All hail mon462 for noodging me into registering for guitar classes at the Old Town School once more, after a multiyear hiatus where I only seldom touched my instrument, and then only to whizz through very basic accompaniments for songs I already knew how to play. All hail!

So yesterday was the first class of the new session, and I'm taking Guitar Ensemble Skills and Guitar 2-Repertoire (a techniques class). When last I was enrolled, I'd made it as far as 3-Rep, but my hiatus and general rustiness encouraged me to drop back down a level for this first toe-dabbling exercise, and I'm glad I did. I am (reasonably so) rather farther advanced than my classmates who just came out of 2, but I can see that the skills we're going to work this semester are precisely the ones that are scariest/weakest for me: treating my left hand's motions as not just simple presets, but variable, and doing Different Things (picking bass notes, different strum rhythms) with my right hand.

Guitar Ensemble Skills is also shaping up to be one of the most fun classes I've ever taken, as well as being 'useful'. Well, and hard. And encouraging me to practice stuff I've gotten extremely rusty on. Which is good! :-> Ensemble classes in general, at OTS, mean students with a range of instruments in a room working up arrangements to perform songs provided by the teachers (often themed -- there's a Guns'n'Roses ensemble, a Bangles ensemble, a jazz fusion ensemble, etc). Usually, this means 2/3 of the students present play guitar, you're lucky to get a vocalist, bassist, drummer, or Something Else Weird, and many of the teachers have been taken aback by the fact that one of my favorite things in all the world to do is to sing harmony vocals. So you often get six guitars all doing mostly the same rhythm part, with one Really Good guy doing leadlines, and a lot of unison singing.

Not in this class -- lawdamercy, no! And I'm glad of it. Firstly, I'm one of only three people who brought guitars to the class (and the least skilled of the three, which I anticipated), so there's actually a desire for me to learn and perform steady-but-basic rhythm lines. Drat it. Which means I have to actually practice my C#m chords at speed, and so on. However, the teachers are also massively in favor of multipart vocals YAAAAAY. And we have a drummer. And the gal who came to class without an instrument entirely, who said she wanted to primarily sing, turns out to be a classically-trained pianist in her 'other' musical life, so can put nifty keyboard riffs on things to substitute for, say, horn lines in the original artist's arrangement.

Yesterday we worked up a serviceable, really neat arrangement of Paul McCartney's song 'Jet' in an hour and a half -- I can tell you, it's really nice working with pros. :-> Now I just need to get home and practice my fingers off trying to get those barre chords back ... now that I have a shiny gaw-juss (to steal Eric Coleman's pronunciation) guitar with low enough action to make them unpainful.

Oh, and do my math writing assignment before Tuesday, and practice my piano class homework before Monday, and ... did I mention next week is the last week of classes at HWC? Argh. :-> Still, good argh.

The past week has made all the difference in the garden. We've clearly crossed a quantum threshhold for green-ness. :-> Probably helps that last weekend was supposed to be constant rain (except when it was snow), and instead was bright and sunny and 50degF or higher.

Two weeks ago, the front yard was mostly hard-packed clay (and moss, near the house), the violets were alien-looking green masses of rooty tuber, and all the bushes and woody plants were bundles of sticks awkwardly standing around in sheepish clusters. This morning, the violets all have leaves bigger than loonies (and we have a LOT of violets!), the bushes are budding out or leafing (the spicebush up front looks like it's been flocked chartreuse; the nannyberries and elderberries out back are quite respectably leafed already -- in a week flat!), and even the new fruit trees I just planted are showing signs of wanting to make themselves to home and settle in. The columbines, even the ones that were just babies last year, all have at least three leaves out, and the older ones are knee-high mounds of foliage. The beans I've been sprouting inside have two creditable leaves each, and are almost ready to go out. And we have our first purple tulip bloom!

I need to go around and take pictures when I get home, document how it's boinging, and maybe even make a 'Welcome to my garden! Here, have a virtual tour' lj post. We'll see.

Well, it's not spring YET (because there are still slabs of ice in my front yard), but it's been over 50degF for two days now and the plants are starting to insist that spring is COMING. There is, for example, a cluster of crocus foliage determinedly poking out of a snowbank.

Also, the birds agree; the redwings have arrived, and they're seasonal migrators. Over the fall and winter, juncoes and downy woodpeckers have firmly moved from 'rarely seen' to 'feeder regulars.' The downies have even gotten so bold as to refuse to fly away until I get within five feet, which is especially impressive given how skittish they were last spring.

Soon the ground will thaw and it will be time to start digging frantically, and time to put all my mail-order garden plants in the ground for the season. I should probably get a head-start on all that by ripping down the old dead morning glories, and generally tidying up fall's leavings, but I think I'll just sit on my porch in the sunshine with my dogs and eat breakfast, first. :->

When I was a child, I was what is politely called 'precocious.' [1] This had advantages, but it also meant that when I *didn't* pick up a new skill quickly, I got very frustrated very fast, threw tantrums, and generally just didn't understand why it had to be so hard.

