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The Apple Stone, by Nicholas Stuart Gray, is very special to me. My sister and I discovered it in the library when we were little, and just devoured it. It is out of print, but I managed to find a nice ex-library hardback on Amazon to read from, since there is not one single copy in the entire San Diego Library system. Grr. It’s a forgotten treasure.

It takes place in England, and there are some elements I definitely didn’t understand when I was little, especially the way the narrator refers to his two Scottish cousins (a MacDonald and a Campbell) as “The Clans”, and why “The Forbidden Word” was so very forbidden. That was the olden days and we didn’t have Google…

This is not a typical “magic adventure” story. It’s beautifully written, and a bit dark, and so poetic. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Here are the first four chapters:

51 The Apple Stone, Ch. 1: The Golden Apple
52 The Apple Stone, Ch. 2: Bird Of Paradise
53 The Apple Stone, Ch. 3: Lost – One Old Rug
54 The Apple Stone, Ch. 4: The Bleep

Oops, forgot to post these chapters as they went up on my podcast feed. Here are the remaining chapters of Half Magic, by Edward Eager:

46 Half Magic Ch.4 What Happened to Katharine
47 Half Magic Ch.5 What Happened to Martha
48 Half Magic Ch.6 What Happened to Jane
49 Half Magic Ch.7 How it Ended
50 Half Magic Ch.8 How it Began Again

And that’s the end of Half Magic. If you liked it, go read all of Edward Eager’s other books! “Magic by the Lake” is the next one.

Yesterday I felt unusually good — so good, in fact, that I did lots of LibriVox work, played Beatles Rockband with Henry, started reading Treasure Island to him, and made two kinds of pie for dinner (a pear galette and a provencal quiche). But today I’m just bone-crunchingly tired. Ugh. Nearly fell asleep in the afternoon.

But I’m happy anyway and here are some of the reasons:

• Dan’s working from home today!
• I was a Good Granddaughter and ordered some yarn for my 89-yr-old grandma so she can knit a baby blanket. (Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece)
• Elli and I had a jolly time watching Mad Men (S04E11), chatting, and goofing around on AIM this morning.
• I did not actually fall asleep and forget to pick up Henry from school.
• On Henry’s recommendation, I listened to an excellent episode of This American Life while driving around this afternoon. It was a Halloween episode, #319. If you don’t already have it, get the This American Life app and your life will instantly be a little better, I guarantee it.
• And I just got a postcard from my dear old lost-then-found penpal Peer, who is on vacation with his family in Italy. It was such fun to see his handwriting again!

Now, because I’m too tired to do anything truly productive, I’m going to log into my neglected google feed reader with its thousands of unread items and delete all the blogs I don’t care about, declare bankruptcy on the ones I do care about, and start fresh. Also maybe I’ll play some WoW. It took nearly a whole day to get the new patch installed and I really would like to find out what’s new. I expect I’ll have to reassign all my talents. Sigh.

Oh, by the way, on Monday it rained, really rained!

I am so fed up with the clutter in this house! It’s time to get rid of some of our junk. Today I managed to come up with a pretty big stack of books that I think we can live without and then I spent several hours cleaning up my hideous yarn mess. There was a big cardboard box of yarn in the closet, and two big project bags full in the living room. I untangled nearly everything, except for a horrible snarl in the middle of the box that just didn’t seem worthwhile (tossed it!), and sorted it all by category and bagged the smaller balls in Ziplocs.

As God is my witness, I’ll never be tangled again. I’ve got a bag full of cottons, one of very special sock yarn, one of worsted scraps, one of hand-spun and hand-dyed yarn, etc. And my Ravelry project bag is empty, so I can take it along to the next Knit @ Night!

Before:

After:

Chloe came over and helped untangle everything, and then she ripped out that purple sweater I got sick of, so that’s no longer weighing on my conscience and taking up space.

I found a brand-new size 0 wooden circ that I didn’t know I had! It’s a good long one, so perfect for two-at-a-time socks.

Also, I baked two batches of banana-oat muffins and burned all the fingers on my left hand when I had a little mishap with the muffin pan. Ow!

Were you glued to the screen to watch the rescue of the 33 Chilean miners last week? I was. The best coverage I found was on the BBC’s website — they had the live TV feed, of course, plus updates in text so I could leave the sound turned down. And, while it was annoying that the reporters had to keep talking so there was never any dead air,at least they had British accents so they sounded intelligent and cultured.

I got teary-eyed every time a miner was freed. Every single time. I saw the first guy come up, and I saw the last guy come up. It was amazing. Scott Simon published a touching little piece this morning:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130609170

“Millions of families, including ours, got our children out of bed to watch the men rise from the earth, wave, sing, and blow kisses. We told our children, ‘Remember this night whenever you think something is impossible.'”

