I just got back from Pondfilk and a brief tour of Washington State. Traveled there and back again on the Amtrak Empire Builder. On the way there I used a sleeper car roomette. On the way back with Peter, we shared a family bedroom. Beautiful scenery in Washington and Montana and no full body airport searches.

The eruption side of Mt. St. Helens looks like the desolation of Smaug.

More if I get around to it.

I swear I feel like I'm moving backwards. I know I'm actually making progress, but boy the list of things that need to be done just keeps growing! Thankfully, I accomplished some things today that hadn't been on my original list for the weekend, so that helped me feel more productive!

( Cut for the sake of the list-phobic )

Note to self: Remember to go to bed at a decent hour. Set the clock. Don't ignore it when it goes off.

I have a favorite band name

The Anderson Council

So, how many music geeks get the joke?

I did the Out and Back trail at Kickapoo again, following the route I'd taken by accident on purpose out to the overlook, which is an excellent place to have a sandwich.  A lovely view, shade, a good place to catch the breeze, and barely any obvious sign of humanity.  (The "lake" itself is a former strip mine hole, but it doesn't look bad.)  There are a couple of telephone poles visible, and a couple of bits of mowed grass in the far distance.  Then I walked to the trail intersection where I thought I'd fallen off the official trail last week, and discovered that it only goes a few hundred feet to the river (which I hadn't even realized I was next to last week) and ends.  I still don't know what happened to the trail markers.  When I finished that loop, I was starting to feel quite tired, even though I had walked less than 5 miles by that time, so I took a bit of a short cut, which got me as expected back to the very unhelpfully marked intersection, and back to my car.  This is the first time in a long time that I've done longish walks on back to back days, but the weather is unseasonably nice, the terrain I was walking over both days is pretty flat, and darn it I thought I was in better shape than this, I shouldn't be so tired!

The butterfly population does seem to finally be picking up; not lots, but there were definitely butterflies around.  Still lots of dragonflies.  But the dominant insect species (and the major problem with enjoying the day) was mosquitoes.  I can't remember when I've been so plagued by mosquitoes, and that's with applying DEET at the start of the trip and applying more at my lunch stop.  Those huge numbers of dragonflies are not doing their jobs, I tell you!

meritmaat, tarkrai and sibylle are proud to bring you:


DFDF
Das Frühlingsfest der Filksmusik
A Spring Festival of Filk Music


Where & When?
22-24 May 2009
Relexa Hotel Bad Salzdetfurth, Germany

What?
Filk music in a relaxed hotel setting, with light programming and German Guests of Honor.

The Guests of Honor?
We're proud to announce that Katy & Ju have agreed to be our first guests of honor!


For more information visit our website at www.d-f-d-f.org, where you will be able to find out lots more, buy a membership and sign up for our online newsletter shortly! Or, why not get your updates the livejournal way? Just join or watch dfdf_convention and you're all set!

meritmaat, tarkrai and sibylle are proud to bring you:


DFDF
Das Frühlingsfest der Filksmusik
A Spring Festival of Filk Music


Where & When?
22-24 May 2009
Relexa Hotel Bad Salzdetfurth, Germany

What?
Filk music in a relaxed hotel setting, with light programming and German Guests of Honor.

The Guests of Honor?
We're proud to announce that Katy & Ju have agreed to be our first guests of honor!


For more information visit our website at www.d-f-d-f.org, where you will be able to find out lots more, buy a membership and sign up for our online newsletter shortly! Or, why not get your updates the livejournal way? Just join or watch dfdf_convention and you're all set!

After I wrote my post on songwriting, I thought I might try and chronicle the creation of a song at some point.

I wasn't expecting Waiting In The Deep quite so soon, but since it's fresh in my mind, I'll see what I can do. Basically, I'm reconstructing this from memory and the crossings out in my Moleskine!

( So here goes... ).

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a ... lawn chair?

I came to the new house today armed with the laptop, the cellphone, and a pen and paper, determined to slay the dragon which is Verizon's DSL activation.

Tried again to verify that their web-based activation system wouldn't work. It wouldn't. I could get there, but it would get halfway through the process and want to start installing software which I didn't want. Yay.

So I called Verizon, and waded through their byzantine menu system, which finally asked me if I was using Windows or Mac. I replied Mac and it promptly send me to Windows support... in India... over a b-a-d VOIP connection.

Lovely.

( Wherein Debbie's patience is tested to the max... )

So I'm online from the new house now!