My Grampa Beltz sat me down and explained it to me, over and over. Some things are easy. Some things are hard. But even the very, very hardest things, he said, I could learn. The trick was to make sure you made a big enough hole to put the magic in.

Magic? Ah, I should explain. There are fairies and leprechauns and other tutelary spirits in the world. [2] They want to help us, honest they do, but sometimes things are hard even for them. So you have to help them help you by pushing as hard as you can to open yourself up inside to make room for them to put the magic in, and then all sorts of things can happen.

I thought he was kidding -- or worse, humoring me -- until the day I learned to read.

( Long, weepy story inside. Feel free to avoid. )

John found, unexpectedly, one of the utterly unobtanium-coated Rock Band box sets with a PS2-compatible game in it [1], and he and I enjoyed playing some two-guitar multiplayer songs. Then he did guitar while I did vocals, which was also fun, and unexpectedly challenging. I never even considered trying the drum set, because it looked likely to caterpillar's-dilemma me badly.

One morning last weekend, however, John decided to start trying out drum parts. I was sleepily lying on the couch with both dogs, half-watching ... and suddenly I not only realized why he was having trouble, but somehow knew I knew how to do it. Or, at least, I got that videogame-fan impulse that says, "Ooh, ooh, lemme try, I can beat that level!"

Three songs later, I was consistently getting triple his scores, and he said from across the room with an admirable lack of bitterness, "Ok, so you're definitely going to be playing the skins from now on!"

I'm finding it surprisingly meditative. [3]

However, skill at playing Rock Band's drum parts is interacting interestingly with my piano class ... which I should have, perhaps, anticipated. Today we learned a technique called 'intervallic sightreading' [4] to which I have never before been introduced, despite a moderate past experience with taking piano lessons. It is STAGGERINGLY USEFUL. My ability to play cold (meaning, sit down with a piece I've not seen before and get mostly close first try) has quintupled, at least, since start of class today. YAY!

However, something else that's gotten staggeringly easier since yesterday is following certain kinds of drum lines on the note crawl in Rock Band.

I think I'm reprogramming my brain.

Which is cool.

Rokk on!!!!

---

Footnotes

1. PS2-compatible Rock Band *exists*, but is very hard to find. Xbox and PS3 versions are easier to come by. The PS2 one (which RockBand.com claims does NOT exist) was, apparently, only made in limited amounts -- most stores that wanted to sell the game at all got a stack of 10 or 20 PS2 ones, plus a larger number of each of the other two platforms, in November. Many sold out before December 1st, so when John and I went looking for one circum-Xmas, there were none to be had. Even online. Everyone was sold out.
   
   Until just a week or so ago, John walked into an FYE [2] for a CD and found an intact stack of 10 ... apparently nobody ever goes to FYE to buy RockBand. Score. :->
   
   
2. FYE is a small music-and-movies-etc store. Around here it seems to have eaten the former local chain Coconuts, which was similar but with different logos on the signs.
   
   
3. Drums as meditation However, unlike OCD-sufferer Hannelore (see 1, 2, 3, et al.), I'm not in it for the counting. I'm actually not counting at all, in a numeric or verbal sense; I'm vibing, just like I do when I'm playing guitar or singing. Which of course gets me into trouble when the 'extras' beats do something silly over an intended-to-be-constant 'skeleton' beat ... but I'm working on that.
   
   
4. Intervallic sightreading (which means 'sightreading using intervals') is a skill in which, instead of the page-to-sound cognitive process looking like: [1. See staff. 2. Translate note position to letter. 3. Translate letter to keyboard position. 4. Press key] it looks more like this: [1. See staff. 2. Choose initial hand positioning carefully (aided by notes on staff of learner sheet music). 3. Locate precise position of first note. 4. Proceed thereafter by relative gaps between said note and next notes: a third means 'skip one finger,' etc.]
   
   You don't play the notes at all; you play the distance between the notes. In many cases, I never even have any idea what letter-note I'm playing until I look down. I bet this is some cool secret Advanced Technique that all you experienced musicians already knew about, but nobody'd ever mentioned it to me, not once. STAGGERINGLY useful. I loves it, my preciousssss ....

Since I never got around to actually reviewing books as I read them last year, I'm going to try to do it after the fact. :-> Any comments I did make at the time are italicised; today's more detailed musings are below.

Ideally, I'm going to get through all 133 books I read in 2007 in month-at-a-time posts, but we'll see. :->

( Books 1-11 of 133 within. )

I am typing this entry on the fourth laptop I've ever owned; before that, I used a desktop machine exclusively.

My first laptop was silver and blue, and I called him Rolan. I've forgotten his make, model, and cause of death (as it were); he was replaced by a slim black number I named Raven because he was very like a writing-desk. :-> Long-term, deteriorating failure of the power supply led to his replacement with Widebody, a silver compaq, and my first widescreen-format laptop. This was a year ago last late summer.

