I Survived Year One as an Auntie!

Sky turned one today and we held a party. The party largely celebrated the adults surviving the first year of her life. To that end, the birthday cake said "Happy Birthday Sky" on the top, but something along the lines of "Go Red House Adults" on the side.

I also began rewatching season one of Buffy--one of my birthday presents from a couple weeks ago--during my babysitting shifts today. Great fun. I always marvel at just how cheesy it was in the beginning...and yet, at the same time, I have to marvel at how decent it was with good likable characters and cute witty dialogue right from the beginning even if some of the special effects are a bit laughable now and some of the pacing drags compared to later stuff. And I think Season One had one of the best Big Bads. The Master was classic. He had the niceties and polished language of Season Three's mayor baddie with the evil look of the Season Seven ubervamps.

We've also been having "winter faerie" presents at Red House, a non-religious excuse for holiday fun and tiny little gifts. The winter faerie commissioned me to write a few poems for people for their gifts and it has been challenging but great fun to stoke up the poetic fires again. I used to write poetry prolifically and compulsively back in junior high, but not much since. I took a poetry writing class in college that was fun and produced a few decent pieces. But it's been some time since I had to sit down and write something on a given topic with a deadline. It's been good though, and the two recipients seemed pleased with the results which is the real heart warming part.

Fictiony Goodness and Holiday Chaos

Well I had some fictiony fun the past couple days. I went back over to Martha Wells website to have a look at which issues of Black Gate Magazine I would need to get from back order to get ahold of her short stories featuring Ilias and Gilead...and, behold!, several of them are up on the website for free now! I guess good things do come to those who wait. There was a short story about Kade Carrion too, one of my favorite heroines of all time...though it wasn't exactly a happy tale.

For those of you who don't know, Martha Wells is one of my favorite authors. I've liked or loved everything she's ever written.Element of Fire I read in the free online version because it was out of print (and my attempt to buy a used copy never arrived, much to my dismay). I hate reading lengthy things on computer screens and there are only a few other books I've read that way, but I reread Element of Fire over and over. I finally got my hands on a paper copy (actually Amanda got the paper copy) and it was fun to read it as an actual book. Her heroines tend to be rye, nobody's fools, and look at the world kind of sideways.

Anyway, it was a little tricky trying to read fiction that was tied to a computer with the baby trying to pull down the keyboard, pull apart the computer, steal the mouse or crawl off in search of choking hazards, but she did give me a few good stretches of contentedly playing with her new wooden blocks.

I'm a little jealous of her wooden blocks actually. She has the coolest wooden blocks ever. They came from ThinkGeak.com and feature little pictures with the letter that goes with the scene. T is for Tentacles. H is for Henchmen. D is for Dirigible. And so on. There are some truly fantastic ones though. I think our favorite is K is for Potassium! (Come on, think back to chemistry class...). U is for Underground Lair is also great but you've got to see the visual to get the full effect.

Things are a little extra frantic around here with all the holiday planning. Nearly everyone is clearing out at one time or another though I think we'll all be back for New Year.

I went to see the Nutcracker for the first time this year. It was quite an epic journey, all they way to Folsom via San Fransisco but Tim, a friend of mine, was dancing in it and it was the first time I'd seen him dance. It was very fun. Shiny in the literal as well as figurative sense. And Tim was great (Snow Prince and Russian for those for whom that means anything) especially considering he was filling in at the last minute and had only a couple days to learn his choreography. I would never have guessed he hadn't been rehearsing for months like the rest of them. It went off flawlessly.

Anyway, I got a quick visit with my Grandma and Dad before heading back and crashing in San Fransisco before going the rest of the way home in the morning. It was great to see both the friends and some family that I don't get to see nearly often enough. Sacramento and, even more so, San Fransisco don't seem very far away on the map, especially considering all those years I've spent in Scotland or Georgia (the state, not the country. Yes, people sometimes ask. Ok, usually not Americans, but some people.), yet somehow on a day to day basis it seems a nearly insurmountable distance. Well, maybe now that Ron has his license it will be a bit more surmountable. Though I'm not sure I would inflict SF roads on him just yet.