Viva humanity!

I got my hands on an audiobook of “Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen” (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) recently, and even found a copy of the book in hardback at the library! Sometimes I read, sometimes I read and listen at the same time, and sometimes, when I’m very tired, I just listen. I am astonished at how much I understand! Knowing the story well helps, of course, and I can guess a lot of the unknown words by context, and, when I feel like it, I look some of them up on http://www.dict.cc/. For instance, a lovely new word for me is “Gehwegplatten” . At Flourish & Blotts there were leather-bound books as big as “Gehwegplatten”. It means “flagstones”. Isn’t that delightful? It’s like “Go-way-plates”! I’ll never forget that word now.

I’ve also got a library copy of Winnie the Pooh in German (Pu der Bär), and Elli reads chapters to me sometimes, but it’s much, much harder to understand, even though I also know those stories by heart. I think Harry must be a lot more simplistic than Pooh in plot, vocabulary, and sentence structure. That’s not really a very big surprise, though, is it?

Look, look, there are a whole lot of new Symphony of Science videos! I like this one about Mars particulary much:

“Mars is a world of wonders. It has canyons, river valleys and giant ice sheets…”

It’s Kathy’s birthday – Happy birthday, Kath!

This was a very nice day. I woke up a bit before 8, and did some recording right away before the world got noisy, and then Elli and I watched the last two episodes of Mad men Season three, and had a long chat about books and all sorts of things. Then when Dan got up he drove me to Common Threads in Encinitas, where I discovered that my Donated Award (for my best-of-division, prize-winning mittens) was $50 store credit! And the shop owners admired my mittens very much :)

I chose 8 skeins of Lang Jawoll sock yarn, which is very fine but hard-wearing yarn, 75% wool and 25% nylon/acrylic (and comes with a spool of matching nylon reinforcement thread for toes and heels). It’ll become three pairs of work-socks for Dan, and one lovely deep red pair for me.

And then I realized I was very hungry, and I saw Roxy across the street — so we had such a nice lunch. I had the Avocado Sandwich, which was lightly-toasted 7-grain bread with sprouts, tomato, red onion, and avocado. It must have been three inches thick, and so nice and fresh! It was exactly what I was wanting. And then I had a cone of Niederfrank’s ice cream.

After we got home, we went over to Chloe’s to hang out and play with the cat, and then eventually we all came back over here for Mad Men.

Oh! And I discovered a GREAT iPhone game! “Trainyard Express” is free, unique, polished, and really really fun. Give it a try! I love their web integration. It’s simple to upload your solutions to their website, and it’s fun to view the solutions of other users.
Here is my user page: http://www.trainyard.ca/users/6731
Give it a try!

More peculiar weather today — thunder and lightning and even a little bit of rain! I know that it’s normal for other parts of the country to have thunderstorms at this time of year, but it’s not normal here! Rain is rare even in winter, and we almost never get thunder and lighting.

Today I went searching for familiar audiobooks in German. I managed to get my hands on “Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen”, which is so much fun! When I read along with the German text, I can understand almost everything, which fills me with confidence.

Oh, and I was complaining to Elli about the lack of good EN<>DE dictionaries online and she told me about http://dict.cc, which has made all of my dreams come true. It even remembers which words you’ve looked up recently, and you can add words to a vocabulary list and then it will train you, flash-card style! Super!

Today is Henry’s 15th birthday. Hooray! Happy birthday, sweetie, I hope you had a good day!

We’re having a bizarre and sudden heatwave — it’s 107 today. UGH. Opening the front door is like opening the oven door. So, Henry and Chloe and I had lunch at the Studio Diner which was cooler than at home, anyway. And then we turned the air conditioner on in the very back room and sat in there watching things on the laptop, and then we went over to Chloe’s house for a while and played with the cat.

It’s too hot to do anything.

Here’s a great site that someone on my homeschool email list sent around:
The Periodic Table of Videos: http://www.periodicvideos.com/index.htm

A short, entertaining, interesting video about each of the chemical elements, plus lots of videos on various molecules and other interesting stuff. (Hit the “Extra Videos” link).

Here, for example, is a video in which one scientist makes a birthday cake in the lab, to celebrate one year of posting their videos, while the main scientist explains all the interesting chemical reactions that go into creating a cake!

Thank you, scientists of Nottingham University!

Can’t sleep, so I might as well write something.

Monday was Chloe’s birthday. Happy birthday, Chloe! She requested a very light cake with fresh strawberries and real whipped cream. My cakes never turn out light, so I did some googling and decided on a chiffon cake. I used this recipe for the cake:
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Lemon-Chiffon-Cake/Detail.aspx. We replaced some of the water with lemon juice, following a suggestion from one reviewer. Next time I would add even more lemon juice. I bought actual cake flour and fresh baking powder, just to be sure, and I really did let the eggs come to room temperature before starting.

