Some stuff that isn't writing!
Feb. 8th, 2004 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperJust to prove that there are still things that don't involve writing in my current existence...
As a general word of caution to any musical geeks who are also Great Big Sea fans on my Friends list, should you be playing the live concert portion of said DVD and find yourself gripped by the powerful need to grab one of your instruments, sling its shoulder strap on and get up and start bouncing around the living room attempting to play "Lukey" along with the band, you might as well give in to the temptation. Because it's incredibly pernicious and it won't give you a moment's peace until you do.
Just be sure to do it when the only witnesses are a housemate whose eyes are closed anyway and the parrot. That way you'll only be heckled by squawks.
Ahem. Er. Or so I've heard.
The karaoke tracks, I discovered tonight, are extra special fun if you stick them in the DVD drive of your computer, slap on earphones, and listen to the videos as they play. You can suddenly make out the instrumentals a LOT better and pick up the strum lines, which is fun fun fun indeed if "Ordinary Day" is arguably your most favorite Great Big Sea song EVER.
Plus, on "Ordinary Day", you can make out the backup vocals much more clearly, especially some incredibly lovely high notes out of Séan McCann. But I swear, I heard the bits where he's warbling "It's all right, it's all right" and I thought it was![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
solarbird, who wasn't even in the ROOM at the time!
"Ordinary Day" also gets my vote for prettiest GBS video, as it is chock full of lovely Alan Doyle Long Hair Blowing in the Breeze goodness, as well as lots of Alan Doyle Smoldering Stage Presence Stare into the Camera goodness, and HOLY CRAP does he look pretty in that rust-colored shirt.
But Bob Hallett looks like a girl with his long hair and no mustache and beard. A very CUTE girl, but a girl nonetheless, which leads me to this as a possible reason for why he went to the short-hair-and-goatee look. ;)
This afternoon,solarbird, spazzkat, tinlail, lyricae, kathrynt, llachglin and I all met at Leilani Lanes for Anna and Paul's Double Un-Birthday Bowling Fest, and much fun was had by all. Even if my arm only really held out for two games, Kathryn was loopy on cold medicine from Britain which she described as "like Dayquil, only with other stuff that isn't in Dayquil" and which caused the distance between her head and her feet to NOT be a constant, and Cheryl had had a close encounter with food with mushrooms in it and had had a nasty allergic reaction as a result.
We divvied up into two teams: Erik, Dara, and me, and Paul, Joe, and Cheryl, with Kathryn sitting out the first two rounds. It quickly became apparent that we had chosen wisely, because Paul and Joe both could blow the rest of us out of the water bowling-wise. I kept looking over and seeing strike after strike and spare after spare showing up on Paul's scoreboard. Cheryl, too, bowled quite well--and later reported that actually getting up and moving around made her feel better, as the exertion helped get the ick of the allergic reaction through her system. Erik proved to be the most competent bowler of our side.
But what amazed me is that I won the first game. I expected to be lousy, since I hadn't gotten much of a score the first time we'd all gone out bowling, and I totally expected to mostly be throwing balls into the gutter. Don't get me wrong--I did wind up doing my share of that, but some of this seemed to be a legitimate result of my arm starting to get tired. Three or four frames in I hit a strike, then hit two spares right after that, and suddenly I was ahead of Erik and Dara both.
When we started the second game, though, my performance dropped significantly. Dara told me at one point that she thought I was thinking about it too hard, and I think she was right... I got to noticing that what seemed to make me roll the ball better was a) if I didn't think too intensely about it, b) I didn't try to throw the ball too hard down the lane, and c) if I aimed low and looked at what board I was going to roll down, rather than looking out towards the pins. Even in the second game I played, where I could also feel my arm just getting genuinely tired, once I figured these things out I started knocking pins down again.
The annoying part of my two games, though, was that our lane was malfunctioning in at least three different ways. A) The mechanism for picking up the pins after you knocked them over and bringing down new ones kept getting stuck, and we kept having to ask the front desk to reset it, b) the system kept giving us ghost points for pins we hadn't actually knocked over, so we kept having to manually correct our scores, and c) although this was, granted, a purely cosmetic problem on the terminal, our scorecard was skewed out of alignment on our monitor so we couldn't see our names properly displayed. We finally wound up moving to a new pair of lanes, and once we did that we were fine.
