Ordinary Day

Le Vent du Nord, who take over as my official Second Favorite Band. They narrowly, narrowly beat out La Volee d’Castors on the grounds that:

• Simon Beaudry is gorgeous, and as previously noted, I have a marked fondness for cute dark-haired bouzouki players! (Note: yes, I am aware he’s holding a guitar in that picture. I have not yet found a suitably pretty picture of him with a bouzouki. Being imaginative, I can extrapolate!)
• LVN actually seem to periodically do US shows, if their tour calendar is any indication. Which means there’s an off-chance I might actually get to see them perform if they ever head out this way, and if they do, I am ALL OVER THAT.
• LVN’s website has an English edition as well as a French one. LVC’s website currently does not, and while I can still kinda poke my way around theirs and make reasonable guesses about what’s what, a coherent full English site is still more helpful.
• LVN also provide lyrics on their website. While I speak only a meager handful of phrases in French, I can at least use the French lyrics to read while I’m listening to the songs, which can let me start to try to parse them as words, as opposed to “lyrical nonsense being sung by guys with sexy voices”! The English lyrics provided are spotty at best, and are clearly the half-assed output of a translation engine, but they are at least enough to give me a half-assed idea of what various songs are actually about.
• Nicolas Boulerice has a hurdy-gurdy, and Unusual Instruments FTW!

Now, all this squeeing aside, LVC are still very, very close behind the gentlemen of LVN, on the strength of their music alone!

And I fear that Carbon Leaf has now slipped to fourth place. Sorry, lads! (I do however resolve to check out CL’s forthcoming live album/DVD set, and show them some love too.)

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

I was listening to Carbon Leaf's Love Loss Hope Repeat on the way home tonight, and found myself startled and amused that it seemed uncannily appropriate not only for my general frame of mind after the week I've had, but also for the three central characters of Lament.

"Learn to Fly" is apparently a Kestar song as far as my brain is concerned. Especially with the bit about "I can feel your heart and I can hear you cry".

"Under the Wire" is Julian. "I need to feel redeemed"? Oh, hell yeah. It's all Chapter-16-y, in particular.

And, the location of the title not withstanding, "Texas Stars" is Faanshi. "So breathe, breathe, breathe in the night / Your journey's just begun"--yep. Girl's only getting warmed up as of Book 1.

None of which of course will make the slightest bit of sense to any of you who have not actually beta read Lament of the Dove for me, but for those of you who have, if you happen to get hold of this particular Carbon Leaf album, think of Lament when you listen.

Several folks have Friended me lately, so a big hello to logrusboy, iwondery, motherofpearl51, and serenalita. Welcome, and hope you enjoy my posts!

We're in the middle of a three day weekend here at the Murkworks, and so far it's been a fairly laid back and pleasant sort of thing. No particular plans have been made, but that's okay, there's something to be said for an easygoing and stress-free long weekend. solarbird and I spent some time today going through our media library--a lot of our old videotapes are screwed up since they'd been taped on a machine that decided it was going to invent its own format, so now we can't play them on anything else. And several others are things that we don't need anymore, since we've since purchased the same things on DVD. So we've built a sizeable stack of tapes we no longer need; anybody local need a bunch of videotapes? Let us know.

It's been fun looking at the stuff, though, and seeing which things we want to keep. Such as, for example, the movie for the eighth Doctor Who. Now that Ninth and Tenth Doctors have finally sold me on Who fandom, I need to watch this again some time soon and remind myself of Eighth Doctor.

It's also kind of amusing just thinking about how media has advanced so much in our lifetimes that we don't even really need videotapes much anymore. I still have a bit of a need for scratch tapes--as we speak, I've been taping the third season of Digging for the Truth for gerimaple since she's a huge fan and it's not airing in Canada yet, and this is the easiest way I have of getting episodes up to her. But other than that, it's been ages since I've wanted to tape anything.

I've also been poking around online trying to find out where I can buy CDs for various Atlantic Canadian artists' music. There's one more Fables CD I want, and some more Irish Descendants, and I keep hearing over and over that as a GBS fan, I probably will like the Punters as well. None of whom are downloadable on iTunes. Sniff. I have found atlanticcanadianmusic.com; any Canadian folks or otherwise fans of Canadian music out there have any experience with this site? Is it reliable?

On the other hand, I have noted with pleasure that the most recent Paperboys CD, The Road to Ellenside, is in fact downloadable via iTunes. Yay! And I was really stunned to see that there's a small assortment of filk on the iTunes store as well--including some Julia Ecklar and Heather Alexander. Soon as I have some music-buying budget built back up, I'm totally making another sweep through the iTunes store. There's some Seven Nations and Young Dubliners and Captain Tractor with my name all over 'em.

