of your readings.
Well, my goodness, that makes all the work and effort and stress worthwhile :)

03 — Felt peculiar on Dec 31 and Jan 1 — lightheaded, thumpy heart, and I almost fainted once. Scary. On Sunday Dan called the on-call Pulmonary Hypertension doctor at UCSD and he said I should go to the ER and be evaluated. UGH. So we went to Tri City. There were like 400 people in the waiting room but they took me right away and started running tests. It was fairly awful. Sally and Jack and Susan and Chloe drove right up from San Diego to take care of Henry and cheer me up, which was wonderful. Eventually they decided I should be transfered to Thornton Hospital (UCSD) to be observed overnight. So some nice EMTs showed up and put me in an ambulance. They let Dan ride in the back with me, thank goodness. We got there about 7 or 8pm I guess. The night nurses were very sweet and found Dan a cot to sleep on, and got us some sandwiches and water and juice. They ran more tests on me and decided my blood pressure was kind of low and that I was maybe a bit dehydrated, but couldn’t find anything seriously wrong with me, other than my known health issues. It coule be a funny virus, too, they say. We got about 4 hours of sleep because they did a catscan of my lungs at about midnight, and then woke us up to check on me at 5:30. Monday they watched me and monitored me and made sure I drank a lot and put a liter of saline into me via IV. I took a little walk in the afternoon and didn’t feel lightheaded so they said I could go home YAY. Jack, Susan, and Henry picked us up at 5 and we were never so glad to get home to our own bed. Slept 12 hours last night. I still feel funny today, but at least we know it’s nothing serious. Dan stayed home from work today to take care of me, and he and Henry catered to my every whim, ran errands, and brough me food and drink.

December 2005

26 — Merry Christmas again! Henry loved his new guitar, his books, his legos, and all. Dan gave me a gig of ram for my iMac and installed it for me right away. My computer is sooo much faster now! Dan loved his slippers and his big whiteboard :) Chloe and Bob came over in the afternoon and we all hung around and had Christmas fun. Kirst and I played double solitaire, and we all sang Christmas carols, and at night we watched Santa Claus vs. The Martians and The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra until we were too tired to stay awake anymore. It was a great day!

25 — Merry Christmas, everyone! Dan and I have the house to ourselves today, and we’re waiting to open presents until Henry gets home tomorrow, so we’re having a nice quiet relaxing day. Kirsten and Marcos are going to show up tonight sometime to that will be jolly!

23 — Dan took the day off work, yay! We ran some errands with everyone else in the world and had a fine time together. Stopped at Trader Joe’s and bought a ridiculous amount of sweet treats. They’re probably last us until next Christmas :) I woke up at 5am so I took a nap in the afternoon and actually slept a bit, so I had enough energy to go see Chloe and Rockola at Humphries tonight. She saved us a table so we could all sit together, and I knitted pants for Henry, and Dan had a tasty burger, and we listened to the band and talked with Chloe. Very fun! Horrible horrible thick fog on the freeway so we had to drive really slowly there and back again, but we survived. Lots of stuff happeneing at librivox… Betsie and I are working on reformatting the catalog, big job. I got a couple of new works uploaded and cataloged today — The Happy Prince (Read by Joy) and Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (read by Rainer). Good work, volunteers!

20 — woke up at 4am, unable to go back to sleep, so i’m pretty tired. but i have a spare few minutes here while i wait for Dan and pizza to arrive for dinner and i thought i’d better try to catch up… librivox was _slammed_ over the weekend as the result of the wired.com article and a mention on heise.de. we had so many new posts and questions it started to feel overwhelming — also two or three completed projects and a new upload system at archive.org to contend with. So Hugh and I chose three organized, dedicated volunteers and made them forum admins. Betsie is my new catalog helper, too. *whew* we had a ton of new german volunteers, and luckily one of our admins is a german woman, so she’s a tremendous help. she’s even helping me fine-tune my pronunciation so i can help with some of the german-language projects! it’s amazing to be meeting so many kind and wonderful people all over the world.

fargo is here for a visit, yay! and the boys and i drove down to birdcrazy.com in san diego and chose a lovely new english budgie. he’s here now, and it’s so nice to have a little bird chirping again.

16 — Hey librivox finally made it to wired.com. If we’ve scrolled off the front page already, you can find the article here: The Web Will Read You a Story. Woohooo!!! Check out this heartwarming thank-you from a listener and his grandmother in KY: http://librivox.org/index.php?p=142. Justin, we’re so happy to know that we’re making a difference!

14 — Finally got “Drum Taps” edited and uploaded. My god. Powerful stuff.

13 — Finished my knitted pants! I’ll have to get a picture of them. They are wonderfully soft and warm.

12 — My 2-year-old Hoover “Soft and Light” (it’s neither) vacuum cleaner has recently stopped sucking (only for vacuums is this a bad thing). I’ve been researching vacuums online for the last year or so, and had decided that I at least wanted to try the Sebo “Felix” model. This morning the house looked so dirty and the thought of trying to suck up all that darn dog hair and grit with a barely-working vacuum was depressing, so Mom and I went to a local high-quality vacuum dealer and tried the Felix. We fell in love with it and bought it on the spot! Brought it home and vacuumed most of the house before I had to leave for my 6-month checkup at UCSD. Anyway the Sebo Felix is a lovely vacuum cleaner. It’s very quiet compared to my old one, and the sound it makes lacks the usual high-pitched whine, so it’s less frazzling to operate. It seems to want to pull itself along the floor, as if it can’t wait to gobble up more dirt! The top bag-and-hose section detaches with the push of a button from the wheeled base, which makes it wonderful for cleaning the stairs. I went back to the store in the evening and bought an extension wand and a dusting brush — it didn’t come with these, which seems a bit mean. But it was only $13 total for the two pieces so that’s alright really. It won’t be hurt by vacuuming pennies, legos, and computer screws either — the gunk doesn’t pass through the motor. So, yay Sebo!

My echocardiogram and doctor appointment went well. He said my echo looked about the same, and since I feel about the same (pretty good, I just get tired if I do too much) I can just keep on with my current medication and see him again in six months. So that was good.

Managed to get Aaron’s chapter of Five Children edited as best I could, so should be able to upload that whole book Real Soon Now!

11 — Recorded my last section of Leaves of Grass — “Drum Taps.” Oh my it was long. I had to split the file into two sections of 45-50 minutes EACH. Whitman is a fine poet, but he does go ON a bit sometimes. I read it cold since I couldn’t bear to read it twice, heheh. I think it turned out ok, but we’ll see tomorrow when I do the edits.

10 — Saturday. Woke up at 6, still on Dan’s crazy early schedule from last week. I put on a good old episode of Loveline (when Adam was still there, *sniff*) and tried to get back to sleep but it didn;t work so I got up at about 7:30 and started working on librivox.org stuff. I recorded the last 4 chapters of A Little Princess and edited them (time consuming process, since I listen to every file from beginning to end and make a thousand little edits for fluency and pacing), then uploaded them to archive.org which took about 3 hours, i think. Anyway, I finally got them all uploaded and catalogued here: A Little Princess. You can download the files directly if you’re too impatient to wait for the next podcast episode. And then I fielded questions and helped newbie readers figure things out. We’ve got a new teenage reader who has started reading the Wizard of Oz for us — if he sticks it out, it’s going to be a fine addition to our catalog. Also made new catalog pages for our most recent projects. In the evening volunteer Paula, who has a podcast called The Writing Show, had me and three other volunteers as guests on her show — we did a 5-way Skype conference call between me and Paula, who both live in California, Hugh in Canada, Kristen in Japan, and Chris in Australia! We lost Hugh for a few minutes once but other than that it went smoothly. Amazing. I was sooo nervous I almost felt like I was going to have a panic attack but i managed to calm down. It was fun talking to them all; i know their voices so well, and they seem like friends since we chat on the forums together so much. :) The best part was when we did some impromptu readings — I may not feel comfortable talking to people but I sure can READ to them. Anyway, Paula plans to release that episode after Christmas and you can expect a link here :)

09 — This morning we met Ronnie and his mom and little brothers at the good movie theater (The Krikorian) to see The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. It was wonderful, and i highly recommend it. If you love the books I don’t think you’ll be disappointed at all — it’s quite faithful, with only a few minor changes and a few extra chase scenes.

08 — I’m just waiting for one more volunteer to send me his chapter, and I’ll have all of Five Children and It ready to upload for librivox, yay! Tired, tired, tired.

06 — Henry enjoyed his Musical Theater class a lot today. He joined late, so the first two classes were a little bit uncomfortable for him, but now he knows what’s going on and has a script. His teacher gave him a cd to take home and practice to so we put that on in the afternoon and he rehearsed his part a little bit. Fun to watch :) And we played a couple of games of Clue when we got home from Bayshore, and then we recorded “The Frog Prince” together — Henry took the roles of The Frog and The King, and I was The Narrator and The Princess. Very fun! I hope he’ll make more recordings with me soon. Dan was at a VMWare training thing in SD all day so he got home late and I made him a steak and then we went to bed. OH, and Henry decided that he wanted short hair, VERY short hair, so I took the clippers to him and cut it like Dan’s a half-inch long all over. But he wanted it shorter so we tried 3/8″, but he wanted it shorter still so we ended at 1/4″. VERY short and fuzzy, very very cute. He then cut out a blue paper arrow and taped it to his head so he’d look like Aang. I don’t care WHAT he tapes to his head, now that his hair isn’t shaggy and sweaty and full of gel.

03 — The first day in a week and a half that my throat hasn’t hurt. Tickle-bird took a turn for the worse yesterday, was unable to climb onto her perch, and had a hard time even righting herself if she fell over. She cried a lot during the night, poor birdy, so this morning we took her to the vet for the last time. :( We miss her so much. She was the most delightful pet you can imagine. Here’s a photo of her when she was in her penny-tossing prime. Dear, dear Tickle-bird.

02 — Hey the Teaching Company is giving away two wonderful lectures on the history of Christmas: Teaching Company — Free Lectures on the History of Christmas. (broken link has been fixed, sorry about that :) I’m listening to the Victorian England one right now. Great stuff!!

Henry and I have been having fun with podomatic.com, sending each other recorded messages and such. Today he started his own podcast! You can hear it at henry.podomatic.com. I think he did a very nice job. Oh that reminds me, he asked me to submit it to the iTunes music store, so I’d better go do that.

01 — My head feels as if someone filled it with cement. Bleah. Today was Bayshore Day, so I picked up Henry at 8:30 (after stopping for bagels) and took him to Bayshore. He ran off to his science class and learned about rocks, and I had my first meeting with our educational facilitator. It went very well! I gave her the list I’d made of things we’ve done that seemed fairly “educational” (Henry reading Junie B. Jones out loud to me, our discussion of footnotes, counting change, watching Nova, etc) as well as a small pile of math pages we’ve done and a few other things. And of course he’s been taking their science and creative writing classes. Carolyn said we’d covered everything and seemed very pleased. So that’s nice! And then it was time for creative writing, so I sat next to H and he dictated a four-page story featuring him, Link, Zelda, and Ganon. Fun :) Then we went to Margaret’s so he could do some archery. Then home, and we watched two more episodes of Nova — one about Hurricane Katrina, and one about raising sunken treasures in the Alexandria harbor. Then some housework, then dinner, then off to see a little production of “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” in San Marcos — very enjoyable. Didn’t see Dan all day so it was such a treat to finally get home and be with him for a little while before bedtime!

November 2005

30 — Starting to feel a little bit better, still worn out and sniffley. The Librivox Audiobooks podcast was on the New and Notable page of the iTunes music store podcast section for a while today! Of course I forgot to get a screenshot. Oh well. Did some good housework today (my god that dog sheds a lot) so things aren’t disgusting. The piano room needs to be mopped but that will have to wait until I feel significantly better. Henry and I sat downstairs and listened to Doctor Floyd and worked on his lego millenium falcon this afternoon — very nice.

29 — We’re having email issues. If you write to me and the email bounces, please just keep trying. Thanks.

24 — Sore throat in the night, but not too bad. By morning I felt just a little sick and my throat a little tender. Rats. I planned to do a ton of reading for librivox today while the house was completely quiet, but my voice wasn’t up to it. So I played World of Warcraft for hours and hours. Now it’s 7pm and my throat is hurting a lot again. Dan brought me salt water to gargle with and is sitting on my feet to keep them warm. I just found the Kate Beckinsale version of Emma on tv, so that’s comforting and entertaining. Sigh. OMG I just saw a preview for the new P&P movie. I knew the costuming was bad (from seeing stills) but I didn’t know how really truly horrid it looks. bleah.

23 — Henry started feeling better by the afternoon, and by the evening he said he was feeling fine so Matthew came to get him as planned to spend the holiday weekend. I’m feeling horribly tired tonight so I suppose I’ll be coming down with a sore thrat soon, too. Bah.

22 — Poor Henry came down with a raging sore throat this afternoon. Fargo was supposed to stay until tomorrow night but I called his mom and she came to get him tonight instead. Poor boys.

21 — Whoops, missed a few days there. Dan and Henry and I went together to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on Friday night, and had a good time together. They both loved it; I thought it was pretty good, maybe not as good as the last one. The dialogue seemed stiff and hard to believe a lot of the time. But the special effects were top-notch, and I thought they did a good job of condensing that enormously long book into movie-length. Yes, they had to skip 75% of everything, but what do you expect? Anyway, it was worth seeing and I don’t feel like I was ripped off. I went early in the day to buy tickets for the 7pm show and stopped in at a place near the theater where you can sit and paint ceramics. I’d really love to do that sometime, but I don’t think Henry has the patience to sit quietly and paint a plate for as long as I’d want to sit there and paint a plate, so maybe I’ll go by myself sometime, or maybe Dan will go with me.

Last night Henry and I drove up to Mission Viejo to pick up Fargo (Henry’s best friend) so Fargo could spend a couple of days with us! He’s such a nice kid, and they get along very well together. They played nonstop all day and I don’t think I heard a single quarrel.

On Sunday afternoon Dan started to teach me how to use php and mysql to make myself a little database to kkeep track of my librivox.org assignments. Eventually I hope to make a web interface that will allow me to update my assignments page! I spent a lot of time yesterday and today cataloging some new completed works for librivox, and re-doing the catalog page so it makes more sense. Oh I promised aaron that I’d mention the fact that I finally convinced him to sign up to read something for librivox — he’s starting out with chapter 5 of Five Children and It. Yay aaron!

18 — Have you been following Sony BMG’s DRM exploits? The story gets better and better. Not only did they release hundreds of thousands of CDs which have the potential to jeopardize the security of, cripple, or kill innocent users’ PCs (users who were doing the honest thing, by the way, in BUYING the cds in the first place instead of downloading them p2p), and try to downplay the potential problems, but now it seems that they’ve illegally incorporated open-source code into their decidedly closed-source software. From the latest wirednews.com story:
“If open-source software is tightly integrated into a single executable program, the whole application has to become open-source software, even open-source software such as LAME whose MP3 encoder is licensed under the more relaxed Lesser General Public License, or LGPL, a lawyer said.”
So it seems that in their paranoiac copy-protection scheme, they’ve violated the open-source copy protection rules. Wow. I hope they get their butts sued off.

Amazon.com is doing the right thing, by the way, and offering a full refund to people who bought Sony’s infected CDs, opened or not. Yay Amazon!

Entertaining: frogs review websites at http://www.frogreview.com/.

17 — I picked up Henry from his dad’s house and took him to Bayshore for his science class and creative writing class. I sat in the lobby and knitted during science, but I sat with him during writing so he could dictate again. He came up with a wonderful and imaginative story and after class he told me that he thinks he really likes creative writing. Score one for Bayshore! Then we zoomed over to Margaret’s house so he could do some archery, and we ended up staying for about two hours so he could play with Margaret’s very sweet daughters. Tonight Dan was not only home but also not working so we actually got to spend some time together! YAY! So we cuddled up as close as possible on the couch to watch Survivor. Ahhhhh so entertaining. Crazy idiot Jamie got voted off, huzzah.

16 — One Laptop Per Child — amazing! Go, MIT, you rule! Make it happen! It’s an attractive little laptop, too. I love that power crank on the side.

15 — Well, now that Adam’s not doing Loveline anymore, they’ve had a succession of guest hosts. The best, I thought, was Benji Madden. He was inexperienced, but intelligent, entertaining, and not annoying. I really enjoyed his episode. He didn’t try to be Adam, he was just himself and it was very pleasant. Danny Bonaduce was second best — he’s got an annoying voice but he’s obviously intelligent and full of stories. I enjoyed his episodes also. His substance abuse might be a problem if they choose him as a permanent co-host, though… No one else is worth mentioning, except Rob Schnieder, who’s got to be THE most annoying guest host of all time. And he’s on for a whole week. He’s completely unbearable — I’ve tried to listen to his first two episodes and had to turn them off. If he ends up being the permanent co-host I guess I won’t be able to listen to Loveline. He’s loud, obnoxious, and stupid, shouting out horrible answers to the callers, constantly interrupting Dr. Drew, and trying to be Adam. No one can be Adam.

13 — Still using Internet Expolorer? You should really switch to Firefox — here are thirteen good (and very funny) reasons to switch: Kill Bill’s Browser

I made a little webpage to help me keep track of my Librivox assignments. You can look at it and be inspired to do some recordings too. And we have a new Librivox FAQ!

12 — Do you enjoy reading out loud? Do you enjoy listening to audio books? Would you like to get to know a great group of friendly, book-loving people? Librivox needs volunteers!
At LibriVox, our volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain in digital format, and we release the audio files back into the public domain (catalog and podcast). We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project. Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.

