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Feeling really wretched today. My mouth hurts and I just feel completely exhausted and wrung out, and I must have slept funny because my whole left shoulder/neck hurts. Bah.

I felt well enough to knit yesterday so I made a lot of progress on Hermia:

Worked the lace while watching Mad Men all day, and worked the hem while we watched a couple episodes of Season Two of Life On Mars (John Simm. Yum.). I split the yarn in half for the underside of the hem to reduce bulk, and instead binding off I just sewed down the live stitches. When the lace peplum is blocked I think it will have a nice swing.

Dan went out and brought me two tubs of mashed potatoes from Boston Market for dinner last night ’cause I’d finished my big homemade pot of soup and my carton of creamy tomato/roasted pepper soup from Trader Joe’s. He also took my iMac in to the applestore on Saturday because it developed a vertical blue line on the monitor. And we had three days left on the warranty. *whew* Apple has given me a new power supply and a new logic board for that computer, and now I think they’re giving me a new screen. Always buy Applecare.

I watched the 1985 BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries on Saturday. It was really great! I liked the whole cast very much except for Mister Darcy, who was just thoroughly unappealing. And Lady Catherine de Burgh wasn’t much to write home about. But everyone else was very well-cast and I even preferred this Mrs. Bennet to the 1995 Mrs. Bennet.

The Book of Art for Young People, by Agnes Ethel Conway and Sir Martin Conway
First published in 1909. Read by Kara Shallenberg.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Excerpt:

Now, the old pictures you see in the picture galleries are just like that, only the people that painted them didn’t invent the stories but merely illustrated stories which, at the time those painters lived, every one knew. Some of the stories were true and some were just a kind of fairy tale, and it didn’t matter to the painters, and it doesn’t matter to us, which was true and which wasn’t. The only thing that matters is whether the story is a good one and whether the picture is a nice one.

Come back next Monday for chapter 2!

(Impatient? Get the entire audio book for free here: http://librivox.org/the-book-of-art-for-young-people-by-agnes-ethel-conway-and-sir-martin-conway/)

two wisdom teeth out today.

Helen’s Babies by John Habberton, Part 12

Helen’s Babies, Part 12

Read by me!

And that’s the last chapter of Helen’s Babies. I hope enjoyed listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it! Next Monday I’ll begin posting chapters from The Book of Art for Young People, a wonderful book about art history.

I’ve been coughing for a week now, and feeling really rundown so I’m not getting much done. Mostly I’ve been sitting around, watching Mad Men, and knitting.

I finished Dan’s laptop bag:

ravelry page

and Susan’s stole:

ravelry page

and I spent my Home and Hobby Special Award gift certificate on enough (I hope) Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece to make Alison Green Will’s Hermia for myself. Got started last night:

ravelry page

I think my cough is a bit better today, actually. Maybe I’m finally on the mend.

Helen’s Babies by John Habberton, Part 11

Helen’s Babies, Part 11

Read by me!

(Impatient? Get the entire audio book here: http://librivox.org/helens-babies-by-john-habberton/)

Ugh, I feel rotten today, stuffy and coughing and whatnot. But at least I don’t have to go anywhere (if my family can just eat whatever is lingering in the fridge) or do anything important.

My throat is a lot better, yay! In fact it’s only barely tender. Now my head is a bit stuffy, but I’d take a stuffy head over a sore throat any time. I’ve been using my neti pot several times a day, so maybe that’s why the sore throat got better so fast. Or maybe it was just a mild case of whatever-it-was. Anyway I think my neti pot is easing the stuffiness a bit, too.

Today we drove up to Henry’s charter school to meet with our consultant and pick his classes. He’s really happy that he gets to take two whole days of classes this year. He chose Science, American History through Interactive Activites, Creative Writing, Art and Music through the Ages, Musical Theater, Math, Student Government, “Games of Life” (life skills), and Health & Fitness.

You know you picked the right school when your kid looks forward to going back and wishes summer vacation was shorter :)

When we got back down to San Diego, we went to the Studio Diner and shared a peanut butter milkshake to celebrate the start of the school year, and then we went to the Mysterious Galaxies bookstore so Henry could buy the next Stephanie Meyer book, Eclipse. Then when we got home, I hung up a couple loads of laundry, cleaned up, dealt with ants, and played Agricola with Henry. We tied! He had a six-room stone house with five family members and I only had three clay rooms and four family members, but I had a fireplace and an oven and a pottery. I took a quick picture just before we started to tally up the scores:

As you can see, one of our house rules is that we give ourselves four extra turns (the face-down green cards). The game just feels so short otherwise! There are no new actions for those turns. We also played the pooled Occupations and Minor Improvements variation (seven of each in a common pool, restocked when a card is used), which worked well. Fun!

And now I have to go create some kind of dinner.

