gypsygirl

Note from Hugh:
Dear LibriVox supporters, friends, volunteers:

Two weeks ago we sent out a request for donations towards a $20,000 fundraising campaign. We outlined why on this post (with a number of questions answered in the comments thread). You responded with generosity, and we can now close down our campaign.

So:

Thank you!

We got to our target so quickly it warms our hearts. Not only did people donate, but this campaign also allowed many many people to express their appreciation for all the hard and wonderful work done by LibriVox volunteers.

We won’t have to talk about money again for a few years. Instead, we’ll get back to working hard to fulfill our mission, which is:

To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.

So: Thank you again.

For those curious:

Campaign Details:

We raised $23,000 from 433 donors, in 13 days, averaging $1,769 in donations from 33 people every day. We had a couple of big donors, who gave a few thousand dollars each, and many more smaller donations which all add up to: everything we asked for. Thank you again.

LibriVox Details:

This money will help support our efforts, which so far have resulted in the following:
* 3773: Total number of projects
* 3227: Number of completed projects
* 470: Number of completed non-English projects
* 31: Total number of languages
* 28: Number of languages with a completed work
* 1498: Number of completed solo projects
* 3549: Number of readers
* 3347: ...who have completed something

Total recorded time: 66472509 seconds, or 2 years, 38 days, 20 hours, 57 minutes, and 37 seconds. Total of 66978 sections.

Have I said thank you? Well: thank you again! Oh, and a very special thank-you to our friends and supporters at the Internet Archive, especially Jacques and Brewster, who managed the donations for us so that we didn't have to worry about setting up paypal accounts and all the rest.

And now, back to making free, public domain audiobooks.

All the best,

Hugh McGuire.

So thanks so much to everyone who contributed!

For the first time in its 4.5 year history, LibriVox is asking its supporters for money.

Chances are, if you're reading this message on my blog, you've heard and possibly enjoyed some of my LibriVox recordings, Pride and Prejudice, or Anne of Green Gables, or perhaps the Scarlet Pimpernel.

I'd ask that you consider supporting LibriVox in this donation drive to allow us readers to continue providing you with audiobooks. Every little bit helps!

Here's Hugh's message:

Dearest LibriVox listeners, volunteers, & supporters:

For four-and-a-half years, LibriVox volunteers have been making audiobooks for the world to enjoy, and giving them away for free. We've made thousands of free audiobooks that have been downloaded by millions of people; our site gets 400,000 visitors every month. To date, all our costs have been borne by a few individuals, with some generous donations from partners. However, these costs have become too big.

See below to FIND OUT HOW TO DONATE (Or, keep reading!).

LibriVox needs your help.

We're asking for donations for the following:

• to cover hosting costs for our website, including: the site you are reading now; the forum; the wiki; the catalog; but NOT including the audio files which are hosted by Archive.org
• to redesign the site and improve its accessibility
• to make the LibriVox catalog easier for listeners to use
• to make the management software easier for admins to use

Your donation will support the work of our volunteers.

Our fundraising goal is $20,000. After we reach it, we'll shut down our fundraising campaign. And we hope we can make it another 4.5 years without having to bother you again!

HOW TO DONATE:

1. Visit the Internet Archive donation page (the Internet Archive, a registered US charity and friend of LibriVox, is managing our fundraising campaign)
2. Select a donation method (Justgive.org, Paypal, or Check)
3. Be sure to write: "Donation for LibriVox" along with your donation (otherwise we won't get the donation!)
4. Don't forget to write: "Donation for LibriVox" along with your donation!

About a year ago, I bought Lucy a new bed. It lasted intact for about three months, I think, then she started ripping out the bottom and strewing the fluff everywhere. It got a little more ripped one time when she was staying with E's dog, Huxley. I think they decided it was a tug toy.

Poor bed.

I'd had it on top of my bedside mat so she wouldn't be sleeping on the wood floor, but it just wasn't pretty. I kept intending to make a sort of quilted bottom for it, to replace the torn one, but I never got around to it. Last weekend I happened to be in Tractor Supply Company and saw a pretty nice sheepskin-ish bed for not too much, so she finally has a bed with a bottom again.

Yay!

Today was a beautiful day! After weeks of cold, rain, sleet, snow (yes, sleet and snow in C. Texas!! Not constant, but still), we had a warm, sunny day; warm enough for t-shirt and shorts, during the warmest part! A perfect day for a little yard work.

About eight years ago, our next door neighbours planted a few bamboo shoots along their back fence. Needless to say, there's bamboo everywhere now. Last spring I was going out every two or three days to cut down the new sprouts that were coming up all over the yard.

