Enemy of Entropy

Thing-​​a-​​Day 2

2 February 2008, 11:27 pm. 3 Comments. Filed under Blogging, Critters, Fun, Geekery, RPGs, Reading, Writing.

My cre­ative time today was spent web­mistress­ing. I tweaked some Word­Press tem­plates to work bet­ter, and moved more stuff over from my old site for­mat to Word­Press. It may not seem like much, but I always rewrite and update as I do that, so I fig­ure it counts.

Sam and I had lots of fun in our game tonight. It’s a lit­tle weird to real­ize that some­one is an avatar of a deity and that not only does he not know it, he’s nowhere near ready to real­ize it. Then there’s the whole issue of not let­ting that lit­tle fact slip at all, because an entire race of peo­ple is wait­ing for his return (and they really, really need him now, of course).

I really should go to the library tomor­row, but I don’t know if Sam will have time to drive me there. I have books to return and books on hold to pick up. I’d best go to bed now, to improve my chances of wak­ing early enough to ask him.

I need to give Kioshi some extra scritchies, though, and I’m think­ing about Jen and her fam­ily, who had to let go of their newest feline fam­ily mem­ber today — he had feline leukemia. I always think of our Andre and Tom-​​Tom when­ever feleuk comes up. I’m glad Kioshi didn’t catch it from his par­ents, as our babies and theirs prob­a­bly did. Please, vac­ci­nate all of your pets! Even if you don’t ever plan for them to go outside!

Relearning How to Play the Piano

13 January 2008, 11:15 pm. 7 Comments. Filed under Family, Music.

I can’t remem­ber whether or not I bur­bled about this already, but if this is a repeat you can get extra hugs the next time I see you or some­thing. We have a work­ing, mar­velous, beau­ti­ful piano! It’s the freecy­cled Korg 88-​​key dig­i­tal that I men­tioned way back in Novem­ber, all clean and func­tional thanks to my sweet Sam. It sounds so good! It even feels right, unlike any elec­tronic key­board I’ve ever tried to play. I learned to play on an acoustic piano, and the feel is just dif­fer­ent. This piano has nicely weighted keys to help old­sters like me, and they’re even touch-​​sensitive, like a “real” (acoustic) piano. And it has two ped­als! (There’s a pic­ture of a sim­i­lar model down there under the “read more” link.)

It won’t go out of tune. We can record any­thing that’s played on it. There are not one, but two head­jack ports, so that, say, a teacher and stu­dent could hear the student’s attempts with­out both­er­ing any­one else in the household.

Yes, I like!
Read on…

Is There A NaNoReMo?

30 November 2007, 12:51 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under Blogging, Family, Health, Music, Reading, Writing.

I think I want a National Novel Read­ing Month. I could do a novel a day (as long as I chose the right nov­els, of course). I’m behind on writ­ing reviews, but I’m wal­low­ing unabashedly in the num­ber of good reads avail­able to me right now. I’ve tweaked the Now Read­ing wid­get to show up to ten cur­rent books instead of just five.

I totally flubbed NaNoW­riMo. No, I don’t wanna talk word count. Ugh. I have, how­ever, man­aged to keep up with NaBloPoMo. so far, and there’s only one day to go! Data­base prob­lems have given me some trou­ble with get­ting the posts to the pub­lic at some points, but I’ve writ­ten an entry every sin­gle day, and I think all of them are even show­ing up now. (The auto­posted Tweets for the day don’t count, of course.)

TodayOn Thurs­day, Katie and I drove all over the place, as she had an orth­don­tic appoint­ment and I fool­ishly chose to com­bine that with other errands. Dri­ving = can’t take usual pain meds. I came home and col­lapsed with a fever. Now it’s the nor­mal time to sleep, and I’m in too much pain to go lay down. (Actu­ally, I was so foggy that I for­got to hit the “Pub­lish” but­ton last night!)

But, thanks to a freecy­cler, we now own a Korg 88-​​key elec­tric piano. The catch: It’s taken apart. Com­pletely. I’ve never seen the innards of such a thing before!

Why did the pre­vi­ous own­ers take it apart, then give it away? Their tod­dler spilled paint on the keys. The donor couldn’t remem­ber if it was fab­ric paint or acrylic paint, but it isn’t water-​​soluble, in any case. For­tu­nately, the paint did not get into the elec­tron­ics! Unfor­tu­nately, it did stick a few keys together. So the man of the house took it apart, intend­ing to clean it up — then stuck it in the garage, where it has lan­guished for two years. In a clean­ing fit this week, he decided to toss it out and just get a new one. Hap­pily for me, his wife per­suaded him to give her a week to offer it on freecy­cle instead, and now it’s ours!

I’m encour­aged by the fact that every­thing worked before it was taken apart (other than the stuck keys). I’m excited about hav­ing a piano. Now I have to fig­ure out what to use to gen­tly clean said keys, then fig­ure out how to reassem­ble the whole thing. I con­sid­ered just tak­ing it to the near­est autho­rized repair cen­ter, but I want to see if we can do it first, as their quoted labor rate of $70/​hour would add up very quickly. This is a $1,000 instru­ment, so it’s worth putting some money into mak­ing it work. Hav­ing the money, as usual, is the problem.

It came with its nice stand, which is inte­gral to the piano, as it has the ped­als on it. I’ll still need a bench, but I’ll deal with that after I have it working.

A repair man­ual would be very use­ful. The instru­ment man­ual can be down­loaded from the Korg web site, but since these things aren’t con­sid­ered user ser­vice­able, it doesn’t show how to take the piano apart and put it back together. If I can get it cleaned up, though, I can prob­a­bly ask Daddy for assem­bly help. My Daddy can fix any­thing.1 He’s much bet­ter with things than with people.