LibriVox is always looking for volunteers, to read and record chapters of books in the public domain, but also to help with other aspects of this growing project: technical (cataloging, social networking, web design, communication); graphics; publicity; coordination of volunteers etc etc… We have about 80 volunteers right now, more than 10 books finished, and we expect to have 30 done by the end of 2005. Right now all our titles are in English, but we hope to have other languages soon. Come help us out.

Info:
http://librivox.org
http://librivox.org/volunteer-for-librivox/
http://librivox.org/forum
info AT librivox DOT org

Some of our books in progress which need readers are Pride and Prejudice, Dracula, The Spy, Leaves of Grass, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Ulysses. Come sign up for a chapter — it’s lots of fun!

11 — In honour of Veterans’ Day (Remembrance Day in Canada) Hugh asked us each to record our own version of the poem “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae. You can find some of the files here.

10 — Henry’s first Bayshore Day (a weekly morning of four optional classes at Bayshore Prep, our new homeschool charter.) It went very well — he seemed to have fun and I sat in on all the classes to make sure everything was stress- and pressure-free. First there was a science class where they discussed sounds waves in relation to woodwind instruments, and the kids got to experiment by making various sounds with plastic rulers, drinking straws, and water glasses. Then there was a Creative Writing class. Henry was uneasy about his own ability to write and spell properly, although the class is about expressing ideas, not about using the right spelling and grammar, so I sat near him and he dictated to me. The class pretended they were on a desert island and had to write a letter to toss into the ocean so they’d be rescued. Henry’s letter was full of interesting ideas about electromagnetic boots and coordinates :) Then they all made a circle and tossed their letters into a pile, then each fished one out, read it, and replied. The letter Henry fished out was VERY creatively spelled, indeed, so I think that may have made him feel more at ease about doing it on his own next time. The next class was Spanish, which Henry opted to skip, and then came Art class where the kids made a little Pilgrim guy. Fun. The staff all seemed very kind and flexible. Henry said I could drop him off next week, so I guess he felt comfortable too! If he continues to enjoy the classes, he’ll have a nice morning of intellectual stimulation and the companionship of other kids and pleasant grownups to look forward to once a week. He’s in a group of about 15 or 20 other 3rd to 5th grade homeschool kids.

09 — Whipped up some more buttons at Hugh’s request: one for archive.org and one for openlibrary.org Feel free to copy them to your own server and use them if you like. Colorzilla came in very handy for matching website and button colors! I’ve been working on improving librivox’s catalog pages, but haven’t had time to do any recording since the weekend, argh.

07 — Busy day. Started at 7:45, got up, put away the clean dishes, made Dan’s breakfast, got Henry up, made his breakfast, went to doctor appointment (he says it’s strange that I still fluctuate between hyper- and hypo-thyroid), went to water store, bought 23 gallons of water (filled two 5-gallon bottles, four 3-gallon bottles, and a 1-gallon bottle), went home, Henry helped me unload the water, went back out, got medications, groceries from Stater Brothers and Trader Joes, stopped by the Sprint store to pay the bill (our balance was unusually high because of Dan’s early termination fee or whatever and I didn’t want to get cut off), got the mail, went back home, Henry unloaded to car for me, put groceries away. By then it was after 1, so I made us a good lunch of avocado sandwiches on this nice Italian bread, yum! Then got caught up on email and did a little bit of work on the Librivox catalog and chatted with Henry and looked at Harry Potter trailers on the internet with him. Then piano students til 5, then housework, then dinner, then cleaning up dinner, then bedtime story for Henry (Paddington, the chapter about Guy Fawkes day), then Dan took some photos of me for the guy from wirednews.com to possibly use in the story about Librivox, for which I was interviewed, along with some other readers! And now it’s 10:30 and time for Henry’s One More Kiss and then bed. Whew. I didn’t have time to make any recordings for librivox today — maybe tomorrow.

05 — Recorded my last two chapters of “The Spy” today, and got them all edited and uploaded, yay me! Also played Monopoly with Henry, did a puzzle with him, watched part of “Gigantic” with him, and read him a chapter of “Paddington” for bedtime. Dan’s playing his guitar right now and I’m going to play a little WoW before bed.

04 — Whoa. Here’s something fun! You know those nifty little 80×15 chicklet buttons that everyone has on his blog nowadays? Alex mentioned this great button maker site. Of course you could whip up buttons in your favorite graphics program, but this is fun-n-easy (mostly). I made a button for project gutenberg: This pleases me because I’ve been planning a slight redesign around here which would include a spot for those little buttons. If you want to use my gutenberg button on your own site, feel free but please copy it to your own server first.

03 — Henry was playing an online Star Wars game, and he asked if he should be Obi-Wan, Luke, Yoda, or Mace. I suggested Luke, and he said Ok. I said “But now you have to whine!” and he said, “But Uncle Owen, I wanted to go to Tashi Station and pick up some power converters!” I laughed, and said in my best Napoleon Dynamite voice, “GOSH” and Henry said “DANG.” Delightful boy :)

Tonight is Adam Carolla’s last episode of Loveline. He’s leaving to take over Howard Stern’s morning show, or something… It’s really hard to imagine Loveline without Adam. He was there when I discovered Loveline 7 or 8 years ago, he was there when Chloe and I used to listen together, he was there when I introduced Dan to Loveline and got him hooked. Adam, if you (or Lynette) are reading this, know that you’ll be missed very much. Best of luck in all your new projects! If you’re a listener who missed Adam’s last show, you can download it from http://ehansen.us/Loveline/ — just hit the “Adam Carolla Era” link, then the November 2005 link. And, hey Drew, we love you too, keep up the good work!

02 — Tired, depressed, and weepy for no reason, stupid hormones. Henry and I went to the Vista park day and had a great time. They do archery there at 4pm, and since my student called to reschedule we were able to stay late enough for Henry to shoot a bow for half an hour! He was so happy! And then we raced back home so Matthew could take him to karate. Traffic was hellish and we were pretty late but I think he made it to class on time. Recorded my chapter of Dracula tonight, will edit tomorrow. Excellent book. It’s funny how some 19th century authors are so easy to read (stoker) and some are so difficult (cooper). I don’t mean the subject matter, I mean the actual words and sentences. Stoker flows off the tongue in an easy and logical way, despite a few half-page sentences, but, for me at least, reading Cooper aloud is difficult. I keep bumping into commas and hurting myself. Dan came home early tonight, yay! He tinkered with his guitar while I recorded Dracula, very pleasant.

01 — Slept badly last night, my back hurt and I was very crampy yuck. The weather changed again and now it’s HOT and dry every day. Henry and I went out first thing so he could buy the new Star Wars DVD (Revenge of the Sith) and then while he watched I cleaned up and did various things and also watched with him for a while and worked on my new socks (which are toe-up). And then I did some grocery shopping, and then we went to the playground for a picnic, and stopped by the library too. I started reading “The Spy” by James Fenimore Cooper, since I have a few chapters of it to read for Librivox and it seems like the kind of thing I shouldn’t try to read cold, heh. It’s really good so far — i’m just going to read up to and through my part and then stop, so I can enjoy the completed audiobook.

October 2005

31 — Halloween! The Kenyons invited Henry to go Trick-or-Treating with them, since they live in a good trick-or-treating neighborhood and we live in a crummy one. Henry had a great time!

30 — Henry and I went to the Halloween festivities at Legoland today. He entered the Costume contest with a couple hundred other kids. We saw a lot of nifty and creative costumes and had fun admiring them. Tired. Recorded my section of A Christmas Carol tonight.. man that was long but very fun to read. Will edit out the coughing tomorrow.

29 — Henry and Sal went out on a tall sailing ship today and had a great time! I dropped them off at the harbor and took lots of pictures which are still in my camera, of course. Maybe tomorrow I’ll sort through them and upload them and the Zero Costume photos! Maybe. Anyway, I watched them haul up the sails and start out to sea, and then I went home to work on an organizing job for Librivox, fixing up all the Secret Agent files which was rather complex and took a long time. Here’s what I did: downloaded all the files from their various homes all over the internet. Pasted together the one chapter that was in three parts. Checked all files for bitrate info, then re-encoded them all to be at 128kbps for the happiness of archive.org. Then fixed all the id3 tags. Then uploaded them to archive.org, which took hours and hours. And now I wait while the archive curator checks them, and then I fix up the librivox catalog page to reflect the new location. It might sounds boring but I really enjoy doing that kind of thing.

27 — Check this out: http://librivox.org/2005/10/27/report-on-open-library-launch/. How’s that for cool? It’s so much fun being involved with librivox… if only I were getting paid, it’d be my dream job, heh, but luckily I have the luxury of being able to give my time away. Today I recorded the first chapter of my next kids’ lit solo project (I’ll announce the title later), rewrote the “how to listen” page on the librivox site, and worked on cataloging “Old Christmas”. That should be up on on archive.org tomorrow sometime, and then I can fix up the catalog page.

Henry’s dojo halloween party was last night. He had a great time, and won a prize (a bionicle) for Most Original Costume! I took lots of photos yesterday also but haven’t uploaded them yet. Soon.

26 — Yesterday was the Big Event that kicked off the Open Library project. Hugh (founder of Librivox) attended, and Librivox provided the audio files for An International Episode. Click the “listen” button, and you’ll hear Alex, Neal, Gord, Paula, Chris and me reading! We got a mention on boingboing, too :) If you just want to listen to the story you can download the files through our catalog page.

24 — Henry and I did some grocery shopping this morning, and other errands, and then came home and worked on his Zero costume for hours. Wait til you see it! It’s quite amazing, if I do say so myself. Photos soon. He is very very happy and ran around striking Zero poses all day :)

22 — Finally got annoyed by the faint but noticable squeak that my mic picks up during the gaps between speech, and tried everything I could possible think of to get rid of it. Dan and I finally came to the conclusion that it’s a faulty design. Sigh. It looks so cool, darn it :) So we bought another USB mic (after a long and frustrating misadventure involving Guitar Center and a line-in style mic). My new mic works extremely well, no background squeak or hum or anything. It’s the Logitech USB mic, $30 at Best Buy. If you’re looking for a USB mic, I suggest Logitech.

21 — Henry and I had a fun morning at Legoland today! He built a motorized kit (you can check them out and then return them when you’re done) and did the Mindstorms robotic thing, while I listened to Loveline on my iPod :) And then we rode the best rollercoaster together, and he did the driving school, and we walked through the factory thing. And he used some of his birthday money to buy some Bionicle armor and a weapon and a mask :) Lego makes good-quality costume stuff, very nice, sturdy and not too expensive. But he still wants to be Zero for Halloween — I forgot to mention that we bought all the cloth and stuff we need for his Zero costume a few days ago and have been working on it every day. I built a helmet already, and have most of the shirt done. We still need to add arm-stuff to the shirt and work on the pants, and make his Blaster Arm. He’s very very happy with what we’ve done so far!

Apple finally fixed my broken podcast image. I found a form to fill in at the bottom of this page, and although I haven’t heard anything back from them, my image was fixed two days after I submitted the form. Thanks, Apple! So if you have a broken podcast image (that broken chain-looking thing) you might try filling in that form. (I’m getting a lot of hits on this blog from people looking for help with this issue, so I hope this link will help some of you)

20 — O Halelujia, I finally found a tool-bar add-on for World of Warcraft that actually works. Both InsomniaxBibToolbars and Discord stopped working after the last patch, grr. So I went hunting for an alternative today, and found the wonderful Flexbar! here’s a link: http://savagevines.com/flexbar/. It takes a little while to set up but boy, it’s nice to have extra buttons that actually work. I wanted to email the developer and thank him but I couldn’t find an email address anywhere. I guess I’ll register on the forum to say “thanks” one of these day.

17 — Nice rainy day. Henry and I both felt really happy and cheerful all day, and we think it’s because of the lovely rain. He helped me with the Monday housework, and then we worked on packing up some of his older, unplayed-with toys and books. We aren’t done with his room yet but it’s a bit better, and we have a HUGE pile of his stuff to store away for now. We went out to the store in the pouring rain, and he suggested we wear our cloaks so we did and got a lot of friendly comments :) I also helped him work on his blog profile — he’s a got a photo and a sound clip up, so you might want to check that out. No new posts yet though :) I uploaded my Road to Oz recordings to archive.org, which is where librivox stores their sound files. The curators still have to approve it, but it should be live in a day or so. Pretty neat! Librivox has several completed books waiting for approval on archive.org. Go us!

16 — Looking at the apple support forums, I see that I’m not the only one with missing podcast images. Today, to my surprise, the OLD librivox podcast showed up with the new image… I guess a) Hugh hasn’t taken it down yet and b) he figured out how to make the feedburner file point to the image I made. Yay Hugh :) I guess I’ll just keep waiting and see if apple ever fixes whatever problem they’re having… Must stop obsessing, MUST stop obsessing…

15 — Why does the iTunes Music Store Podcast Search Thing suck so much? I made a new xml file for librivox, one that i can update manually to show all the book podcasts forever. They had been using a feedburner one which drops older podcasts off the bottom so it’s harder for new subscribers to find old episodes. Anyway, made my file and submitted it to the iTMS. Next day it showed up when searched for, yay, but with a broken image link. I noticed that the _old_ librivox podcast also had a broken image link, as well as several other podcasts among the top 100. I’ve never seen that particular problem before. I’m not talking about the default purple “you didn’t submit an image” icon, but the new one which looks like a broken chain. The old librivox podcast used to have the purple one — now it has the chain, and I didn’t even TOUCH that file. My xml validates perfectly. The image is sitting in its proper home on my server. My Kara’s Audiobooks podcast uses the same code and its image shows up perfectly (knock on wood). Hello apple, what the heck are you doing? Also, it seems that podcast subcategories went away. Also, when you’re at the purple podcast page and you hit one of the “categories” links, it takes you AWAY from the podcasts and into the music store, and you have to scroll down the list to hit “podcasts” again. What kind of logic is that? Apple, please stop sucking.

Dan and I had the house to ourselves today. It was soooo nice and quiet :) I did a ton of recording on my iMac (instead of using my iBook in the closet to avoid noise) and was able to FINISH recording, editing, encoding, id3ing, and uploading The Road to Oz! Woohoo! Way ahead of schedule. Also did my Treasure Island assignment. Huzzah! I sure do enjoy making audiobooks, I do.

Last night I was fishing around on the tv in our room, as there was nothing in the tivo I wanted to watch, and bumped into Monty Python’s Flying Circus on BBC America, or whatever it’s called. When Python was over, these two men in odd green jackets appeared and introdiced a show called “The Mighty Boosh”. They were odd and funny and appealing so I left it on and was hooked. Dan stopped doing whatever he was doing and watched too. We watched two episodes, one with Mod Wolves in it (but Vince was King of the Mods so the wolves gave them a lift on their scooters), and another in which Vince told a story about Charlie, a creature made of bubblegum. We are in love with The Mighty Boosh. Highly highly recommended if you want to watch a peculiar and very funny show that’s truly unique!

14 — Got my hair cut short today. Thought about it for three months and finally decided today. It was a harrowing experience. I think the result is ok though, and Dan says it’s adorable AND beautiful :)

13 — I took this little movie of Henry playing along with “Money” on his bass in September, but I had my camera set to high quality and the resulting file was ridiculously huge. It took me until now to figure out how to make it smaller, heh. I wasn’t as simple as opening it in Quicktime or iMovie and exporting it to a smaller format, which is what seems reasonable — everytime I tried that, I got video but no audio, arghhh. This morning I spent an hour researching the problem and trying various solutions. Apparently the movies my little camera takes are “muxed” which somehow separates the audio and video and confuses the heck out of Quicktime or whatever. The final (and easiest) solution was to open the .mpg file in Toast, on the Video tab, then select it and “export” to .dv format. Then, finally, I was able to open the .dv file in quicktime and export to a much smaller file size. Jeebus, I had to hunt all over the internet for help with this. Click the picture!

12 — Oooooooo my podcast showed up in the iTunes Music Store Podcast Directory Thingy. Do a search on any combination of these keywords — kids books children’s audiobooks kara shallenberg oz baum — and my podcast should turn up :) pretty cool, eh? Or you can just click my iTunes 1-click icon on the podcast page.

11 — Alex linked to a neat personality quiz. Here are my results:

Big Five Test Results
Extroversion (16%) very low which suggests you are extremely reclusive, quiet, unassertive, and private.
Accommodation (60%) moderately high which suggests you are, at times, overly kind natured, trusting, and helpful at the expense of your own individual development (martyr complex).
Orderliness (70%) high which suggests you are overly organized, neat, structured and restrained at the expense too often of flexibility, variety, spontaneity, and fun.
Emotional Stability (38%) moderately low which suggests you are worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious.
Inquisitiveness (54%) medium which suggests you are moderately intellectual, curious, and imaginative.
Take Free Big Five Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

I think it’s far too exaggerated, but if you kind of tone it all down it does sound like me, I guess. What do you think?

I’ve been listening to Alex’s fabulous solo recording of “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” lately. He’s got 7 chapters done already. Go Alex!

10 — We were looking forward to more Foyle’s War last night… but I guess it’s over. BAH. Only four episodes? Well every episode was 1.5 hours and very very good, so I guess that’s fair. Better that than 12 half-hour episodes of crapolla. Well, we’ll be looking forward to the next season! We were really in the mood to watch some tv together tonight, so we put on Dr. Drew’s show, Strictly Sex. Pretty good, not as entertaining as loveline (nothing could be) but still enjoyable and informative. It’s on one of the Discovery channels in the middle of the night, in case you were wondering.