Kathryn took over for me after I dropped out, and had fun too, despite the cold medicine. I wound up writing a little bit while watching the others, since I had a small notebook in my backpack. Joe asked me what had happened to my little computer, and I told him that it'd been messed up the last time I'd futzed with it. And that in the olden days, people had in fact used to put words on PAPER. ;) (I did, as it happened, find it a little awkward to try to compose prose on paper since I kept having to cross out words as I wrote them and then decided to change them, and that's a trifle awkward when you're used to just backspacing over your mistakes!)
All in all though, lots of fun bowling goodness. We plan to bowl again soon, but at a different lane this time so as to allowjessicac and her fiance to join us more easily, and hopefully this time mamishka will be able to join us as well.
Meems and I were going to have us a little Angel fest tonight since we're three weeks behind on episodes--but for whatever reason we lost the two most recent ones off our Tivo. DOH! So we wound up being able to watch only one of them, which was "Soul Purpose", and this was a lot of fun in some ways and a bit perplexing in others.
High points: the "awwwwww! Poor schmoo" factor of Angel and seeing all the things he dreamed about while he was delirious. Seeing Lindsey stealing details wholesale from Angel & company's earlier days as he sets up Spike. Spike's joke about "Crockett and Tubbs" when Wesley and Gunn come to see him. Angel specifically dreaming about Spike and Buffy--and his plaintively blurting, "You're taking Buffy to the prom?!"
Perplexing point: Somebody remind me why the hell Angel & company need to say "how high?" when the Senior Partners say "jump"? I had had the impression that the L.A. branch of Wolfram & Hart had been handed over to Angel & company to run as they see fit? Are they supposed to be on the actual Wolfram & Hart pecking order, then?
As a general word of caution to any musical geeks who are also Great Big Sea fans on my Friends list, should you be playing the live concert portion of said DVD and find yourself gripped by the powerful need to grab one of your instruments, sling its shoulder strap on and get up and start bouncing around the living room attempting to play "Lukey" along with the band, you might as well give in to the temptation. Because it's incredibly pernicious and it won't give you a moment's peace until you do.
Just be sure to do it when the only witnesses are a housemate whose eyes are closed anyway and the parrot. That way you'll only be heckled by squawks.
Ahem. Er. Or so I've heard.
The karaoke tracks, I discovered tonight, are extra special fun if you stick them in the DVD drive of your computer, slap on earphones, and listen to the videos as they play. You can suddenly make out the instrumentals a LOT better and pick up the strum lines, which is fun fun fun indeed if "Ordinary Day" is arguably your most favorite Great Big Sea song EVER.
Plus, on "Ordinary Day", you can make out the backup vocals much more clearly, especially some incredibly lovely high notes out of Séan McCann. But I swear, I heard the bits where he's warbling "It's all right, it's all right" and I thought it was
solarbird, who wasn't even in the ROOM at the time!"Ordinary Day" also gets my vote for prettiest GBS video, as it is chock full of lovely Alan Doyle Long Hair Blowing in the Breeze goodness, as well as lots of Alan Doyle Smoldering Stage Presence Stare into the Camera goodness, and HOLY CRAP does he look pretty in that rust-colored shirt.
But Bob Hallett looks like a girl with his long hair and no mustache and beard. A very CUTE girl, but a girl nonetheless, which leads me to this as a possible reason for why he went to the short-hair-and-goatee look. ;)
This afternoon,
solarbird, spazzkat, tinlail, lyricae, kathrynt, llachglin and I all met at Leilani Lanes for Anna and Paul's Double Un-Birthday Bowling Fest, and much fun was had by all. Even if my arm only really held out for two games, Kathryn was loopy on cold medicine from Britain which she described as "like Dayquil, only with other stuff that isn't in Dayquil" and which caused the distance between her head and her feet to NOT be a constant, and Cheryl had had a close encounter with food with mushrooms in it and had had a nasty allergic reaction as a result.We divvied up into two teams: Erik, Dara, and me, and Paul, Joe, and Cheryl, with Kathryn sitting out the first two rounds. It quickly became apparent that we had chosen wisely, because Paul and Joe both could blow the rest of us out of the water bowling-wise. I kept looking over and seeing strike after strike and spare after spare showing up on Paul's scoreboard. Cheryl, too, bowled quite well--and later reported that actually getting up and moving around made her feel better, as the exertion helped get the ick of the allergic reaction through her system. Erik proved to be the most competent bowler of our side.
