This past week in review

[annathepiper]

Music: playing a considerable amount of guitar. Trying to learn "It's Now or Never" and "Don't" out of one of my Elvis songbooks, since I am of the opinion that if I HAVE these songbooks, I should darned well LEARN from them. Plus, playing Elvis ditties on guitar = deeply satisfying. "It's Now or Never" has the more challenging strum pattern, plus I had to transpose the ditty on the fly; it's written out in E flat in the songbook, but the song is actually in E if you listen to the recording. So I transposed the chords down to D and then capoed up two frets to actually come out in E, because I can't play E flat on the guitar to save my life. I don't have the finger reach for it. "Don't" was at least written out in the right key--D--but it has harder chords.

Also, played some more with kiki_elf, who wanted to play my mandolin, and I played bouzouki along with her. Showed her my mandolin fakebook, to give her some new stuff to play with and try to learn more. That was very satisfying. :)



Geeking: Lots and lots of this. I've been working on trying to merge my personal stock of Two Moons logs with the ones I have on the Two Moons site, since I thought it was silly for me to be maintaining info on those logs in two separate databases. So I plunked all the log files off my personal page over onto the TM one. And I've been coding up a browse page for folks to be able to come and search through these logs, so they can find any log featuring a given book character, any log set in or interesting to a given tribal location, and any log RPed in a given year. There will be more code coming on that, but that's a good start. As a consequence of this, geeked with K. a lot since he's actually interested in converting all these logs to XML format, and coming up with a way to do it in a consistent fashion that other MUSHes might swipe. So I'll be rolling his work into mine when I get to that point. But till then, I have a lot of coding and database work to do.

Also, BOY HOWDY do I have a lot of logs. But re-reading a lot of them has made me nostalgic for Rillwhisper.

The vexing part of the whole experience, though, was messing up my own work no less than three times, thanks to typos that caused me to change every record in the table rather than just the one I actually intended to change. Grf. The gods are clearly telling me I should be using transaction-safe tables.



Master and Commander on DVD: Got this on Tuesday of last week, and had a minor fret fit as the boxed set I was looking for was not in immediate evidence in the store. I found the cheap version of the movie without the goodies first, and only after I was on my way to the register with it, somewhat disappointed, did I actually spy the boxed set. With the goodies. I swiftly switched out, determined to make it home with M&C extra features goodness. Especially the bit with Russell swimming shirtless. Mmmmmmmm.

(I found that first on the extras disc, of course. It turns out that scene was a little snippet involving Captain Aubrey inspecting the ship from the water, while calling up orders to the guys on the deck. It was at the tail end of a long "shipboard life" sequence that apparently belongs in the movie before they get down to Cape Horn... but despite my bitching about the lack of wet shirtless Russell in the theatrical release, I can see why they cut the sequence. It was very long and didn't add much to the plot; it was mostly full of nice characterization for a lot of the minor characters. I suspect most theatergoers would have been bored by it.)

Still need to watch the rest of the extras, though I did watch the movie itself with solarbird on Friday evening. And wound up MST'ing it in IM both with her and with boudiccathered, which resulted in some giggles. ;)

At the beginning, where Hollum first spots the Acheron in the fog and the entire crew beats to quarters:

Hollum: "... I saw a shape."

Me: "You saw... a shape. And you're on my crew why?"

Bou: "Did it look like a butterfly?"

During dinner:

Mr. Allen: "Might we press you for an anecdote, sir?"

Me: "I don't think you're drunk enough for one of my anecdotes. KILLICK! More rum for these men!"

And when they're about to send young Calumy over the side:

Aubrey: "Wouldn't want to lose you."

Me: "I haven't told you my gladiator stories yet."

When they haul the kid back onto the ship:

Aubrey: "Now tell me that wasn't fun."

Me: "Th-th-that wasn't fun, sir, th-th-the ocean's FUCKING FREEZING!"

When Aubrey is giving Hollum high holy hell for being a wuss of an officer:

Hollum: "Strength... discipline..."

Dara: "... and telegraph poles."

When Stephen is wounded:

Jack: "My dear doctor, I have been around and amongst wounds--"

Dara: "Most of which I've caused--"

Jack: "--All my life--"

Dara: "--Sometimes in my own men!"

And,

Stephen: "Put your hand on my belly..."

Me: "Not like that, Jack, we're not in your cabin!"

When the Acheron is coming up on what they THINK is an English whaler:

Me: "Holy sheet! Zey have GUNS!"

Dara: "WELL! ZAT did not go as planned, now did it?!"

When Pullings is being sent off to command the captured Acheron:

Aubrey: "Mr. Hogg would make a good sailing master, but that is up to you... Captain Pullings."

Me: "And let me recommend Boyle as cabin boy."

Hee hee.

Dara also remarked that in the bits where we see Maturin with his spectacles on, doing the naturalist thing and dissecting stuff in his little cabin, he reminded her of Dumbledore from the Harry Potter flicks. We agreed that Paul Bettany would make an excellent young Dumbledore.



Last weekend (not this one past), Dara and I biked over to one of the houses we were looking at, and took risu and mamishka over to see the same one on the following day. It turned out to not be a good one--we liked the house, but it was right on a noisy intersection. Sigh. That was the bad part of the trip; the good part was just doing the biking. Even if I couldn't make it up very many hills.

Last Sunday (again, not this one past), we looked at a couple other houses besides the aforementioned, but they turned out to not be particularly interesting either. Sigh. Stupid houses.



Power outage at Borg on Friday, but I touched on that already. spazzkat and jiapa both came over on Saturday night, and they and Dara played a game while I tried to fight off a headache and did more geekwork with the database I'd been working on all week. Mimi came up and joined us for a bit of anime watching after, which was fun.

Yesterday, I had a walk on the treadmill, trying to soothe my angry conscience about being lame about workouts.

And as of last night, I started writing again. Yay!