We baked it in my two round glass cake pans, at 325 degrees for 40 minutes, though 35 would have been fine, I think. The recipe tells you not to grease and flour the pans — that was nerve-wracking, but I was able to pry the cakes out of the pans when they were cool. *whew* Next time I might try greasing just the very bottom of the pan.

For filling between the two layers, I whipped heavy cream with a little sugar and mixed that with chopped strawberries. We topped the cake with more whipped cream, and then Dan decorated it with sliced berries.

When Bob and Chloe came over to watch Mad Men, we devoured almost the whole thing. It was way better than any store-bought cake I’ve ever had, including my fancy bakery birthday cake! We sent the last slice home with Chloe for later.

It’s time for a new story in the “Kayray Reads to You” podcast. This is “Half Magic” by Edward Eager, a wonderful book and the first part of a whole series of in which ordinary children have magic adventures. The author acknowledges his debt to E. Nesbit in every book. I hope you enjoy this one, and I hope you’ll track down more of Eager’s books. Ooo look, here’s a lovely little boxed set!
http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Magic-Boxed-Edward-Eager/dp/0152025464!

Episode 43:
Half Magic Ch.1 How it Began – 21:09
Episode 44:
Half Magic Ch.2 What Happened to their Mother – 13:59
Episode 45:
Half Magic Ch.3 What Happened to Mark – 34:34

I use googledocs a lot. Recently they changed the default format for new docs to a horrible fixed-width page layout:

This wastes a ton of space and allows me to see far less text per screen. Also it’s ugly. I don’t need to see margins on a fake “page” when 99.99% of my documents will never be printed! And if I do want to see a page layout like this, I can just choose “view” -> “fixed-width page”.

I found a fix on this page of people complaining about this dreadful new “feature”:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs/thread?tid=0cf3f67e3bde8a86&hl=en

1. Go to settings (upper right hand corner)
2. Select Editing
3. Uncheck: Create new text documents using the latest version of the document editor

Now, reload googledocs, or close all its tabs and start over. New documents should be the old-style full-width layout, so just copy the text out of one of your fixed-width docs, make a new doc, and paste it in. Voila!

If google eventually decides to force everyone to always use fixed-width layouts, I guess I’ll have to find a new online text-editor.

My 41st birthday was yesterday, yay!

Dan worked from home so that was a treat right there. Henry went with me first thing in the morning to pick up the birthday cake that I ordered for myself. Got it from Flour Power. It was pretty good, though not lemony enough and with wayyyy too much frosting, but still it was tasty and festive!

Then we had breakfast (including birthday cake) and the guys gave me some lovely presents. Let’s see, I got two lovely Elizabeth Zimmermann hardbacks, The Opinionated Knitter and Knitting Around so now I have all of her books! And the new reprint of Betsy and the Great World/Betsy’s Wedding. And a pair of absolutely adorable cupcake print pajamas, the very same ones that Liz Lemon wears in 30 Rock. Cute, cute, cute!

Dan also gave me a CD recording of my favorite performance of Die Zauberflöte — 1964, Otto Klemperer conducts. Lucia Popp is Queen of the Night. My old LPs are quite worn out and warped, and now I can listen on my iPhone and through the good TV speakers! So exciting!

I took Henry to his Kung Fu lesson at noon, and then at 1 we picked him up and we all went to Chloe’s house for a few hours, which was such fun! They gave me a fantastic Breaking Bad t-shirt (ladies’ babydoll-style in lime green — better get one for yourself now before AMC shuts them down!). Heisenburg! Lordy, we have to wait until July 2011 for more new episodes.

Celia gave me the “Free To Be… You And Me” CD! We were hanging out a couple weeks ago and someone said something about a boy with a doll… oh, it was their cat we were talking about. He has a little lion toy that he thinks is his kitten. Anyway Celia and I both started singing William’s Doll, and it freaked me out that she knew it! And she told me she had the CD, and I asked if I could borrow it someday, and she remembered, and gave me my own copy! Kirsten and I must have listened to that record 8,682,392,734 times when we were little and it’s so much fun to get to hear it again, all clear and nice and remastered. Our record had a skip in the “Atalanta” story, so Alan Alda said, “So he told Atalanta, so he told Atalanta, so he told Atalanta, so he told Atalanta,” until someone got up and moved the needle. My new CD doesn’t do that, heh :)

Chloe drew me a picture that illustrates elements of 13 of our favorite iPhone games. She’s amazing! I’ll replace this with a better photo tomorrow, but you can get a pretty good idea. If you go to the flickr page you can see notes that tell the name of each game. I love it so much!