Housework today, and some errands with Henry — we went to the fabric store to look at possible patterns for Halloween costumes. Henry decided, after looking for a while, that he wants to be something mroe creative for Halloween, so we’re thinking of a Zero costume, similar to the Megaman one I made last year. But as long as we were looking at patterns anyway, and they were on sale, we picked up the adult-size Jedi — they were out of the children’s size but I can scale it down easily enough — and a child and adult-sized Matrix-style coat, just for fun. Henry loves to wear costumes and I love to sew, isn’t that nice? :)

09 — Ok, I guess I don’t actually _hate_ the Oz book I’m reading for my podcast. I read three chapters today and kind of enjoyed it, really. Sally was upstairs giving piano lessons and Dan was playing GTA:SA in our room (using his headphones, but still making clicky joystick noises), so I took my laptop into the closet and did my recordings in there. The recordings turned out well, with even less background noise than usual. And I enjoyed sitting in the closet :) Between takes and while editing my files I turned the AC on for Dan, and it didn’t even freeze me too badly, although a little bit of icy air leaked in through the door. Hehehe. I installed ipodder, a podcast catching program, just to make sure it liked my xml file as much as iTunes does, and it worked just fine. Very good, yay me!

08 — I’ve set up my free children’s audiobook podcast! Hit the “audiobooks” link at the top of the page, and feel free to subscribe :) I’m quite proud of myself for figuring out the xml business. I submitted my podcast to iTunes so I hope to be able to have a one-click subscription button once I get accepted. I’ll be sure to mention it here!

Recorded two more chapters of Oz this morning before Dan woke up and then made him a big jolly breakfast, his standard weekend favorite of sausage, eggs, cinnamon toast, and orange juice. Then I worked on my podcast setup for a while, and then we went out and did some errands — guitar strings, returning a video card, bolts, and more juice etc at Trader Joe’s. We bought a loaf of French bread and a thing of herbed goat cheese and some tomatoes, and had that for lunch/dinner while watched The Office. Speaking of offices, Dan told me today that he loves his job. That made me so happy!

07 — Recorded my chapter of “Five Children and It” today. It was an absolute joy to read! If you’d like to hear it, go here: fivechildren and download the mp3 for yourself. Librivox volunteers are working on the rest of the book right now (I hope) so I’ll keep you posted on our progress.

06 — This morning Henry was at his dad’s house, John and Dan were at work, and Sally was out, so I had the house all to myself for a few hours and it was quiet! Actually quiet! Amazing. Recorded two more chapters of “The Road to Oz.” I’m beginning to hate it. I loved the Oz books when I was a kid but now they’re too syrupy, wayyyyyyy too cutsie-cute. But I’ve got five chapters done so I suppose I’ll keep slogging through. Will probably set up a podcast of it this weekend, in case anyone out there is in the mood for something sweet, heh. The next book I solo will be something I’ve read recently, something that can be enjoyed by 8-yr-olds and 36-yr-olds alike.

I made another apple pie tonight. Here’s my recipe: buy a ready-to-bake crust from Trader Joe’s. I used to make my own but it’s so much easier to just buy one, and that means I make more pies! Put one of the crusts in your pie pan. Peel and chop 6 or 7 granny smith apples. Mix one cup sugar, two heaping teaspoons cinnamon, three heaping tablespoons of flour, and a dash of salt. Coat the apples with the sugar stuff, dump into the pie pan, cover with the other crust, trim edges, press edges together, bake at 425 degrees fahrenheit for 15 minutes, then cover edges with tinfoil and bake another hour at 350. Let it cool for about an hour before you try to cut it. We like it drizzled with significant amounts of heavy cream. YUM.

04 — Ran many errands. Took Henry to breakfast at Einstein Brothers (they have pumpkin bagels and pumpkin cream cheese again YAY!), and then went to Circuit City for a game controller for Dan, then over to the lab for my bloodwork, then to Starter Brothers for groceries. It was noon by then so we went home and will do the Trader Joe’s shopping trip tomorrow maybe. Still coughing and sneezing but it’ll surely be over soon. This house was _unbelievably_ noisy today but I still managed to get a little bit of recording done by hiding in my room and plugging my mic into my laptop. The elephants went stamping around overhead but the recording turned out ok. Henry invited me to play his Star Wars game with him and it was pretty fun! It’s sort of Unreal Tournament style, the screen splits and we drive Star Wars vehicles around and shoot at each other :) Very entertaining. We seem to be equally matched, too.

03 — Happy birthday Kathy!

Did a lot of stuff today… errands in the morning — bank, water store, videogame place, where Henry rented a Star Wars game. Went home, vacuumed the whole house while Henry emptied the wastebaskets. Helpful boy. Did more miscellaneous housework, recorded some more “Oz”, and volunteered to be “team leader” for the librivox recording of “Five Children and It”. Go here to volunteer to read a chapter or two! I know a lot of other things happened today but I’m tired and I can’t remember them now. Oh well.

02 — Recorded another chapter of “The Road to Oz” today. I had to record it twice — the first time I picked up a horrible hum from somewhere. It took me about half an hour of troubleshooting to figure out where it was coming from… Sound Studio decided to forget about my USB mic and use the built-in mic instead! I’ve just volunteered to read a few of the Just-So stories too. Really excited about that! Watched two more episodes of “The Office” with Dan tonight. “Free love on the free-love freeway…”

01 — Congratulations pthree and ern! Hope your wedding day was lovely :)

The scenery changed in Animal Crossing — the ground has an Autumnal look to it now. And I caught a ladybug! We went to Fry’s today to get new bits for Dan’s desktop… tiring. Watched the first two episodes of “The Office” tonight. What a show… so entertaining and yet so difficult to watch. I think it’s even better the second time through.

September 2005

30 — I feel a lot more human today, but if I talk I start coughing. Ugh! Last night I made a very good dinner, a Shepherd’s Pie. I modified a recipe that saw online. Here’s how I made mine:

Kayray-style Shepherd’s Pie:
Chop up a handful of green beans, a handful of baby carrots, and an onion. Cook them all together with a pound of ground turkey until the veggies are tender and the turkey is all cooked. I covered the pan so the veggies would cook in their own juice, since the turkey was pretty much fat-free. Stir in some chopped fresh basil and a 15-oz can of tomato sauce. Salt and pepper to taste. Cook uncovered for a while to let some of the juice evaporate so it’s not too wet. MEANWHILE, boil a few potatoes. If they’re large, chunk them. I used three unpeeled russetts. When the potatoes are tender, drain and mash them with some butter, some cream, a shake or two of garlic powder, a few spoonfuls of parmesan cheese, some oregano, and a bit of salt and pepper. MMMMMMMM. Ok now spoon the meat/veggies into a greased baking dish, then spread the potatoes over the top. Bake at 375 degrees (Fahrenheit) for about 30 minutes. There was enough for three hungry people plus a leftover serving for Dan’s lunch tomorrow. All three of us liked this dinner — astonishing :)

29 — The summer weather finally arrived, after a cold July, August, and September. Suddenly it’s hot and very, very dry, which is not helping my cold. I felt pretty awful all day, and since Henry spent the day with his dad, I spent the day lying in bed listening to Loveline until it was time to teach my piano students. Then Henry came home and I watched him and his turtle swim in the pool :) There are few sights cuter than that. Crush is a fast swimmer and really seems to enjoy touring around the pool. My MacMice MicFlex USB Microphone arrived today, so I’m eager for this stupid cold to clear up so I can record some more public domain audiobooks. My Smartwrap cable managers came too, so now my earbuds aren’t all tangley. I highly recommend powermax.com if you need to buy anything Mac-related!!

28 — Still sick, my cold has landed in my head and chest. Yuck.

27 — Happy birthday, dear Henry! We had a great day. Dan woke us up early so Henry could open his presents before Dan went to work, and then Henry built one of his new Lego models while I rested a little more. Then we got up and I helped him connect his new iPod to his computer, and showed him how to manage his playlists and podcasts and stuff. Gerry came over and gave Henry a turtle in a tank, and set her up for him and everything! She’s a nice turtle, named Crush. Then Henry went off to spend the day with Matthew and I did house stuff and played a bit of WoW on my new computer, and recorded the last part of my librivox assignment, and then did the encoding and catting and uploading etc. And then I realized that Strangelove didn’t have lame, and didn’t have fink, etc, so Rob helped me install all that goood linuxy stuff, mmmm linux! Also submitted a photo for the TFTF “Motion” assignment. Still mildly sick. Dan had to work very very late tonight but I managed to stay awake til he got home :)

25 — Still sick. Dan and I worked on installing all the software I need. Time consuming. But Strangelove is all set up now, with all my favorite software — and it can even run World of Warcraft! So for the first time ever I can play on my very own computer, without asking the guys if I can use one of theirs :)

24 — Still somewhat sick ugh. Henry went to Daneesha’s birthday party at the bowling alley and got to play with the girls at their house afterwards. I worked on getting Strangelove (windows/linux desktop box) set up, software updates etc. Haven’t used it since we moved here in April, but finally got Dan to carry the old monitor upstairs for me. But then, while I was beating iTunes into submission… it went into a rebooting cycle. In the past it would sometimes spontaneously reboot but this time it just kept rebooting over and over. Dan tried to fix it but it was no use. Poor Strangelove.

But then Dan said we had to go to Fry’s :) And when we got there he bought me a lovely new 17″ iMac! I am so happy! It’s just the most beautiful computer. We named it Strangelove… I know that’s a little odd, but I’m just so used to that name for my desktop computer. So from now on when I refer to Strangelove, it means a lovely iMac, not a rickety old windows/ linux box :)

23 — Sore throat a lot better, still sick, ugh.

22 — Last night around bedtime I came down with a horrible sore throat, absolutely dreadful. Hurt badly all night, ugh, still bad this morning. Dan cancelled my piano students for me, and Mom is picking up the housework slack. Everyone is sweet to me. Mom and Henry went horseback riding this morning so all I have to do is lie here and rest.

21 — I learned how to take several small .mp3 files and make them into one larger one. Dan was right — cat did the job. I made three small test files — test1.mp3, test2.mp3, and test3.mp3. Each one just has me saying “test 1” e.g. Then I did this command: “cat test* > test123.mp3” and the result was a new file, test123.mp3, which, when played, has me saying “test1 test2 test3”. Yay, I love learning new things! Now I can record Psmith’s adventures in much smaller segments and not worry about straining my iBook :) Chapters 7 and 8 are complete!

Henry and I walked to the pharmacy this morning to pick up my synthroid. Very nice walk. The weather changed a few days ago, and we have that nice Fall feeling in the air. Not sure if it’s a smell, or a change in humidity, or the angle of the sun, or what, but whatever it is, it’s lovely. Oh, we watched “It Happened One Night” together, too. Great movie! And we went to the library. Henry got a stack of books about paper airplanes, and I got Part 1 of “The History of English” on cd. YAY!

20 — Massive thunderstorm last night! An incredible crack of thunder woke me at about midnight; Dan was still reading and I asked him what that sound was — didn’t recognize it as thunder right away. It sounded like the storm was directly over our house! Thunderstorms are rare here; there might be one every couple of years, way off in the distance over the mountains, so it was exciting to have one so close that it rattled our house! I got up to check on Henry (sound asleep) and close windows. Went outside to see if I could see an actual lightning but it was raining so I came back in. The lighting flashes were so bright that they lit up our bedroom through the curtains! I went back to sleep but the thunder woke me up several more times before morning, and the power flickered a few times too. Once it was off long enough for the UPS to beep, but it always came back. Yay for SDG&E!

I’ve been working slowly on my librivox recordings. It’s rare for this house to be quiet enough for interruption-free recording, what with piano lessons, electric bass, loud music, people stamping across the floor above my room, doors banging, etc, but I got a chapter done on the weekend when no one was home, and another chunk done last night. I’m recording into Sound Studio and then will convert to mp3 with lame. My poor little iBook is having trouble dealing with the very large .aiff file that Sound Studio puts out… it takes 30 seconds to save the file and it’s less than half done… I’d like to record in smaller separate .aiffs, convert, and the glue the resulting mp3s together but I’m not sure how. Dan says either cat or dd might work, so I’ll experiment with those tomorrow.

19 — The weather has changed; it’s got that autumnal feel now. I love it. The change is extremely subtle and I wonder if people who’ve moved here from places where that have actual WEATHER can notice the difference. H and I went to legoland for a few hours this morning. Nice and empty there, rode the best rollercoaster (Technic Test Track) over and over. I tried out the Knights’ Tournament ride, which Henry loves, but did not care for it. It was merely uncomfortable, not fun at all. Then home, did housework, played with Henry, taught piano students, drove H to the gym to play racquetball with Dan after work, home, burritos for dinner, bedtime. The new season of Arrested Development began tonight — it did not disappoint :)

18 — Sunday, movie day! Dan and I watched the new Final Fantasy movie on his laptop — better than the first FF movie, truly amazing animation, light on plot, heavy on crazy fight scenes. Entertaining. They sure do know how to animate hair and alienated young men. Loved the scene where all the characters launched Cloud higher and higher toward the big bad boss monster. Physics, be damned! Then Dan played GTA while I watched The Snake Pit (1948, Olivia De Havilland). Amazing movie. I saw it years ago and remembered it as being extremely good — I was right, it is :) Highly recommended. And then Henry came home and brought Prizoner of Azkaban with him so we watched that! Not as good as I remembered, but it had some moments.

17 — I sort of wanted a USB microphone so that my librivox audiobooks would sound clear and not have any extra noise, but they’re hard to find. Fry’s was out, Best Buy was out, and I wanted to start recording TODAY, so I just got down on the floor, put my laptop on the coffee table, and spoke as near the built-in mic as I could. I did the first of my Psmith chapters and it turned out well! I’m trying VERY hard to speak slowly and clearly. It’s really thrilling to be part of this project! I’ll let you know when my chapters are podcast :)

16 — Feeling a bit better, yay! Henry and I went to the library this morning and I discovered that our branch has several of the “The Teaching Company” lecture series on cd!!! I got part 2 of “The History of English” and asked them to let me know when part 1 is returned. Maybe there’s a part 3 to look forward to, I’m not sure. Anyway we put the first disk and listened while we drove to Encinitas for yarn (decided to make Henry a Harry Potter scarf). It’s a wonderful! So extremely interesting. We did the grocery shopping and then when we got home Henry played with Eric and I finished lining Sal’s curtains (while listening to The History of English of course!).

I started Henry’s scarf this afternoon while listing to more English. I’m using the guidelines at knit.atypically.net, using a Gryffindor color scheme. It’s going very fast so far, despite being a tube. It’s really nice to have a knitting project again!

15 — There has been a peculiar smell in our bedroom for the last few days, a foul smell that seemed to come and go. Last night we thought it might be a garbage smell drifting in through the window, but even after the garbage was moved it was still noticable. Tonight we decided something must have died in our room, and Dan got ambitious and started moving furniture around to see if he could find it. Moved the bed, nothing. Moved the dresser, nothing. Yet the stench seemed strongest in that part of the room. So we sniffed at the power outlet and discovered that whatever died, died in the wall. ICK. The smell was so bad and so strong I felt ill. Dan unplugged everything from that outlet and covered it thoroughly with packing tape to block the stench. The smell is gone, yay! I hope it won’t drift through the wall and emerge at some other outlet, but it hasn’t so far. We had so much fun tracking down the smell — we were laughing and goofing around and having a fine time! Who would think that tracking down a foul odor could be so much fun? :)

14 — Still feeling tired and yucky, mostly lay on the sofa and hung out with Henry today. He played Pokemon Colusseum quite a lot, but I made sure we did some educational stuff too (not that Pokemon Colusseum isn’t educational…) We listened to some good podcasts together (mugglecast and doctor floyd) and I showed him how to download and install new casts on my ipod, a skill that might come in handy for him sometime. We read quietly together for a while. We also went out in the backyard so he could practice making numerals with sidewalk chalk. We started doing that yesterday, since I’d noticed he’s still having a little trouble making nice, uniform numerals on paper when we do math and I thought maybe making LARGE ones with chalk might help. I already see an improvement! I also read him the last two chapters of Prince Caspian while he played with his Legos and put on various costumes :)

13 — I’ve been hunting for interesting podcasts over the last few weeks and have found quite a few. Here’s a list of the good ones:

tips from the top floor — digital photography tips and tricks, and LOT more
a good read — pleasant book reviews
librivox — collaborative, public-domain ebooks — volunteer readers needed!
mugglecast — discussion of Harry Potter books and movies. Henry loves this one :)
NPR books — “NPR book reviews, news and author interviews — for people who love to read.”
NPR movies — “NPR reports, interviews and reviews about the movies — and the people who make them.”
science friday — science friday with Ira Flatow!
the radio adventures of doctor floyd — extremely funny, entertaining, and educational!
the secrets of harry potter — Fr. Roderick explores themes and symbols in the books of J.K. Rowling. Henry and I love this one. Father Roderick seems so nice, and his analyses are thoughtful and interesting.
the star wars chronicles — more Father Roderick, this time talking about Star Wars :) Excellent!

12 — Discovered LibriVox — a project for making collaborative audiobooks from public-domain texts. The first book was “The Secret Agent” (first 5 chapters are on my ipod right now) and they’re now taking volunteers to read something by Dostoyevsky and “Psmith in the City” by P.G. Wodehouse! I volunteered for Wodehouse, of course. Very exciting project!

Felt tired and yucky all day — PMS probably. Henry and I went out to buy water and use our September “free vidogame rental” coupon to rent Pokemon Colusseum, which he then played all day. Apparently it’s a very fun game :) And I listened to loveline on my iPod while cleaning the house. And Dan came home a little bit early!

11 — Dan and I went out to do a little birthday shoppping for a wonderful boy :) I’ll say no more in case a wonderful boy is reading this!