Until then, I am apparently going to be in a huge Carbon Leaf mood, since Ether-Electrified Porch Music has taken over my iPod; it's a very, very strong album. I've also been giving Love Loss Hope Repeat a few more listens--and as I'd expected it would, it's starting to grow on me. Something about it suddenly went click once I started catching the mandolin work in the background. It's a subtler album than earlier Carbon Leaf, but there's some serious goodness there, especially "The War Was In Color".

And oh yeah, it must also be noted that the remastered TOS episodes are kicking serious ass, if y'all haven't managed to catch them yet. We just caught "Amok Time" last night, and enjoyed the new effects and space shots quite a bit--suddenly, Vulcan has ice caps! And the wide-angle shots of Vulcan terrain, including a shot of Spock's hometown that's consistent with the animated Trek series, are really cool. The whole episode got me off onto an amused mental tangent about the story behind how Spock's parents got together; I mean, what possessed Amanda to decide, "Hmm, Vulcan! I want me some of that!" ;)

Hope everyone's weekends are going well!

Miles since the 8th: 26.3
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1773.8
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 464.8
Miles to Isengard: 19.2

And it has been made a good birthday indeed. I got surprised with a cake at work, first off--the contractor who's been working with me teamed up with our lead to get me a tasty chocolate cake from Whole Foods. The same cake I actually got for the lead last month, actually, but that's not a bad thing. Any cake that calls itself Chocolate Eruption gets mega points from me!

Then I came home to find the tasty homemade cake made for me by my beloved solarbird, which we all shared after dinner while I opened up the loot. To wit:

• One $30 Barnes and Noble gift card (always a good choice). You can imagine how fast this will burn a hole in my little pocket. Especially now that spazzkat has advised me that B&N is having a "buy one set of TV-related DVDs, get another one free" thing. There's some Doctor Who and Remington Steele calling my name, oh my yes.
  
  
• The one remaining Carbon Leaf album I didn't own yet, which is the live one, Five Alive!. Yay!
  
  
• One rack for all my weights, which makes me very happy indeed. Now this means I can put all my weights upstairs in the guest room where I can work out without disturbing spazzkat. "Under his desk" not being really a convenient place for my weights to have been stored, for any parties concerned. (Meanwhile, OOF but I haven't touched those weights in far, far too long. It was a workout all by itself moving them all upstairs, I'm here to tell ya. My arms still feel it, even as I'm typing this now. Also, note to self: keep the guest room door closed, to keep out the cat, who left a few unpleasant surprises therein. Meh!)
  
  
• I didn't actually get this as part of my birthday loot, technically, but I must also express my appreciation to kathrynt and jessicac, who got me the Masterharper of Pern CD that came out a while back. I am informed that it is full of flute music, and also that it does not suck. Said kathrynt, "Flute, and Pern!" Which apparently sums me up for her.

Many thanks to all who expressed their felicitations, and much love for spazzkat and solarbird, who do indeed know me well. Big hugs to you all! ^_^

Tonight's iTunes music report will focus upon the early Carbon Leaf albums I purchased. In the absence of a Carbon Leaf icon, I default to Elvis With Guitar. For lo, he is the progenitor of all my Music Love! And now, in order of release date:

Meander--seimaisin warned me that Carbon Leaf's own lead singer apparently tries to warn people against purchasing Meander. I think Mr. Privett is harder on this album than I am, but I can kind of see where he's coming from. It's definitely their roughest work, and his vocals have this rough, raw edge to them on this album that you don't hear on any of the others. It's like he was trying to imitate heavy metal singers when he was a teenager and hadn't quite gotten out of the habit yet once Carbon Leaf formed. If you are more familiar with Carbon Leaf's later albums (such as the most excellent Echo Echo, which is where I came in), that aspect of it might possibly put you off.

I had already heard a few of the tracks on this album since I'd downloaded the freebies off an earlier version of the Carbon Leaf site, and had also scarfed free copies of a couple of tracks off the MSN music store at one point since I had free download codes, so I wasn't entirely unfamiliar with them. "Kettle" is the track I remembered the most, I think. And I will note that "Skeleton Man Dance" did kind of make me go "buh huh what now?" as I listened to the lyrics, just trying to figure out what the heck it was about. So at least in that respect, it was an interesting listen. We'll see if any of the tracks in general start growing on me whenever they come up in my Carbon Leaf random rotation.