Anyway, we finally have our holiday plans all worked out and bus tickets bought. If you're one of those wondering where we'll be, give me a call or email. We're going to be going to Reno first, then Sac, then back to Los Gatos (no, for the record, since there seems to be a lot of misconception on the topic, I do not live in Santa Cruz any more. Los Gatos is closer to San Jose though Santa Cruz is still only half an hour away.).

Driviness

Sorry everyone, I've been very negligent of this blog this year. But I've been poked and prodded and so I've decided to have another go at it.

I'm not going to try to backtrack to all my news since my last sparse posts, but let's see, recent news...

The most recent is that yesterday Ron got his driving license. Huzzah! Now the two of us can leave the premises without having to find another adult willing to take us. I have to say, living at Red House is the most remote location I've ever lived--UCSC's campus included--for all that it's fifteen minutes drive from one of the biggest cities in America.

Did you know that San Jose is ranked as the 10th largest (most populous) city in the US? That it ranks above San Francisco now (in 12th place)? Crazy, huh? And it seems even crazier that Atlanta, which always felt huge and sprawling and inescapable, is way down at 33, right above Fresno (35) and Sacramento (36)! And Glasgow, which always felt like a relatively small city for all that I knew it was the largest in Scotland--after all, it didn't have much competition really--is actually about the population of Boston which is 21st in the US ranking. I suppose it just shows how subjective a feel of a place can be. So the smallest place I've ever lived till now was actually Aptos (a tiny 9100 population) while commuting in to Santa Cruz (still small at around 55,000). Los Gatos is technically between the two in size at 29,000 but we're up in the mountains, just a bit too remote from the town proper to actually walk in. Actually, I could walk in, but I'd have to walk along the Old Santa Cruz Hwy which is a bit too hair raising for my taste.

Oh well, it seems duty calls and I'm not to get any further today. Perhaps I'll have time to circle back around to my own live next time. (You see my problem?!)

JPF Awards

So, the results are in, and the Madrigirls won our category of the Just Plain Folks Awards for our album Nevermas. Yay!!

Before you ask, I'm not actually on Nevermas. Nor am I on the new second album. I came just a little to late for one and left a few months too early for the other. Sigh. But it's still my choir and I still think we're great and so I still recommend the albums. I'll have to get ahold of the second one myself now... They recorded it during their tour to Wales. If you ever hear any of the recordings from our tour to Northumbria, though, I'm on those!

No progress on finding a local group to sing with. The church we are thinking of attending has choir starting back up this week, but their rehearsals are Thursdays and therefor conflict with fencing. While I haven't been really gung-ho about restarting fencing, it is one of my few opportunities for some exercise.

Another of the nominees for our category of the JPF awards is based right here in San Jose. But they look very...sober and serious. I'm not sure its quite the thing for me. Anyway, I've probably missed audition season now, since their website said they do it through the summer. And I'd have to commit to the whole concert year and there is still a chance we could pick up and move at any time if Ron gets a job offer in another city.

Speaking of which, the job hunts slog onwards. Ron is applying all over the western US though with a preference for the Bay Area still. I'm applying for anything I can think of in the area. I've started putting up flyers for tutoring, I'm applying for lots of editing jobs and even things like book stores in the area (hey, book discounts would be nice!).

Speculations

I just discovered something I find rather sad. One of my favorite writers resources from long ago in undergrad (and when did that become long ago, I ask you?!) was a forum called Speculations. It felt like they'd been around forever and always would be. They were going strong when I drifted away, and whenever I remembered to pop back by they were still going strong. But now, no. The site still exists and it might even be usable for some networking since they have a set up for Twitter, Livejournal and MyBlogLog. But the lovely forum with all its threads, from the lively debates about current trends in fantasy to the daily writer's posts of how many words you've written today, just to keep you honest--all that is gone, and that I'll miss.