10 — We had Henry’s birthday party today! It went really well, and I think everyone had a nice time. Fargo came early — about 10, and Matthew brought Henry over (he had spent the night at Matthew’s) so the boys could play all day. The rest of the guests (Nathan, Laura, Cassidy, Cierra, and Daneesha) arrived around 3:00 and everyone jumped in the pool and swam. I didn’t think it was warm enough but I guess it was warm enough for kids! Heh. Matthew and Dan helped keep an eye on everyone and no one drowned. When swimming was over, the kids broke up into groups doing stuff… Daneesha and the boys and I watched each other playing video games, Henry worked on one of his new Bionicles, and the rest of the kids circulated for a while and then went back in the pool. And then everyone got hungry so Dan went out and got the pizza and we all ate, and then we did the pinata (YU-GI-OH, filled with Legos and candy) and the cake (cheesecake, with really great striped candles that Matthew brought). And then at 6:00 most of the kids got picked up but Fargo stayed til 7, and then Matthew and Henry went home. And then I went to bed, totally exhausted. Very successful day :)

09 — Bought a plain white t-shirt and some iron-on letters and made a “VOTE FOR PEDRO” for Henry, so he has something to open from us tomorrow. It turned out awesome! We’ll give him the rest of his presents on his actual birthday.

08 — Looks like paperclip is ok — pthree heard from a former gf of his who’d tracked him down to Oklahoma. *whew* Paperclip, let us know if you need anything!

Called the dr about Henry’s eye (kinda puffy and discolored, along with slight cold symptoms) and she said not to worry about it unless it gets dramatically red or he runs a fever. The swelling is down today, and his cold seems almost better, so his party should go as planned on Saturday! We did grocery shopping today and I sewed Henry a purple velour shirt to match his pants and shorts. He suddenly decided to learn Napoleon Dynamite’s dance and, after dinner, used google to track down a clip of Napoleon’s dance and worked on imitating him for a couple of hours before bed. Tomorrow he plans to dance along with the DVD :) I love his singleminded determination!

06 — Happy birthday Chloe :)

05 — Does anyone know if Joseph Vitosky, aka paperclip, is ok? Paperclip, where are you? irc.oftc.net #palmchat is worried. Joseph is a resident of New Orleans and the owner of Mary Jane’s Emporium, 1229 Decatur St. New Orleans LA 70116. Please contact me if you have any information about him or his family. Thanks.

04 — Please, everyone, donate to The Red Cross. Help the people of the Gulf Coast. Reading about all the other nations who are sending money, supplies, and manpower chokes me up. Thank you everyone, all over the world.

I’ve discovered a podcast which I really love. It’s Chris Marquardt’s “Tips From The Top Floor” — tips and tricks for the digital photographer. I’ve listened to all the more recent episodes (available through iTunes) and plan to download all the back episodes soon, too. I’ve learned a lot already!

03 — Dan and I had a nice quiet day in our comfortable, safe house. God we’re lucky. We watched a little tv, played some videogames, played music, did yard work, washed my car, ate pizza…

02 — Happy birthday, Ken :)

Henry and I did charitable good deeds today — assembled and shipped three hurricane survival kits and bought and delivered a big bag of groceries for a local homeschool family that has fallen on hard times. Had a good time together :) Dan bought home new strings for my banjo tonight and changed them for me and cleaned my fretboard. My banjo sounds and feels a lot better now. Everyone else is gone for three days — we have the house all to ourselves!

01 — Hurricane Katrina hit the southeast a day or two ago. The situation is horrific beyond belief. Today a friend gave me an url with instructions on how to make small relief kits so tomorrow Henry and I will create a few and send them on. And of course we’re donating to The Red Cross. I wish there was something more we could do. The scale of the disaster is too immense even to comprehend.

We’re planning Henry’s birthday party and he had a brilliant idea for his pinata — he suggested we fill it with Legos! Then the kids can have fun building with the Legos they pick up, and can take them home as party favors. Dan donated his old tub of Legos, so all we need is a pinata. I think we’ll throw a little candy in too, just in case.

I woke up at 4:30am today for no appparent reason and felt like crapola all day. We took Tickle-Bird to the vet in the morning, since she’s stilll no better. He x-rayed her and says her abdomen is enlarged in a way which suggests liver disease, so we’re to keep on giving her the liver-support powder and try to wean her onto a pellet-based, rather than seed-based, diet.

August 2005

29 — Lots of housework and piano students but also had time to play WoW with Henry, and Monopoly, too! He’s a fun guy to play games with. We played time-limit Monopoly and he beat me by about $1000 dollars, and I didn’t go easy on him at all. He faked me out in several auctions — I know how far to push a computer opponent but a small intelligent boy is harder to manipulate, heh, and I ended up spending more than I wanted on worthless properties. Tired, tired, tired, stayed up WAYYYYYYYtoo late with dan last night heh. Early to bed tonight by god!

28 — Dan and I had fun out shopping this afternoon, when he took a break from setting up a laptop. We went to Fry’s where I bought a super-excellent iSkin case for my iPod and a pair of retractable headphones. The case is perfect for me, and I highly recommend it. I wanted a case with no giant belt-clip apparatus permanently poking out. The iSkin’s belt clip is entirely removeable, leaving only a perfectly smooth back. I got the translucent white one, so the nice green finish of my iPod shows through. The case is very well designed and comes with a sturdy, clear LCD-cover. Now my little iPod is completely protected from bumps and scratches :) Is there any joy greater than the joy of finding the PERFECT case for a new gadget? :)

After Fry’s we went to the loathesome Guitar Center for a cable. We planned to look at instruments but the store is so horrible (crowded, noisy, obnoxious) that we fled as quickly as possible and went to Buffalo Brothers instead. Buffalo Brothers is the opposite of Guitar Center — a quiet, spacious, pleasant store. Dan looked at acoustics while I browsed through their excellent selection of banjo books :) Then home again where I played with my toys and read while Dan continued to set up that laptop. Oh, and he made time to test my new digicam and told me I should set it to sharpen less. And he was right, the images look a lot better now. Wonderful Dan :)

27 — Today was my birthday! Everyone was sweet to me all day and gave me luxurious gifts — an amber pendant, a pair of decadently comfortable sheepskin slippers, and a green iPod mini! I love everything :) Henry and I picked up breakfast for everyone at Einstein Brothers, and then we had a relaxing afternoon watching old movies (Fantastic Voyage!) and playing with my new toys. Dan’s been asking me for years if I wouldn’t like an iPod. I never wanted one until recently, when I _finally_ made peace with iTunes, and even began to (*gasp*) enjoy using it. So I hinted that I’d like an iPod and my dear family gave me a lovely little green one! I’m really enjoying it so far :) Also love all my other presents. My alarm went off at 12:50 while we were watching the movie, and Henry and I looked at each other… and realized that he had a Karate workshop at 1pm! Eeek. So we raced over there and got him to the dojo on time, thank goodness. Then I came home and got dark clothing for him — the summer camp kids went to play laser tag after the workshop. We brought Henry’s friend Cierra home with us to play, so that was a nice treat. In the evening Matthew picked up Henry, and Dan and I had a quiet evening together. Very nice day, very happy birthday :)

26 — Tired, so tired, but got a lot of housework done, played with Henry, went to the library, and made a good dinner. I don’t usually get all mushy here but I feel awfully mushy so go away and come back tomorrow if you don’t want to read mush! I’m just so happy with Dan. He is so wonderful, so good to me, so loving, so much fun, so generous, so sweet, so caring, so extremely intelligent. I feel amazingly fortunate to be with him. Well, I’m not doing a very good job of expressing myself but you get the idea. Hey Dan if you’re reading this — I love you :) :) :) Here’s one of my favorite things about Dan — some nights when we go to bed, we’re both so tired we plan to fall asleep immediately… but then we start talking. And before we know it, hours, literally hours, have passed, and we’ve been laughing and talking and enjoying each other’s company, and yeah we’ll be tired the next day but who cares. It seems like we never run out of things to talk about. He is the most fun person to be with and he makes me laugh and I admire him so much. Plus, we both like soup.

25 — Finished “All About Eve”. Great movie!!! Henry watched part of it with me, enough to get the general idea. He said Eve was Evil heheheh :) The review I linked to is from www.filmsite.org, which I found today while hunting for a list of great movies. I realize it’s a horribly ugly and outdated website (hello 1996!) but their Top 100 list seems pretty good, better than the AFI one, although I do disagree with a few of their choices, e.g. “Vertigo” (sorry, it’s just not that good a movie although it has all the components of a GREAT one). It occurred to me that it might be fun to try to watch all 100 greatest so I might print out a checklist to keep near the TiVo. Between Henry, Dan, and me, we’ve seen a good many of them already! Hmm, never realized that Billy Wilder directed not only “Some Like It Hot” but also “Sunset Boulevard” AND “Double Indemnity”! Wow. Maybe we need to watch some more Wilder films. Those three are some of our favorites!

24 — Tired. Cut out some new purple velour shorts and stretchy pants for Henry this evening whie watching part of “All About Eve”. Ooooo creepy. I had to turn it off just when Bette Davis started getting bothered by Eve’s creepiness, so have more to look forward to tomorrow! Henry worked on “Roundabout” on his guitar while I hemmed Kirsten’s black pants, which are made of a difficult synthetic. I did an ok job, good enough I hope. Henry and Mom took me to Legoland this morning to buy me a membership for my birthday (to go with Henry’s membership, heh). Nice place, and I’ll look forward to spending a few hours there with Henry now and then!

23 — Took Henry down to the bagel store this morning for a half-dozen to go, then over to the bookstore to find the new Knights’ Kingdom books he’s been longing for. When we got into the bookstore, he suddenly wondered where his Bionicle toy was, the one he’d brought with us. He was afraid he’d left it at the bagel store, so I went out to the car to look for it whlie he asked a pleasant clerk for help finding the books. I found Takanuva under the bagel bag on the floor of the front seat and brought him back into the store, whew, no need to drive back to the bagel place. Henry and the nice clerk had found two of the books, the first two in the series. They were only $4 so I bought them both for him. Yay for a boy who yearns for books! Then I dropped Henry off at his dad’s apartment and they went to the movies etc. I went home and lazed around a lot — was pretty tired today so I didn’t accomplish much more than the usual basic daily stuff. Taught a couple of students, tested out the new Oster clippers. I think they’ll work great. Made shrimp and snow-pea stir-fry for dinner.

22 — Henry and I finished “State Fair” this afternoon. He liked the dress with the red velvet bodice and the white pleated skirt and the artificial cherries — said I should make one for myself :) And we did the shopping this morning and I made vegetable beef soup in the crockpot for dinner, delicious.

21 — It was a great weekend! Friday night Dan took me out shopping for a new digital camera (I left the charger and spare battery to my old Canon in Iowa) and we eventually chose a Sony DSC-P200. It’s a very good camera. I wanted something with some manual controls (not just a point-and-shoot), and the Sony has lots of options of that sort — manual focus, manual shutter seed, manual aperture, manual iso, etc — AND is pocketsize. And it has lots of other fun settings to tinker with. I practiced with it a lot this weekend, and got a few very good photos! Henry and Dan and Sal played racquetball on Saturday and I was able to get a few interesting action shots of them. See my gallery if you’re interested — haven’t cropped and uploaded all the good ones yet though, so check back.

Henry came home on Saturday morning and was with us for the rest of the weekend! We all watched Napoleon Dynamite on Saturday night. Henry loved it, so we watched it again on Sunday, heheh. And we worked on my Magical Mystery Tour puzzle, and played a lot of Animal Crossing, and read, and ate. Sunday morning I was about to make a nice breakfast for everyone when I discovered that the dishwasher detergent had clumped up and stuck in its little tray the night before, so the entire load of dishes was still dirty. Ugh. So we went out to breakfast — McDonalds for Dan and Einstein Brothers for Henry and me. Mmmmmmm pumpernickel!

Sunday afternoon the guys played racquetball again. Usually I watch them play, but this time the gym lackeys noticed that I wasn’t a member so I wasn’t allowed to go over to the courts, but there was a comfortable chair in the lobby and Dan lent me his Treo 650 so I could read Greenwitch, and I listened to The Goldberg Variations on my Zire 71. So it was really quite pleasant. Sunday night Henry and I started watching State Fair — very good so far, hope to finish tomorrow. Love the costuming!

18 — Finally got my XM Online trial membership thingy to work on my iBook. It was broken in different ways in every browser, and kept claiming it couldn’t find “the plugin” although I had both WMP 9 and Flash 7 installed. I tried various fixes and nothing worked until I reinstalled WMP — then all of a sudden everything was happy and content and played nicely. So I listened to the 1940s station, mostly. Sally and Henry went to Legoland, where they had a fine time and Henry got his face painted like a tiger, as you can see :)

16 — Henry and Dan played racquetball this evening! It was Henry’s first time and he really loved it, and I enjoyed watching them. After I got Henry to bed tonight Sal, John, Dan and I watched the first two episodes of the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Sooo funny. Dan and I have seen them all already, but John and Sal hadn’t and they liked them.

14 — Rockola concert in PB this afternoon! Henry and I went together, left around 2:30 and got there just after 3, so got a good parking place, yay. Rockola played an excellent show, as usual, and the crowd loved them. And Bob let Henry borrow an acoustic electric bass and play with the band on “Summertime Blues”! Very exciting :) Henry says he wasn’t nervous at all, just happy.

13 — Bought Animal Crossing for the gamecube. We rented it for a week and really wanted to keep playing after it was returned, and it was only about $15 for a used copy. Gosh it’s a fun game!

12 — Gerry finished painting the big teaching room! It’s beautifully red, just luscious. I started working on the puzzle Mom brought me from Yosemite while we watched Zoolander tonight. Zoolander was better than I expected. I had the TiVo get it because of the cast (Ben Stiller, Jerry Stiller, Will Farrell, Owen Wilson, etc) but I didn’t expect much. It wasn’t GREAT, but we were entertained.

11 — Henry and I watched “The Towering Inferno” this afternoon and finished our map of the world puzzle. We had so much fun together! We decided that an alternate title for the movie could be “What Not To Do In A Fire”, or “The Tower of Idiots” hehehehehe. It really was entertaining, though. Henry said the sleazy son-in-law deserved to be punched and we cheered together when William Holden punched him. And of course Steve McQueen and Paul Newman were manly and heroic, and the 1974 interior decorating made us gag. All that harvest gold and little stairways to nowhere… Henry is old enough to be a really fun movie-watching companion, yay! He understands basic plot conventions and can prdeict the plot with me :)

09 — Danny picked up my car and changed my oil and rotated my tires etc. Wonderful Danny! I played some WoW while Henry was at camp today and got my warlock to lvl 43, woohoo! Amazing. Also I worked on that map of the world jigsaw puzzle that Henry and I started and got a lot further, made all the continents and even filled in quite a bit of ocean. Jigsaw puzzles are so relaxing and fun for me, I don’t know why I don’t do them more often. Fargo spent the afternoon with us. He and henry are completely obsessed with Yu-Gi-Oh cards, my goodness. Henry asked me to draw one for him afterdinner. He found a good picture online of the one he wanted, some kind of rare ferocious dragon, so I drew it for him and colored it in, and we pasted it to one of the cards he never uses. He loves it so much, he took it to bed :)

08 — Watching Adam Carolla’s new show “Too Late”… so far it’s fairly entertaining but he’s really just doing the same bits he does on Loveline… but I’ve laughed heartily a few times so I’ll give him another try tomorrow. And now it’s time for Jon Stewart! This afternoon, when Henry got home from karate camp, we started working on our big world map puzzle. Difficult!

07 — Picked up Henry from his dad’s house in the morning and took him to the morning karate class, and then we came home and did stuff :) Henry and I watched the first episode of “Cosmos” And Dan cleaned our bedroom!!!

05 — Art camp for Henry, then I went home took care of plants and things, taught, then picked Henry back up. He had a wonderful day, and came home with lots of clay projects that he’d made over the week — a box, and a bowl, and a parrot. Then we came home and Henry played Animal Crossing (fun game!) and worked on more house stuff and started sewing Sal’s new curtains. Then another student, then took Henry to his two karate classes, then dropped him at his dad’s house (in Carlsbad now, not Lemon Grove anymore!). Came home, talked to mom (home from her road trip). She likes the color I chose for the teaching room (red!!) and the one set of curtains I got mostly finished. And then I was hungry and too tired to cook, so Dan took me out for Greek food :)

04 — Picked Fargo up this morning when I dropped Henry at his art camp. Fargo hung out at our house while Henry was in class, playing gameboy and eating toast and moving all my LPs from my bedroom to the sitting room, where my record player lives now. Helpful boy! Then we picked up Henry and I took them to Matthew’s new apartment, then came home and did stuff… moved all the small things out of the big teaching room, plants, chairs, etc, so Gerry could start painting it today. And I cleaned Mom’s room really well — she’ll be home tomorrow. And Gerry lent me his cordless drill and brought a ladder upstairs for me, and I installed Mom’s new curtain rods. Yay me!!

03 — Extremely busy day. Dropped Henry at art camp, went to Home Depot to choose paint for the big piano room, came back and discussed things with Gerry, did housework, took down some of the nasty old curtain hardware from mom’s windows, then picked Henry back up, got lunch at Del Taco and went straight over to Vista for his computer class. Then I got to sit outside in the shade for a few hours and read, which was lovely. Oh and I played a little Mario and Luigi, but I got stuck on killing the plant monster on the runway, argh. After his computer class, Henry played with a bunch of nice kids for a while and then we raced back home, picked up our prescriptions, got home just in the nick of time for my 4:45 student, and rushed off to karate the moment I was done teaching. Then home by about 7 and I just had to lie down for a while. Dan just moved all our recent Loveline recordings from one computer to another (the one that stays on all night) so now I get to fall asleep to the soothing sounds of an episode I’ve never heard before, YAY!!!

02 — I spent the entire morning hunting for decent curtain hardware at a variety of stores. I finally found some good stuff at Bed Bath and Beyond, and on sale, too! So I got everything we need for Mom’s curtains, and now I just need to install the hardware and sew the curtains, heh. i was hoping to have them done by the time she gets back from vacation, but… well, maybe.