But what amazed me is that I won the first game. I expected to be lousy, since I hadn't gotten much of a score the first time we'd all gone out bowling, and I totally expected to mostly be throwing balls into the gutter. Don't get me wrong--I did wind up doing my share of that, but some of this seemed to be a legitimate result of my arm starting to get tired. Three or four frames in I hit a strike, then hit two spares right after that, and suddenly I was ahead of Erik and Dara both.
When we started the second game, though, my performance dropped significantly. Dara told me at one point that she thought I was thinking about it too hard, and I think she was right... I got to noticing that what seemed to make me roll the ball better was a) if I didn't think too intensely about it, b) I didn't try to throw the ball too hard down the lane, and c) if I aimed low and looked at what board I was going to roll down, rather than looking out towards the pins. Even in the second game I played, where I could also feel my arm just getting genuinely tired, once I figured these things out I started knocking pins down again.
The annoying part of my two games, though, was that our lane was malfunctioning in at least three different ways. A) The mechanism for picking up the pins after you knocked them over and bringing down new ones kept getting stuck, and we kept having to ask the front desk to reset it, b) the system kept giving us ghost points for pins we hadn't actually knocked over, so we kept having to manually correct our scores, and c) although this was, granted, a purely cosmetic problem on the terminal, our scorecard was skewed out of alignment on our monitor so we couldn't see our names properly displayed. We finally wound up moving to a new pair of lanes, and once we did that we were fine.
Kathryn took over for me after I dropped out, and had fun too, despite the cold medicine. I wound up writing a little bit while watching the others, since I had a small notebook in my backpack. Joe asked me what had happened to my little computer, and I told him that it'd been messed up the last time I'd futzed with it. And that in the olden days, people had in fact used to put words on PAPER. ;) (I did, as it happened, find it a little awkward to try to compose prose on paper since I kept having to cross out words as I wrote them and then decided to change them, and that's a trifle awkward when you're used to just backspacing over your mistakes!)
All in all though, lots of fun bowling goodness. We plan to bowl again soon, but at a different lane this time so as to allow
jessicac and her fiance to join us more easily, and hopefully this time mamishka will be able to join us as well.Meems and I were going to have us a little Angel fest tonight since we're three weeks behind on episodes--but for whatever reason we lost the two most recent ones off our Tivo. DOH! So we wound up being able to watch only one of them, which was "Soul Purpose", and this was a lot of fun in some ways and a bit perplexing in others.
High points: the "awwwwww! Poor schmoo" factor of Angel and seeing all the things he dreamed about while he was delirious. Seeing Lindsey stealing details wholesale from Angel & company's earlier days as he sets up Spike. Spike's joke about "Crockett and Tubbs" when Wesley and Gunn come to see him. Angel specifically dreaming about Spike and Buffy--and his plaintively blurting, "You're taking Buffy to the prom?!"
Perplexing point: Somebody remind me why the hell Angel & company need to say "how high?" when the Senior Partners say "jump"? I had had the impression that the L.A. branch of Wolfram & Hart had been handed over to Angel & company to run as they see fit? Are they supposed to be on the actual Wolfram & Hart pecking order, then?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-02-08 12:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-08 12:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-08 06:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-08 12:14 pm (UTC)Of course, it also now occurs to me that this may be part of what Spike was making so much noise about in this episode--i.e., that Angel & crew are indeed going down a slippery slope if they're starting to become more willing to do something just because they think the Senior Partners say so. ;)
no subject
Date: 2004-02-08 11:05 am (UTC)"Way, hay and away we go tech-geek bowling tech-geek bowling...."
It's insidious.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-08 12:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-09 12:16 pm (UTC)Instead of bowling Saturday, I spent 3+ hours getting my hair done.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-09 06:50 pm (UTC)And yay, nice hair!