Then Widebody got posessed -- it acted as if the right arrow key was constantly held down. It didn't do it constantly, though; there would be times when everything was fine, times when it intermittently experienced the behavior now and then ... and periods where I couldn't do anything that involved pull-down menus, or edit textfiles at all. Then the periods of posession grew worse, and longer. Its unusability contributed to my lack of any progress to speak of on my NaNovel this year, among other factors.

When we discovered Widebody's warranty was expired, John took an opportunity to whip out the screwdriver and try to fix it. He cut the trace to the right-arrow key, which fixed the problem ... but also took the rightmost eight keys of the array with it. Oops. :-> So he ordered me a new keyboard on eBay, which, once installed, solved the problem entirely.

So why do I have a new laptop, when the old one still works? I tend to be the kind of person to run a machine utterly into the ground and then have to have it pried from my fingertips -- I dislike change, and dislike settling into a new computer or operating system worst of all.

No, I have a new laptop, running Vista, because my mother-in-law needed a laptop that would run WordPerfect 5.1 that she could use at her office.

We discovered it would run on Widebody quite handily; we had no information on how Vista would handle it. So my mother-in-law bought me a laptop, we baselined my old one, and installed and set it up for her use. Complicated, but not nearly as much so as some of the stuff we come up with in this family. :->

Meanwhile, now I have my new lad, a sleek black Presario, called Ateva (yes, I'm reading Cherryh's Foreigner novels at the moment), long may he serve. Now to re-upload and re-install and re-customize all my most-used applications, spread my files about, and generally litter up the place and make it homelike.

Praise be, Vista's only about half as insanely annoying as I've been led to believe. Though if any of you folks have suggestions on where to find its customization settings, do let me know? It seems bound and determined that I don't need to worry my pretty little head about a whole lot of things I enjoy knowing about.

Specifically, Walles Music on North Avenue at Oak Park Avenue. It's awesome. Small business, GREAT enormous retro sheet-metal-and-neon sign, good selection of guitars, good selection of non-guitar instruments (everything from 30 harmonicas in stock to a CHOICE of accordions and trumpets and flutes). They seem to be focussed on electric guitars, amps, and pedals, but as the lady said, that's what sells, so that's what they carry.

I went there in search of a tuner to replace my poor insane old Intellitouch. Really, it owes me nothing; it's well over 5 years old, and I've only had to change the battery once. The problem is, if I tune my guitar so that my tuner says I'm all set, anyone ELSE's tuner says I'm off. Consistently off, actually, so I think my tuner's idea of what an A-440 is, is the problem, but I don't know how to fix it. I've dredged through the manual, buttonpressed through its menus, nothing.

Therefore, time for a new one. Technology has marched on, and Intellitouch now has a smaller, cheaper one (I paid about $95 for mine, long ago; the same model is currently going for $75ish) that isn't infinitely retunable to differing As -- which is good, as I've never tried to take mine out of 'concert'.

Problem is, nobody seems to have it in stock. For values of 'nobody' that include the four non-chain they-sell-guitars music stores in easy striking distance of my house. However, Walles offered to order it for me. I considered coming home and checking eBay ... until I saw that they carry Seagulls at Walles. MULTIPLE MODELS of Seagulls. OMG, a guitar shop that's HEARD of the Canadian Heresy? Um, yeah. I rolled all my Willpower dice not to come home with a guitar today (especially hard since they had some decent ones in the sub-$500 range). I didn't even let myself play one, though I really, really wanted to.

They have good service, their folks are knowledgeable, their prices are on par with all the 'big stores,' they're near to my house, AND they like some of the same things I do in guitars. I'm totally going back when I have a few hundred to blow on upgrading from my Patient Lady to something I can actually do barre chords on ...

But in the meantime I ordered a tuner. It should be here in about a week. :->

A lot has changed since last winter in our yard, and I don't remember the last time I posted about the yard, so. :->

First off, we've finally accepted in our hearts that we're not going to be parking our car on the concrete pad in our backyard, so we're going to stop calling it 'the garage'[1] and have begun calling it 'the patio'. Partly this is because it is now so full of my container-gardening containers (and benches to support the smaller versions of same) that we couldn't get a car ON there without a lot of work and rearrangement.

The Crops

Container gardening, I hear you ask? Why, yes. It sort of started with bonsai, but I also decided I wanted to get into actual crops this year. John insists our soil is too potentially dangerous [2] to grow food in, so anything we're going to eat has to go in pots with storebought soil. Some are big, and sit on the ground; some are small, and sit on waist-high benches. The tomatoes go in big pots, the strawberries in small.

We mail-ordered six varieties of heirloom tomatoes from Seeds of Change, and despite some incompetence on my part in their initial planting and some later maintenance, they all survived, and are now growing with varying degrees of enthusiasm. We have received at least one ripe tomato fruit off each plant now, and there are a lot more hanging green waiting to ripen. Luckily, we have a chest freezer, if worse comes to worst. :->

The strawberries are also from Seeds of Change, and are the 'Seascape' variety; they only sell them in packs of twenty crowns, so I bought four four-hole strawberry pots (plus planting in the top, of course), because OMG even if John trusted our soil did I learn YEARS ago that it's utterly stupid and far too much work to plant strawberries in the ground. Strawberry pots, properly planted, make them effortless. And explaining that statement would probably take a whole how-to post talking about strawberries and their propensities, which I'll make later if there's interest.