The Hendrix family came over to swim this afternoon but Gerry had to put extra chemicals in the pool and anyway it was COLD, so we went to the playground at Holiday Park instead and the kids had lot of fun climbing all over the tall spiral slide. And we devoured a bag of chips and a container of salsa :) I made dinner for everyone later and was SO TIRED by the end of the day. But it was a good day. The Hendrixes are going home to Germany in a couple of days so we won’t see them again for a while. But they might come back again in a couple of years!

01 — Henry started his art camp today — for a whole week he gets to do clay-related activities from 9:00 til noon! He seemed to enjoy the first day very much. It was strange to have him gone for so many hours on a weekday, but I got a lot of housework done, watered the roses etc.

July 2005

30 — Finished “The Subtle Knife” while the boys were swimming this morning. Whew, that was an intense book! Time for “The Amber Spyglass”!

29 — Henry went to Fargo’s house to play today, and I got some housework done. We have a mysterious ant infestation in the kitchen, just a trail of them them coming in through the window in the sitting room and making for something on the kitchen floor. I can’t figure out what they’re looking for, and I mopped twice but still they keep crawling about. I don’t really care very much, though. Ants aren’t particularly bothersome to me, especially when they’re just crawling around on the floor. Oh I did some sewing this afternoon, too — took my Romantic Blouse in by 3/4″ on both sides, up the side seam and underarm seam. Now it fits JUST right. I think I just have to always sew a much smaller size than my measurements indicate, for some reason. Maybe because I’m so skinny, I don’t know, but when I go by the measurements on the pattern things ALWAYS end up too big. I listened to my “Ruth” audiobook while I was sewing. It’s good so far, but it’s no “Wives and Daughters” heheh. This afternoon I picked up H and F and we all went to karate. No one showed up for the little kid class at 4, so Sensei Mike helped Henry with his katas for about 20 minutes before the bigger kids’ class started. Fargo and I watched the class and I read more of “The Subtle Knife”, which is amazing so far. Fargo spent the night tonight. After I got the kids to bed, Dan and I watched the very excellent movie version of “Persuasion” starring Amanda Root as Anne Elliot and I sewed the waistband lining onto my bodiced petticoat. I think it will turn out well!

28 — Fargo spent the day with us again, and Bob, Chloe, and Celia came over in the afternoon to swim! I started reading “The Subtle Knife” which Alexzandra lent me (not available in any of the libraries around here, for some reason).

27 — Tired, tired, tired. Piano students, housework, Henry’s computer class, more students, karate, dinner, watered the roses, etc. Dan and I have been watching My So-Called Life at night before bed. Such a very good, enjoyable show, my goodness.

26 — Henry and I used our free passes and spent the day at Legoland! Got there about 10am, left about 7:30pm. He spent hours just building with Legos and doing the Mindstorms robotics classes (three times) so I was able to sit and rest and read Cold Comfort Farm, again. We had the most lovely day together, we really did! Henry is the Best. Boy. Evar.

25 — Piano students, housework, errands, library (Henry picked out a huge pile of non-fiction books about monkeys and tigers), more piano students, more housework, tired tired tired. Still recovering from night out at Humphrey’s.

24 — Last night I drove down to Humphrey’s to hang out with Chloe and hear Rockola. Dan was going to come along but was too tired. It was super-crowded and Chloe didn’t get there early enough to get us a table, but we dragged some spare chairs near the dance floor and sat there until a table in back was free. The band sounded great of course. I always forget how GOOD they are! And it was wonderful to see Chloe :) I didn’t get home until 1:30am so I’m pretty tired today. Oh also Dan bought me a new purse yesterday, at Mervyn’s. It’s olive green canvas, rather small, with a zipper, a velcro flap, and a shoulder strap. I love it.

So anyway today I was basically dead tired all day and just lay around. Played quite a bit of WoW and got Carol the Warlock up to lvl 40 AND got my mount, yay! Who’s awesome? Me!

22 — Bought water, helped Henry clean his room, got my Enchanted Gold Bloodrobe :) I need to go out and find some kind of HEAVY base for my umbrella… the plastic, fill-it-with-water base I bought is useless. But right now I’m too sleepy to go out again.

21 — Chloe and Bob came over this afternoon to visit and swim! Very fun. Bob and Henry played music together (Bob on guitar, Henry on bass), we watched a couple of Futuramas, and ate pizza. Super good fun time!

20 — Happy Moon Day, everyone. Dan’s parents came for a visit — good to see them again, nice people.

19 — Fargo came over this morning and then around noon the Hendrix family showed up, and we all went to the beach. I took my new beach umbrella and it worked pretty well — I only got slightly sunburned (despite said umbrella AND sunscreen). Henry tried out his new boogie board, which works well, and he and Fargo and Hannah played in the waves while Johannes built a sandcastle with his dad. Very nice, though somewhat stressful for Ute and me to keep an eye on the kids in the rough surf. They all kept washing south down the beach. Then we all came back here and the kids swam in the pool until it was time for everone to go.

17 — At 10:30 last night, while I was taking my shower, I got a tremendous craving for grapefruit juice. So Dan ran down to the store to get some for me :) :) :) Also, I just can’t get enough of the Musical Tribute to Star Wars so there’s the link for you again.

Today I’m feeling a bit better so I cleaned all the bathrooms, using a mild solution of Pine-Sol to get rid of the shower-door soap scum. That works way better than anything else I’ve ever used. I usually do all the basic weekly housework on Mondays, but I have a bunch of students tomorrow and anyway this house is too big to take care of all on one day.

This afternoon I watched “Bride and Prejudice” , courtesy of Greencine. I had high hopes, as I’d heard it was good and I loved “Bend it Like Beckham” — I was not disappointed! It was wonderful. Even the corny musical numbers were fun — so colorful and dazzling — and the whole cast was great, although the guy who played Darcy was awfully bland. Not at all attractive, if you ask me. But then, who can compare to Colin Firth? :) Anyway, it was fun to watch Austen’s story unfolding in a modern Indian setting, and to think, “Oh! That’s Charlotte Lucas! That guy is Mister Bingley! Oh no, here comes Mister Collins.” etc. Beautifully done, yay!

16 — Woke up, went to the library. They’ve got Shakespeare’s plays performed on CD, done by the BBC! I got Hamlet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing. Drove to SD to pick up Henry (listened to MND all the way there and back), got home, cleaned up etc. Watched Henry swim, fed people. I’m pretty tired tonight. Oh yeah, the doctor’s office called me back yesterday with my lab results (did it really take 4.5 days to get the results?). He wants me to go back to alternating 50 and 75 mcg every other day. Uh huh. That’s the dose I was on last time I went HYPERTHYROID. Of course by the time the office called me, the doctor had already gone home for the weekend. Since I’ve been feeling slightly better the last three days, I told them I’m not going to change anything over the weekend and that I want to talk to himn on Monday. Sigh. Terah suggests I try the name-brand thyroid hormone, so I think I’ll ask the doctor to write a prescription for that for me.

15 — Felt slightly better today. Henry and Sal and I went to Target this morning to return the Worst Toaster Oven Ever (don’t buy the $30 Black and Decker toaster oven) and then over to Bed Bath and Beyond for doormats and a better toaster oven. (Also $30, the Euro Pro model, a very good toaster oven! It actually works.) In the afternoon Ute and Martin, and their sweet children, Hannah and Johannes, came over for a swim and a visit! The’re in town from Germany for three weeks. Lovely people, easy-going and fun. The kids played in the pool for ages and we talked. Very nice! Hope to get to see them again before they go home. At night we watched “The Producers”, which was wildly funny in places. The scene near the beginning when Leo gets hysterical was my favorite part.

14 — Tired. Endlessly tired. When will the results of my last round of bloodwork be in and what will they indicate this time? Stay tuned.

Yesterday, while I drove Henry to his computer-game-making class in Vista, we listened to the mp3 cd I made recently. We started with the Fleetwood Mac, and sang “The Chain” together several times; when the cd moved on to “You Make Lovin’ Fun” I pointed out that it had a sort of disco feel, more so than any other song on that album, and then we started discussing disco, and then I realized that I have a true, undeniably disco song on that cd — “Le Freak” — so we put that on and Henry was enchanted. He repeated that song until we got to our destination and then played it on the way home, too.

13 — Tired. But here’s a link to a very entertaining flash movie: Star Wars: A musical Tribute.

08 — Have been tired, cold, depressed, and cranky for days. I suppose I’m hypothyroid again. Sigh. My doctor is out of town and then booked up through August, but luckily they had a cancellation on Monday so I get to go in then and convince him that I don’t feel well. And the bird is sick so i had to take her into the vet today. Poor birdy. They’re not entirely sure what’s wrong with her, but she’s definitely got an intestinal fungus. She has to drink a vinegar/water solution for the fungus, and also has some powder for her food in case she’s also got liver trouble.

07 — Mass-transit bombings in England. Horrific.

06 — Today was a nice Henry-and-Kara day. We had breakfast and then drove over to Vista to pick up my new LP, stopped at the mailbox place, and then came home to play WoW together for hours :) Lots of fun! We took Zinny and Ramona to the wetlands and did a bunch of the quests at Whelgar’s Excavation, all except for the one where you have to find four relics — we each found three but couldn’t find the fourth, argh. I started reading “Gone-Away Lake” to him, too. Lovely book. Still horribly tired.

04 — Tired all day. We went down to the beach at 8pm, hoping to be able to see the fireworks on the pier at 9. We brought beach chairs and sat on the beach and it was just lovely, lots of happy people waiting around and little kids running and splashing. As it got dark, lots of people on the beach set off their own fireworks while we waited for the offical fireworks! It was extremely entertaining :) And then of course the waves were phosphorescent still, so that added to the show. We sat there ’til after 10, I think, and then walked up to Coldstone for ice cream — banana split for Dan and milkshakes for John and me.

03 — Played a bit more WoW this morning and got my warlock up to lvl 35. Also joined a pleasant, chatty guild — The Guardians of Azeroth. Our copy of Bagthorpes vs. the World was due back on Friday but we haven’t quite finished it yet, so I read the last couple of chapters into my laptop so Henry can hear them when he gets home, and now I’m off to the library to return it and other things.

Forgot to mention — a couple of days ago I decided that, since I like “Never Going Back Again” so very much, I ought to investigate Fleetwood Mac a bit more thoroughly. I have heard that Rumours is one of the best-selling pop albums of all time, and the sonagram analysis page had a lot of interesting things to say about the album. So I tracked down all the songs from Rumours, gave them a test listen, and discovered that I REALLY like a lot of them! I deleted the really goopy ones and kept eight — The Chain, Gold Dust Woman, Secondhand News, Never Going Back Again, I don’t Want To Know, You Make Lovin’ Fun, Go Your Own Way, and Don’t Stop. I’ve just bought the LP, too. (Which I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t been able to download the songs for free ahead of time, to make sure I really liked them) The varied textures in some of the songs really blow me away — deep thumpy bass drum, interesting twiddly guitar stuff, vocal harmonies so clear and high, and lots of empty space. Yay for “new” music!! “Never Going Back Again” is one of those rare Perfect Songs.

02 — Saturday. Slept until nearly 11am, amazingly! Got up and played WoW for hours and hours, until Dan woke up in the afternoon. Played Carol the Warlock — she’s lvl 34 now! Dan and John and I went to Anita’s for dinner, and then when it got dark John and I went for a walk on the beach (i needed some fresh air after so much computer gaming today) and saw the amazing phosphorescent waves, caused by the Red Tide. There were lots of people on the beach admiring the waves. We discovered that the phosphorescence stays in the damp sand after the waves wash back out — you can stamp on the sand or drag a foot along and activate the glow. Amazing! We stopped for milkshakes at Coldstone, then came home and Dan and I played Monopoly. I won :)

01 — Henry and I finally had a chance to play WoW together for a good long time! We played Zinny and Ramona and had lots of fun adventures together until Matthew came to pick Henry up for the weekend. And then I cleaned up, did laundry, sewed, etc. It was COLD today. Crazy. Oh, the floor in the main teaching room is done! Mom and John and I re-arranged the furniture and it looks so nice now!

June 2005

30 — Echocardiogram this morning, while Henry and Sal went biking. When I got home, Henry had successfully installed Neverwinter Nights on his computer and was playing. We put our “Dragonsong” audiobook on, and he played his game while I basted together my victorian corset mockup and created most of a bodiced petticoat. I don’t know how the corset will turn out but the bodiced petticoat is going to be great, I think. I just need to sew the waistband and skirt on tomorrow. I think I’ll make a gored skirt.

28 — Henry and I went to the Fair today! His karate school did a demo at 3:30, so we had free passes and were allowed to park in the performer lot, for free :) We went early, got there about 11, and had a wonderfultime walking around looking at things. We saw Design in Wood first thing before it got crowded. A nice old man was making wooden spinning tops on a lathe, so we watched him for some time, and Henry bought one of the tops he created. We heard the Dixie Hasslers, a wonderful Dixieland group that has been playing at the fair every year since I was little (in fact, this was their 52nd year at the fair). They asked for requests and I suggested Darktown Strutters Ball, and they played it for me! We listened to them for about an hour. Then we met up with Henry’s dad and looked at some more exhibits until it was time for Henry’s karate demo. He did very well, as did the whole school, from the tiniest kids to the Senseis themselves. Then Matthew left and Henry and I ran over to see the Hypnotist! Great show as usual. Then we saw the animals, the kids’ hobbies, and the farm area, and henry played in the playground there until around 8… and then we went home. Lovely day :)

23 — Drove Dan to the airport this monring — another business trip. Traffic was pretty good and we had a nice time talking all the way down, and then I listened to Loveline all the way back. Stopped at Target to see if they had a nice shady umbrella for the backyard (the sun attacks me even when I sit under the shade-cloth) and I found an adorable colorful UV-Protection one! Bought that and a weighted stand for it and only spent about $40. And it will fold up easily so I can take it to the beach as well. Sally took Henry ice-skating this morning and now they’re off again to play miniature golf! They’re going to pick up Fargo to join the game, and then bring him back here afterwards for the day :)

22 — We picked up Henry’s friend Fargo this morning at about 9, and he spent the whole day here. The boys had so much fun playing together, and swam for hours. We’re hoping Fargo can spend lots of time with us now that he’s on his summer vacation! I actually felt good today. Very nice to have some energy.

21 — In the morning I drove to Temecula and picked up Henry YAY!!! And then I taught several make-up lessons and caught up with some housework. Henry helped me a LOT. Pretty tired. 20 — Today we left Iowa. Susan’s flight was earlier than ours, so Sally and I went back to Lagomarcinos so I could buy some nice candy for Dan –I bought him an assortment of the gummiest, fruitiest things I could find — and have another fabulous black raspberry milkshake for breafast :) And then we drove around a bit and ended up at Duck Creek park aagin, and walked about in the shade for a while. Then back to the Quad-Cities airport, the dearest, cleanest little airport in the world. It’s like a little Lego airport or something! Bought postcards and things to read ((Macworld magazine and David Sidaris’s “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” for me) and sat enjoying the free wireless internet access until it was time to board the little plane to Chicago. Flight went fine, got to Chicago with 2.5 hours to spare. Found our gate and sat reading and eating (delicious avocado sandwiches bought in Davenport at the health-food store) until the flight. That flight went fine too and eventually we got home! The San Diego air is very nice, more breezy and refreshing than Iowa. Amazing the different quality air has from place to place. Picked up my car from the parking garage and got home before 9. We had a wonderful trip but it’s soooooo nice to be home! Dan and John kept the place pretty clean and Dan even made the bed for me so it would be all nice and welcoming when I got home :)

19 — Picked up Susan’s high-school friend Chris and drove to Iowa city to see their college and the places they’d lived and shopped etc :) Superfun. We saw the house where Sally, Susan, Chris, and three other girls lived in the attic, saw Black’s Gaslight Village next door where Susan met Dave Sanborn and where my Dad used to listen to Miles Davis records with Dave :) Saw the Hamburg Inn #2 where they used to eat (when they had enough money for something besides bread and honey), and where my dad saw my mom for the first time. Saw the Iowa Bookstore and bought Iowa merchandise — a clingy little t-shirt and some little bitty shorts for me, heheh, and a nice blue boyish Iowa t-shirt for Henry. Walked around on the campus, in the Union, and over the river. It was tremendously fun!! In the afternoon, back in Davenport, we walked through the high school where EVERYONE went (including my grandparents) but it had been remodeled so everyone was disgusted at all the changes :) Then took a ride along the Mississippi and ate dinner in a too-fancy restaurant in Le Claire, also drove on the Government Bridge out to The Arsenal and back. Our last night in Iowa.

18 — Whew long day. Susan and i are tired and are back in the hotel, but Sal’s still out having fun in Davenport :) This morning we went to Starbucks to meet Sal’s old friend Margie Flanders, then went back to the Lustron on Broadlawn so Susan could look at/in it. Then off to the house on Grand and the dear sweet family who lives there let us come in AGAIN and look around, and were so amazingly warn and kind and welcoming, as if it were normal for three crazy women to want to come look around in their house. Then we drove around Davenport looking at all the places we looked at yesterday again, then grabbed some lunch at the healthfood store and went to Lindsay Park to eat. Oh and after that we had fabulous ice cream at a place right across the street from the park. Um and then… we went to the Masonic Temple so Susan could rehearse for the reunion concert tonight while Mom and I drove out into the Iowa countryside. Too lovely! Then back to the hotel for a rest, and then back to the Masonic temple for the concert. Then back here for dinner and bed. I need to flesh this entry out bwith some details but I’m too tired… maybe tomorrow.

