gypsygirl

I've rearranged almost all the furniture in my loft and my poor dog doesn't know what to do with it. She's figured out where her bed is, at least.

I'd been thinking about doing this for a few weeks now. I have new housemates, and the one directly below my "office" (it's an attic loft, spaces are designated by furniture arrangements) has been running the bathroom extractor much more than the previous one. The roof vent for the extractor is right above the office, which means that when it's running, I can't record. So I'd been thinking of moving the office to the space catty-corner from where it had been, which just happened to be the "bedroom"; unfortunately, it couldn't be a straight swap, because there's a column in the office corner that makes that space smaller than the rest of the corners, so I had to move three corners... bedroom to "dining room/spare bedroom"; spare bedroom to office, dining room to open space in the middle of the loft, office to bedroom.

While I was going to be moving stuff around, I figured I'd try to make myself a better recording booth. Several months ago I built a frame for a booth out of 1" PVC pipe. It looked ok just by itself, but when I covered it with soundproofing blankets it got a bit saggy. It ended up being a glorified dog house for Lucy. Then I had another idea. Pegboard sheets (I can get 2' x 4' sheets at the hardware store) covered with acoustic foam tiles, attached in pairs with binder rings (which I had been using to hold up the blankets in the first booth). The tiles came at the end of last week, and I finished attaching them to the pegboards Friday afternoon. I used adhesive spray, but I think I'm going to have to go back with a hot glue gun, because a few have already come loose. I'll need to test it first, though, to make sure it won't melt the foam.

I started off with eight pegboards, which made a 4' square. On the floor inside I laid four interlocking rubber mats (like you see in children's playrooms), but once I had the four panel pairs up around it, and the mic inside, I found it a bit cramped, so I added the final two mats (which I'd been saving for blocking knitting projects) to make a 4' x 6' little room, and hung two of the sound-blocking blankets across the spaces between the pegboards.

I'm quite chuffed. I need to get a small table, and a second monitor to go with the secondary keyboard and mouse I already have, so I'll be able to leave the laptop outside the booth, but still be able to read off the screen, and control it from inside. And maybe a little stool instead of the chair.

A bunch of us went to a karaoke bar after strike yesterday. My first time, because until now I've only ever sung karaoke at Beth and Marcel's parties (not that I ended up singing last night... the line was kind of long). It was fun, and we may have been a little too loud. We got a few dirty looks from the regulars. But this is the first time in ages that I've been in a place that allows smoking and I'm living with the consequences this morning. I haven't been this stuffed up since my allergies wore off at the end of last season.

This may be the first time I'm glad it's Monday, only because it means that last week is over.

Can you say, "week from hell"?

I got the flu on Monday, was sick till Wednesday, and just as I was starting to feel better, I found that my scooter had been stolen from the driveway while I was out of it. Fortunately, it was found on Thursday, but that made that a stressful day, dealing with recovering it and getting it to the shop, and talking to the insurance people, etc.

And then cap off the week with three fun, but stressful performances of Gypsy!

Ai. I'm worn out.

So I was at a luncheon yesterday; part of it was a showcase of fashions created by one of the family and consumer science students. In describing her collection, she wanted to say something about it being enrapturing and captivating but she got a bit tongue-twisted and ended up saying it was 'enraptivating'. My new word of the week. The luncheon was enraptivating.

Not quite 8:30am and I've already filled my laugh quota for the day.

Was chatting with one of my coworkers, and the subject drifted into Hebrew words and phrases we were familiar with. He was trying to remember the "writing on the wall" from the book of Daniel, "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" (KJV); what came out was "many, many tickle a parson".

We had a pretty good snowstorm last Tuesday, two to three inches. The weathermen thought the temperatures were going to drop below freezing overnight and make for difficult driving (around here, everything shuts down when there's ice on the roads... our cars just aren't set up to drive on ice, and our people just get stupid when trying to drive on ice, so it's just safer to keep as many people home as possible), so the university shut down a bit early and sent us home. On our way out, while cleaning the ice off the cars we played around in it a little. A couple of girls built a snow bear in the bed of one's pick up (sic 'em bears!), we had a minor snowball fight, and I made a tiny snowman from the snow on E's hood.

When we got home we discovered that the weight of the snow had bent the poles of the canopy we'd put over my scooter.

I'm going to have to see if I can find something with stronger poles.

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.

Saw this in California a few weeks ago while I was visiting Mum.

Take a closer look at the far right of the bed.

Only it was the Heart of Texas Fair, not the State Fair. K, one of the girls in the Woman in Black, which I'm stage managing, was given some tickets at work, and she invited me and M, another girl from the play to go with her. She'd never been before, and really wanted to check it out, and since the fairgrounds are right next door to the theatre, we didn't even have to pay for parking.

When we got down to the end of the fairway, we came across the freak show booth; K had also never been to a freak show before, so we went in. For the most part it was a collection of live, stuffed and preserved animals of the conjoined twins gone more wrong than usual variety. One of the stuffed animals, however, was purported to be a chupacabra.

After looking at it for a couple of minutes M said, "That's just wrong. That's a deer butt, upside-down."

I was telling one of my coworkers about it, and he dubbed it the "chupacabr-ass"

On our way out, we saw one of those "Old Timey Photo" booths. Yet another thing K had never done (not that I had, either, incidentally... but then I'm not really one for voluntarily getting my picture taken). I agreed to join them in the photo under the stipulation that I was not going to wear anything frilly. They did have something in the Annie Oakley style, so I was happy.

I recently bought a set of shelves from Ikea for my tv and for some extra dvd storage space.

When I'd put it together, I found that it was a bit too tall for the space, and I didn't like the amount of space between the shelves. So I decided to modify it. I set the shelves to a spacing that I liked, and then trimmed the uprights to the height of the top shelf.

I decided to use the scraps to make two little shelves to put at the back of the bottom two shelves to create even more dvd storage space.

I used the scraps I'd trimmed off, along with a plank of 2x2 that I bought to make the two small shelves.

I'm thinking of staining it a darker colour because it sort of fades into the yellow of the wall, but that'll be later. For now, I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.