Chloe just let me know that freerice.com has more than just a vocab quiz now — they have languages, art history, chemistry, math, and more. I tried German and it was too easy — zoomed right up to lvl 10 and stayed there until I got bored. Art History was easy up to about lvl 8, but then they started throwing non-European painters into the mix — but then there were a few in a row that I remembered from Art History classes and I got up to lvl 9!

Remember, for ever answer you get right they donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. I’m glad Chloe reminded me about this site, ’cause I’m sitting here watching dumb TV and feeling rotten, so I might as well play web games for rice.

Edit:

OK, I hate to brag, but hey I just got to lvl 10!

I felt run-down all weekend and things didn’t taste right, and then last night i noticed that my throat had that dry scratchy feeling. And sure enough, came down with a bad sore throat in the night. Sigh. But Henry came home this morning from his long weekend in Colorado at a Morris Dancing event with his dad, so he’s here to keep me company. We’re playing with the WiiWare Aquarium (well worth the $5!).

Here’s a nice blogpost about LibriVox from a Catholic news site:

Librivox is a non-commercial, non-profit and ad-free project in which volunteers record audio versions of public domain books, and then release those recordings into the public domain. It’s a loose-knit, chummy bunch of folks who are so laid-back that it’s amazing that they have recorded hundreds of books for enjoyment by anyone who can play an mp3.

Read the post and see their LV recommendations here: http://datelinesqpn.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/2-september-2008/

Happy birthday Ken! Love you, hope you have a good day! Keep saving those endangered animals.

Helen’s Babies by John Habberton, Part 10

Helen’s Babies, Part 10

Read by me!

(Impatient? Get the entire audio book here: http://librivox.org/helens-babies-by-john-habberton/)

This morning Henry and I made a Dr. Horrible Mii and a Captain Hammer Mii. I just posted them to the Mii Posting Plaza. Here are their numbers, so you can find them and import them to your own Mii plaza if you want to, and perhaps vote them up. I think they’re pretty good!

Dr. Horrible: 5143-7259-7185 (Yes, I know it says he’s female. We did that to make it look like he’s wearing a lab coat)
Captain Hammer: 1634-5717-6203

We’re working on Penny but she’s not quite right yet.

I had such a good day yesterday. Henry came home from his dad’s house about 8:30 and gave me my present, the portrait of Animala in the previous post :) And then around 9, his friend Nicolas came to play for a few hours. He’s been taking guitar lessons from Henry’s dad for the past few months, so the boys at least get to say “hi” every Saturday, but rarely have actual playtime. I haven’t seen Nicolas since the boys were 5 or 6 and we moved to Oceanside! I was really happy to get acquainted with him again. He’s a great guy, smart and polite and fun. They played Guitar Hero for most of the morning (I had a few turns as well), with a quick break for real musical instruments, and then we switched to Smooth Moves.

Chloe and Celia came over in the afternoon, with a watermelon, which was a great hit, and we took turns with Smooth Moves until Nicolas’s mom came to pick him up, and pretty soon after that it was time for us to go to Kung Fu and Celia to go to her rehearsal.

Dan came home a bit early and gave me another pile of presents: A Mama Bear swift (walnut!), the new Lileks book (Gastroanomalies, hilarious), a set of watercolors in tubes, a special watercolor paper Moleskine, a bottle of watercolor mixing medium, and a lovely pack of my favorite ultra-fine Sharpies! In the photo, you can also see the pictures and cards than Chloe and Celia and Henry drew for me :)

And then Dan and Henry and I played a game of Agricola in which we used the Occupations and Minor Improvement cards for the first time. It was very fun but those cards add a lot of complexity so it took us something like three hours to finish the game, by which time Bob and Chloe and Celia had come back over to play some more! (Dan won, by the way, but it was a close game. It won’t take three hours next time ’cause we’ll be more familiar with the extra cards!) So then Henry played Wii sports with Celia and we sat around, and then the guys and Celia played Uno Extreme while Chloe and I giggled at Gastroanomalies. It was a wonderful day!

For my birthday (Today! Thanks for all the greetings, everyone!), Henry drew a portrait of my main WoW character, Animala of Aggramar!

She’s a lvl 70 Night Elf Druid, with an epic flying mount :) He drew her in her Healer gear, but she also has a complete set of Feral gear for FIGHTING. I love this portrait!

First Useful Thing:

How often do you use your capslock button intentionally? If you’re like me, you hit it by accident now and then, look up to find you’ve typed a WHOLE SENTENCE IN SHOUTY CAPS, swear a little, delete, and re-type. I recently read a tip somewhere telling how to turn off the the darn caps lock button on your mac! Here’s a little tutorial for you:

1. Open System Preferences. The easiest thing to do is click the little apple up in the top left-hand corner of the screen:

2. Once you’re in System Preferences, click “Keyboard and Mouse”:

3. On the “Keyboard” tab, click the “Modifier Keys” button:

4. Now set Caps Lock Key to “No Action” in the drop-down box, and hit “OK”:

Now sing and dance, ’cause you’ll never type an accidental string of shouty caps again!

