gypsygirl

I do so dislike having to play "takesies backsies" at baby showers, but I just didn't manage to finish the sweater. I'd be further along if I hadn't noticed a mistake two nights ago and frogged back to fix it. Still, baby isn't due till July, so hopefully I'll have it finished before then. And the shower was a fun way to finish a work day, even if all the men did congregate in one corner as if the rest of us had cooties (you'd think they'd have outgrown that by now!).

I've decided on Sense and Sensibility for my next LibriVox project. I'll do Anne's House of Dreams after that. I do wish Anne of Windy Poplars were out of copyright. It's one of my favourites in the series. Darn you, Lucy Maud Montgomery! You should have written faster!

Now that Gypsy is over, I've been able to get some serious recording done. Tonight I finished the last two sections of a biography of Padre Pio for Ignatius Press, and the last two chapters of What Katy Did, which I'm doing for LibriVox. Now I have to decide on a new LV project. I'm wavering between Sense and Sensibility and Anne of Green Gables.

Now I'm off to knit. I hope to get the body of the little sweater finished tonight. Then just have to do the sleeves by Thursday!

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!

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.

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.

I've started working on baby projects for T. I've already made a little panda hat. I still need to buy eyes for it, but otherwise it's finished.

The other project is going to be a pullover with a train on it. I found a pattern, and I'm going to change up the colours to make it look like the Hogwarts Express. I had ordered the pattern a couple of weeks ago, but they had run out, and I had to wait for their new stock to come in. It finally arrived at the end of last week. Now I just need some yarn - I have some in my stash that I want to use, in red, black, white, and yellow, but I also need some grey, blue and green.

The melodrama goes up in less than two weeks. I'm not particularly excited at this point, but then, I hadn't wanted to direct to begin with. I wanted to be nice and rested when auditions for Children of Eden came along. Ah, well. We do get to use the theatre space as of tonight, which is a week earlier than we'd expected, so that's nice. Even though we don't get to do any set building as yet (the Children's Theatre are still officially in the space), at least the actors will get a feel for the dimensions and the acoustics.

I went downtown to watch the fireworks last Friday for the first time since coming to live in Waco. The closest I'd come to this before was hanging out with friends in one of the Baylor parking lots when I was an undergrad and setting off some of our own little ground based fireworks and then watching the big display from a distance. It was quite fun. I hung out with Beth and the 92.9 tent; and Eileen came and hung out with us too.

I've just started working on Anne of the Island for LibriVox. I had been working on Mr Hogarth's Will and Angelina, but I just couldn't get into them and I kept procrastinating and not doing any recording at all. I've turned Mr Hogarth's Will into a collaborative, and started up Anne as my new English solo. I feel sort of guilty abandoning Hogarth, especially because no one has shown any interest in it in the nearly two weeks since I turned it collaborative. But I've also started recording more often now that I'm working on a project that interests me. If no one picks up any of the chapters, I'll probably do one here and there just to keep it alive. Oh, and for the first time since, I think, my second project, someone beat Ans to signing up to PL one of my English solo projects!

I'm still working on Angelina too (more enthusiastically since I started Anne). Spanish is so under-represented in the catalog, that I feel it's my duty to contribute as much as possible, both in solos and collaboratives. I've currently got three collaborative projects going - part 6 of Aesop's Fables, Jose Martí's La Edad de Oro, and I took over part 2 of Don Quijote from Gesine when she needed some time off. Angelina is only the third solo Spanish work in the catalog, and one of the other two is mine as well.

I spent some time last night playing with the veil and wimple from my costume, trying to get the "habit humour" scene down. I'm doing alright with Pocahontas, Heidi, Pippi and Attila, because, well, they're simple, and even if they weren't, the actress does these on the dvd. Katherine Hepburn is a problem, not because I don't know what I'm doing, but because the veil's too long, and the little tail that's supposed to kind of stick up droops down to my chin. Easy to fix, fortunately; just a bit of cutting and hemming. My biggest problem is Princess Leia, because she doesn't do that one on the dvd (she does Twisted Sister instead), and I have no idea how to get the coils to stay (or maybe I'm just supposed to hold them??). I also need to alter the wimple so that it doesn't move around on my head, because that just ruins the picture. I'm thinking of replacing the strips of ribbon that tie at the back with elastic, but I have to make sure it's ok with the director first.

I've kind of been going into LV withdrawal lately because I just haven't had time to record. I can only manage a chapter or two a week right now. I did manage to finish The Elusive Pimpernel and Anne of Avonlea before the new show started. I've got two new projects going now, Angelina by Manuel Delgado (in Spanish) and Mr Hogarth's Will by Catherine Helen Spence. I'd never heard of either of these before I came across them while browsing gutenberg, but the title's sounded interesting. I was most interested in Angelina because it's by a Mexican author.