Sooj Gig 1: Friday, July 11th, 8pm, at the Horizon Temple at 1423 10th Avenue on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Performance space is small, come early for best seating. A small suggested donation is requested, see our schedule for details.

Sooj Gig 2: Saturday, July 12th, 5pm, at A Gathering Grove at 2820 Oakes Avenue, Suite C, in Everett.

• The show at A Gathering Grove on Saturday, July 12th, has been changed from 7pm to 5pm. Reason: There is a "dueling pianos" bar nearby whose 8pm show tends to get loud enough to spill over into their space. The Gathering Grove folks found out about this ahead of time, and they are adjusting our schedule to prevent our show from being disrupted. How kind of them! I'm glad this got discovered this far in advance.
  
  
• Edited: The show on Friday, July 11th, at the Horizon Temple just got updated on their calendar from 7pm to 8pm. You might want to get there quite early anyway, as I'm told that the performance space is kinda small, so coming early might help guarantee an actual seat.

A nice person named Erin, who heard about us through Seanan's Strange Messenger Story, had some very nice things to say about the album recently.

mood

sleepy

Tuesday's my birthday! (I think. *checks* Right. Tuesday.) You don't probably wanna know how old I am.

I never remember people's ages, even after I've asked them, and I'm plain rotten at guessing by looks. I think I might come across as age-obsessed sometimes, because I'm always asking people their ages and comparing them to each other and to me. Now you know the real reason-- it's because I can't remember how old you are, and I can't tell how old you are, and so I always feel sort of eternally ageless and adrift and very much not like my real age, and like nearly everyone I just met and/or with a strong personality must be older than me, and I'm always sort of trying to orient myself in time that way.

My mother has wished me happy birthday two or three times this week. Each time she thought it was the actual day. Once she called me to sing. Actually she's not that far off; not bad for someone with a memory problem.

I have not, obviously, had time or brain bandwidth to plan anything. (I did bake brownies today, but just on a whim, not in honor of my birthday; as of this morning I'd kinda forgotten about it. They didn't come out that well anyway.) So I don't think I'm doing anything special.

On the other hand, I has a Fishy. At least through my birthday. That's pretty special. :D

mood

cheered up

In summary: ( Spoilery! )

Side note: I'm listening to "Brand New Day" over and over, and marvelling at the Sondheimness. Not just internal rhymes, but internal rhymes on every foot.

( Lyrics )

Daaaaaaaaamn. I hate him from the bottom of my much-scratched-out notebook.

mood

bouncy

1) Why, Joss? Why? Why now, why free, why us?

Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.

Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first.

2) What happens when it goes away? Does it go to a happy farm for always like Fluffy did when mommy was crying and the neighbor kept washing his fender?

No, Dr horrible will live on. We intend to make it available for download soon after it’s published. This would be for a nominal fee, which we’re hoping people will embrace instead of getting all piratey. We have big dreams, people, and one of them is paying our crew.

And somewhat later, we will put the complete short epic out on DVD – with the finest and bravest extras in all the land. We’ll go into greater detail about that at Comiccon, but we’re changing the face of Show Friendliness a second time with that crazy DVD.

3) Joss, you are so kind, and generous, and your forehead is like, huge, like SCARY, like I think I can see Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint hanging off it… what can WE do to help this musical extravanganza?

What you always do, peeps! What you’re already doing. Spread the word. Rock some banners, widgets, diggs… let people know who wouldn’t ordinarily know. It wouldn’t hurt if this really was an event. Good for the business, good for the community – communitIES: Hollywood, internet, artists around the world, comic-book fans, musical fans (and even the rather vocal community of people who hate both but will still dig on this). Proving we can turn Dr Horrible into a viable economic proposition as well as an awesome goof will only inspire more people to lay themselves out in the same way. It’s time for the dissemination of the artistic process. Create more for less. You are the ones that can make that happen.

Wow. I had no idea how important you guys were. I’m a little afraid of you.

mood

clicky!

Something I've been meaning to do for a while now...