Now to lock down the wireless router, which is currently wide-open. Yay for functioning internet!

I have not seen the finale yet.
Nor has bardling.

I've already seen TWO FRODDING SPOILERS in my first half page of friends posts.

Please PLEASE can folks keep their snark, comments, critique, flames and the rest behind cut tags for at least a frodding DAY?

Moleskine + transport = win, be it plane (This Is My Land), train (The Miller's Tale) or car* ( Waiting In The Deep )

[*] Relax, bardling was driving!

Some noodling around in Corel last night produced a nice eerie Big Brother Is Watching YOU pair of eyes. A quick export to PNG and voila! (Yes, spelled right. THIS is a viola :-)

Okay. Let's see if we can't get some eggs, milk, toilet paper, and the rest of life's necessities into the house. See all y'all later, nice peoples. Play fair and share.

Hi, azakir again.

Stacy is still in hospital, but she is responding well to treatment. I went to see her again last night and once more today, this time accompanied for the afternoon by rifiri and kikuichimoji. Stacy was well enough to sit up in bed and play some board games with us (although not well enough yet to beat me - mwa-ha-ha *grin*). Seriously, she is doing better every day, her temperature is now down enough that she actually asked me to turn her fan off today, and her leg, although it still looks very red and a bit swollen and unhappy, is gradually improving.

Latest update from the doctors is that she may be released on Monday to recuperate at home for a while, but this is still to be confirmed. It's still extremely painful for her to move her leg, and through extended periods of elevation and inactivity, her ankle and knee are both rather painful as well. I'll be going back to see her tomorrow, and in a few minutes time so she has someone to talk about the closing episode of Doctor Who with.

Finally, all the messages that have been sent via the last LJ posts have been delivered, and Stacy is really happy to hear that people have been thinking about her and wishing her well. I'd like to thank everyone who responded as well, it's nice to know there are so many people out there looking out for her.

More updates as I get them.

Azakir Devaris

Still trying to get to the place where I can do some substantial posts, but that might not happen until after Confluence. I'm even behind on reading LJ right now -- I can't seem to break the skip=200 barrier -- and I got behind because I discovered the Galaxy Zoo. For someone who loves astronomy and also has an OCD-style bent for classify-and-list-type projects, that site is like crack cocaine. And the fact that RuneScape just released a graphically upgraded fullscreen version isn't helping.

The biggest time-sink beyond these things, and my regular job, and helping mom with grandma, is of course Confluence preparation. I should have a final filk schedule to post early next week, but the one timeslot that remains unfilled is from 8 to 8:50 on Friday. I had thought that we filkers would have to surrender the Redwood Room to Main Program during that hour and move to a meeting room with neighbors, so I had tentatively scheduled a "Shh! Quiet Filk" for that slot. As it turns out, we get Redwood after all.

Now, I was planning to pass the hat for Tom Smith during open filk, but it occurs to me that if we're going to do any programming specifically dedicated to helping Tom, that's the one slot I have available to do it in. I don't want to just repeat the "Tom cover concert" or any other items that have been done at other conventions, so what can we do? Two ideas have come to me so far:

Stretching Filk Boundaries -- In Tom's honor, people perform a song or genre or style that is atypical for them and/or out of their comfort zone: An ose piece if you normally only do comedy, a comic piece if you only do ose, an a capella piece if you've been afraid to sing without accompaniment, a country song if you're Pete Grubbs, etc.

Letters to Tom -- People sing songs dedicated to (but not necessarily written by or for) Tom, along with brief messages to him, and we'll record them and press a CD-R and mail it to him to listen to in rehab.

Do either of these sound good, or does anyone have other suggestions? (Also, Ada Palmer of Sassafrass has suggested doing some kind of knitting-based fundrasier for him at the con; any ideas along those lines?)

( What kind of day has it been: )

Automatically stabbed through your living brain by LoudTwitter

Come to the green wood at midnight
If you're chasing fairies, if you're chasing stars;
Come to the green wood at midnight
Leave the ones without wonder to drowse behind bars.
Come to the green wood at midnight
There are things that are yet to be seen.
Come to the green wood at midnight
Give your hope and your heart to the green

For the Lady of Trees has a story to tell,
And there's few that can listen, I fear,
And it's all about angels, and how far they fell,
I think it's a tale you should hear,

( And dear Jack of the Green swears you'll pass through unharmed... )

It was a nice morning for working outside, so I made a start at pulling weeds from along our back fence. About 95% of it was catnip. Plants that look cute and of value when they're eight inches high lose a lot of their appeal when they top the four foot mark. Without exaggeration, I estimate that at least ten pounds of the stuff went into containers for composting. Jane suggested drying it, but the questions "Where?" and "For what?" come to mind. We still have enough fresh out there to last every cat in the neighborhood for the rest of the year...and then some. (I have fond memories of the single $1.29 catnip root we purchased at a garden center all those years ago.)

