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Monday, November 28, 2005

mmm... squash...

I'm craving a really good pumpkin pie. Our friends Carol and Shawn provided the pumpkin pie for our Thanksgiving extravaganza last week, but I've come to realize that the general public doesn't enjoy their pumpkin pie with quite as much kick as I'm used to. I'm craving a pumpkin pie ala ECB.

May have to make my own sometime soon... Won't hold a candle to an ECB original, of course, but it's better than nothing...

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Oh My god

omgomgomgomgomgomgomg

There is ANOTHER LOST EPISODE OF BLAKE!

We are missing episode six! It's called "Seek -- Locate -- Destroy" and it's about TRAVIS and why the hell he's so fixated on Blake anyway. DUH! I always wondered if we weren't missing something, and lo and behold, we ARE!

Now my only problem is that I don't have any way of seeing it. *weeps*

Woe. But yay! But woe.

Jag-U-Are

Our photographer sent this photo to the people at Jaguar.



They liked it, and want to send it to their people in the UK who publish a Jaguar magazine.

Look at us! We're famous! ;)

Friday, November 18, 2005

HAPPY HP DAY!

T-minus five hours until I get to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

AKA: The Film the Hairdressers Forgot


Wednesday, November 16, 2005

So, not much going on in the land of Lacy. I sort of woke up today and realized that Thanksgiving is a week from tomorrow. That was a shocker. Some of you may remember where I was last Thanksgiving and I'm glad to say that this year my house will be a little fuller. A couple we know from choir is going to celebrate with us. I am increasingly amused by the fact that Carol and I have planned exactly which board games we're going to break out, but haven't even begun to discuss food. Oh yeah. Balderdash and Scrabble. We've got our priorities straight...

In other news, the NaNo is still kicking my butt, but less so. I started writing a plot summary when I got stymied on the actual writing, and that seems to be helping a bit. Oh well. Can't force it, or I might actually break something. Believe me; I was getting shooting pains every time I looked at it last week. ;)

Sunday, November 13, 2005

woe

There's a forum on the NaNo website called "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die."

I know why it's there.

Friday, November 11, 2005

inspiration!

How much do I love my silly Blake's Seven? More and more each day, my friends.

I came home this afternoon after being dismissed by the boss lady, and decided I would watch a little Blake while eating my lunch, and suddenly... suddenly...

*cue heavenly choir*

I had a revelation about two of my St. Jude's characters inspired by good old Blake.

We bought a DVD recorder. Hopefully, very soon now, I will be able to transfer all of the episodes to DVD, and then I'll stop having these horrible nightmares about one of the tapes breaking and the episodes being lost forever...

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Best. Horoscope. EVER.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In my astrological opinion, you really need to kiss the mist on the grass at dawn. For your life to be a complete success, you should also gaze at the tops of trees regularly, make a wish as you spit into a pond where the moon is reflected, and arrange for the sun to shine on the back of your neck as you sing an improvised ballad about your future. And if you'd like to earn some extra credit with the deities, making it impossible for them to resist sending you a bolt of brilliant cosmic juju, I advise you to eat a cookie while imagining it's the body of your favorite god or goddess.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

hidden treasure

So, in my writing life, I'm in the habit of putting thoughts and ideas I don't want to lose down on note cards, especially when they pertain to a particular project I'm working on.

Well, over the weekend, I grabbed a stack of notecards from the pile in my desk and was busily making notes, when I turned one over and discovered that I had already written on it. Turning over a few more, I found four notecards in all that had ideas on them -- but the thing is, I have NO IDEA what they were about.

Here they are, in order, exactly as they appear:

*

Doctor with a lisp

*

Collections of books, music, movies don't mean anything b/c they can't provide her with meaning -- search for meaning

*

"I make a point not to apologize for other peoples' ignorance."

*

-she meets a boy - a musician - in the bookstore.

Monday, November 07, 2005

nano first week update

So, a week into the nano process and I've hit the 10,000 word mark. So far I'm on the money in terms of hitting my word counts for the week and what have you. Unfortunately, not much has happened in the book yet. Well, I mean, a lot has happened: I've introduced all the characters, started laying the foundations for the plot (sort of) and built up a little suspense, but there hasn't been a whole lot of action.

I have this bad feeling I may be meandering. I guess that's allowed. This is supposed to be my crappy first draft, right? I mean, it's not supposed to be literary gold. I'm just not precisely sure where I'm going with all this, and I think it's starting to show.

Oh well! Onward and upward!

Friday, November 04, 2005

Lux Aeterna

For those musically inclined persons out there, I wanted to tell you about this piece we are doing in choir for All Saints Sunday this weekend. It's Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna and it's just... Wow. It's different than anything else I've ever sung before.