It's the On the Way Home meme! Inspired by corivax, who did it here (along with the best description EVER of the cry of a Stellar's Jay). The idea is that you take a bunch of pictures as you go home from work or school and post them. Thing is, tfabris and I carpool to and from work most days, so you'd just see a lot of blurriness, some traffic at the occasional stop light, and the inside of Tony's car. So instead, I decided to make mine the On the Way To the Post Office and Back meme, since I walk there most days (it's part of my job duties to check the company's PO Box). Or, as I like to call it, There and Back Again. :D

These photos are taken from a few days' different walks over the course of a couple weeks, because Fishy's camera battery would last about a quarter of a mile or so each day before dying and being recharged overnight. Then it died utterly and I finished up with Tony's camera. Caution: LOTS of photos under the cuts.

( There )

( Back Again )

Vixy & Tony's Schedule

mood

busy

Hey LJ braintrust. I'm looking for your personal experience here...

Now that we won't be paying crippling amounts of rent to Mom's cousin anymore, we can afford to get Mom a cell phone. We want to get her something simple and program our numbers into it so she just has to find the name she wants and call. (It's kind of a pain for her to use the land line in her new place, and it would be reassuring to her to be able to call us any time.)

My sister had seen this phone advertised called a Jitterbug, which claims to be really easy, with live 24/7 operator help to call if you get confused (they'll dial for you and even add numbers to your call list for you)-- ideal for seniors. Thing is, the plans don't seem all that great to me. The highest ones are $80/month for 800 minutes, and $40/month for 300 minutes. I'm pretty sure she could blow through 300 minutes in no time; possibly 800 would be enough, but the price for that seems high to me. Voice mail is an extra $3/month, and add-on minutes are 15 to 25 cents a minute.

In your experience, is this way expensive for cell phone service? Or does this seem worth it? I just don't know what's standard these days.

Alternately, have you seen where anyone makes a cell phone whose UI is REALLY EASY to get to the speed-dials, and has a good deal on a service plan?

I should note that one of the reasons we got rid of her old phone was that somehow she ran her bill over a thousand dollars, either by going over her minutes or with long distance charges-- she was living in Phoenix then and my cousins were never really clear with me on that. Partly it was that my sister was texting her incessantly, realizing neither that the recipient is charged 20 cents a message nor that my mother didn't know how to read them anyway. But it was also partly that if she can, she will call us a LOT for reassurance, and talk a lot.

Tony suggested a pre-paid option, which I may look into, but then I still need to know if anyone's seen one thats *easy to use*. It's kind of impossible to tell that from a website. Anyone faced a similar dilemma lately?

mood

jittery

*jitters jitterfully*

Tonight and tomorrow night are the concerts with Skinny White Chick! Tonight's Capitol Hill, tomorrow's Everett. (See our schedule page.) I'm nervous, as I always am before a gig. (It's just what I do.)

And there will be harmonizin'! We had a fantastic rehearsal with them on Wednesday night. It went amazingly well and included a lot of lovely and generous hospitality and I'm SO EXCITED about what we're gonna do, and so thrilled that Sooj was pleased with what I came up with.

And, as a bonus, we got to be covered with kittens. KITTANS! Betsy, as it happens, breeds Maine Coon cats. So naturally, we got to take a kitten-break. And apparently recycled cotton smells REALLY REALLY GOOD to kittens, because many of them decided that 'vast expanse of white fabric' was the best cat toy EVAR. Kittens climbing into my lap to pounce my knees, kittens crawling under my skirt to bat at my hem, kittens sneaking around behind me. I could've stayed there for HOURS. :D Many thanks to Dave for dinner, Katie for toffee, K for techie-ing, Sooj for being generally awesome, and Betsy for ice cream and KITTANS.

Now I decide what to wear. Tony never varies from his t-shirt and black pants, so there's not really any way I can either match or mis-match him, but I'm thinking about dresses, which I rarely do for gigs, but it's summer and I'm sure it'll be hot. So I'll be changing outfits and tossing clothes about like a teenager while Tony and Jeff are off at panicStudios having Jeff's album mastered. (Did I mention we have a Jeff?)

