Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Haven't had much to blog about the last little while. But I don't want to let the blog slide, so I need to post something.

Ah. "The Sound of Drums" on Doctor Who. Wow. Just... wow. Super drama. Super-duper drama. I seriously have no idea how this story is going to wrap up. The episode also allowed me a couple of Geek Level Doctor Who Knowledge moments. The orange skies of Gallifrey: yup, Susan referred to orange skies waaaaaay back in the original's first season (maybe in "An Unearthly Child", but also possibly in "Marco Polo"). And the Master watching Teletubbies: the original Master, while imprisoned during the Pertwee story "The Sea Devils", found himself enthralled by the British children's TV series The Clangers. Heh. The Master offering people jelly babies: well, that one's a gimme, really...

Oh, got myself a Facebook account. Lynn got one after discovering some friends having one, I decided to give it a shot, too. Kinda fun. Lynn and I can actually play Scrabble through it, even while one of us is at work. Just log in during a break and take a turn.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

I love it when a patron at the library has a celebrity's name. Last hour, I helped a patron named... Bruce Campbell.

Hail to the king, baby.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Just finished watching the new episode of Doctor Who, "Utopia".

Holy.

Snappin'.

Crap.

(Derek Jacobi really is one kick-ass actor, isn't he?)
I had a voice class with Mark Hellman on Wednesday, the first in a long, long while. Just a little refresher to begin with. The old "engage the body" thing. Becoming aware of my breathing (which really needs some work), loosening up, et cetera.

I did notice one thing in particular. When I tried to exhale long "f" or "v" sounds, they're not quite right. My lower lip went to the same place as it did before I had that dental surgery a couple of summers back. Which is now the wrong place if I want to be properly enunciating.

Still, I felt relatively good about the session. We zipped through a good amount of training over the single hour as I remembered much of it with just a little prompting from Mark. I must schedule a couple more sessions over the next couple of weeks.

On a new topic, I was a king-sized dunce earlier this week. A couple of permanent postions came available at the library. Positions that I fully intended to apply for. Except for the fact that my brain kept telling me I had until the end of the week to apply. Turns out that my brain was wrong. The deadline was the beginning of the week. King. Sized. Dunce. In the slightest of defences, though, I mentioned this to a co-worker and managed to finished my story herself when I was about half-way through. Although she was not thinking of applying for any of the positions herself, she did think that the deadline was a departure from all other posted positions over the last six or eight months. Still. Dunce.

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Well, it's not the most momentous announcement, but I've finally gotten off my big, fat... procrastination muscle and gotten a hold of Mark Hellman, my "voice guy". We've only arranged one session for next Wednesday, just to see where I'm at for now. I think it's important to do that, given that, after my dental surgery a while back, I essentially have a whole new mouth than when I last worked with him.

Now, I just need to think of a project of some sort to actually work towards. Hmm.

In other news, Lynn is away on Saltspring Island this weekend with her scooter group. They go there every June and two-wheeledly explore and wander. This means she can't update her blog herself, so I've been adding some placeholders on her behalf. So, basically, that means parties and strippers here all weekend. And if you believe that last sentence even the slightest bit, you've obviously never met me.

So, I've just blogged in my blog about blogging in someone else's blog on their behalf. Is there such a thing as a "meta-blog"? Because I think I've just hit one.

Friday, June 1, 2007

I've been a bad blogger. So, time for a little catch-up.

...

Um...

Okay. New book for Lynn and me. We finished Mr. Thundermug pretty quickly. It was a very thin book. Sort of peculiar. Somewhat humourous. Not really a story, more a series of vignettes about the history of this talking baboon. I think it was intended as a comment on some aspect of humanity. Exactly which aspect, I'm not sure.

We have now moved on to Hamish X and the Cheese Pirates by Sean Cullen, the first in a planned ongoing series about an orphan boy called Hamish X (a second book is already in the library system). Now this is one insane book. The author, Sean Cullen, is a Canadian comedian formerly of the comic musical group Corky and the Juice Pigs, who now works on his own. And he is stark... raving... mad. And I mean that in the best way possible. In this YouTube clip of C and the JP, he's the one on the right:



This first installment in the series introduces us to Hamish, an orphan whose name is feared by orphanage owners around the world. The nasty ones anyway. Hamish is placed in the Windcity Orphanage and Cheese Factory, run by the evil Mr. Viggo Schmaltz, creator of Caribou Blue Cheese (made, naturally, from caribou milk). Hamish plots his escape with the help of some new friends. Meanwhile, somewhere out there in the world... the Cheese Pirates grow closer and closer...

The story itself is crazy enough but then there are the footnotes. Here's one example. Cullen describes the cheese making process and mentions that the curds have the liquid squeezed out the them. A footnote to that explains:



Curds, not Kurds. Curds are immature morsels of cheese that must be ripened and
aged over time. Kurds are a people who inhabit a region that encompasses
southern Turkey and northern Iraq. No one knows if Kurds ripen with age, but it
is likely that if they were pressed, liquid would come out of them.


Needless to say, after reading this aloud to Lynn, I had to stop while we tried to get control of our giggles. In fact, that happens after the vast majority of the footnotes.

I'm guessing our next joint-read will be the next Hamish book, Hamish X and the Hollow Mountain.

In other news, or rather non-news, I keep managing to put off calling back Mark Hellman to try and get back into the voice work. The last couple of times I've called, I've managed to just get his machine and left messages saying I'll try him again. And so far, I'm still trying to call him again. Stupid intertia.