The Windkey and the Lamplighter

I think I’ve found my checklist for places around the world where I want to visit.
http://curiousexpeditions.org/2007/09/a_librophiliacs_love_letter_1.html

This is the coolest thing I’ve seen all day. I want a metric ruler to wear on my wrist!
It’s the perfect complement to the stainless steel “Brass” rat.
Sadly, they are currently out of stock (and they’re also $40) or I’d be giving them as Christmas (or your winter-holiday-of-choice) presents to all my hardware-hacking and sewing friends.

I am by no means a rabid Obama supporter. Even though I’ve since learned that I can not support McCain(1) and I’m still upset at the insinuation that I should support Sarah Palin because I like hockey and have two X chromosomes, I had a lovely time last fall freaking out my in-laws(2) by telling them I was considering voting for McCain.

However, I am thrilled to see my friends interested and active in the political process, and I enjoy vicarious(3) hair-dyeing experiences, so I present to you the below combination. The lovely Sasen, pictured at left, is the artist.

Obamania Hits Hard
Originally uploaded by nimlabs

(1) I’ve since realized we have some incompatible beliefs about how much government is permitted inside one’s home, doctor’s office, etc. and negative campaign ads really turn me off. Also, the “We must suspend our campaigns to Solve The Economy” thing irritates me, since I didn’t want Congress to do anything in the first place.
(2) Politics is no longer an acceptable dinner table discussion when visiting inlaws or when they are visiting. Sometimes, keeping one’s mouth shut is essential for family harmony.
(3) I’ve never dyed my hair(4)—I’m the only woman in my family who can say that, and one of few of my friends, especially the female ones. But I was thrilled when it looked like one of my bridesmaids would have hair that (accidentally) matched the bridesmaid dresses(5), and I love some of the bright colors and Cool Stuff that my friends do with their hair.
(4) It’s too fragile—my hair is long, but it breaks at the slightest provocation.
(5) She decided to dye it back to brown shortly before the wedding, but we may have pictures from trying on dresses where it matches the slate-blue dress.

“The thing I’ve noticed about being a Solar is that you’re always either loved or reviled. Generally, both at once. And you always seem to have the choice between the bad thing and the worst thing. Generally, people seem to prefer the worst thing — so that’s what I’m going to do.” - Koyenne

Schmap has my picture of Dockweiler State Beach in Los Angeles!
(They sent me a note on Flickr telling me they used it.)

This is what Creative Commons licenses are for. Unfortunately, some people are unhappy with having allowed commercial use—Virgin Mobile in Australia is using Flickr photos in an ad campaign that portrays some of the subjects rather poorly. They’re attributing, but they didn’t contact any of the photographers or anything. Some of the subjects are quite upset, like this girl. I suspect I’d be upset, too.

As my birthday present to myself a few weeks ago, I bought a guitar.
It’s beautiful. It’s also apparently Canadian (La Patrie, so it’s actually Quebecois and probably speaks better French than me.) Oddly, I can’t find a picture online of one just like mine—it came with steel strings, which I replaced with new steel strings, and all the La Patrie guitars online have nylon strings and different patterning around the sound hole.

Anyway, I am having a lot of fun. My left-hand fingers still hurt whenever I play, (and somewhat the rest of the time—I don’t really have callouses yet) but over the last three weeks I have gone from barely being able to play anything to being able to play at least one song, at least five chords (G, Eb, D, A, and C, in order of how good they sound on average) and being able to change between chords often fast enough that (if I had more songbooks) I could play songs at speed.
It makes me *so happy* to tune my guitar. (I have a pitch pipe to tune the low E, and then tune by ear from there. It works out pretty well, since I have a good ear.) Its also really loud, so I bet I could play outside or in crowds and be heard.

Once I get non-lazy, perhaps I will take some of the folk songbooks I have from when I did vocal solo singing and write out some chord accompaniments for them. I bet they will be pretty easy to play, they just don’t have chords (and certainly don’t have guitar tab). The one songbook I have *with* guitar tab is Billy Joel’s “River of Dreams” album, which is really really hard and has a lot of F chords, which I can’t currently even fake. I suppose I should not be surprised that the Piano Man’s music is hard to play on guitar…

This year’s Passover Haggadah was pretty well received. The host said it was “polished,” and others commented that it “had nice flow.” I’m now comfortable making it generally available. The Mercurial repository is at http://evenmere.org/hg/Haggadot/. You can probably check out a copy to look at with hg clone http://evenmere.org/hg/Haggadot/.

This year I experimented with direct representation of Hebrew. In the past I’ve used embedded graphics, but they never look quite right. Now I’ve found a good source of properly-spelled Hebrew like the following:

?מַה נִּשְּׁתַּנָה הַלַּיְלָה הַזֶּה מִכָּל הַלֵּילוֹת

I had a few complaints about the placement of vowel points under narrow characters, but nobody seemed to have actual trouble reading it. I borrowed and copied and learned from many sources in assembling this document. I hope others benefit from this document in the same way

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