Shadows in the Banquet Hall--A stronger listen than Meander, and again, some songs here I'd already heard a time or two before from checking out the previously available freebie downloads off the Carbon Leaf site. "Wolftrap and Fireflies" was the most familiar of these to me, I think. Some good listening here, though overall mostly striking me as "with occasional glimmers of the splendidness to come". I think it was at the tail end of "For The Girl", though, that I noted some really nice instrument work.

Ether-Electrified Porch Music--Okay, now we're talkin'. By this, Carbon Leaf's third album, they're really starting to get their groove together; their sound is coalescing into the powerhouse of Echo Echo and Indian Summer. My biggest beef that I have with this album, I think, is one it shares with the two previous; there's this mixing issue where the vocals don't seem nearly as strong as they ought to with the vocals. It's like all the guys had their mikes turned down a notch too much or something. And this issue doesn't happen on the later albums at all.

There are several tracks here that I'd heard before, either as freebies off this album or the 5 Alive! concert one, or actually performed live at the one Carbon Leaf show I've been to so far--when they opened for Great Big Sea in 2004. That they still have several songs off this album in their concert rotation, I think, tells me that here is where they really did start to pull it together. Favorite listens off this one so far: "Home" and "Blue Ridge Laughing", possibly with "Nowadays", "Kinakeet Island", and "Aurora" tying for third.

Well, just because it annoyed me to leave the tweaks un-dealt with, I recoded everything I could think of tonight. I also saved the code fragments out to a local file on my hard drive this time, so I can actually restore them if I lose them again. Yes, folks, she can in fact learn. (Now if I can figure out why the external stylesheet I put in keeps occasionally not working, I'll be on to something here.)

Aside from that, it's been a very, very, very long week. We had a big ol' adventure at work involving attempting to patch databases and operating systems both on a couple of mission-critical servers, a thing which desperately needed to be done and which had not been done in well over a year. Needless to say, with over half the time being less than a year on the job, the process we cobbled together to take care of this failed in explosively spectacular fashions. We've had two big meetings this week about that already, trying to figure out what the heck went wrong and what we can do next time to fix it. Though I will say that I do deeply appreciate that the overall tone of the meetings has been positive, focusing strictly on not only identifying the problem areas, but working towards solutions to these problems. So that's good, even though it's been kind of exhausting to deal with.

My thyroid levels have also gone wacky again, though, which is making the week long as well. Dropping back down to 137mcg was apparently extremely premature, 'cause after a few days at that dosage I've gotten sluggish again and my weight's started creeping back up, which is extremely annoying. So is the impact it's having on my ability to not only write, but be cheerful and determined about writing. Thyroid wonkage also tends to make me excessively irritable too, I've learned. Plus, the sleep problems have returned, and on top of it all, it's gotten gray and gloomy again.

(Just a dandy, dandy state of affairs to have going on when you've also gotten a rejection letter, let me tell you.)

So I'm taking the 150's again until things stabilize, and then I'll see about alternating between them. I don't see the endoc again until November. But at least her assistant has been very helpful in fielding phone calls from me when I need advice. And hopefully I'll keep squeezing at least a few words out of my brain.

solarbird is continuing to improve, and the PT folks have her walking down and back up the hill at least once a day now. They've also told her walking down to the shops is reasonable. So hopefully she will be able to walk with me to the shops this weekend for Sunday market.

I've now done my first run through the new Carbon Leaf album, Love Loss Hope Repeat. Picoreview: not grabbing me as much as Echo Echo and Indian Summer. Definitely closer to Indian Summer in feel, but I'm not necessarily hearing as many repeat-play catchy songs here yet. Gotta give it another spin, and will post longer commentary this weekend.

And since I haven't done an Eowyn Challenge update in a few days, here are the numbers.

Saturday through Thursday miles: 15.15 (walking mostly, but a little bit of treadmill)
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1360.05
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 51.05
Miles to Isengard: 432.95

Dude, I am .2 miles away from Rauros Falls! I think I'm going to scamper off to Isengard next, and follow the pretty half of the Fellowship. Frodo can damn well trudge off to Mordor by himself, and besides, Sam would kill me if I tried anything.

Meanwhile, I went to MurkSouth last night to attempt to change the locks on the Admiralty space, since we have a new guy moving in tomorrow night. solarbird is not back up to speed yet for handling landlady foo, so I get to do that for her till she feels better. So this involved me having to take four locks off three doors, take them down to a nearby key place, and have them redo the locks. That part was quick and painless (even if I screwed up how many keys should be used for how many of these locks), but getting the locks back on the doors, not so much. I had the damndest time of it until I figured out that I had reversed which screws went into which locks on the front door. It would have been nice if I could have figured that out before I got myself irritated enough by constantly dropping the screws in the fading light that I started growling and snarling out loud!