The 'Seascape' variety is supposed to be a two-cropper, not an everbearing variety; in theory this means that they give you a spurt of fruit in late spring and another spurt in early fall. Well, our plants decided about a week and a half ago that, clearly, it is now fall, because they put out clouds of flowers and are starting to fruit again. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, I just think their timers are a bit off. :->

I also have a variety of Small Trees, which are on the way towards maybe becoming bonsai someday, once I've learned more, and probably killed a lot of trees. :->

Drainage

When it rains heavily, certain weaknesses in the construction and maintenance of our property come into sharp view. The sidewalks have heaved and torqued a bit, and were probably not pitched properly to start with, meaning that the entire back yard, our eastern neighbors' entire back yard, and half of our breezeway [3] all drain to a point just at the bottom of our back-porch stairs, and puddles there. Lots of fun in winter, of course, when it turns to black ice ...

This spring, John and I finally got sick enough of it to Do Something. In retrospect, we could have taken more extreme measures, but we do tend to take a Small Step and then another later if it seems warranted. Even this 'small' project ended up entailing four separate trips to home centers, so perhaps it was just as ambitious as we could handle. :->

We dug a sump. Specifically, we took the odd-shaped corner of lawn [4] adjacent to our porch stairs and dug it out to a depth of about 30 inches [5], then filled it in with medium-sized smooth stones, what home centers call 'pond pebbles'. They range in size from 'big strawberry' to 'child's fist'. In fact, we filled it with SIX BAGS of pond pebbles -- this is why we had to keep going to home centers, because we underbought repeatedly. Man, but that hole ate rock and greedily asked for more.

However, the work is all worth it, because in Torrential Downpour (better than an inch an hour), the foot of the stairs does still lake up, but it takes quite some time for the water level to get high enough to slop over the top of the basement stairs and cascade down towards the drain down there [6]. Also, as soon as it stops raining, the lake drains away to nothing in about ten minutes, which is impressive.

I have a few pipedream plans about what I might do to continue to improve the drainage situation, but most of them involve a LOT of digging, so it has to wait till the weather cools off. A serious vaporware that nonetheless might happen sometime before hell freezes over involves prying off the bottom several stair-treads of the back-porch stairs, and digging out the area UNDER the stairs themselves to widen the sump. I'm more likely to try digging out the dirt-beside-the-breezeway-sidewalk to put in several inches of gravel first, though. I doubt, because of the proximity of our neighbors' chain link fence, that I'll be able to make it more than 4-6 inches deep, but even that might help a bit. It'd be less work than ripping up the porch and digging out a 2ft-by-3ft area as deep as the sump. :->

Landscaping

Aside from the native bushes (nannyberry, elderberry, spicebush, bittersweet) I've probably talked about putting in, I've also been installing a whole flat of columbines all over the place, and in spring planted a six-perennial 'hummingbird' assortment. Hopefully they'll come back next year with enthusiasm. I certainly don't intend to put up and clean hummingbird feeders until I've SEEN a hummingbird in my lab -- too much work. :-> So I'll get the plants to do my work for me. I still have to figure out a nice shady-but-convenient-to-water place to put a windowbox of fuschias; tough, in our yard. Sun, we got. Shade, not so much, despite Grandmama Cottonwood's thorough effort.

None of the bushes I put in this year really had much of a growth spurt, though the elderberry did put out flowers and is developing fruit; I think mid-May is probably, in hindsight, a little late to be putting in bushes. :-> Hopefully they've gotten their roots nicely established this season, though, and will therefore go PAVOOM in spring.

( The footnotes, if you care. )

A lot's been going on in our garden since the last time I wrote. A full accounting of species, with pictures, is going to have to wait; however, here are a few jottings.

( Click for more. Or don't, if you don't want to. )

I just recently clicked on my knitting tag, and was shocked at how few posts were there. I knit a lot more than that ... especially recently (i.e. since mid-February). On the road trip to-and-from Toronto for FKO, I knitted like a mad knitting thing. I've finished multiple pairs of socks since the first of the year. And does any of it show in my journal? Just the hat post, which I still haven't gotten around to patternizing. I knit while working my local NPR station's pledge drive, and geeked about knitting with many of my peers there. I even made up a flyer to post around offering to teach people to knit for $25/hr ... and gave a slip from it to Gianofer Fields (when I quit fangirling at her too hard to be able to speak!).

Clearly, I am remiss. However, I need to actually get PICTURES of all those finished objects so I can show them off and babble about them, I suppose.