17 — Mom and I drove all over Davenport looking at all the places she remembers… houses she lived in, houses of school friends and relatives, schools, stores, parks, etc. Also went to memorial service for MOm’s old friend but I waited in the car, heh. Then drove around some more! So much fun! Davenport Iowa is a beautiful little town, it really is. Picked up Susan at the airport in the afternoon and had a riot together. I’ll add more details later, too tired now.

16 — Mom and I flew to Iowa today. We dropped Henry off at his dad’s house, and then left my car at a parking garage near the airport, then got to our terminal an hour and a half early, and then when we got on our plane they said it was windy in Chicago so we had to wait on the ground, in the plane, for another hour and a half, heheh. But then we finally got to Chicago and raced to the other gate but then that plane was late too, so we didn’t miss it. But it was really stressful. We finally got to Moline and got our rental car and got to our hotel about 11:30, and had a little rest, and then went across the street to the Denny’s and had pancakes for dinner in the middle of the night. This is a super-nice hotel (The Best Western). We have free high-speed wireless interweb! WOOHOO!!! Oh, in case you’re wondering why we went to Iowa, there’s some kind of 100-year high-school reunion thing and also one of mom’s school-friends died, so she wants to hang out with that family and also Susan will be here because of the reunion, but i’m not sure anyone actually wants to go to the reunion… So we’re all going to hang out in Davenport for the weekend. They invited me along for the ride and to see where they grew up. So far we’ve only seen Moline, Illinois, but tomorrow we’ll go to Davenport!

13 — Henry helped me with the housework today — he did a lot of running up and down the stairs to put things away for me. It was extremely helpful. It’s exhausting for me to go up and down these stairs all day. I discovered that a Pine-Sol solution on a scrubby sponge (and a lot of elbow grease) is very good for cleaning the shower, and even got off most of the soap scum. I did our downstairs bathroom today and will do the two upstairs ones later this week, probably. This ends the exciting housework update for the day :) John and I watched David Suchet as Poirot in “Evil Under the Sun” tonight. Suchet is the BEST Poirot, down to his egg-shaped head and ridiculous moustache. He’s perfect. I got a chance to play a little WoW this afternoon, and polished off a couple of quests. I think I need to go to someplace called Thousand Needles pretty soon. Sounds pretty but it’s probably grim. Oh, I hit lvl 33 today :)

10 — Yesterday Henry and I watched most of a 1996 movie version of “Twelfth Night” and tonight we finished it. We both really enjoyed it! Ben Kingsley played Feste _extremely_ well, and the rest of the cast was good too. There were so many familiar faces! Olivia (Helena Bonham Carter) was Lucy Honeychurch, of course. Viola was Lucy Steele in “Sense and Sensibility” (quite a contrast, heh) Maria was terribly familiar — I’m sure she was in one Austen adaptation or another but I can’t quite place her, and I also can’t quite place Antonio, Malvolio, and Sir Andrew. Time for imdb.com! Ah yes, Malvolio (Nigel Hawthorne) was King George III!!! No wonder I kept seeing him as a king in my imagination :)

Since we have more move channels and a bigger hard drive in the TiVo now, I asked it to get a lot of movies this week. (That’s why we were lucky enough to get Twelfth Night.) I’ve got Bells are Ringing on now — I’ve seen it so often that I don’t feel bad about fast-forwarding most of Dean Martin’s scenes and other tiresome bits, and skipping to Judy Holliday’s wonderful singing! I started “In The Good Old Summertime” earlier but I couldn’t stomach it. It’s a remake of my all-time favorite movie, “The Shop Around the Corner” so I thought I’d give it a chance, but it was too obnoxious. None of the charm and subtlety of the original, and Van Johnson seemed to be trying to do a James Stewart impression. Bleargh. Henry’s staying with us this weekend, and since “The Ladykillers” is also in the TiVo I think we’ll try that tomorrow. He saw Alec Guiness’s name in the blurb and got all excited. We’ve also got “Easter Parade”, which we both really enjoy. Movie weekend, yay! Mom’s got that 1990s version of “Midsummer NIght’s Dream” around here somewhere (Stanley Tucci as Puck) so we’ll watch that again if it turns up. Henry and I were talking about Shakespeare and he requested the Midsummer night’s Dream with the bald Puck :) Oh I know why it came up — Feste spoke directly to the camera at the end of Twelfth night, and Henry pointed out that it was what Puck did, too! Smart monkey. It’s been at least a year since we watched Midsummer Night’s Dream together!

08 — Today Henry and I spent a couple of hours putting unpacking his stuff, cleaning up his room, and putting his toys away. His room is very very nice now! We also finished up a very good audiobook — “Ginger Pye” — which we’d been working on for a few days. Very good ending! So then we started a new one; I think it’s called “the Good Dog” by Avi, which is also very good so far!

This evening John, Dan, and I worked together to bring satellite tv and tivo to mom’s new room… A couple of hours later and she still doesn’t have tivo. At some point during the 6 weeks when her tivo was unconnected, her account was deactivated. We’re not sure if the good people at tivo shut off her service because she wasn’t using it (?!?) or because that credit card was cancelled… I suspect the latter. Anyway we should be able to finish the process tomorrow if I call the tivo ppl and get her account reactivated.

07 — Tuesday… Henry and I did the grocery shopping and errands — Stater Brothers did NOT have my new favorite ice cream (B&J’s Dublin Mudslide) this week, darn it — and then he played some Zelda while I played some WoW. Finished up some quests in the Charred Vale that kicked my butt at lvl 29, but were much more possible at lvl 32. I’ll be lvl 33 before you know it hehehe. We picked up Dan at the airport tonight, so now he’s home yay!!! I actually enjoy driving to the airport if there’s no traffic. It’s a pleasant drive and only takes about 40 minutes on a good night. We got Greek food (for us and John) and Chinese food (for Henry) on the way home, so that was a nice treat. Mmm dolmades. “You don’t eat no MEAT??? That’s ok, I make you lamb.”

06 — Typing in the dark, here, so I may not notice and fix all the typos. Nice day, long day. It was a little bit warmer, for part of the day, but then the wind kicked up in the afternoon and it got chilly again. But it was almost summer for a few hours! henry and I drove Dan to the airport this morning (business trip) and then came home and did the MOnday housework. henry did the vacumming for me, and I did the decluttering, mopping, dusting, emptying-of-wastebaskets, etc. And we got the whole place loooking nice! Then he settled down to play Ocarina of Time and I did some more chores and then had time for a bit of World of Warcraft before teaching. Henry played his guitar and bass while I was working. He figured out the Main Riff of “Smoke on the Water”. I picked up my pills at the pharmacy and took henry to the fabric store to choose white fabric for some new stretchy pants for his Link costume. Created the pants after dinner and henry was SO extremely happy! I miss Dan an awful lot but he’ll be home tomorrow night so I might survive :)

05 — Unpacked another box of books and found several to give away, yay! More later, if i think of something to say. …… Well I feel crampy, tired, and moody today so maybe not.

04 — Woke up at 6am. Ugh. John reinstalled Henry’s operating system so his computer is all nice and minty-fresh now. Um what else… it rained a little this morning. Oh, and all three of us drove over to the carwash so we all three have nice clean cars. And we played Settlers of Catan this evening!

May 2005

31 — Henry and I played Settlers of Catan today! And we played a little WoW, too — took Zinny and Ramona to Duskwood. And we made cinnamon rolls (from scratch, naturally) and did housework and watched an episode of Nova about dogs.

Here’s a quote from that sonagram analysis of high-contrast rock hits page I’ve been reading, for those who haven’t gone there yet because it doesn’t sound interesting enough. This is from the section on “When the Levee Breaks”:

“Looking at the sonogram you might think you’re looking at a nuclear blast, which it practically is, but looking at the RMS plot, the RMS loudness is flickering as much as 3 db in a tenth of a second, continually. It’s a wall of sound, but it’s a CHURNING wall of sound with shrapnel flying out of it, it’s spikey on both the peak and the RMS level. You can’t just make sustained loud noises and expect them to be as compelling as this- even while sustaining a brutal, unbroken crescendo, Led Zeppelin continue to be high contrast- the very sounds themselves are. At full blast, they can flicker 3 db in a tenth of a second or cover as much as 6 db range in under a second without once slacking off the full-blast output- and the peaks cover a range of 9 db and more.”

I defy ANYONE to find that uninteresting!!!

30 — Tons of housework today. Picked up Henry in Temecula in the morning and then we got Fargo and the boys played here all day! It was wonderful. They get along so well together. They played with their lightsabres and Star Wars action figures and Star Wars legos, and swung on the rope swing and swam in the poool a few times, even though it’s still pretty cold.

Here’s the most interesting website I’ve read in a long time: http://www.airwindows.com/analysis/Albums/index.html. It’s a sonagram analysis of hit rock albums, which may sound dull but it’s not :) Read the “how to read sonagrams” link first, and then dive in. I still don’t understand everything I see but reading the analysis is fascinating. I skipped the Eagles album because I hate the Eagles, but the Led Zeppelin IV and Beatles White Album pages were great. I’m going to go read some more now… Oh yes and after you’ve looked at some examples of awesome, effective, high-contrast songs, take a look at some Bad Examples. You can clearly see that the bad examples are weak, mushy, and dull when compared to the vibrant, interesting sonagrams of the good examples! Really amazing! Mmm here’s a page that explains a bit more: http://www.airwindows.com/analysis/Dynamics.html

OH!!! I forgot to mention my incredible triumph. For the last… 15? 20? 25? years I’ve had this little acoustic guitar tune in my head. It’s one you’ll hear now and then on the classic rock stations, and i was pretty sure it was Fleetwood Mac (not a fan of most of their stuff but this little tune is something special); however, I’ve never known the name of it and no one has ever been able to identify it for me when I hum it to them :) But today, when we were driving, it came on the radio during 103.7’s “500 greatest rock hits” thingy and I made a mental note of the time it came on and its position in the 500 — it was #64, far higher than Stairway to Heaven (#144 or something) so the judges must have been crack monkeys, but I digress… Anyway when I got home I called the station and they identified it for me!! It’s “Never Going Back Again” by Fleetwood Mac. So yeah, go listen to it and it’ll stick in your head for the next 25 years too. But at least you’ll know what it’s called.

29 — I beat The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap! The last boss fight section was hard, and I failed a couple of times but this morning I triumphed. After the credits rolled it offered to let me save, so I did, and then my GBA SP seemed to reboot — but my savegame is back at the point before the boss fight. Hmm. Well, anyway, I won! And now I desperately need another Gameboy game…

28 — Housework, grocery shopping, errands, unpacking of boxes, ugh. I’m tired. Tonight Mom and I lay around and watched the Antiques Roadshow and a couple of episodes of The Daily Show. Bought a new flavor of B&J ice cream called Dublin Mudslide. Yum!

27 — Appointment with Dr. Rubin, my PH guy. But first we drove all over the place (Fry’s and Apple store) for Danshopping. But anyway my walk test went well and they say I’m no worse, so that’s good. Very very tiring day.

25 — Unpacked a few books and things, and set up my record player. Henry and I played some WoW together (took our Taurens to the Tirisfal Glade for some easy quests) and later I had some time to play by myself and got my warlock up to lvl 31, woohoo! She’s my favorite character.

Did I mention that I’m reading “Jonathon Strange and Mister Norrell”? I’m enjoying it very much. It’s completely unlike anything I’ve ever read before and I absolutely cannot predict what will happen next. And that’s rare.

24 — felt pretty bad today. Dunno why, just had a sort of cruddy feeling I guess, and didn;t feel like doing much of anything. But I accomplished my housework and piano students and spent time with henry and dan so that’s ok.

23 — the DirectTV guy came today and was here for 4 hours installing that dish and various boxes and cables all over the house. Now we have nice new DirecTiVos in our room and the living room, and Mom will have satellite tv hooked up to her TiVo in her room when it gets finished. The new TiVo units are very nice, just as nice as our old one. Long live TiVo!!! Henry and I started “Bagthorpes Vs. The World” for his bedtime story tonight :)

22 — A nice Sunday. I was able to play World of Warcraft for a good long time, for the first time in weeks. I played my little gnome warlock, Carol. She was stuck with too many hard quests so I travelled to the Duskwood area and got a whole lot of new non-impossible quests and worked on them for hours. And now she’s level 30! Woohoo! I had a lot of fun. And I did other stuff like laundry and other little chores… Last night we started watched “The Office” (the British one) and it’s great, so probably more of that tonight I hope!

Here’s a link to a great Scientific American article: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense in case you get into an argument with a creationist… although I doubt if rational argument will help much in that situation :) It frightens me that in the 21st century we have to worry about creationism being taught as a SCIENTIFIC FACT and not as the MYTH that it is. Sigh. It’s a nice story, if you’re into that kind of thing, I guess. It sure would be nice if people could accept myths for what they are and be happy. Mythology can be a good thing! Enjoy your myths! But don’t proclaim them to be facts, please.

It’s nice to have my desktop computer back again, and very nice indeed to be using John’s gigantic LCD monitor. Lordy the thing is huge. I’m using it now… in the sitting room in front of the open window with with the smell from some jasmine-like plant wafting in. Lovely.

21 — John arrived at noon just as he planned. Yay! He and Dan moved furniture into the sitting room and set up computers and made the wireless interweb work etc. Now that room is pleasant and mostly useable — we still need to unpack books/records/desk stuff etc. Still sick.

20 — Ugh I feel sicker again, and horribly tired. Gerry finished the floors in the hall and sitting room!

19 — Star Wars Episode III opened today. Henry has been really excited about it, so I took him to the very first show this morning, at 9:30. We got to the theater (the nice new Krikorian in Vista) at 9, and there was already a pretty long line of people who had tickets, and a short line at the box office, which wasn’t open yet. So Henry stood in the long line and I stood in the short line, but they actually started letting people into the theater before the box office opened! Henry pointed out that there was a self-serve ticket machine, so I ran over there (no line) and bought our tickets and in we went! Although it was pretty crowded we managed to get our very favorite seats — the front row behind the railing above the walkway that divides the “too close” section from the “normal” section, so no one could sit in front of us and we could put our feet up on the railing. The first preview was for “The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe” — it made me all shivery and choked up and teary eyed, it looks SO good, and from what I can tell seems pretty faithful to the book. The audience applauded when the preview was over!

Then they played a few more preveiws for wretched-looking movies (Stealth — ewwwwwww) and then Star Wars started! And now I have to cook so I’ll finish this post later…

Ok I’m back. Anyway, Star Wars III was pretty enjoyable. The dialogue was stiff, and unintentionally hilarious at times: “Hold your fire! I will kill this Jedi scum… MYSELF!” (can you guess what happened next?) I got tired of lightsabre fights. But mostly it was a good enjoyable adventure movie.

18 — Set grommets in the big curtain and finished it except for the hem. My excuse for not hemming it is that it’ll be good for it to hang for a while first :) Yeah, right. Washed everyone’s sheets and pillowcases and hung them out in the sun to dry, yum, and then made all the beds up fresh when they were dry. Henry and I played WoW together for a while, ran around in the wetlands killing raptors and screechers. Henry tamed a screecher and named it Kashmir (he had Zeppelin running on iTunes in the background). Is he the coolest kid or what?

17 — Bought muslin and grommets for curtains! I decided to make them single-layer, so I bought 2 yards of 45″ wide bleached muslin for the stairs and 2.5 yards of 108″ wide bleached muslin for the sliding door. Also a pack of grommets. I washed, dried, and ironed the stuff, and then did most of the work of measuring and hemming. I split the 108″ width in half and did a narrow hem on the long sides and a 3/4″ hem at the top. The stair curtain is done already, as I didn’t have to hem anything but the top and bottom and set in two grommets. It looks nice and serves its purpose well. I got too tired to finish the big ones but I can finish tomorrow. Henry and I finished “The Bagthorpes Unlimited” tonight so we need to take it back and get the next one soon. Sooooooo tired tonight.

16 — Happy birthday, dearest Dan :)

I am feeling a lot better but my throat is still a little bit scratchy. Today was basic housecleaning day — vacuum, mop bathrooms and kitchen, dust, empty trash, declutter. This house is nice to clean because it really looks good when I’m done. (well, the rooms that are at least semi-finished, anyway!) I need to make some kind of curtains for the sliding glass door, and one for the stairs between the kitchen and the livingroom, for a little bit of privacy. I’ve been considering this for days, and I think I finally made up my mind. They’re going to be extremely simple, just flat panels of bleached muslin with grommets set into the top corners, which will hang from nails or hooks. I said it was simple… To “draw” them in the daytime we’ll just unhook one corner and let them drape to the floor on the other side. I think it will be a pretty effect. The sliding glass door is big but if muslin comes 60″ wide, two panels will be perfect, and they can overlap in the center. I’ll do a double layer of muslin, I think, as it’s thin. They will be extraordinarily easy to wash and dry and iron, so there will be no reason for them to get dusty and filthy over time. They should always look fresh. And if everyone hates them, I’ll have 14 yards of muslin for other projects :) I’ll buy muslin and grommets tomorrow.

Dan came home from work tonight while I was teaching my last piano student for the day, and he sat in the teaching room with me for a while. What a treat!

15 — Henry updated his blog! (http://spaceman3000.blogspot.com)

I had a notion a while ago that it would be convenient if our family had some kind of online calandar, so that all three of could easily see doctor appointments, Karate belt tests, piano students, etc. I hunted around for a good, free, php-based online calendar and decided on http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php. Dan helped me set it up last night. I did most of the work, which was very fun! It’s a wonderful calendar and does everything I was hoping it would. We have it set up so that Henry, Dan, and I each have our own calendar, but each can view any calendar. There’s also an “everyone” view, in which you see all appointments from all three calendars. When you create an appointment, you can choose “participants”. Each participant will see the appointment on his calendar — so for instance, Henry’s karate classes show up on his calendar and mine, but not Dan’s. But of course Dan can see them by viewing the “everyone” calendar. It will also send email reminders if you wish, and is highly customizable. We had such a fun time setting it up and everyone is very pleased.

