…answers pending. We’re closing in, folks. I have nothing really to say other than tackling the nit-pickies trying to get this thing up and running.
Of course...I have no product yet. Just covers. :lol: Oh, and a few, mostly-corrected files. Now that we’ve got Carolyn’s test file up on her site, that’ll help a lot. Once we know the process, it’s all mechanics.
Have faith!
…to all of you for keeping our spirits and enthusiasm up through what has been a tumultuous (to say the least) year. Without all of you cheering us on, Closed Circle might have slowly faded away as a cool idea, but way too much work, in a year with so much else needing to be done.
One of the problems in getting CC launched into V-Space has been the distance between the purple circle and the red and teal circles. We talk by phone and email, but that’s not the easiest way to “read” someone’s state of mind. Last week, after finally taking the time to dig into the Joomla site and investigating some of the pros and cons, I took a deep breath, grabbed the bit in my teeth, and asked Lynn if it would be helpful if I took a stab at the CC site with WordPress. She’s had so many calls on her time and spiritual energy, I thought, maybe, she would appreciate same, but at the same time, it was kind of her baby, conceptually, and creative toes are very sensitive.
I’m happy to report, her toes remained intact. She said “go right ahead”, so I did. After playing with my blog the last few months, I’m pretty comfortable with its capabilities, plugins, and language, so I’m not starting from scratch, and it’s moving along pretty quickly. After playing with themes and shopping carts for the last week, I’m going to take a deep breath and say that CC will be in business by the first of December. We won’t have a lot of stock on the shelves, but we should have the framework into which we can stick a lot more as we concentrate on production.
Thank you all for your patience and encouragement. We seriously could not have done it without you.
YIPES! On second thought…I just looked at the date…I meant the first week of December, of course! (Oooo, I love to dance a little sidestep…)
Ja ne!
It’s filking time!
Gotta a call last week from the local filk group. They’re having a get-together tomorrow and Patty and Mike Briggs are coming up for it. Patty suggested they call me, and, well, here we are, looking forward to the get together, tho with no small trepidation, considering we haven’t done this seriously in, oh, fifteen years!
Filking, for those who don’t know, is SF/F folk music, i.e. music written by and for SF/F folk about subjects, be it books, movies or spaceflight, that are of interest to us. For decades now filkers have come together at conventions and home gatherings to share gossip and music. It’s a fun community within a community which has gained increasingly public acknowledgment in recent years. I understand there’s even a filk radio station somewhere.
The work “filk” allegedly comes from a typo in a program book back in the stone age of conventions. Whether or not that’s true or whether some clever fan or pro came up with the term, it’s stuck and filkers wear it proudly.
Filk isn’t the reason Carolyn and I got together back when…that was her work and my wild notion of doing a graphic novel adaptation. But once we met, Carolyn, who was heavily into filk at the time, introduced me to it, and it certainly became part of the glue that holds us together.
I’ll never have the voice my mom and sis had and has, I’ll never be more than an average amateur (and now PPA) with the guitar, but it’s brought me many hours of enjoyment over the years, and I’m looking forward to getting back into it.
We’d already begun to drift away from it when we were in OKC. We moved the guitars with us, but apartment life was not at all conducive to practice. Then, we met Patty and Mike, and they were into filking and we sort of brushed back into it, briefly dusted off the guitars, then kinda drifted away again, because of those too-close quarters of an apartment. Once we moved into the house, we hoped to turn the basement into a filking area, but we’ve just not had it at a top priority. Now, with this little event looming, we’ve dusted off the quitars, restrung, and am desperately trying (in two days) to reconstitute calluses and break in the nylon strings (on my classical baby. Carolyn’s 12 string beast is doing just fine).
Hence, the Band-Aids. And the WD-40? My vocal chords are beyond rusty and all the way over to frozen solid.
Wish us luck!