Second Useful Thing:

Did you notice all those nifty little screenshots up above? I made those with a wonderful new little program called Skitch for OS X. It’s a free beta right now. It’s hard to describe how useful it is, but I’ll give it a shot.

So, you run the program and you get a little empty window, surrounded by a frame with a few familiar tools on it — pencil, eraser, color choices, text, paint bucket, etc.

There’s a “Snap” button on the frame. Click it, and you get crosshairs, and the Skitch window disappears so you can take a screenshot of whatever window is now on top. You can click to take a picture of the whole window, or click and drag the crosshairs for a selection. There’s a timer option too. Once you’ve taken your screenshot, Skitch pops back up with your shot in its frame. Now you can manipulate the little image however you want — draw on it, drag the lower right corner of the window to enlarge or reduce the whole image, drag inside the window to crop, add text, select and drag elements you’ve added, whatever. When you’re done fiddling, hit the “webpost” button at the bottom of the frame and Skitch uploads your little image to your own “Skitch” page. Every image has this little box on the right side of its page:

The “copy” buttons copy whichever url you choose to your clipboard, and then you can go paste it in to your email or your blog post or your forum post or whatever. The default privacy setting is “secret” but you can change that.

So this one little app lets you easily take screenshots, edit them, upload them, and share them. I need to take a lot of screenshots to explain things to LibriVox volunteers, and boy oh boy does Skitch make it easier! It’s got lots more fun and/or useful features — for instance, you can take a snap via photobooth (or a webcam?) and give yourself a fancy hat and a moustache and a bow tie and some party balloons:

Go install Skitch! What are you waiting for?

Helen’s Babies by John Habberton, Part 9

Helen’s Babies, Part 9

Read by me!

(Impatient? Get the entire audio book here: http://librivox.org/helens-babies-by-john-habberton/)

I made a little quilt-top yesterday:

The white-ish fabric is leftover from the regency dress that I made for Chloe many years ago. The red and green is flannel leftover from pillowcase Morsbags, and the purple is a scrap of velour. (WordPress doesn’t think that “velour” is a word, heheh) I set up a nice sewing area on the back porch, under the overhang, and sewed it all together while listening to old (2002! 2003!) episodes of Loveline with Kathy Griffin as the guest. (Oh Kathy Griffin we love you SO MUCH! Can’t wait for season 5 of D-List!)

Anyway, got the quilt top pieced, and then pieced together odd scraps of batting from Dan’s Monkey Wrench quilt and sandwiched the whole thing with a large scrap of mom’s hydrangea/raspberry curtains for the backing. Ready to quilt!

I don’t even really know why I’m making this… I just had an urge to use up some scraps and make a little quilt. Go figure.

Yesterday we spent the whole day with Bob and Chloe and Celia again! We played Wario “Smooth Moves” on the wii (such a fun and ridiculous game) and lots more multiple solitaire for hours and hours. We fixed salad and pasta for lunch and then Bob and Chloe took us out to the Studio Diner for dinner! What a treat! After dinner we all went over to their house for a couple of hours. Dan, Bob, and Henry played Uno Extreme until it was time to go home. It was such a great day, and so nice to be able to spend hours and hours having fun with my wonderful family!

Right now I have a wretched headache but I got some good recording done today — two more chapters of The Adventures of Sally, one episode of a history podcast that some students in England wrote and asked me to record for them, and 100 word/sentence combinations for a Brazilian fellow who’s creating a computer program to help teach English to adults.

Oh, and Annie and I decided to record Emma as a duet, alternating chapters. I did my first chapter already — fun!

Oh, hey, my birthday is next week! Here’s my wishlist :)

In my family, the card game of choice for get-togethers is what we call Double Solitaire, only it’s usually triple, quadruple, quintuple, or more. We’ve played with up to eight players but it gets pretty crazy at that point. Chloe, Celia, and Bob came over yesterday afternoon and we taught Bob and the kids how to play. It’s regular Klondike (turn three cards at once, no limit on the number of times you can go through the deck), only each player has his own deck and you sit on the floor so the players all face each other in a big triangle, square, pentagon, etc. If you have a lot of players, you need a lot of floorspace!

Aces are played into the area in the middle so all players can see and reach them. Anyone can play to any ace. For instance, Henry can play his two of hearts on my ace of hearts, and then Chloe can put her three on top of that. A good game can get quite competitive and crazy! When everyone is stuck, count up the cards in the middle. The player with the most cards in the middle wins. Or if it makes more sense to count the remaining cards, the player with the fewest is the winner, of course. If everything works and you “go out” (all cards played onto ace piles, nothing left) the player who slaps down his last card first is the winner.

We played for hours, and I hope they’ll come back soon and play some more! I’ll try to get a photo of a game in progress if they do.