Also I've got some Mom-related calls to make and such. (Bureaucracy is never-ending.)

MAN I'm glad I took the day off work today.

*goes to listen obsessively to her rehearsal playlist some more*

hpapillon

...women's heart attack symptoms can be different from men's -- we might feel pain in the back, jaw or stomach instead of the chest, for instance, and the radiating pain down the left arm we all hear about doesn't show up as often in women. Why, I asked the doctor, had I never heard that before, at 25 years old? "Well," he said, "until about 20 years ago, they just didn't test much on women. The assumption was that it would be the same for them as for men."

...Worse yet, the information they did have by the time my mom died wasn't even common knowledge for some reason -- and still isn't.

...And when I read today that women with Type 2 diabetes and heart disease are given less intensive medical treatment than men, I was furious all over again.

When I was in cardiac intensive care, I was surrounded by women. Women who had had several untreated heart attacks - women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, who had not known the symptoms of heart attack in women and had ignored them, or more strikingly, had gone to a doctor or an ER and been told that their physical symptoms were from untreated mental illnesses - depression, stress, etc. These women walked out of doctor’s offices and Emergency Rooms in the middle of, and directly after, having a heart attack because they were diagnosed with a case of ‘its all in your head’, or being told the problem was that they could not handle stress.

And because they were denied early care, the damage to their hearts continued, until one day they just fell over in full blown cardiac arrest and ended up sharing a room with me, in a cardiac watch-ward.

...Because they were not treated in time, because they eschewed science for cayenne pepper, because ‘everybody’ knows that young women don’t have heart problems, and that young women includes all women under 50, because when they complained of chest pain they were told to lose weight instead of being evaluated, because they were taught that women’s hearts are not as valuable as their male counterparts’ hearts, not treated with the same care and worry and concern, they all died.

mood

sleepy

Me: See, in French, there's an accent mark... you know the one that looks like this? (Makes hand shape to indicate ^)

Marty: Yeah.

Me: Well, in French, that's an accent circonflexe; it often indicates where, over the evolution of the language, an S was dropped. Like in the French word hôtel, it's over the o, because that word would have come from hostel.

Marty: Uh huh.

Me: So, since the scar on my forehead looks like an upside-down circonflexe, I like to say that that's where I lost an S when I was little.

Marty: I see. So you used to be Smichelle?

Me: No, I used to be Mischelle, with an S-C-H. So now my circonflexe is over my i.

Marty: So why did the French lose all these S's, anyway? War reparations?

Me: Nazi invasion.

Marty: Ah. Somewhere, deep beneath Berlin, there's a vault... filled with Jewish gold, and French S's.

mood

loved

Okay, I've been meaning to post this for about a month or more, and keep getting distracted. But the tab's been a consistent part of my ongoing saved session for all that time.

Someone-- I think it was either Anne or Jovanie-- happened to point me to this

Vixy and Tony lyric icons.

Vixy and Tony. Icons.

OMG.

Someone heard something I created, and loved it so much that they used it to create something *else* that was beautiful. I'm totally overwhelmed.

Edit: Check out her other icons too. I may be swiping some of the Golden Compass ones soon...

mood

procrastinating

In happier and miscellaneous news...

Part of my Amazon order just arrived. This includes a new battery for Fishy's old camera (the battery was working for roughly ten minutes at a time per overnight charge); if this works, then I can finally finish the on the way home meme. And maybe also the Week in the Life meme.

This order also includes the next Laurie R. King book that I haven't read, and another Jeeves book. ('Cause I figured, as long as I was ordering a battery from Amazon ANYWAY...)

iPod: still shiny.

Summer weather is here! It's sunny and warm and I can wear skirts and summer weather clothes and not even need a sweater at 7:30 am when I leave the house!