I’m totally open to sug­ges­tions for gen­tle sol­vents.2 I’m fig­ur­ing non-​​acetone nail pol­ish remover might do it, but will it dam­age the keys?

Of course, if any of you fine folks hap­pen to have expe­ri­ence with tak­ing elec­tric pianos apart and reassem­bling them, by all means, please speak up! (Hey, a girl can hope, can’t she?)

1 Yes, I am 41 years old, and he’ll always be Daddy, and I’ll always believe in his mirac­u­lous fix-​​it-​​ability

2 Yes, that’s some­thing of an oxymoron.

More Fun Reading from Carrie Vaughn

25 November 2007, 11:21 pm. 3 Comments. Filed under Reading.

I really needed another fic­tion author to fol­low, right? But I’ve seen this series of books about a were­wolf named Kitty, and I finally got a chance to read them. I fin­ished the first, Kitty and the Mid­night Hour, today and jumped right into Kitty Goes to Wash­ing­ton. I have Kitty Takes a Hol­i­day all lined up and ready to go, but I’m already wish­ing that I had the next vol­ume, Kitty and the Sil­ver Bul­let. And that, my dears, is a sign of a fine author spin­ning a very good yarn, con­sid­er­ing all the other books wait­ing and ready on my shelf.

The library has the books labeled as hor­ror, but I’d put them in the para­nor­mal romance/​dark fan­tasy cat­e­gory. Hap­pily, the “romance” part isn’t the most sig­nif­i­cant one, and doesn’t get in the way of good plot. There was a moment today when I won­dered if ">Vaughn and Kim Har­ri­son had shared a brain to a small extent, but they’ve dealt with a super­fi­cially sim­i­lar issue in very dif­fer­ent ways.

If it weren’t for the fact that I just finally got done with my school assign­ments for the week, and must get up when Sam does in the morn­ing, I’d prob­a­bly be sit­ting up reading!

Now I really need to find a source for these short sto­ries, though. Any of you have the rel­e­vant mag­a­zine issues?

Reading

21 November 2007, 11:07 am. 5 Comments. Filed under Education, Family, Home, Homeschooling, Parenting, Reading, Relationships.

So, the Crazy Hip Blog Mamas want me to talk about what read­ing means to me or my child. How about both?
Katie reading
You might have noticed that I talk, a lot, about read­ing. I think Now Read­ing shows at least four five of the books that I’m read­ing right now, and that’s a fairly nor­mal num­ber. I don’t include my text­books, because they’d be there too long!

Read­ing is one of the things that I can still do, most of the time, despite the fibro and other crap. I can’t always man­age to read on a screen, or fol­low some­thing like a text­book. For­tu­nately, though, fic­tion by some of my favorite authors — espe­cially an old favorite novel, like Part­ners in Neces­sity — is eas­ier, and is a very good way to dis­tract myself from the pain for a while.

I haven’t talked about it much, but Katie has had increas­ing health prob­lems over the last year. Her migraines are no longer man­aged, despite tak­ing high lev­els of pre­ven­tive med­ica­tions. The res­cue med­ica­tions aren’t work­ing well because she has to take them too often. She had another round of sleep stud­ies, too, and a new neu­rol­o­gist has been try­ing dif­fer­ent med­ica­tions to help her get a decent night’s sleep (which should help the migraines and other prob­lems). So far, any­thing that helps her sleep despite severe rest­less leg syn­drome leaves her zomb­i­fied the rest of the time. Provigil, even taken twice a day, can’t keep her awake and aware enough to func­tion in school. She’s lit­er­ally sleep­ing like a cat, 14 – 18 or hours a day, just never deeply. Her dark cir­cles have cir­cles, now.

But she can still read, too. Slowly, some days, and going back to re-​​read some pages, but she gets the same com­fort from it as I do. You know she’s mine when you real­ize that she’s never with­out at least one, and often two, books in her purse.

I started read­ing to her dur­ing my preg­nancy, along with talk­ing and singing and play­ing music for her. I read out loud to her from her first week out of the womb, too, some­times while breast­feed­ing, other times while just being with her. She talked at an early age, and was very clear. She learned to read quickly, too, and has always been very opin­ion­ated (where did she get that?) about her choice of read­ing mat­ter. One of her favorite things about leav­ing the pub­lic school sys­tem was being free of that damned Accel­er­ated Reader pro­gram and its ridicu­lous restrictions!

It’s no sur­prise that I hope my nephews and niece are read­ers, too — although that’s far less likely, since their par­ents aren’t, really. My brother used to brag that he’d never read any whole book, even those assigned for classes. (I never under­stood that being a point of pride, even if he did get good grades.) My sis­ter has never read any­thing that wasn’t required. I don’t know their spouses very well, but I’m fairly sure they aren’t recre­ational read­ers, either. At least the grand­ba­bies have our mother (their Nana), who got me started read­ing, and will sit for hours with any child, read­ing book after book (or the same book, over and over) patiently.1 I’m not close to my sib­lings, geo­graph­i­cally or oth­er­wise, so I don’t have many chances to influ­ence the babies. I can give them books, though, and hope to catch their fancy so they ask to have them read!

Being a flu­ent reader gives one more of an advan­tage that any other skill you can give your child. Read­ers can use that skill to learn absolutely any­thing else. They can explore math, sci­ence, crit­i­cal think­ing, his­tory, cur­rent events, art — you name it. If you teach them to read, get them in the habit of doing so, and teach them to judge their sources well, you’ve given them an incred­i­ble start on life.

1 Mom (and I!) did read to my sib­lings, but nei­ther of them ever wanted to sit still long.

 

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