Cinderella at the Ball

Tonight I attended my first Gaskell's Ball. The ball is named for Elizabeth Gaskell, a novelist writing a bit later than Jane Austen such that the industrial revolution was in full swing and factories and workers rights were the ignored topics at the balls instead of Napoleon.

The costume span at the ball started with a spattering of Renaissance costume, picked up steam around the Regency Era and peaked across the American Civil War and English Victorian Eras, tapering off to include some twenties and thirties finery and then going wide to embrace modern formal wear. I, and the whole of my party, fell into the last category except perhaps Tim who actually had a top hat.

I learned a number of things at this ball:

Dancing for hours is hard hard work.

I am out of shape.

Waltzes are scary.

Polkas are scarier.

Mazurkas are scarier still.

Gallops, in contrast, are surprisingly fun and easy to pick up.

A schottische is great fun and while if you're anything like me, you're likely to mess it up regularly, it doesn't really matter and you're unlikely to crash into anyone as long as you try to keep going around the circle and hopping periodically. (Step, step, step, hop. Step, hop, step, hop, step, hop, step, hop.)

Staring soulfully into your partner's eyes during a waltz is not as practical nor as lovely as the novels would have you think. It is a great way to get very dizzy very quickly. "Spotting," as they called it--the art of picking a spot in the direction you are headed and watching it as you turn--is much more practical. Indeed it was the very best thing I learned from the quick and dirty dance lesson at the start. I certainly didn't learn the actual steps to waltzing.

I still maintain that set dances are easier than ballroom dancing. That one I knew already. We danced a slightly strange version of Strip the Willow--sets of about eight that ended up half way in between set-type Strip the Willow as the Scots would do it (as best as I can remember), and an Arcadian Strip the Willow. They danced it at a very survivable pace too which is less frenetic but I can't really mourn since it also left me with fewer bruises. There was another set dance I learned there and then and danced twice in the evening that was also good fun.

The Congress of Vienna seems like it would be great fun. It was certainly beautiful watching it the first time. By the second time Manda had taught us the steps, more or less, and so we hazarded the dance the second time they played it, with mixed success. It is something in between set dancing and more free form dancing. Everyone does the same thing, and you shift through the different sections of the dance, but everyone is dancing around the ballroom in couples, more as you would with a waltz or schottische or the like.

Anyway, it was grand fun and I got to wear one of my fancy dresses I never have occasion to wear. Actually I wore two in a row. Last night we went out to a fancy restaurant and I wore, wait for it, one of my prom dresses. That was very funny. And it was a very lovely night out. It was all very formal and they handed the ladies long stem roses as we left the restaurant. Not my usual world, but a fun one to visit once in a while. That's been true of the whole weekend I suppose.

Monday will be back to the normal round of babysitting and job hunting. And we're starting up a new chore rota too--at least we have a very colorful and artistic chart to go with it. I hope it helps.

Baby Madness

It is a fact being abundantly demonstrated to me of late, that one's IQ drops significantly when one is holding a baby. Perhaps it is because babies are learning things so quickly, that they need to sponge off the thinking power of those around them. I'm not sure why, I just know that it's significantly harder to remember things, plan things, or act intelligently when holding a baby.

Even sleeping babies aren't safe. They emit snorons, making the holder drowsy and prone to staring idly at walls or out windows, contemplating little but their relief that the baby is finally sleeping.

It is amazing how much of one's daily life a baby in the house eats up. For a few weeks there, while "mom" was in summer school, I seemed to be the primary caregiver, having the baby for up to ten hours in a day (sometimes as little as six, but mostly around eight or nine). But even on a "normal" day in Red House when I might only have the baby for three or four hours spread out across the day (although sometimes significantly more even without summer school), it is incredible how hard it is to be productive with the day.

The fact that I'm typing this post with a baby strapped to me seems almost herculean if you ask me.