John and I both got exceedingly punchy on the drive home yesterday -- for some reason, I'd be fine for half an hour to an hour, and then suddenly I'd get overwhelming sleepiness. Pull off, switch drivers ... and I couldn't actually NAP to get RID of it. Grr. At one point we actually stopped at an outlet mall and did some bra shopping because neither of us were safe to drive and it was a good way to get a break -- of course, I was also too punchy to shop efficiently, so it was probably unintentionally hilarious for the staff. :->

On our way into the city, we swung by ashnistrike-and-Nameseeker's place to retrieve Boston. He apparently really, really missed us. He moped and cried most of the weekend, and then forlornly trailed around after their cats in the hopes one might turn into Ajax and play with him. Also, he's off his feed.

John and I did something we may regret, as a precedent, and took him into our bedroom for the night shift -- a crate in the closet in case he wanted it, but he didn't; he slept like a particularly exhausted rock on the coverlet between us alllllllll night. He's still sleeping the weekend off, trailing after me and setting up shop on whatever couch is nearest for another nap. He's off his feed, but I expect that to fix itself once Ajax is back (the final missing piece of His Pack).

Speaking of, that's my next task -- retrieving Ajax from my dad's house. Then deborah_c's plane comes in circa 3PM to O'Hare, so I'll pick her up and bring her back home with me. Tomorrow morning I drop the Honda off at CarMax at 8AM so they can put in the airbag controller unit; tomorrow evening the whole household (sans canines) troops off to chezdork for dinner.

While we were up there, my sister-in-law corvicula1979 took the chance to hand-me-down some of her less-used apparel and unwanted-anymore books, so you folks may be seeing me in more velvet, furbelows, and frilly girliness than usual, when it comes to clothes. Included in the batch is quite a lovely black-and-red leather corset, which I am SO wearing to my next con! *happysmile*

In fact, I even unvented it, to use Elizabeth Zimmerman's terminology. From this sock pattern. So I'm not sure it's quite kosher to write it up as a pattern 'by me'; I've asked them for permission to do so and we'll see. But meanwhile, here's pictures!

( Pictures within. )

As the second shot shows, I got two whole hats and a tiny bit of extra out of three balls of Knit One, Crochet Two's yarn called Wick. It's 53% 'soy', whatever that means, and 47% polypropylene, and very soft and slithery-nice-feeling. Splits a bit, but not nearly so bad as some I've worked with in the past.

As is normal for me, the first hat wasn't QUITE right, so when I knit it again I (a) made umptyzillion mistakes I didn't make the first time, despite this being the second try through, and (b) adjusted it just slightly in a whole bunch of fiddly ways nobody but me is ever going to notice, which made it much more what I was aiming at the whole time.

I think I'm going to put the less-optimal cap in the Interfilk auction at FKO.

I posted earlier about the new store in the location my old local grocery store, a Cub Foods, once occupied.

Once more with feeling, I mean with pictures. :-> Not Pictured Here: the Aisle of Tea, which was far too cool and all-encompassing to take proper pictures of.

( Pictures within. Marvel at the scope of ethnic food now cheaply available to me! )

From Grandma, an emergency-mitigation kit to keep in the car -- very practical, and a nice one! -- for the both of us, and subscription to Games Magazine for me, plus a check (see below). From Dad-&-co, gift cards to Border's and Home Depot (that latter sort of a couple thing, I think, given who's likely to be using it), which have not yet been redeemed into meatspace presents.

Luckily, all the us-to-them presents were well-received and enjoyed. I always feel dumb when something I put a lot of thought into fizzles at the opening.

Then we hung about Grandma's for a while, hooking all my cousins on Guitar Hero (Foul Temptresses Union, Local 625, reporting for duty!), and playing a very, VERY STRANGE game called Quelf. I don't know if I can recommend it, per se, but it was incredibly silly and fun to play, if VERY STRANGE. Playing this game induced in the participants about the same mental state-change as two to three shots of strong liquor, only without the hangover and dizziness.

Then we took my sisters home and played MORE Guitar Hero, and some Katamari Damacy, and fed 'em, and then took 'em home.

The morning of Boxing Day, formerly St. Steven's Day, dawned bright and clear, and we prepared to trek westward out to anach-and-jerusha's place for a day of video games and wifi network configuration. As we were leaving the house and preparing the car for its journey, John remarked ruefully, "Even though we're going to Westmont, I have to remind myself to be good and NOT go to Fry's!"

"... Why do we have to not-go to Fry's?" I asked. "Remember? We need a second controller for the PS2, and maybe a guitar-shaped one. And I can look and see what the prices are like on some of the games I've had in mind for a while." Given that John's already beaten Katamari Damacy and we've just spent the last three days STRAIGHT doing almost nothing but playing the two games I *had* already, this seemed logical to me. :->

Turns out that 'Guitar Hero' is one of this season's Hot Toys, as it were, and nobody has the controllers in stock. Period. Nobody. So I'm lurking on Ebay waiting for the unwanted Christmas presents to show up and bring the price down. Also unfortunately, they were out of all the what-John-considers-'name-brand' wireless PS2 controllers, so we didn't get one. No two-player action for us (except in Guitar Hero with one of us on the guitar and the other playing on the controller). Meanwhile, I turned Grandma's Christmas money into a relatively-inexpensive dance pad and DDR Extreme 2 to start attempting to instigate a fitness program, and also a DVD and one of the games on my 'PS2 Wishlist'.