It does strike me as funny how certain plants that we work to encourage can turn into aggressive 'colonists'. If we did nothing in the back yard for a couple of years, I wonder what would come to dominate: catnip, raspberries, dill, tomatillos(!), oregano...? (Probably the garlic mustard would wipe out everything.)

pixel_0, your card came today...already! Did you bribe the postman or something? :-) Anyway, THANK YOU SO MUCH! ♥ I thought, you know, that I'd make some Finding Nemo icons to thank you and because we're dorks (and because of that fic we're going to write) :-) I was going to do more, but my wrist is hurting and I need to read some more :D Anyway... *squishes*



( 30 Icons )

tibicina: Here's the web site of the lizard guy from last night: http://www.lizardwizardandfriends.com/
cadhla: LIZARD.
tibicina: I would totally recommend him for your next birthday party, except I'm not sure he goes out of L.A. Also, he might be slightly confused by doing a birthday party for someone in their late twenties. I'm not sure most of his patter would work for your friends, but maybe he adapts.
cadhla: LIZARD.
tibicina: He also has snakes and tortoises and turtles and frogs and a tarantula and a baby alligator and hissing cockroaches and millipedes.
cadhla: LIZARD.
tibicina: Lizards.
cadhla: Now you're speaking my language.

We proceeded to have a coherent conversation after this, one wherein I proved myself capable of using more than one word, but really, sometimes you've just got to acknowledge the fact that if you dangle lizards in front of me, I'm gonna be chanting 'lizard' for a little while. (If they're literal lizards, I'm actually likely to be cooing and telling them how beautiful their scales are, but, well, y'know.)

I need to do two book reviews, one for I Will Be Invincible and one for John Dies at the End. Why yes, I do assign myself homework. What else can you call items on my to-do list like 'process edits' or 'balance your checkbook'? The best way to share awesome books is to tell people they're awesome, and why.

Lilly and I have a rule when I'm sitting at my desk chair: if I have pants on, she can be in my lap. Otherwise, her possession of a great many claws means it's no lap for her. Well, I am sitting here in my nightshirt, and she keeps coming back, standing on her hind legs, and patting my knees with one paw, in case I've extruded pants through my skin. It's cute but very surreal.

Plans for today include a Farmer's Market and hitting the Other Change of Hobbit for this month's Locus. See y'all later.

( Squirrel rantings. Plus I finally update My Life In A Nutshell comic strip. )

Geschichten Anthologie - Story anthology

Die geplante Geschichten-AnthologieGeschichten-Anthologie zum Thema "Diät", in der auch eine meiner Geschichten erscheinen wird (Januar 09), ist schon bei Amazon angekündigt. Meine Güte, sind die vom Diana Verlag schnell.

The story collection about "dieting" in which one of my stories is going to appear (January 09) is already offered for prebooking at Amazon. Goodness gracious, these people (Diana Verlag) are quick.

If you have the means, I highly recommend The Hunter 31, it's
Optimized for Efficiency and Comfort.

It's also a great way to sail up to the fireworks barge on the San Francisco and watch the sky light up.

From the Brooke McEldowney LJ (officialpibgorn) , to explain why 9CWL is so strum and drangy these days...

Captain: What is that off the starboard bow? (exposition) Take a look there with those heavy, official-looking Navy-issue binoculars hanging around your neck, Lieutenant.
Lieutenant: I believe it is a torpedo, Captain. (conflict)
Captain: I believe there is a supreme being, Lieutenant. But officers and gentlemen never discuss religion. (development) What is that thing off the starboard bow?
Lieutenant: A torpedo, sir. (certain conflict)
Captain: Can we maneuver out of its path? (more development)
Lieutenant: No, sir. (really tense tense tense conflict)
Captain: Then kiss me, you fool. (resolution)

This, then, is storytelling – storytelling of burly men at sea, and the sound of binoculars clinking together like nobody's business.