Professional Voice Talent, Amateur Actor and Knitter

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Merry Christmas!

So far this morning, I’ve had a slab of Christmas cake for breakfast, lit a fire in the fireplace and rescued a small dog I’m watching for a friend from the yard next door after he wiggled through an apparently one-way hole in the fence. Hope your Christmases (or other holidays of choice) are as pleasant as mine is gearing up to be.

Reassurances

This is for friends and family outside of Texas who may be worrying after hearing of the fertilizer plant explosion nearby. The explosion happened in the town of West, about 15 miles north of Waco. I’m well out of the danger zone here in Waco.

Updates

So the new housemates have two dogs. Their own is a beagle, a little less than a year old. He’s a sweet little guy. The other dog they’re fostering for the landlady, whose daughter wanted a largish dog, but they don’t have room for it where they’re living on campus. She’s a husky mix, and she’s very sweet with people, and gets along with most dogs, but wouldn’t you know it, the one dog she hated on sight was my poor Lucy! (we think it’s a dominant females thing) 🙁

Finished another two books recently. One for Iambik called Getting Sassy by D. C. Brod. It’s for their new Crime collection, which they’re supposed to be releasing any day now. It was lots of fun to read. It’s a sort of mix of crime, thriller and comedy. The other book I just finished was a critical edition of Mansfield Park for Ignatius Press. It’s the full text of MP plus an additional ten or twelve sections of modern criticisms, and some contemporary opinions that Jane Austen collected of the novel.

Up next I’m starting a children’s series for Iambik called The Chronicles of Valonia by Katie Paterson. They’re Arthurian legend, which I’ve been partial to since I took a lit class in college that covered everything from Mallory’s Mort D’Arthur through Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon. Ignatius has given me a book called Poor Banished Children by Fiorella de Maria. I’m about a quarter of the way through my pre-read of it, but it promises to be very interesting. It’s set in the sixteenth century, and begins with a shipwreck off the coasts of Cornwall. The only survivor found is a young woman dressed as a boy. She’s taken in, gravely ill, by the local gentry and is found to speak Latin. She asks for a priest (dangerous, because this is after the dissolution of the monasteries) to give her final confession, starting from her early childhood. Still working on Sense and Sensibility for LV, though it fell a little by the wayside while I finished the last two, as I had definite deadlines for them. My next LV book will be The Big Time by Fritz Leiber, which I’m doing for the 5th Annual SFFAudio Challenge.

Feliz Día de Reyes!

I bought a Rosca de Reyes (King Cake, to non-Spanish speakers) today, to share with my housemates on the occasion of Epiphany. In Mexico, King Cake is eaten on Ephiphany, which is the celebration of when the Three Wise Men arrived to worship Jesus. Which makes sense to me, with a name like “King Cake”. In the Mexican tradition, whoever gets the slice with the figurine of the baby in it, has to throw the Mardis Gras party later in the year.

Oh, the drama!

I’ll be directing a melodrama this summer. K and M both wanted to act one, M especially since she’ll be moving back to GA in August, but there was doubt whether there would be one, because no one had submitted a proposal to do one. I told them that if they could find a script they liked, I’d submit a proposal to direct it. They came up with The Rose of Dismal Flats. I got the notice that I’d been approved a couple of weeks ago, and that my scripts had come in last night. First read-through tomorrow night! Show goes up a month from Wednesday!!!

One thing about this one, since it has a tiny cast (only 5 people), and I already had two people who wanted to be in it, and it’s not a part of the main line-up, I went ahead and pre-cast rather than holding auditions. I think it’ll be a good show.

Shower fail

I do so dislike having to play “takesies backsies” at baby showers, but I just didn’t manage to finish the sweater. I’d be further along if I hadn’t noticed a mistake two nights ago and frogged back to fix it. Still, baby isn’t due till July, so hopefully I’ll have it finished before then. And the shower was a fun way to finish a work day, even if all the men did congregate in one corner as if the rest of us had cooties (you’d think they’d have outgrown that by now!). 🙂

I’ve decided on Sense and Sensibility for my next LibriVox project. I’ll do Anne’s House of Dreams after that. I do wish Anne of Windy Poplars were out of copyright. It’s one of my favourites in the series. Darn you, Lucy Maud Montgomery! You should have written faster!

Consequences

A bunch of us went to a karaoke bar after strike yesterday. My first time, because until now I’ve only ever sung karaoke at Beth and Marcel’s parties (not that I ended up singing last night… the line was kind of long). It was fun, and we may have been a little too loud. We got a few dirty looks from the regulars. But this is the first time in ages that I’ve been in a place that allows smoking and I’m living with the consequences this morning. I haven’t been this stuffed up since my allergies wore off at the end of last season.

Ack!

I need to get back to knitting! Next baby shower is next Thursday and I haven’t finished the body yet, much less the sleeves (though I’d already decided that I’m going to do stripes on the sleeves rather than the star/snowflake design that’s on the body, so they shouldn’t take as long).

I’ve had to pause in the knitting a couple of times, to work on costumes for Gypsy and then cos I got the flu (never feels right to work on baby garments while ill… not that I had the energy for it anyway).

Kill me now

We had our first Adventure Lunch* at work today and towards the end it degenerated into a discussion of Lost. And no way to escape because I rode with someone else. Ugh.

As for the rest of the lunch, it was good. We went to a new Japanese Steakhouse; food was good, decently priced, service was good. Everyone else at my table had various kinds of meat on the hibachi; since a high percentage were having shrimp, I decided to have veg tempura instead. I didn’t want my food cooked on the same grill as shrimp. My intolerance to it isn’t dangerous (no anaphylactic shock or trips to the hospital), but it is unpleasant.

*Every summer we make a list of new restaurants in town that at least three quarters of the group haven’t been to yet and go to one each week.

Tickle a what, now?

Not quite 8:30am and I’ve already filled my laugh quota for the day.

Was chatting with one of my coworkers, and the subject drifted into Hebrew words and phrases we were familiar with. He was trying to remember the “writing on the wall” from the book of Daniel, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” (KJV); what came out was “many, many tickle a parson”.

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