The game is Psychonauts (wiki), and I remembered I had read somewhere an absolutely gushing review of it. Also, it was $15, so the risk was low (yes, I know I need to get Okami sometime, but it's still $40 and I'm not really in the mood for it this week! Got to save some games for later). I think, in retrospect, that it was Games Magazine who reviewed it (in their Games 100, a yearly best-games-list sort of thing with detailed write-ups). Whoever it was, they were OH SO RIGHT. This game is funny, well-written, deep, rich -- it could easily be a novel or a movie. The art is cute and disturbing (appropriately). The overall feel, so far, is sort of Zelda-ish, meaning you gather up randomly-scattered tokens from all over (remember to smash all the vases looking for Deku Nuts Health Points!), talk to people, find side-quests, and pursue an overall arc. If I had a complaint at all, it's that the PS2 joysticks (as I noted when I first played Katamari Damacy) are incredibly touchy and hard-for-me-to-work-accurately. Also, there are parts of this game that are dark and uncontrasty enough that, on the limited TV we have to work with, I sometimes lose my depth perception and miss the edges of platforms I'm meant to jump up onto. :-> Those are quibbles, though. Even though I find some of the platform-game-only-in-3D-with-whirling-camera tasks annoying, the rest of the game enthralls me enough that I forgive it. The tutorialish 'obstacle course' task does a really good, forgiving job of teaching you how to use all the weird physical jump/swing/hit/trapeze/etc buttonmashing skills you're going to use later in the game, and doesn't hold your incompetence against you (infinite lives and infinite retry). I'm having a lot of fun getting to know all the characters and their bizarrely-dense emotional interactions. Recommended.

The DVD was a fortuitous discovery -- it turns out Animusic has a sequel! Who knew? I found the original because the creators had a table at a filk convention some years ago, playing their DVD on loop. Filkers would wander by, suddenly realize there were really cool CGI musical instruments playing themselves on the TV, watch for a song or two, wander off, return, be fascinated again ... and buy. Which is what I did. It never seemed to get much press, but I adored it. Yesterday, John and I were walking through the 'Home Theatre' section on our way to the checkout, and my eye was drawn to what was playing. I suddenly realized that the animation was synched to the music in a very familiar way, and began squeeing and waving my hands to get John's attention. He found a rack of the DVDs nearby, and I clutched mine to my chest ALL THE WAY HOME. New Animusic! Yay!

Actually, to be completist I should note that we (as a couple) got a nice set of mixing bowls for Hannukah from judygs and family, and I got a nifty magnetic poseable necklace, but the HARDCORE loot starts today, with John's and my presents to one another.

He totally won the unofficial 'who made the other squee harder' contest this year.

I now have a PS2.

Also Katamari Damacy, which will eat up enough of my future spare time, even if he hadn't gotten me ...

Guitar Hero (II). Duuuuuuuuude. I've been playing the tutorial levels of this at Best Buy for over six months! Rock on. Of course, my left hand cramps up after a song or so, but presumably that will change with practice (and increased ergonomicity of controller-holding).

Amusingly, John has discovered that he can play along without using the guitar-shaped controller -- on the ordinary PS2 controller. This may lead to amusing multiplayer madness (and give him a fairly unique Stupid Fan Trick, once he gets good at it).

I'm better than he is, partly because of months of (lackadaisical) practice with the demonstrators in the stores, but largely because I can 'get into the music' more deeply and feel what's coming next just from the beat and how the song goes.

Now I just need to go get a couple of memory cards, so I can have 'ongoing games' instead of just one-session practice/fun runs. I forsee a quick weekend trip to Game Stop's bargain bin in my future.

I'm glad I finished my Christmas shopping already. :->

Also, it seems to get me actually SLEEPY and ready to go to bed, instead of just sitting-around-tired like my PC games do (a win!).

Add 'play my new video games' to the list of possible 'come over and hang out with me' activities until further notice. :->

Finally, a 'how my life is going' update. All mixed together and delivered as bullet points, because I have no spare spoons for organization right now.

( Cut because I love, and it's longish. Depression within. )

Random websurfing leads to strange things.

I started out talking to John about an article in ... SciAm, I think, some time ago, about the evolution of color vision.

To back up my half-remembered handwaving, I hit Wikipedia's article on color vision (there's a handy chart there showing what frequencies of light OUR eyes are most sensitive to).

For those of you who didn't pay attention in that part of biology class, we [1] have three kinds of cones (color sensors) and one kind of rods (uncolored brightness sensors) in our retinas. This makes us 'trichromats' -- three-colored, as it were. For the three kinds of cones.

Mantis shrimp [2] have, however, sixteen different types of cones (though no more than eight different ones in any given species). Their eyes are also each effectively trinocular, and contain regions specialized to perceive polarized light as well as all those freaky pigments. They have layers of receptors on top of each other in individual ommatidia, separated by color filters ... just like the newest kinds of digital camera sensor chip. They see in ultraviolet as well as we see PERIOD.