And then in the evening, after Celia’s mom had picked her up, we brought Chloe back over to our house by way of a good Mexican take-out place, and then Bob came over and we watched “James May at the Edge of Space” and then “Hud” (1963, Paul Newman) which I love but none of them had even seen and I think they all liked it as much as I do.

So it was a very happy day!

Here are the last two chapters of part 3 of This Country of Ours:

27 How The Quakers First Came to new England – 00:09:27
28 How Maine and New Hampshire were Founded – 00:08:27

Oops. Forgot :) This will catch you up with the podcast feed:

Episode 32: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 11, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 11, Part 2 (8:52)
Episode 33: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 12, part 1:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 12, Part 1 (9:59)
Episode 34: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 12, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 12, Part 2 (5:27)
Episode 35: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 13, part 1:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 13, Part 1 (8:02)
Episode 36: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 13, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 13, Part 2 (4:38)
Episode 37: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 14, part 1:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 14, Part 1 (9:39)
Episode 38: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 14, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 14, Part 2 (9:36)
Episode 39: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 14, part 3:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 14, Part 3 (7:10)
Episode 40: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 15, part 1:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 15, Part 1 (7:44)
Episode 41: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 15, part 2:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 15, Part 2 (8:15)

And the very last part:
Episode 42: Absolute Zero, by Helen Cresswell, Chapter 15, part 3:
Absolute Zero, Chapter 15, Part 3 (8:30)

LOL! How I love the Bagthorpes.

If you use MacFusion on Snow Leopard, you may have noticed that it’s broken, heh. I hadn’t run it in a while but this morning I got this charming error message every time I tried to mount a host: “Could not mount filesystem: Remote host has disconnected.”

After a bit of googling, I found this solution:
http://rackerhacker.com/2009/08/28/fix-macfusion-on-snow-leopard/

And it worked! So I thought I’d post here to help others find an answer.

(In case you’re wondering why I use Macfusion, I use ssh and vi for daily podcast maintenance, but when it’s time to add a few dozen new items it’s just easier to edit the file locally with Smultron. And who wants to ftp things back and forth if you don’t have to? ;-) )

The longer I go without writing a real post, the harder it is to get started again. So I just thought I’d write a little something this morning to get myself going.

Today I’ll take Henry in for a checkup, and then I hope we get to hang out with Celia and Chloe a bit in the afternoon, and then in the evening it’s possible that Bob and Chloe might come over to watch “Hud” with us, which just arrived from Netflix yesterday and is one of my favorite movies.

I’m reading my very first Edith Wharton novel, “The House of Mirth”, and it’s fantastic. I’m almost glad I waited this long to discover her,’cause now I have a whole lot of wonderful books to look forward to, if “The House of Mirth” is any indication. I also re-read “The Three MIss Margarets” and “The Hills at Home” last week. Both were as good as I remembered from reading them years and years ago. I’d like to read the two books that everyone is talking about — “The Hunger Games” and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” — so I ordered them from my library but it’s “wait time unknown” heh. But I don’t usually like to buy fiction unless I’ve read it once and know I’ll want to read it again.

Knitting — I’m working on a top-down cotton tank top which I’d like to extend down into a little dress-thing if I have enough yarn. Well, even if I don’t I can get a few more balls of Knitpicks’ Simply Cotton in a coordinating color and just keep working till it’s long enough. It’s actually a lot further along than this photo shows. I’m working the body in a sort of seed stitch rib, which is k9, then a panel of k1p1 seed stitch for three stitches, then k9 again.

Also making a pair of Aargh! gyle Socks for a certain boy’s 15th birthday. These are also further along than the photo shows. Hmm, time to take some more photos.

Yesterday, August 10th 2010, was LibriVox’s 5-year anniversary. I can hardly believe it. We cataloged our very first free, public domain audiobook (The Secret Agent) in September of 2005, and I finished my first solo, The Road to Oz, in October 2005.

We produced a total of 30 audiobooks in 2005, and I remember thinking that someday we might reach 100. As I write this we have 3659 completed audiobooks in our catalog — in 29 different languages! Amazing!

More important to me than numbers, impressive though they are, is our community. We have without doubt one of the friendliest forums on the internet. It’s always so pleasant to browse through our working threads and see the cheerful interaction of our volunteers as we all work together, making audiobooks just for the love of it.

You can read a post from Hugh, our founder, here:
http://librivox.org/2010/08/10/librivox-turns-five/

and listen to our amazing 5th Anniversary podcast here:
http://librivox.org/2010/08/10/librivox-community-podcast-114/

Hooray for LibriVox!