I don’t think I’ve ever had a pair of shoes that one of the first things I think of in the morning is getting them on. Even greater shock: Carolyn, the barefoot queen, has the same reaction. These shoes really are something. My ankle gives me only the occasional twinge now, with or without the shoes on.
You’ve got to be a little careful the first few times you squat down to work because they play subtle games with your center of gravity, but stretching to reach top shelves and standing on tippy toe has never been easier! And no inserts and no plantar fasciitis! Like…wow.
But they don’t make them for men! How cruel is that? They’re being touted as these great exercise aids, for butts and thighs…which I know is a huge selling point for the 21st C female market…but…don’t guys want to have good butts, too? 
I know I want guys to have good butts!
Probably they don’t want to advertise the orthodic advantages of the shoes…that being not nearly as glamorous as a good behind…Weird world we live in.
But still…why not make them for guys?
And it’s gorgeous!
Merry Christmas to us! This is the one thing we really wanted for the house, and it’s a whole lot cheaper (and cleaner) than plumbing the fireplace for natural gas. Besides which, natural gas fireplaces give me a headache if I sit too near. Carolyn’s very sensitive to wood smoke, so a real fire was out of the question. To top it off, there’s a bit of a compromise in our chimney, nothing that compromises its structural intgrity, just a flashing or something that needed fixing if we were going to use it as a wood fireplace. Considering I don’t do roof work, that fix would probably cost us more than our new insert! (We won’t even talk about the work of cleaning a real fireplace!) So, this was actually a relatively inexpensive answer to our need to spot-heat the living room in the winter and take care of a big dirty black spot (the fireplace) that dominates an entire wall. Last winter, we had to heat the whole house to take the chill off the living room. Not now! We might well save the cost of it in just a couple of years…only time will tell.
I tried to get some pictures. Setting it on the table and taking a delayed picture worked like a charm. Thanks, Walt! I took one really long exposure to show the fixture, but in actual fact, at night, it doesn’t show at all. Spent a lot of time this afternoon checking out various fireplace screen options, then it finally hit me: we don’t really need a fireplace screen! I’m going to get a tension rod and make transparent, seasonal drapes to help disguise the fixure when it’s not in use. I’m thinking nifty, sparkly spider-webby stuff for Halloween, something with sparkly colors for Christmas… I’m sure I’ve got something downstairs that’ll work beautifully and take (knock on wood) half an hour to construct! Wheeee….
Anyway, for now, here’s the fire….
One of my bestest prezzies! From OSG:
Not Romeo and Juliet! I’ve had them for several years.
A Bday gift from Carolyn.
I’m talkin’ about the socks!
When I opened them, I looked up and could swear I saw Juliet wiggle her foot invitingly. And they were a perfect fit!
Ja ne!
For those of you who thought pronunciation was important…
Carolyn started reading the new Bren book to me today…and she’s changed the say SHE pronounces a bunch of the names. When she read me the last book, she pronounced Machigi, Mah-CHEE-gee. Now, suddenly, she saying MAH-chi-ghi. Go figure. Oh, and Najida has gone from NAH-jhi-dah to nah-JHI-dah. Hmph.
So…bottom line, just pronounce things the way that sounds good to you. There isn’t really a right and a wrong.
Ja ne!
Save the day again. Only this time, she’s not typing.
I think I’ve mentioned I have rotten feet and ankles? Well, when I was up on the ladder cleaning the gutters, I managed to dislodge something in my ankle. I thought I’d just strained it, but none of the strain cures made a dent in the pain, which simply escalated. And there was no real swelling. I mentioned I thought I’d dislodged something, and Carolyn grabbed the foot and pulled. Not hard, just steadily, like traction, and something indeed shifted. It’s ever so much better this AM and hopefully we’ll be able to start skating tomorrow! YAYAYAAYAYAYAY I miss the ice so much…
Ja ne!
Today, I donned my editorial hat to work on CJ’s Faery Moon. Thought you all might be interested in the kind of stuff we do for each other. Read the rest of this entry »