13 — Sick. Last night around bedtime I noticed that I had that funny feeling in my throat, a sort of tingle, that I get before a bad sore throat… and sure enough my throat was terribly sore all night and still is. Had creepy dreams, too. But I don’t have any students, errands, or activities to attend to today (Karate was cancelled) so I can just lie around all day. But still it stinks to be sick.

Everyone loves maps.google.com, right? Well it worked in every browser on every computer in the house except in Firefox on my iBook. Annoying. Today I installed the latest Firefox (1.0.4) hoping google maps would work but no, it still didn’t. So I went searching the interweb to see if anyone else has this problem… and, finally, many pages deep into a google search, I found the answer! You must go into firefox prefs: web features: javascript: advanced: change images ON. Hallelujia, it works! I guess firefox on all the other computers had that option checked already. Odd.

Well I’m just lying on the bed, computing and watching tv today, waiting for mmy throat to feel better. Henry was keeping me company for a while and we watched a couple of episodes of Star Trek together. Now he’s gone out with Sal. They’re going to bring me some juice and get the mail while they’re out. I’m watching the Antiques Roadshow now, very soothing. Speaking of TV, why is American Dad so very very bad? I expected more from Seth McFarlane. The first episode was lame but I thought, well, that’s only the first episode, maybe it will get better, but the second episode was equally lame. I watched about half of it and then I realized I hadn’t even smiled once and was simply feeling annoyed, so I tuned out. Dan has a greater tolerance for bad TV, or perhaps more optimism, than I do so he watched the whole thing. Go ahead and cancel it, Fox.

12 — Gerry finished the floor in the dining room. Henry and I moved the table and chairs back into place and now we can eat like civilized people again :) It’s lovely! Gerry says he might be able to finish the upstairs hall tomorrow, and then work on the sitting room on Tuesday.

My dear nephew John flew into town this morning for a job interview and he got the job YAY!!! He’s flying back to KY tomorrow and then will drive out here next week. He’ll be staying with us for a while which will be wonderful, although the poor guy won’t have his own room until Sally’s remodelling is done. He’s geeky and lots of fun and we all get along really well. Henry adores him because he likes Tolkien as much as Henry does, and taught Henry some Elvish long ago.

11 — The house is coming along nicely. The downstairs floor is done, so today we dragged the furniture back into place and it’s sooo nice!

08 — I’m sitting with my laptop out on the back patio, blogging and listening to the mockingbirds. Sal’s roses look so good! One of my favorites is the Double Delight rose, which is sort of yellow and pinkish, mixed and streaked together. Henry’s been helping her plant big clay pots of annuals, and they’re looking lovely. Today Henry got home early (10am) because his dad had to work, so I took him over to Sunterra to play with his best friend, Fargo. They get to play together all day so they’re really happy! I took the last stuff from our apartment and loaded it in my car (Cannie the giant trash can, my vacuum, my mop, etc) and on the way home stopped at Target to shop around a little. I was looking for a replacement mop head for mmy O’Cedar twist mop but they don;’t seem to carry them any more. Argh. But they had nice duffle bags on sale for $15 so I got one for Henry’s karate gear. I think he’ll be pleased! I was going to make him one but I couldn’t even make one for as little as $15, and this one looks all sporty nice. Well I guess I’d better go unpack some more kitchen stuff.

07 — This was a busy and very good day! First we went to Dan’s office so he could do some work for an hour or two, and I sat around and finished reading Whip Hand. Then we drove back up to Oceanside and picked up my car and went over to the apartment for some final posession-removal and cleaning. Dan loaded all our remaining stuff into the two cars while I cleaned the kitchen and bathrooms, and then he vacuumed. And he also threw out a bunch more stuff yay!!! We both really love throwing things out — it’s quite liberating and gets easier and easier the more you do it. It sounds like a big awful job, doing a move-out cleaning on a whole apartment, and I guess it was, but we had a ton of fun together, talking about all the Sunterra crap we won’t have to put up with anymore and how much we both love living with Sal! And encouraging eash other to throw things out, and just talking and working together and stuff. By the time we got home we were exhausted and filthy so we took showers and hung around for a while. Dan wanted to buy me so I didn’;t have to cook, and he had the lovely idea of going to Trader Joe’s to pick out some fun microwavable food that we wouldn’t ordinarily buy, so we did that! Came home, fixed food, sat in front of Jon Stweart and ate and laughed and had a great time, and then it was bedtime :) A lovely day!

05 — Yesterday Henry and I watched a Nova episode about tornadoes and then we watched the String Theory one again at his request. And he asked me to save it in the TiVo so he could watch it again. I mention this in case he becomes the most famous String Theorist in the world someday :)

Here’s a time-waster for you: guess-the-google. Very amusing.

04 — We love living here! There’s so much elbow room, even with three of the rooms being completely torn apart for remodelling. I am especially happy about the laundry situation — five steps from my bedroom and there’s the washing machine — out the door from there to the backyard and there’s our lovely new Brabantia Lift-O-Matic Outdoor Clothes Dryer. I recommend it very highly, by the way. We also have the garage stand for it (since there’s no dirt out there to drive the stake into) but be warned that if you use the garage stand outdoors you’ll need to weigh it down with something. I used a couple of bags of potting soil. Otherwise the wind catches in the laundry and knocks the whole thing over :) Anyway I don’t have to haul the laundry down a flight of steps and across a parking lot, remembering to bring quarters, laundry detergent, and a key. It’s a luxury, I tell you! Also there has been no pointless ridiculous excessive yardwork performed by a squad of leaf-blowers outside our window at 8am, a common occurrence at Sunterra. There are workmen here doing the remodelling, which is noisy, but they are kind and cheerful and are here for our benefit and for a good reason! That makes all the difference in the world.

Oh yes it turned out that the oak staircase leads from linoleum-on-cement to linoleum-on-particle-board. I would like to know what the original builder was smoking. Our fabulous floor guy is chipping off all the disgusting old linoleum today, and says he can start laying the Pergo down on Thursday (it has to acclimate to the house or something).

03 — They’ve started ripping out carpet to install pergo floors! Wooohooo! Under the layers of crappy old carpet and padding and linoleum on the stairs they found solid OAK. No one knew it was there — when we moved into this house in the mid-80s there was hideous gold shag carpet everywhere, and when Mom had it replaced a few years ago no one told her about the oak staircase. We wish the whole house had oak under the carpets but so far it’s just the stairs. Crazy!

02 — We went to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this afternoon! Dan and Henry both liked at a lot. I didn’t think it was that great but it had some good moments. My favorite was when Slartibartfast took Arthur onto the Magrathea factory floor… awesome. When we got home we put the radio play on :)

01 — Dan unloaded the U-Haul today and set up his and Henry’s computers and made the TiVo work so it would record the new Family Guy and American Dad. Family guy was pretty good but American Dad wasn’t. It’s great living here! We all love it. We were so sick and tired of all Sunterra’s crap.

April 2005

30 — Moving day. Dan’s friend Dave came over to help him move everything so I didn’t have to do a lick of work. We reserved a truck at U-Haul but will never use U-Haul again! Dan had to wait in line for 2 hours to get his truck. Jeebus.

29 — Dan stayed home from work today to help pack and throw out stuff. Moving day is tomorrow!

25 — Henry went to Disneyland with Bob Tedde and Chloe and some of Bob’s assorted relatives, and I stayed home and packed a few more things and did about half of the weekly housecleaning — I’ll do the mopping and bathrooms tomorrow. I needed to save some energy for teaching this afternoon as I’ve been really tired lately. I think my thyroid levels are still out of whack, sigh. So I sat around and played WoW in the afternoon which was fun of course. I finally found Yowler and killed him. It was sort of a suicide run — I had a soulstone so I just went ahead and attacked him and got jumped by about three of his friends, but my minion and I managed to kill Yowler before we were killed by his buddies. Then I resurrected and looted him and fled to town :) Love my warlock!

23 — Busy day. I went to Sal’s in the morning and helped her throw out a giant pile of JUNK, mostly old kitchen crud. We filled her front porch with give-away stuff! And we also re-arranged the furniture in the livingroom, and hung up laundry on the new Brabantia laundry rack. And then at noon I came home to make breakfast for Dan. After a while we went back to Sal’s and then down to Ikea to buy a desk for Dan! That was tiring but fun. We got home around 7:30, and then Mom came over to watch Survivor with us :)

20 — Yay Henry gets to stop wearing his splint today! We got up around 6 to take Dan to the airport. When we got home we were both pretty tired so we didn’t do much — Henry watched cartoons and I did housework and played a little WoW. I’ve got to recommend the insomniax collection of ui mods for World of Warcraft — it’s better than Cosmos and seemingly more stable. Dan replaced Cosmos with insomniax the other day and it’s wonderful.

19 — Henry and I had a lot of fun together today. First we went out to breakfast at Einstein Brothers, and then we browsed around in Bed Bath and Beyond looking at things we might like to have when we move (next week!). IT sounds boring but we really had a ton of fun :) And then we did a little grocery shopping, and then went to Mervyns for socks for Dan, and then came home. I guess it was fun because Henry is such an agreeable, friendly, pleasant little guy and a wonderful companion. When we got home we considered playing WoW but it was update day and the patch took an hour and a half to dl and install, so we ran out of time — so instead we played Streetcar and Amazing Labyrinth and watched the Antiques Roadshow together until it was time for me to go teach some of Sally’s students. Dan got home nice and early and I made him marinated ginger steak for dinner and he was happy :)

17 — So far I’m very pleased with Thunderbird. I’m still training it for spam but it’s learning quickly and it’s doing better than crm-114, and it’s a LOT easier to train than crm-114. Spam is the main reason I switched away from pine… The straw that broke the camel’s back happened when I trained crm-114 for a false positive and then the next morning my inbox was FULL of spam and a letter from Henry had been marked as spam. And I just got sick of it. This morning I went to Sal’s to check on the animals, and then bought water. Now I’m watching Dan make cinnamon rolls and advising him when necessary. But he doesn’t need much advising :)

16 — Henry and I got up early and I drove him down to his dad’s house. We listened to the latest cd of our homemade “Absolute Zero” audiobook. I’m quite a good reader, if I say so myself :) After I dropped him off I took myself to IKEA. I had never been there before and oh my goodness it was heaven on earth. Mercy. So many beautiful and useful things! I did not buy anything but I have my eye on some nice stuff for someday. I spent almost an hour there and had a lot of fun. After I got home I played a bit of WoW while Dan played his guitar. He’s working on “Dogs” and sounds amazing! I played my warlock and ran around in the Stonetalon Mountains with a nice fellow named Thiefelf who owns a liquor store in TX. And then I threw more stuff out and packed a box of sewing/desk stuff and worked on my rug while watching the history of Britain while Dan went to the shooting range. And then we watched a bunch of tv together, Malcolm in the Middle and Family Guy, and I installed the Thunderbird email client on my iBook and my linux box. I’ve been using pine for 6 years but I have finally gotten so sick and tired of dealing with spam that I decided to try Thunderbird, since I’m quite impressed with the way Thunderbird handles Henry’s spam. It took me a while to get it set up to my satisfaction but I think it will be ok now. Hint: if you’re installing it on more than one computer, you can fill in your addressbook on one computer, then export it, then import it to the other computers. Very handy.

14 — Henry was sick today, pukey and listless, so we lay around and watched movies. He watched his awfuldreadful Spy Kids 3-D movie, and then we watched Bells Are Ringing, and then The Empire Strikes Back, which is good for the first 20 minutes or so and then goes rapidly downhill heheh. And then he napped and I packed all the books in his bookshelf, and then I played a little WoW, doing quests in Ashenvale with my warlock. Tonight we watched Survivor — Coby’s gone, thank GOODNESS! If I had to see him roll his eyes while griping about everyone else one more time I was going to scream.

12 — Packed up the ENTIRE living room bookshelf! I’m so proud of us for gettign rid of so much stuff lately. If we had not, I would have probably filled at least 6 more boxes than I did. Ugh! Time to throw out even more stuff yay!

10 — I picked up Henry from Temecula around noon and then we went to La Jolla for Rockola’s Abbey Road show! It was a top-quality show and we had a great time. And we had front row seats! The band was wonderful, the extra musicians were wonderful, and the audience loved it! They didn’t just perform the album, they added lots of interesting little touches, like a real Moog synthesizer, a bubble machine and disco ball (for Octopus’s Garden), an extra percussionist to add all the funky little sound effects, a real upright piano for the songs which needed it… I could go on and on. Rockola rocks!

09 — We cleaned and packed up Dan’s desk area today. Whew. It was a huge horrible job but now it’s over and it looks so much better! And I packed a box of photos/art supplies, one of sewing/craft/costume books and one of music books. And then we ran out of boxes, so I’ll need to buy some more soon.

Forgot to mention that in Minish Cap I am at the part where you fight Vaati on top of the castle, and I keep dying. But I’ll conquer him eventually. And when I played WoW this morning, I got my rogue to lvl 26 woohoo! And then I decided to “forget” alchemy and learn skinning instead, so I had to travel back to Dolanaar to find easy animals to skin, to improve my skill. While I was over there I helped a group of lvl 8-9s with the Relics of Wakening quest. Horrible quest. I think if I ever start another character over there I’ll skip that one — it’s not worth the aggravation.

Mom came over tonight and Dan went out to get us ice cream and milkshakes for us, and then we talked and ate pizza and watched Survivor (Steph is all alone on her island now) and Arrested Development. Fun :)

07 — Happy birthday Kirsten!

05 –Took Grandma and Carol out on errands this morning. Carol flew in from Florida yesterday for the sole reason of escorting Grandma back to Florida with her, because Grandma is afraid to fly alone. Carol told me that that’s what Mike (my Grandpa, Carol’s recently deceased husband, Grandma’s ex) would have wanted her to do. Carol is a very good person.

Henry and I had to do a few more errands after we dropped them back off at Mom’s house, including the drugstore and the ice cream store, and then we went home to keep our Jeeves and Wooster date. We sat together on the couch, ate ice cream, and watched all three episodes on the new dvd. Very fun, very enjoyable! How awesome is it to have a 9 yr old son who enjoys Jeeves and Wooster so much? I worked on my prodded rug (2″ x 4″ strips of old t-shirts poked through the holes in a piece of rug canvas) while we watched, and got a lot done. My thumb is sore from rubbing on the canvas, though.

03 — Stupid time change. H8N. Yesterday Dan said that if I bought him a big garbage can it would be easier for him to go through his stuff and throw out the junk, so this morning I went to Lowe’s and bought one of those huge 45-gallon garbage cans with wheels! He filled it up THREE times today with old junk. Now, instead of having a closet filled with boxes of junk, we have a closet filled with empty boxes!

02 — Drove H to SD this morning (before the horrible all-day traffic jam, luckily). We listened to the first disk of “The Positronic Man” while we were driving. He seemed really to enjoy it and asked me to wait to listen to the rest of it until he’s home again, which I am haappy to do of course! We got up to the part where Sir starts asking Andrew to learn all about woodcarving. I think it’s Henry’s first real sci-fi novel. Dad would be proud. Even though he wasn’t a big Asimov fan, sci-fi is sci-fi.

In the afternoon we went over to Mom’s to help Grandma get packed up, and then Mom came over here in the evening to watch survivor but she and Dan mostly talked about the house remodelling projects. But then we finally got to watch survivor — poor Ulong has only two members left. They’ll surely merge next week.

01 — Henry’s new moccasin kit arrived today! He was soooo happy to get it. His old moccasins (which we gave him for Christmas in 2001) were too small and getting worn out so he ordered a new kit with his own money. He assembled one of the moccasins, and then asked me to do the other. He’s been wearing them constantly and proving how quietly he can walk in them :) Adorable little boy!

This was Chloe’s last day in SD so Dan picked her up on the way home from work and she came up and had dinner with us and hung around and listened to me read the end of Ordinary Jack and the beginning of Absolute Zero to Henry for bedtime, and then I drove her back to Bob’s house. We listened to Loveline all the way. She’s so much fun!

March 2005

31 — This morning I looked in the Oceanside library catalog online and saw that THEY have Absolute Zero! (Henry and I are both enjoying Ordinary Jack so much that I want to get the next book asap) So we took a drive out there and got AZ, and Bagthorpes Unlimited, and Bagthorpes vs. the World. YAY!!! And we stopped and bought Trader Joe food on the way home, and got some cheap paintbrushes so Henry could paint his model submarine. When we got home Henry helped me bring in all the food and then I helped him paint his model. Really, he did all the painting, I just opened the jars for him and held the sub steady while he painted. And then I did the decals for him (he wanted me to) and now his sub is done! I’ll offer to help him blog about it tomorrow :) And then we sat on the balcony and I read two more chapters of Ordinary Jack to him.

It’s a santa ana all of a sudden and my hair is all crackly and dry. Ugh. But the warm weather is kind of nice for a change. And my lovely new car has real actual air conditioning so it’s not grim running around doing errands in the heat :)

30 — Went to the Carlsbad Library, hoping to get Absolute Zero (the next book in the Bagthorpe Saga) but they don’t even own a copy. Boo, hiss! But I got a good stack of other books:

1215: The year of Magna Carta (history — started this one already and it’s excellent)
Bergdorf Blondes (fiction)
Revolutionary Mothers: Women and the Struggle for America’s Independence (history)
The Best Awful (fiction)
The Children’s Blizzard (history, about the same terrible winter as “The Long Winter”)
The Island at the Center of the World (history, about the settling of Manhattan)
Hissy Fit (fiction)
Reproduction is the Flaw of Love (fiction)

The books were just jumping off the shelves at me today!