I'd been meaning to thin out the thickets along the back fence for ages; there's a rosemary bush back there that's completely hidden in the thicket, and a pretty little tree that's all but surrounded, but it was hard work with a hand saw, so I never did too much.

Until today.

Another thing I bought while I was at TSC last weekend was a reciprocating saw (cashier had the nerve to ask me if it was a Valentine's present. Hmpf! Yeah, sure, Valentine's present to myself, maybe!). We now have a mountain of bamboo in the yard.

E and I are planning on using some to make gardening stakes (for tomatoes and such). Not sure what we'll do with the rest. If you're in Central Texas and could use some bamboo, drop me a line!! Free to a good home!

The back fence looks much better now. You can get to the back gate without resorting to a machete, you can actually see that there's a tree back there, and there's still enough bamboo to provide shade and privacy.

Gosh, look, there's a door back there! And a tree!

The brown patch in the middle of the bamboo is the poor rosemary bush, which is half dead, but we're hoping, if we trim it back and stake it down a bit, it'll re-root and grow back this spring and summer.

E also suddenly remembered that she had a picnic canopy that was sitting around gathering dust, so she offered me the use of it so I could have semi-covered parking for my scooter. Great fun putting that up, because by that point, the temperature had started dropping again and a fairly brisk wind had picked up. Always the best time to put up tents, when it's blowing a gale!

Finished recording the latest Ignatius book today. Just need to proof-listen the last section and upload it. Those long sections were a challenge, though, even divided up into three recording sessions each.

So New Year's Eve I was getting ready to head out to Beth and Marcel's 4th yearly karaoke bash when I found that my car wouldn't start. My poor car is fourteen years old, and it's been going downhill for the past year or so, dying at intersections, juddering, etc. Now, it's dead. It might be resurrectable, but at fourteen, I really don't want to put more money into it. On the other hand, I'm not quite ready to buy a new car right now. I'm trying to pay off my school loans, and getting further into debt isn't part of my plan. So, instead of a car, I got me one of these:

Granted, mid-winter is probably not the best time to start riding a scooter, but I'm still having fun.

I recently finished my recording of Dayspring by Harry Sylvester for Ignatius Press. It's already up on their website, and I've started a new recording for them, The Eternal Woman by Gertrud Von le Fort. It's considerably shorter than either of the other two books I've done for them, and I'm nearly halfway through already. The only difficulty with it is the length of the sections; only four of them but two are about 20 pages and the other two are upwards of 40. That's over an hour of recording for those last two sections. I've had to divide them into three so that I don't blow out my vocal chords.

I'm also currently recording The Sky is Falling by Lester Del Rey for LV, another scifi, since I had such fun with the Mack Reynolds one I did for the SFFAudio Challenge.

The library book sale was last week. I went on opening day this time ($5 entry) because last year I couldn't find any knitting books and I was hoping to get a better choice this time. There still wasn't a whole lot, but better than last year. In addition I got a few books of poetry, some mysteries and some scifi. I also picked up a few baby books for a friend.

I've started a new LV project, Ultima Thule by Mack Reynolds. I'm doing it for the 4th Annual SFFaudio Challenge. It's a short novel, so I hope to have it finished within a couple of weeks.

Left the window cracked in my car a couple of weekends ago and got rained on, and though it's nice and dry now, it still smells. I may go through an entire bottle of Febreeze to get the smell out. The car has been living on the roof of the parking garage in the sunshine with the windows cracked while I'm at work, hopefully that'll help too.

Finished stage managing Woman in Black this weekend. Dressed as a dead cowgirl for this year's Masquerade Ball (which for once actually fell on Hallowe'en!). I'm hoping to get some more photos from the others who were there, but for now there are a few on my Masquerade Ball page.

Have been able to get more work done on my recording projects since the end of the show. I've been putting a bit more effort into Dayspring (had been concentrating mostly on Clara Vaughan before); the chapters on that one are much longer than any others to date - I have to make sure I have a glass of water handy or I won't make it through.

Finally finished The Secret Garden for LibriVox.

Also finished two paid gigs within the last month. Megan for I Publish Press, though I don't think it's up for sale yet; and The Death of a Pope for Ignatius Press.

ETA: Megan is now up on their website

A few years ago I discovered that my local public library had access to a whole bunch of audio books through netlibrary and I got all excited. I was a little less excited when I discovered that they came as one massive DRM'd file. When listening at work, I had to mark down the time stamp each time I stopped (they were WMA files, and I don't know of a way to make WMP remember where you stopped, like itunes can); listening on my mp3 player was even worse, because the one I had at the time didn't pick up where you'd stopped when you restarted it, it just remembered which file you'd been listening to... you try sitting with your finger on the fast forward button for ten minutes trying to get three hours into a file, and woe betide you if your finger slips and you accidentally advance to the next track, because then you have to start ALL over. Ugh. And of course, since the files are DRM'd, I couldn't import them into Audacity or some such to break them into more manageable chunks. So, I mostly listened at work, and got used to jotting down the time stamp (oh, also, you can only listen to a given file on the computer on which you originally downloaded it, you can't transfer rights from your work computer to your home one, for example).