On that note, I went shopping last night and indulged in a bit of retail therapy. (Possibly unwise; I'd been counting on the $500/month I'm currently paying to Mom's cousin for rent/caregiving to become available soon to start paying down my debt.) But anyway, all hail new and comfier summer underwear that was on sale, new bras 'cause they were also on sale, and the things I mainly went on a quest for: skirts and tank tops. I went a little crazy, because Penney's was having a massive sale and the skirts were FIFTEEN DOLLARS EACH. Fifteen dollar skirts! And the tank tops were FIVE DOLLARS EACH. In many lovely colors! And some cute capri pants that were buy one get a second pair for 88 CENTS. And two of the skirts have POCKETS. It is so hard to find cute skirts that I like (that is, skirts that don't look like camping gear or an army uniform) that include pockets. I now own more flowly calf-length skirts than I care to admit, but two of those flowy calf-length skirts have POCKETS. es.

Also, some of the skirts are this brand of clothing that claims to be all recycled cotton. The sizing on that brand was REALLY erratic, even across the same cut/style, but then, that's women's clothing for you. We're used to stupid sizing.

Pondfilk weekend was fantastic but too short. Douglas & Juliana are excellent hosts, the people were lovely, the weather was lovely, the music was lovely. Next time I swear I'll find a day off somewhere so I can stay and SHOP. (And eat at the Blue Fox!)

chimera_fancies is about to have another pendant sale! This is the very definition of shiny.

Finally and most importantly, we have summer gigs coming up! Friday July 11 and Saturday July 12. Both gigs opening for Skinny White Chick! ( Details: )

I am absolutely a-jitter about this (I swear, s00j runs on jet fuel or something), and am listening frantically to mp3s in hopes that our scheme of singing with each other a little can be pulled off. (I should've started listening *sooner*, but... y'know. There's that other thing going on.)

Gotta keep focusing on the shiny things, don'tcha know.

And now to finish my sandwich and get back to putting off work.

Vixy & Tony's Schedule

	mood		cheerful
	music		Wait Wait Don't Tell Me podcast

This was going to be a comment to this post of cadhla's from not too long ago, but I decided to make it its own post instead. To quote: Yesterday's glee...caused me to stop and contemplate physical belongings -- what I have, what I've acquired on purpose, what's been given to me -- and realize that sometimes, what gives me joy is entirely out of proportion with how much effort went into obtaining it. These are ten things that make me happy by existing in my possession. Because I can.

I figured I could use a little bit of dwelling on the shiny right now. So, herein are ten things that make me happy just by existing in my possession. They are in no particular order except how they popped into my head as I wrote this on & off over the course a few days. (I own more than ten things that I love and adore, of course. But I have to let you stop reading *some* time.)

( Prized possessions )

What shiny things make *you* happy?

Vixy & Tony's Schedule

	mood		pensive
	music		Robert Plant, "Ship of Fools"

Totally random thought: someone *seriously* needs to make one of those Dr. Who fan videos to this song.

Some days ago, while I was wandering around my house putting away laundry and being overwhelmingly depressed by "Midnight", iTunes decided to come up with this song. (Thanks, iTunes.) Man, if this doesn't fit, I don't know what does. I mean, c'mon. Who claims that no man is an island / While I land up in jeopardy - more distant from you by degrees / I walk this shore in isolation / And at my feet eternity draws ever sweeter plans for me... Can't you just see it?

Besides the music itself just being incredibly melancholy and lonely.

I dunno, it really fit my mood that evening, and it just came up on shuffle again and reminded me. I know there's video editors out there...

( Here's the full lyric, in case you wondered. )

mood

delighted

From tsukara comes News I Didn't Know About:

Matt, aka "Where the Hell is Matt", aka BadDancer, has a new video out!



This makes me unutterably happy. Especially the crowd scenes. If you've never seen this guy, you should watch the older ones first and then the latest one. If you've already seen the older ones, this one has some bits that will surprise you. I think my favorite bit is in Gurgaon, India. Also there are lemurs, crabs, and freefall.

