Re-starting the Blog

Saturday, July 4th, 2020

Re-starting the Blog

I have chosen to restart my blog.  I am in search of finding a genuine way to communicate with family and friends to replace my irregular posts on Facebook.  

I can no longer tolerate the way that both Facebook and Twitter have been hijacked to spread propaganda designed to destabilize this country.  Particularly as both those platforms have allowed dangerous-to-fatal misinformation to spread during a global pandemic I will no longer support these social media sites.

We come now to you, Gentle Reader; what would you like to see on this blog?  How can I best communicate with you about the things that you are interested in?

My current thoughts are to include:

• General news about my husband, Mark
• Updates on Stelle and Gene
• Funny cat stories/pictures
• Garden updates with pictures
• My current reading
• My current recording/video projects
• Current adventures establishing the Archetto library

Sunday, July 5th, 2020

General News

Today is the day before my shoulder arthroscopy, so I spent it getting the last of the household in order.  

Our cat, Lightning, now drinks from a beautifully clean fountain with a fresh filter!  Lightning has not deigned to notice my work.

My ballot for the August primaries has been mailed, the two surveys from the state about my relationship with the special needs services provided for my children is in.  The survey from the VASD regarding my thoughts about going forward during a pandemic is in.

Mark had a solid interview with yet another recruiting service and then the initial interview for a job.  While he is still technically on furlough, he is hoping to find something better.

Mark has also been enjoying spending more time with the children and has even managed to get all of us into a round of "Ticket to Ride."

  Lightning

Lightning is fascinated when the printer sucks the paper back in to print on two sides!

Children

Stelle is in quite the growth spurt!  Mark cooked two pounds of chicken yesterday, ate one thigh, and the rest seemed to magically disappear!  Then she slept for 14 hours. This morning(?) she ate two eggs and then continued to munch throughout the day.  Can we spell Growth Spurt?

Gene continues his explorations into the world of computer art and directing the evolution of imaginary species in Spore.  He has also conned his father into a 2 player game of Ticket to Ride.

Gardening Adventures

I have spent much more of this weekend than I expected to trying to finish the drip irrigation system for my deck garden.  Yesterday I must have spent 2 hours reworking some of the irrigation lines to work in four new plants and balance the pressure.  Then, as long as (oh, no! an ALA!) I had the equipment out, I decided to replace some of the sprinklers that were, sort of, watering 2-3 containers.  I set up a drip line to each individual planter, carefully setting up a perfectly sized circle that I could easily hide between the containers.

Alas, today when I ran a water check, I discovered that all my careful work had created this perfect circle that was. . . wait for it . . . NOT connected to the rest of the watering system.  In figuring this out, I pulled out the whole circle so it is no longer hidden.  I spliced a water feed in and now the all the lines won't fit back in. Oh, Laura, please notice that your ninja gift is now the center of the display and doing a fairly good job hiding some of the tubing.

Reading

I usually keep about three books going unless something really grabs my attention.  Currently, I am reading

• James A Corey; Leviathan Wakes
• Neil Stephenson; Some Remarks
• Christine Valters Paintner; Wisdom of the Body

Recording, Videos and Web-Page Construction

I have managed to create my first video (that I'm willing to share).

JS Bach; Suite #3 in C, Prelude

I am still not happy with the angle of the camera and it somehow started filming in landscape rather than the portrait mode that I thought it had been sent for.

I did, however, finally manage to set my fancy microphone so that it picks up my sound properly.  Through that I was able to run the sound track through a program called Audacity which allowed me to do things like 

• add a little reverb so it sounds like I'm playing in a bigger room
• add a limiter so that it doesn't overwhelm the speakers that it plays through.

Alas, the learning curve seems to be steep for the video effects that I was playing with, so there are none here.

And yes, I know I make funny faces while I play.  More things for me to work on. . . .

Archetto

Archetto is still moving, but really slowly.  Finding the time to work on it has been really hard during this pandemic.  It is currently morphing into a library for my teaching materials.  Follow:

• Archetto
• Viola
• Solo
• Marcello
• Adagio or Allegro

to see what it currently looks like.