I was pretty cranky by the time I got home around 10pm, too, and Dara, bless her heart, came up and hugged me as soon as she heard me snarling my way into the kitchen. So I hugged her for a bit and complained about my general lock ineptitude, and was reassured that things will probably be okay with the locks--that before Dara had started messing with them, there'd been four different keys for these locks, and reducing them to two is actually a good thing. And that also, the doorknob on the front door of the space was already upside down, so no, I didn't break that. Whew.

So then I had a Mike's hard apple, and hugged Dara some more, and then had a nice hot bath and washed some clothes and went to bed. Where more Dara hugging occurred, and I had the best sleep I'd had in days even if there still wasn't quite enough of it.

In other news, rumors are flying around the OKP that GBS will be putting out another concert DVD, to be entitled "Courage and Patience and Grit: Great Big Sea in Concert", with a show filmed during the Hard and the Easy Tour. Rumored release date is November 21. Must. Have. DVD. NOW. And I am also counting down the days until the release of rachelcaine's fifth Weather Warden book, as well as the next Carbon Leaf album, Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat!

And today I must go to the Polyclinic and have my thyroid levels checked again, since I think they may have gone wonky over the last couple of weeks. I mention this mostly because I am looking forward to the walk. After two weeks of sitting around Harborview, my legs need to be reminded of their daily exercise!

Monday evening miles: 1.8
Tuesday miles: 4.1
Wednesday morning miles: 1.4
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1308.8
Miles out of Rivendell: 850.8
Miles out of Lothlórien: 388.8
Miles to Rauros Falls: 0.2

So as long as I'm working at Real, I have access to Rhapsody, their subscription music service. The way it works is that if you're a subscriber, you can play any music in the Rhapsody server library as streaming media for free, and you can also download it to your own system and/or put it on your portable device. But if you stop paying for the subscription, you can't play the music anymore. You can also outright buy albums off their servers, and those you get to keep.

I don't like the player as much as I like iTunes, but I'm taking the opportunity to use this to check out some albums I've been thinking about buying anyway. So I listened to Nickel Creek's first album yesterday, and yeah, they're pretty cool. (I mention this for seimaisin, who recommended them!) I am amused that they are filed as Country/Bluegrass, yet they sound a lot like the various Celtic/Irish-American bands I like. Which of course goes right back to Heather Alexander's remark, "Same music, different whiskey." Hee.

I've also scarfed the Carbon Leaf albums I haven't heard yet, the other two Nickel Creeks, some Gaelic Storm, some more Altan, a Solas album I haven't heard yet, some Leahy, Danu, and Lunasa, and just because they were GBS opening acts and they get attention on that basis alone, the Young Dubliners and Seven Nations.

And, of course, all the GBS they had on their servers. Which is not all of the GBS discography, sadly, but at least they had most of it. ;)

Days till the Great Big Sea Show (YAY!): 4
Monday evening miles: 1.85
Tuesday morning miles: 1.6
Miles out of Hobbiton: 681.35
Miles out of Rivendell: 223.35
Miles to Lothlórien: 240.65

We have an update out of Google, folks. It seems that since they don't have the people up here in Kirkland to interview me (which we'd already suspected here at MurkNorth), and since I would specifically be non-local to the main Google office, they need to do a second phone screen with me to make absolutely sure they want to bring me down for an interview on-site (which would still count for a Kirkland position). I can deal with that, and it's good to know what's going on now. So I get to talk to another Google type on Monday morning. Wish me luck, folks!

No word yet out of Volt about the current contract nibble on the line, though. I'd been given to understand that I should have heard something today, but so far nothing.

In the meantime, although I have been trying to write all day, mostly this has amounted to the following exchange between me and my brain:

Me: "Heeeeeeeeeeeeere words! Here word word words!"
My brain: *sound of crickets chirping*

I've barely written a couple hundred words today. This vexes me.

On the other hand, I have at least amused myself by downloading all of the available tracks off Carbon Leaf's official media downloads page. A scattering of songs on all of their albums may be downloaded for free; I approve! So this gives me a partial sampling of all the rest of their albums that I don't have yet, and hopefully this'll give me an idea of which one I want to buy next.

Wednesday miles: 0.1 (walking)
Miles out of Hobbiton: 493.9
Miles out of Rivendell: 35.9
Miles to Lothlórien: 426.1

Anybody know what the "Paloma" of the song by that name refers to? It's one of the songs sticking with me off Indian Summer, but I don't know if the song is supposed to be addressing a person or a place.

And it's also vexing me, since I keep trying to put "Tacoma" in place in the lyrics, which just makes me giggle. :)