I'm leaving out a lot (see footnote 2 for why scuba divers colloquially call them 'thumb-splitters'); you'll just have to go read yourself. I was just gobsmacked at the coolness of it, and had to share.

Science fiction ain't got nothin' for sheer weirdness on what Earth's come up with on its own, half the time.

---

1. And by we, of course, I mean primates. Most of us. Some of us have two or two and a broken third (hence blue/green color blindness, etc), and a very few of our females have four. Mutants walk among us, and they can tell more easily when your outfit isn't properly color-coordinated! They are called 'tetrachromats,' and you can google for info on them yourself. They're like 'supertasters', only with retinas instead of tongues. Most supertasters are also women. Clearly, female humans are a superior lifeform -- or, rather, are more likely to be genetically more-flexible individuals with superintense senses. Or not. :->
   
   
2. Mantis shrimp are, naturally, neither mantids nor shrimp. They ARE crustaceans, specifically Stomatopods. They're commonly called mantis shrimp because in bodyplan they look vaguely shrimplike, and they have MASSIVE ATTACK CLAWS they hold folded to their bodies like mantids do. Their claws are so powerful that ... well, let me quote from Wikipedia.

   these two weapons are employed with blinding quickness, with an acceleration of 10,400 g and speeds of 23 m/s from a standing start. Because they strike so rapidly, they generate cavitation bubbles between the appendage and the striking surface. The collapse of these cavitation bubbles produce measurable forces on their prey in addition to the instantaneous forces of 1500 N that are caused by the impact of the appendage against the striking surface. Which means the prey is hit twice by a single strike; first by the claw and then by the even bigger force from the collapsing cavitation bubbles that immediately follows.

In other words, for a day in which I spent hours and hours sacked out half-asleep in various positions all over my house (thank you, female reproductive biology. Grr), there were actually a surprisingly large number of things I've been meaning to do for weeks that were done at the end of the day. Most thanks are due to John, for facilitating my productivity (as well as tearing through chores on his own recognizance!).

We bought a shrub (Spirea japonica) and put it in at the corner of the 'garage' [1] in the spot that's been BEGGING for a shrub, in my design-mind, since we first started clearing out the trash and looking at the 'shape' of the garden, in spring 2004. I may not want a spirea there, ultimately, but it was what was on sale at the garden center's "please take these plants off our hands before snow flies" sale, and there's (just barely) time for it to establish before frost, so if I later decide I want a different shrub there, I can move it to the front yard next summer.

We put up the bird feeder again. Finally. We'd had it with its pole in a bucket of gravel, and that worked for a while, but then it got tipped over repeatedly (I now blame the squirrels), and finally we quit putting it back up until we could do it more permanently. Weeks ago. Now we've pounded the end of a 12-foot piece of electrical conduit at least 3 feet into the ground, then trimmed to where we want it, and the bird feeder is sitting on an oak dowel jammed firmly into the top of the piece of conduit, just about my head-height when I stand in the garage, so I can fill it easily. Now to see if we can get something besides sparrows to visit it! [2]

John lopped a good number of twiggy limbs off the (enormous, ancient) cottonwood over our yard, getting our electrical and phone lines out of danger. Again. It says something that he has to put our 20-foot ladder in the garage to be able to reach even the low branches -- the tree's taller than our house by a good safety margin. And, unfortunately, has several dead limbs that the woodpeckers just love to snack from. Unfortunately, it is just barely entirely in our neighbors' yard, so we have no say over it, and no right to call an arborist on its behalf.

I put anchors in the wall for, but did not finish mounting, my new delicates hamper.

I changed my guitar's strings, which needed them so badly that when I went to slack my high E string, *it broke*. New record for 'needing changed,' for me. Probably over a year and a half since the last change, though I don't play it much. My dearling guitar should stay in tune better now, at least once they stretch in. :->

We went to the fabric store for bias tape to repair the edge of one of our comforters and some buttons for the seatcushion slipcovers I made a few weeks ago.

Saturday, we did groceries and hit the pet supply for a couple of clickers -- we're going to try to click-train the dogs, given Ajax's continuing anxiety. I'm just going to have to study like heck to stay at least two lessons ahead of the dogs. :-> While we were there we topped up on flea treatment, replaced Ajax's muzzle, bought a coupling attachment for our leash, and some other oddments. We discovered that while Ajax adores pig ears, Boston doesn't seem to see the point -- he'll nibble once or twice, and then drop it. Carrots, on the other hand, both dogs adore.

We played about ten minutes of the 'Come' Game with each dog on Saturday. They did fairly well for being tossed in the deep end of a new game and an entirely new training method, and much crunchy cereal fiber-treat was consumed, which is often a win on its own merits.