Now, my musical vocabulary is limited at best, so I will try to explain this the only way I know how. You know how when you hear a piece by Bach, or Mozart, you kind of know where they're going with it? You can, to some tiny extent, predict the way the chords will progress and how the piece will be structured and so on and so forth. It makes musical sense because we have heard that kind of music so often before.

Lauridsen's work is totally the opposite. He uses harmonies that just don't make any sense. Notes that shouldn't go together. Chords that aren't so much chords as random conglomerations of notes. And yet somehow it works. Again, I haven't got the musical vocabulary to tell you why it works, but it does. It's a very modern piece. Not a-tonal (is that the term I want?) but definitely not traditional or classical either.

The Latin is different too. With nine out of ten pieces we sing, the liturgical Latin is exactly the same. Agnus Dei, requiem aeternum, etc. With this, the guy apparently went in and wrote all these lyrics and then translated them into Latin, so it's like we're not only sight reading the notes, but the Latin as well. And I never took Latin. There's one line that says something about "in laboris refrigarium" which we unanimously decided must either be about refrigerator repairmen or the fact that the choir was laboring away and the air conditioning was turned on too high. One or the other.

This makes it an incredibly challenging piece to sing. David, our director, commented that it just isn't performed all that often. It was debuted here in LA several years ago, I take it, to very good reviews, but it's just so different and difficult that most choirs don't even attempt it.

I feel that this might be a good time to mention that we are a church choir of twelve. Thirteen on a good day. None of us are professional musicians. We have only five men in the choir: two first tenors, one second tenor, one baritone, and one bass. Our director sings bass while he conducts and he invites a friend of his to sing baritone when we do Big Important pieces like this.

Suffice to say, this would be a challenging piece for a full choir of professionally trained musicians. Parts of it are near to impossible for us.

And yet... We're making remarkable headway. I'm really terribly proud of us. But we really are an excellent group. We've been told many times, most notably by the professional musicians David brings in to play with us for big events, that people are astounded at the quality and quantity of sound we produce with such a small group. Frankly, so am I.

We've also been debating whether or not Lauridsen hates basses as we work on this song. Both the bass and the alto parts (not to mention the tenor and soprano parts) are painfully high. There has been much laughter and jokes about thongs in the bass section. In addition, sometimes the lines are just so incredibly random they lose any sort of musicality when taken separately from the rest of the choir and the accompaniment. Last night we, the sopranos, were trying to learn this section that jumped from a high c, down an octave, up to a high d (that's a ninth for anyone keeping track) and back down an octave again before moving on. Parts of it are almost like singing a vocalese!

And yet, when you get it, when all the parts come together and it actually works, David cuts us off and there's this collective feeling of oh. That's what it was supposed to sound like, eh? Well that's actually quite nice.

Who knew?

Thursday, November 03, 2005

My horoscope

Pisces: That higher-up who's been giving you a hard time lately isn't going to ease up -- at least, not just yet -- so just keep your nose to the grindstone. They may not be deliberately giving you a hard time, though. They may simply be trying to get you to show them what you're capable of. Take the challenge and work even harder than you have been.


Well that's just swell...

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

8:16 in the morning and I've already been at work for 45 minutes. I got up at 5 FREAKING thirty this morning so I could get ready and have time to go to the grocery store to get bagels, danishes, croissants, etc. for the big FREAKING meeting today.

The meeting starts at 9. Boss lady is not here yet. Quel suprise.

On the plus side, I look ten kinds of hot young professional with funky jewelery today.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

nanowrimo has begun!

So! It's started! I wrote and wrote this morning! Haven't got a word count yet because I was writing by hand, but I was writing hot, which felt really good.

Went to TWO NaNo real-life meet up events this weekend. Sunday was the kick off party which was tons of fun. We just sat around at this pizza place playing writing games and laughing and being very raucous. My kind of party. And yesterday was supposed to be a "planning" party, but only four people showed up, so it was kind of dull. I didn't stay for the whole thing. But it's pretty cool to meet some other insane writing people out there and they're going to continue having these meet ups every week during November, so maybe I'll go to a few more.

Anyway, feeling pretty good at the moment. I think we can pretty much expect that I will crash and burn at some point along the way, but that's OK. Pretty much par for the course.

I think from here on out I'll be doing NaNo updates on my St. Judes journal -- I mean, it's THERE, I may as well use it. I won't be posting the whole thing there, but I'm thinking of putting up daily dribbles if I write anything worth sharing. We shall see. There will, undoubtedly, be rants, however. ;)