28 — Extremely busy day. Did all the dusting, mopping, vacuuming, and decluttering in the morning after I made pancakes for the boys (Fargo was home from school all day!), and then built boxes for the auction stuff i had to ship, and dealt with the payments and the printing of shipping labels etc, which took FOREVER. Then had to drop everything off ot the UPS dropoff place, and rented a game for Henry with one of our free coupons, and stopped by the bank for cash for Grandma, and then taught two students. Oh yeah I managed to get dinner started in the crockpot at some point also. Then came home, fixed dinner for Henry, read him another chapter of Ordinary Jack, and put him to bed, then sat here in my nice chair listening to the Brandenburg Concertos and working on my flash animation assignment, which you can see if you wish to. It’s nothing special, just an exercise for attaching actionscript to buttons etc. Here: facefacts_fade.swf. Don’t complain to me about the ugly buttons, I whipped them up really fast to replace some even uglier ones. They don’t bother me, because I know exactly how to fix them to make them look good. What does bother me is the brief preview you get sometimes of the text that’s about to fade in… it’s very annoying and i’m not sure what to do about it. Grr.

26 — Last night I dreamed about loading and unloading a dishwasher. It just doesn’t get much more exciting than that, I tell you!

This evening Mom and I drove down to Viejas to hear Rockola and hang out with Chloe. We had fun! The band had to go on late because of a poker tournament, so Bob bought us dinner while we were waiting, very sweet of him. Chloe and I danced and danced! And they played “I want you to want me” at my request :)

25 — This morning Henry and I worked through a couple of the lessons in my Flash book. You can see his work if you go to his blog :) Chloe flew into town today for her spring break! She’s staying with Bob, of course, and flying to Florida with Rockola next week, but we got to see her tonight at The Steely Damned show at Humprey’s. Kirsten and Marcos and I drove down together and Dan went there after work, and we all got to hang out with Chloe while the band played! It was really wonderful seeing her, and being with K & M, but the best part was getting to meet up with Dan after work, sort of like a date :) Which is silly because if it had been an ordinary night I would have seen him just as much. It’s the Going Out thing, I guess. He says I’m a good dancer!

24 — Jeeze where does the time go. What have I been doing lately? This has been a busy week I guess. I signed up for one of those Cnet classes for beginning flash animation, and the first couple of lessons were fun so today I helped Henry go through them. He seemed to really enjoy working with flash! It took us about 3 hours to go through the first three lessons and I thought he’d get sick of it, but he kept saying he wanted to continue. The result is an animated face, which you can see if you go to his blog. Ok well I’m tired so I’m going to bed now!

20 — Set up a couple more auctions today, and they’re all going well. I played WoW for many hours and got my Warlock up to level 24! Also cleaned and decluttered my sewing/office area, got rid of the crappy white plastic clutter-trapper rack thingy and sorted out my thread and notions and stuff. I’s SO much better now! And I threw away a whole big bag of stuff and gathered up some more giveaway stuff too. Now we’re going to bed early to watch 7 episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm :)

19 — Still feeling sick but had a nice day with Dan anyway. Mom came over in the evening and we watched the two episodes of Survivor that were in the Tivo. Very entertaining! The good team (Koror) won a reward challenge and got a new shelter, and the bad team (Ulong?) quarreled amongst themselves and voted off Kim (no great loss) and Angie, who seemed like one of the smartest, strongest people… So entertaining!

18 — Feeling a bit better already! Fargo was home from school today due to car trouble so he and Henry played allllll day. Fargo broke his right arm on Monday so they are a matched set, heh. He says his break is just a crack, and he had a splint, no cast. But still, they’re two boys with broken right arms. It rained this afternoon when I took Henry to karate, and the Tiny Tigers class was so crowded I sat in the car and listened to NPR and played Minish Cap, but then during Henry’s class I sat in the dojo and watched/played gameboy/read Smokescreen. Dan and I are on a serious Dick Francis kick. We got two more Curb Your Enthusiasm dvds in the mail today!

17 — Sick. And Henry’s still coughing, too, so we stayed home and had Movie Day. First I put on Some Like It Hot, then Henry chose A Mighty Wind, and then we watched Best In Show. Funny movies, all three. We lay around on the couch together and played on our gameboys some of the time. It’s not bad feeling semi-sick when you have a sweet 9 yr old to watch movies with.

16 — Last time I went to the library I got “Freddy and the Ignormus” (audiobook) for Henry. He was playing it on his computer in the livingroom yesterday and I started listening, and it was really entertaining! Quite a funny story, really, with a delightful old-fashioned vocabulary and good “lessons” that don’t seem “lessony” at all. We played all five cds over the past two days, and, although I wasn’t paying 100% attention every minute, I’ve been laughing out loud at it quite a bit. We did a bit of math today for about 10 minutes (adding single digits to 9 and 8) and then played WoW together for a long time — Zinny and Ramona in Redridge, mostly. And this evening I read TWO chapters of Ordinary Jack to him for bedtime :) Dan had to work very late tonight and I miss him but he’ll be home soon.

15 — Henry made me laugh so much tonight! I was reading “Ordinary Jack” to him (which he loves, btw) and we got to the part where Jack creates a Mysterious Impression by accident, and all of a sudden Henry sang, to the tune of “I Won’t Grow Up” (from Peter Pan)

“A Mysterious Impression (a mysterious impression)
and he didn’t even try! (and he didn’t even try!)”

(if you dont know the song, the original words are “and a serious expression (and a serious expression) in the middle of July (in the middle of July)) I love fitting new words to old songs, and Dad did too (5 foot tree, don’t blame me, if it’s so tiny that you can’t see — has anybody seen my tree…) So I was delighted :)

14 — Now we are home. We drove home yesterday. It was funny — Idyllwild was completely clear and sunny, but right when we drove out of town there was all this thick fog that didn’t clear up until we got almost down to Hemet. The first time we reached Hemet, I realized we’d left my sweater, Dan’s coat, and our hats on hooks behind the door of our cabin, argh! So we turned around and drove all the way back up the hill, heh. But then we eventually got home. We were so tired last night. We put Henry to bed at 8 and just went straight to bed ourselves.

Today I did a lot of Stuff that had to get done… packaged up my auction stuff for UPS, picked up Kirsten at the airport, did laundry, did half the weekly housecleaning (Henry did all the bathroom windexing for me) and, um, other stuff which I can’t think of right now. And taught four students. And Henry and I had a little time to play World of Warcraft together, and I read him two chapters of Ordinary Jack for his bedtime story.. gosh I love that book and Henry seems to like it too! He laughed out loud at “I see dot dot dot, I see dot dot dot…”

12 — Slept late, made breakfast, hung around in our nice cabin. We played with our cameras and got lots of good photos which I’ll post when we get home. We just had dinner at the Greek place again — we went around to other places and looked at menus but nothing looked as tasty as Greek food, so that’s what we had! now we’re in the internet cafe catching up on email etc, and then we’re going to go home and lie around some more :) We got our wet firewood to burn last night by using FireLog(tm). Immediately upon use, FireLog increased our fire efficiency by 364%. I highly recommend FireLog to anyone. (Note: The Duraflame Company asks that you respect their products by ignoring proper article usage in language, so you must never refer to FireLog as “the firelog” or “a firelog”. It is simply FireLog.)

11 — I woke up pretty early this morning, read for a while, then got up and had a shower and made coffee, and then walked into town to the market for juice, salt and pepper, a newspaper, and a shady hat. We didn’t expect it to be so sunny here and I got a little sunburn just from walking around yesterday. Then I came home, put our wet firewood on the porch in the sun, and sat in the open doorway reading. When Dan woke up he had no internet, of course, and he usually wakes up by reading his email and looking at his websites, so I pretended to be the internet and I told him he had 7000 new emails, and that cnn.com said there was trouble in the middle east, that boingboing.net reported on a new Monkey Attack and people being upset about the government censoring bloggers, and that slashdot reported that Microsoft Sucks, that someone made something cool out of legos, and that someone made something new that does something interesting in an overly complicated way. So then he was happy :)

And then I made him breakfast (I brought ingredients and my lovely cast-iron skillet) of scrambled eggs, toast, sausage, and juice, and then we sat around reading together for a long time. After a while I wanted to go out so I walked to the library and browsed around there for a bit. It’s a nice library for such a small town! And then I came back and we read some more… and then we took a walk into town again. We had a good time browsing around the tourist stores and Dan bought me a silver and garnet necklace :) Also looked around for a present for Henry but couldn’t find anything really neat. But it was a good long nice walk in the fresh air under the beautiful trees. Now we’re back in our cabin. Dan’s reading some more and I’m typing up this post in textedit on my laptop so I can post it quickly next time we go to the internet cafe place. I imagine we’ll go find some dinner pretty soon… This is the nicest honeymoon anyone could ever possibly have, just doing almost nothing in the quiet, taking little walks, and being together.

10 — Today we drove to Idyllwild for our honeymoon! It was a nice drive and only took about 2 hours. We’re staying at The Manzanita Cabins which is a wonderful place! Our cabin has a little front room with a daybed and a little table with two chairs, a little bathroom with a shower, a little kitchen complete with gas stove/oven, small fridge, coffee machine, toaster, and microwave (and helpful accessories such as a corkscrew, cheese grater, dish drainer, dish soap, hotpads, and some dishes and silverware!), and then a large main room with a queen-size bed at one end and a fireplace at the other, and a couch and tv right in the middle. And there are lots of windows and a front door and a back door. It’s extremely home-like and comfortable and we are very very happy to be here!

After we got here, checked in, unpacked, and lay around for a while, we took a walk into town. It’s only a block or two into downtown Idyllwild — past the library and the propane supplier, around the corner, and there’s the town. We got some lunch/dinner at a fabulous Greek place, walked around a little more, and then came back to our cabin. Then we watched a couple of episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (brought our latest greencine dvds along for entertainment), and then drove over to the Java Lounge which is an internet cafe with free wireless! I bought Dan a couple of pastries and we checked our email, etc. (that’s how I am able to post this, of course) And then we went home again and lay around and watched more dvds and had fun using Dan’s digital camera and laser pointer to make light- paintings — example soon :) Also tried to build a fire in the fireplace but the wood we brought is so wet it won’t really burn. but Dan had fun with matches and paper trying to help it along. We’ll get some dry wood or a fake log or something tomorrow. We are having the BEST TIME already. It’s so beautiful and quiet here, and the air is fresh and everyone smiles at us.

10 — We’re leaving today for our honeymoon! We’re going to Idyllwild, to stay in a little cabin and relax and do nothing. We probably won’t have internet access so I’ll post again when we get back on Sunday :) Have a good weekend everyone!

09 — Dan and I got married today! It was a tiny civil ceremony at the County Clerk’s Office. Here’s one photo for you, and there are a few more in my photo gallery. We had a wonderful time. Mom and Henry were there, and Dan’s good friend Midori. And afterwards we went to the Maritime Museum and walked all over The Star of India and the H.M.S. Surprise. It was a wonderful day!

08 — My wrist is hurting, argh. It hurts even though I wear my wrist-support thing all the time. I’ve been crocheting a lot of lace, lately, also playing the piano a lot the last couple days, so it’s probably all that activity that’s causing the pain, darn it. Yesterday I taught one of Mom’s students and the little girl played an arrangement of the old doo-wop song “Come Go With Me” and I liked it so much I brought a copy of the book home to play here. Henry likes it too and started doubling the melody way up high on the piano. I jazz up the rhytym a lot and it sounds really good. But anyway that’s probably why my wrist hurts. Sigh. Henry and I watched the Antiques Roadshow together today. Love that show! I learn so much every time. Dan and I are getting married tomorrow yay! Hope it’s not raining :) (when have I EVER said that before? heheh)

I’ve been obsessed with a great old tune lately: The Darktown Strutters Ball. It’s one of my favorites on my old Benny Goodman 1935 album. This morning I decided to try to find an mp3 of it (since I can’t digitize my LPs) and found a (differnt) Benny Goodman version, an Ella Fitzgerald version, and a Boswell Sisters version. (ever heard of The Boswell Sisters? Me neither, but they’re good!) All three are great, and now I know the words too. Dance all over my shoes when the band plays the jellyroll blues!! Speaking of acquiring music, I went to the used record store across from karate today, just looking. I found a New Christy Minstrels record for $.50, which I bought because I’ve never heard them but Mom says they’re the group that The New Main Street Singers are based on, so I thought it would be fun (or possibly agonizing) to hear the real thing. Too bad when I got it home I noticed that the wrong record was in the jacket, heh. Oh well. But while I was there I bought another Benny Goodman LP for $7 and an album of Rush doing cover songs for Dan. And then I was wondering — why doesn’t the RIAA crack down on people reselling used records and cds? The artists and labels don’t get any money from such sales. Why is _sharing_ music wrong but _reselling_ it is ok? Hmmmmmmmm… Yeah, I know, it’s because sharing creates copies. Tough, technology marches on. Sigh. I will reiterate what i’ve said many times before — the ability to get a taste of new music via p2p filesharing has caused me to actually purchase far more (NEW) cds in the last couple of years than I would have ordinarily. And hey, sharing is nice! Some stranger today provided me with some music that makes me extremely happy, and now I’ll be looking for a Boswell Sisters cd to buy. RIAA, you can go jump in a lake.

07 — I made an almost-sleeveless chemise to wear under my Romantic Blouse which I will wear under my Romantic Jumper, which I washed and ironed today. So all my wedding clothes are all ready for Wednesday :) Henry helped me with the housework this morning and then we played together, and then I taught three students this afternoon. I had to renew my domain registration for kayray.org today, so you can enjoy this blog for yet another year, lucky you! And now I am tired and going to bed.

06 — Dan was using our main WoW account today so I started a character on the 2nd account — all my other chars there are ones I use when I want to play with Dan or Henry, so I don’t like to use them to play solo. So I started a night elf Druid (Animala) and got her to lvl 7. Fun! It’s nice to have healing spells. And in only three more lvls I’ll get to learn how to take an animal form. Cool.

I have figured out the perfect way to listen to Loveline while I go to sleep. We record them from the internet stream so we have a huge archive of old shows. So I run one on my laptop, turn the brightness all the way down, and plug in my earbuds. Then I get in my comfy sleeping position, on my side, and put one earbud in my ear, and turn the volume almost all the way down. When commercials come on I take the thing out of my ear for a few minutes, and usually I fall asleep pretty quick. Very relaxing and soothing.

04 — This morning Henry and I worked on his bookshelf a little bit, and he came up with some things to give away/throw out! Yay Henry! Then we worked on his Math-u-see for a while, which was fun. It’s a nice system. The early stuff is quite simple for Henry so we just do a few excercises until he’s sure he knows it. And then we played WoW for a while (Mooly and Yry went to Oggrimar together and then took the zeppelin to The Undercity), and then it was time for karate. Matthew picked him up from karate and I went to the fabric store for embroidery floss for the vintage stamped-for-cutwork linen napkins I got on ebay, and while I was there i bought a fabulous encyclopedia of needlework (used the gift cards mom gave me for Christmas). I’m planning to take my linen napkins to Idyllwild to work on. (We’re getting married on Wednesday and going to Idyllwild on Thursday for a long weekend honeymoon!)

03 — Claire (Fargo’s mom) came over with a borrowed sewing machine for me to thread for her. I threaded it and tested it out but it was having some kind of bizarre tension problem. I fiddled with it for quite a while and then gave up and sent Claire home with my old Kenmore machine, which I haven’t used since Dan and Mom gave me my Pfaff last year. I tested it and showed her how to use it. The sound it makes is so comfortably familiar. Nice. And then Henry went home with Claire and little 3 year old Max to play for a while, and I set up some auctions on ebay — getting rid of STUFF yay!

Oh I also went to the post office to pick up the math-u-see stuff I bought for Henry, and to the pharmacy to pick up our prescriptions, which I had refilled online yesterday. And they actually filled them all with no problems! amazing. Then Henry came home and we played a little WoW together (Zinny and Ramona this time, collecting red leather bandanas in Westfall) and then went over to Sal’s to teach. We took our new math stuff and watched part of the video in Sal’s VCR. Looks good! Henry understands about place value now, and is eager to do more.

Then we went to karate for the fist time since Henry broke his arm. He did well in class, but came down with a migraine at the end and turned all pale and ill. Took hime home, tucked him into bed, and waited for him to puke, which he did eventually and then felt immediately better and got up and had a little dinner before I put him back to bed for the night. And then Dan and I watched Survivor and I finished sewing buttons on my blue dress :)

02 — Doctor appointment for Henry today, and they x-rayed his arm and said it’s healing well, yay! He gets to go back to karate as long as he’s careful :) And he also can sleep without it being elevated which means he can sleep in his own room again so I am going to go clean it and make his bed all nice before he gets home (He’s hanging out with Matthew right now).

01 — I’ve started to feel a little bit hyperthyroid again… it’s very very subtle but annoying. Yesterday I called the doctor, prepared to argue my way into a blood test again, but amazingly enough they didn’t argue and gave me a lab slip that very day. We’ll see… The last time this happened I felt even more hyper thank I do now but the test showed me being only slightly above “normal” so I would not be surprised if this test shows nothing. But at least I tried.

This morning Henry and I went down to the free museums in Balboa Park. The free ones today were the Science Center, the Model Railroad Museum, and the Natural History Museum. We had a nice drive down and parked as usual in the lot off president’s Way and took the tram into the park. Then we walked up to the Model Railroad Museum, which was crowded but fun, and then to the Science Center but there were 989349389170 school children on field trips and the noise was unbelievable. So we only walked around a little bit and then went for lunch at the Park Cafe instead :) We had a good time together!