In other news, whatever it was I planted near the southeast corner of the garage is coming up like gangbusters -- it's either cardinalflower or a blue lobelia, but I forget which I put where. Regardless, it's sprouting all over, so I'll have some next year. :->

Today, we're going to go spend the afternoon at the Chicago Botanical Gardens with one of my sisters and maybe my dad. Of course, all their bestest special cool stuff happened YESTERDAY, but we'd scheduled this fun-day quite some time ago, so oh well. It'll be neat anyway. Turns out John's never been! We'll fix that. There will likely be pictures.

---

1. Our garage is in fact a bare concrete pad -- we joke, "instant garage, just add walls and roof."
   
2. Birds on our feeder Mostly we have sparrows on our feeder, no matter what we fill it with. There are cardinals, jays, mourning doves, hairy woodpeckers (!), and a possible gray catbird in our neighborhood, as well as the sparrows and grackles, but we've never seen them on our feeder. I'm trying a 'woodpecker mix' now, which includes peanuts and corn and dog only knows what-all, and supplementing it with raisins to hopefully lure the cardinals, and we'll see. I want to try suet, but not if the squirrels are just going to eat it all, so the mounting method requires thought. :->

Why? Well, for a bit over 24 hours now, the Grey Havens have been a two-beagle household.

No, really, two.

Why? Well, there was this 8-month-old beagle, see. And its owner thought it was ok to leave it out in 110+degF weather with no water bowl, because he's a tough dog and it'll be fine, right? So then when it got sick he took it to the vet, who immediately saw the poor thing had heatstroke and was half-starved, and convinced the owner to let the vet find the dog a new owner who is not INSANELY ABUSIVE. Though the vet didn't put it quite that way to the man, as I understand it.

kanabysstee's friend damage_addict happens to work at that vet. And she mentioned in IRC, that, y'know, since we'd taken one abused/neglected beagle and made him fairly sane and happy, that, well, mightyajax needs a friend, doesn't he? We now, by the way, have a 2-for-3 on accepting beagles offered to us by redheads (sorry, exapno, you clearly came at us too soon after we got Ajax and our resistance levels were still high).

We're a soft touch, clearly. Also insane. Certifiable. We'd just gotten Ajax down from Insane levels of inappropriate behavior and phobia to Eccentric levels, and now we suddenly have an All New Troubled Dog. Not to mention, beige_alert was visiting so we could do museums and born_to_me's music party and whatnot. But suddenly, we'd somehow agreed to do a Home Visit with the New Beagle at 10:30AM on Saturday.

His markings are almost disturbingly similar to Ajax's, but don't worry. If you should ever meet the two of them in person, you'll have no trouble telling them apart, because the new one is calm and silent. No, seriously. And that's not just relative to Ajax (than whom MANY dogs are calmer and quieter), but relative to most dogs I've known.

Of course, when we put him in his kennel for the night and leave him ALL ALONE he's not exactly silent anymore, but hey. :-> Turns out he's a tenor to Ajax's treble. It's also amusing watching Ajax get gander sauce from him, because they neither of them have serious doggy social skills.

More later when I have slept and eaten and AAAAAAAAAH, and also figured out how to upload the MANY PICTURES.

The cute is coming. Fear the cute.

Also: name suggestions solicited. 'Comet' will be summarily ignored (despite being the current favorite of people who are not us). He came named 'Dino', but doesn't answer to it, so we feel fairly secure in our renaming rights. It seems to me there are a lot of pale-eyed young male fantasy protagonists who rise above a solitary and abusive childhood with their Inner Strength to become calm, loving men, but I can't think of any of them right now.

Exhausted. Also overheated, since there's been a heat wave going on in Chicago, apparently, while I was gone.

In an attempt to get a little more distance on things, I'm only going to talk about the GOOD THINGS that happened.

( Good things within. )

Oh, and those of you who know of cool fannish or nature-loving things to do circa Tacoma, WA, drop a comment in this entry over in urockgyrl's journal suggesting them? She's going up to give a talk on frogs and flog her book (also on frogs).

Ahem.

Let's try that again:

I say, kind readers, I had a most felicitous discovery this evening on my journey home from grand-mère's. Haply, the public library at the top end of our block's cross-street -- whose convoluted construction process my better half and I have been watching with much interest -- opened to the public this past Friday. I have now visited it, received a replacement card (mine old one is sadly buried deep in the sedimentary layers of my clutter), and borrowed a small spate of books.

Plus put some on hold, a new-to-me practice that jerusha speaks highly of.

OMGsqueeLIBRARY. Books! That I don't have to pay new-book prices for! And it's a short walk away, so I can stroll over with the dog if he's only going to be tied outside for five or ten minutes (as I return a stack and accept a stack of holds).

Almost makes up for over 5 straight hours of grandma-ing, phone tag, and bureaucratic AAAAAAAH. But it will definitely make the impending day-of-plane-ride plus-week-of-AAAAAAH far more congenial. BOOKS. *NEW*(-to-me) books! That I haven't read, and that I've WANTED to read for lo these many years!

One of them being, well, a con last weekend. :-> But I've been explaining my two other recent pieces of fiscal irresponsibility/moderately-big-ticket-purchases to myself as birthday presents.

And I do, technically, have the money to pay for them wit