This makes me all teary. I can't help it. :)

mood

tired

How to add extra steps to your walking regimen, #232: Lose something on your walk back from the grocery store, half a mile away. Ask the nearby businesses, who don't have it. Retrace your steps looking for it, the whole half mile to the store. Have it occur to you about halfway there to ask all the businesses along the way to see if someone picked it up and brought it in. Discover on the way *back* that someone *did* pick it up and bring it in-- to the store that's two buildings down from your office. :P

Depressingly, my current mileage shows that in the race to the filk cons, I haven't even left Washington yet. I'm somewhere south of Mount St. Helens. Fond as I am of active volcanoes, I was still hoping I'd made it a little farther.

mood

lazy

Alright, you've had a couple of days. That's plenty!

(Note: gfish graciously decided to abstain on the grounds of having an unfair advantage over all of you.) :)

( The answers... )

mood

sleepy, but happy

Alright, what the heck. Let's play a guessing game! Fifteen favorite movies, quotes from IMDB (or memory, or Wikiquotes, which is FAR less obnoxious and error-filled). Guess 'em, no Googlin', yadda yadda, you know the drill.

Edit: What is with all these people peeking at the comments first and then going "oh, someone already guessed mine?" GUESS BEFORE LOOKING, you silly goofs. That way the other people don't spoil it for you because you're still testing yourself!

At least, that's how *I* do these things...

( Name that movie! )

mood

accomplished

Finally got around to adding the mini-collages to my Etsy shop. :)

They were a lot of fun. I'm hoping to have the time to make more very soon!

mood

annoyed, and yet, amused

Okay, what the HELL is up with the spiders lately? Today is the second time this week that I have arrived at work, gone to unlock my office door, and let out a yelp and a jump when I discover a spider DANGLING FROM THE LOCK. This one was much more active than the last one, which just waved a little. This one really wanted to get acquainted with my keys.

Oh, and that's to say nothing of the baby spider invasion last month, which I forgot to post about in my Baycon reports. Back at the end of May, when I returned home from the airport and parked Tony's car in the garage, I got out, bent to get my sweater out, turned to consider how much stuff I could carry in one trip...

..and came very, very, very close to having BABY SPIDERS ALL OVER MY FACE.

There were several long, torn web strands hanging from the garage door, directly in the path I would've taken, exactly at head-height, crawling with baby spiders.

It looked like they'd been in a web that was stretched vertically across the door, actually, and that this had been torn when the door opened. But HOLY CRAP AIGH. I'm not sure what sort of sound I made, but I just thank all the stars there are that I had turned first and seen them before I started moving. As it was, they were blocking my only route out of the garage, so I grabbed the first thing to hand (ironically, a bag of ant killer) to knock all the webs down. (I don't mind the spiders on the floor.)

The spiders have been SERIOUSLY violating our agreement lately. Couldn't they be doing something constructive, like, say, eating all the ants that keep trying to come in the house?

Oh yes, it's ant time again. Just like last year, if a little later due to the tardiness of the warm weather. And yes, they're trying to HACK MY LAPTOP again. I'm finding more of them on the laptop than last year.

So once again, if you start seeing posts in either tfabris's or my blog that say things like "ANTS R00L SHUG4R IZ AWESUM!!1! I CAN HAZ PEETZA??" or "+++COLLECTIVE 04029481 REQUIRE ASSIST MONKEYS SUBDUED BUT ARACHNID FORCE ENGAGED CODE 09389 END TRANS+++", come by and check on us, would you?

(Also, thank you for all the suggestions from last year; now that I've gone and looked at that post again, we may be adding some of those things to our arsenal.)

Edit: Discussion with jhitchin has brought to my attention that although I'll still be pissed if the ants change my preferences, my data should be safe, because I regularly back things up to the RAID.

*pause*

(Okay, seriously I *DO*. I did not even realize what I was saying until Jeff pointed it out! It's all his fault I tell you!)

	mood		tired
	music		Toad the Wet Sprocket - Butterflies

Several things are happening!

Tony and I have some gigs coming up. I'll be sending something brief to our fledgling mailing list (still getting used to *having* a mailing list!) You should see Tony's post for the details, but briefly:

We're at Wayward Coffeehouse this coming Saturday from 8pm to 10pm, in a pre-celebration of the third annual Can't Stop the Serenity Charity Screening Event the following week. Come down!

