kayray.org

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

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

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

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

044 – The Battle of Bannockburn

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

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

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

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

Subtraction
multiplication
drilled 2 and 3 times tables
practiced writing numerals
drawing

Bayshore Art
Bayshore Science (Prisms)
Bayshore Spanish
Greenwitch
Finished Samhain cake

043 – Robert the Bruce and Bohun

042 – The Hammer of the Scots

041 – The First Prince of Wales

040 – The Little War of Chalons

039 – The Story of the Poisoned Dagger

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

 Stuffed Peppers

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

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

Gardening — chose plants and seeds, finished amending soil, and planted!
researched Samhain celebrations and baked a Kornigou cake (as near as we could tell, basically a spice cake formed into the shape of antlers)

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

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

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

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

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

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

handwriting
released butterfly!
Lemony Snickett
wrote out 2 and 3 times tables
did several coloring pages for Story of the World

Henry beat the 3-times troll in TimezAttack!  Yay Henry!
Lemony Snickett
volunteered to help with little kids’ halloween party at the dojo
Greenwitch

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

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

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

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

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

Our friend Squigley from Australia is travelling all over the country and stopped in LA, so he took the train down to visit us today for a few hours! He’s just as nice in person as he is on IRC. He and Dan went down to the Guitar Center in SD so he could buy a Geddy Lee bass (much cheaper here than in .au) so I got a LOT of recording done while the house was quiet: four or five sections of the poetry book and one of the Letters of Two Brides. (As I had hoped, the poetry book included “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix“!!!) When they got home, the guys played music while I made a huge ginormous lasagna for dinner. Henry came home and played TimezAttack (he’s almost beaten the 3x troll) and Fizzball, and then we ate. Squigley brought us a little jar of Vegemite :)

The time change threw me off, of course (did I mention how extremely much I hate the time change? I HATE the time change!), so dinner was very early. Henry and I had time to play WoW for an hour while Dan and Squigley went to the shooting range. At about 8pm Henry and I started the Bedtime Routine and I read him the last chapter of The Dark is Rising. Ahhhhhh what a book. It runs circles around Harry Potter in every possible way. At 9 Chloe called and said they were up in Carlsbad and could they stop by! YAY! So we all sat around and talked til 11. So nice to see them!

The air is so dry, and I think there are particles in it from the big wildfire that’s been burning up north. The inside of my nose has felt yucky all day, like it needs to be washed out. Oh I wish it would rain. I put the little humidifier in the bedroom and hung up some damp towels to try to make it more comfortable tonight. Dan and I ran some errands today, and I edited four more recordings, and did a bunch of LibriVox work. And I registered Fizzball!

Multiplication drills (TimezAttack)
karate demo