Anyway, I'd been working my way through the Amelia Peabody series on audiobook. Netlibrary had the first few, but most of the rest I'd borrowed as discs, so I hadn't been to netlibrary in a while. Imagine my delight when I went back and found that they'd insituted a new software to manage and listen to the books, and that this software downloads the books in approximately hour long chunks, rather than one massive one, AND remembers where you left off listening if you turn it off! Add to this the fact that I have also bought a new mp3 player (a sansa fuze, last November), that not only remembers where you left off, but has individual file recall for any file with an audiobook genre. I'm suddenly back on netlibrary with a vengeance! Yes, you can still only listen on the computer on which you downloaded it, but having an mp3 player that plays well with audio books, I no longer care! Thank you netlibrary for improving the interface, and thank you WMC Library for continuing to subscribe to the service!

I have a couple of minutes before my meeting begins, so this seems as good a time as any to update here.

I've been working on Little Shop of Horrors for the past few weeks in the ensemble. We open a week from Friday. It's been interesting... we rented a set of puppets from somewhere or other, but when they showed up, they were in pretty bad condition. The director ended up going to Louisiana to rent another set, only he didn't have room in his vehicle for the largest, so we're still having to fix up the largest of the other set (and try to make it look sort of like the other set). Other than that, it's been quite fun. It's a small cast, fifteen people, and the youngest person is 19 (a great relief after the huge number of teenagers in Brigadoon); everyone sings well, can do harmony, acts decently. All in all, a really nice group, and at least half are new to the theatre, which is always fun too.

Finished the two Montfort books for Catholic Audio Company, and am close to finishing Death of a Pope for Ignatius, and not too far off on the two for iPublish. Have been neglecting Secret Garden dreadfully, but after next week, I'll have my evenings free again and will be able to record more.

I've also been working on a sound booth, because since the weather got hot, I've pretty much been limited to recording first thing in the morning, because the crickets and cicadas are so loud. I build a cage out of half inch pvc pipe. It's tall enough in the centre that I can stand up straight. I bought a set of sound absorption sheets from Audimute to cover it with. I've attached two lengthwise along the sides with gromets and one inch binder rings. I've started attaching a third sheet to the top. I had originally planned to just hang the fourth sheet over the front opening, but quickly decided that wasn't going to be effective, so I've decided to build a door and attach the fourth sheet to it with the gromets and book rings like the rest of it. That leaves a section on the back wall between the roof and the top of the other sheets. I'm planning on attaching a couple of acoustic tiles that I had for the portable sound booth to a piece of muslin and hanging that over that hole. Once it's complete, I'm going to move the mic in there, along with a secondary monitor, keyboard and mouse so that I can continue to read off the screen, but without having to worry about laptop fan noise (and without having to move the laptop back and forth, which gets pretty old when you have as many things plugged into it as I do). I forgot to take pics of the work in progress, but I'm planning on taking some as I build the door, and then of the completed booth.

Betty Buckley is coming to the Hip this Saturday, and I've bought two tickets to the show. I've invited Regan to go with me, since she's a big fan of the Mystery of Edwin Drood in which BB played the title role. It's my birthday present to myself, and I had to do some wangling to be excused from rehearsal the Saturday before opening night (but I made sure to wangle before buying the tickets, just in case).

I originally had this in my last post, but I decided to separate it out and leave the Star Trek review in its own spoilery post.

I managed to record eight chapters for my Clara Vaughan project this weekend (it had been on hold for a while while I finished the Interior Castle, did Brigadoon, and then bought and set up a new laptop after my old one died). I'll be working more steadily on this one as it's due mid-June and I'm not quite half-way yet. I may be doing another project for Catholic Audio Company (the people I did Interior Castle for), a two parter by St Louis de Montford, True Devotion to Mary and the Secret of the Rosary. I haven't signed a contract for this one yet. My three LibriVox projects have been sorely neglected for the past few weeks.

I've been watching Rosemary and Thyme via Netflix. I've been a fan of Felicity Kendall's since I came across her as Viola/Cesario in the BBC's Twelfth Night back when I was an undergrad, and after she appeared on an episode of Doctor Who, I saw that she'd done this murder mystery series a few years ago and decided to check it out. I've also been meaning to watch the Good Life (aka Good Neighbors in the US) because although it comes on PBS every so often, it's quite sporadic, and I've never figured out the schedule.