We (mostly Tony, since he did most of the work) have finished the first chunk of Behind the Music text for our album, Thirteen. Feel free to comment on Tony's post or mine, if you're so inspired. :) More text to come for the rest of the songs, and I'm also planning to finish the notebook pages project that I started at michelledockrey.com, and link it over on vixyandtony as well.

And in July, we have TWO gigs we're excited about-- two nights in a row, we'll be opening for the amazing Skinny White Chick, aka Sooj Tucker and Betsy Tinney! Ohgodohgodohgod, I may die before we ever get there. The dates are Friday, July 11 and Saturday, July 12; please see Tony's post or vixyandtony.com for the specifics. He's good with dates. I'm still in a fog of squee about the whole thing. :)


In other, somewhat music-related news, I has an iPod! I've actually been wanting one for a while. I poked about the iTunes store a bit this evening, and oh wow, that's *dangerous*. I can see how this will be a disastrously easy way to spend a lot of money very quickly. (Also means removing some CDs from my Amazon wish list.) No more iTunes store for me until I've had time to raid the RAID where all our existing music is currently stored. I'm *really* happy about it, though, having a quick way to get music and an easy way to have it with me and having podcasts, too, which up to now I have just been listening to on the web when I happen to remember (which isn't often).

Amusing side note: when I was setting it up, it asked me to name it. It hadn't occurred to me I'd be naming it, but I do have a naming scheme for computers-- literary heroines. (I used to say 'storybook heroines' but I'm not sure how far to stretch the definition of 'storybook' anymore.) I've had Lucy (my first desktop; long since retired), Hermione (also retired, but had the bonus of also fitting Fishy's household naming scheme of H's at the time), Phedre (current desktop, downstairs in the basement), and Alice (current laptop). I don't buy *nearly* as many electronic devices as some of my friends. :)

So, the iPod's name is Dare. Most of you haven't heard of her. You will. Those of you that have: shut up. I go with what pops into my head; I can't help it. It's little (enough to stand on my palm...) and shiny and sassy and, right now, still somewhat of a mystery to me, but has information to impart.

La la la!

mood

hopeful

You'll know this already if you've been reading filk or partiallyclips or mrgoodwraith. But I know that at least some of the filkers on my flist don't, so I'm passing the word along, largely pasted from Rob Balder's and Mark Bernstein's posts to filk...


Our friend Tom Smith, aka filkertom is in the hospital after badly tearing either a muscle or ligaments in his leg while taking the stage to perform. Surgery is yet to be scheduled; for now he is in the hospital in a full leg cast (and no net access, yikes!) He plans to dictate something to huskiebear to post to his LJ soon. (Edited with updated information from Randy; please see this post for full details.)

He is going to be all right, but his entire Summer travel schedule is pretty much shot; no DucKon, no Contata, no AnthroCon...nothing until GenCon at the soonest and even that will depend on his progress.

As lots of you know, Tom makes his living with his music, and that can be a precarious proposition. With, as Tom put it, "literally one misstep" he's shot all of his Summer schedule for performing and selling CDs, and taken a big hit for medical expenses.

Again, because it bears repeating: Tom makes his living from his music. Which, let's face it, is an incredible achievement - he's a professional filker. (I personally only know of two filkers who don't still have their day jobs, and he's one.) CD sales at conventions are a huge part of that. Over the next three weekends, he was going to be at Duckon, Contata (as Toastmaster), and Anthrocon. Missing those three is a very real hit to his income. Mark and others will be bringing CDs to those cons, but it's the concerts that sell the CDs more than anything.

So if you like Tom's music, if you have good memories of his concerts, if you appreciate all he's done for the filk community, think about giving something back. Go to this page, and either buy something, or drop a tip in the virtual guitar case.

Edit:
hiddenriver adds:
"Tom does excellent commission work (and I don't know, but I'm guessing that he'll be back to that long before he starts doing cons again). He did an original for me a couple of years ago, a b-day gift for my daughter. Turned out to be the best gift I ever gave her. For those on a smaller budget, he also template songs (think Mad Libs set to music and recorded for you). Info on both types of custom work is on this page."