Category: Uncategorized

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Nerdware

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll probably have noticed I’m somewhat of a freak for all things Star Wars. And while I never got around to posting the Wookie version of “Silent Night” on this site or Eddie Izzard’s hilarious Death Star Canteen routine set to Legos, I would like to share this link with you about some rejected Star Wars toy ideas.

At the bottom, he’s got all his sketches of the rejected ideas. I’m not so sure how I feel about the Han Solo fridge (that’s a little macabre, isn’t it?), but I would TOTALLY buy the Bantha slippers. Except that sandpeople always travel in single file to hide their tracks…so would the Banthas on my feet be ridden by storm troopers? Hmm…

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Crash

Yesterday, the airwaves were filled with dire warnings of a winter storm. It was going to snow, they said, but later it would get cold enough where everything would turn to ice. Now, I’ve weathered a many a winter storm since I moved to the East Coast back in 1992…in fact, my first storm was a Nor’easter in Boston that left the tree branches encased in ice. Beautiful, but very cold and very dangerous.

But until now, I’ve been fortunate enough to not have to drive in a winter storm. Usually by the time the weathermen are predicting the coming of the ice age, I am already well-ensconced in my cocoon of blankets, sipping on hot tea. Not so last night.

I was on my way from work to pick up a little dinner before heading into Philadelphia to sing the roles of Flora and Annina in La Traviata at the High Note Cafe, when I skidded on some black ice and ran into a telephone pole. But it didn’t end there; hitting the pole only sent me back into the street to end up facing the wrong way on the shoulder.

Now, before you start worrying, I wasn’t really going that quickly, so the impact was really not bad at all.  I’m fine, I didn’t hit anyone, and the car doesn’t even have a dent (you’ve gotta love those plastic Saturns!).  But it did shake me up a bit.

After making sure my car was, indeed, okay, I made my way SLOWLY to the place I was planning on grabbing some dinner.  I phoned Ray and told him what happened, and he told me I should ask whether or not the show was still on.  I had never thought of that.  Why would someone cancel a show because of weather?  And why would I not continue on my journey?  I mean, don’t they say “the show must go on” for a reason?  I inwardly guffawed, but I called the guy in charge just to make sure.

The show manager said there was no change, and that the show would go on.  He seemed concerned when I told him I ran into a telephone pole, but not so concerned, obviously, to tell me to go home.  I expected that reaction and ordered my food and studied my music.

About 20 minutes later, Ray called again and told me that NJ emergency management was telling everyone to get off the roads and go home.  He said I should call the show manager again and tell him I wasn’t coming.  Although I was loathe to do it, Ray convinced me by telling me the traffic was so bad that it would have taken me 2-3 hours to make the normally 30-minute trip in (and besides, he said, I was worth a lot more to him in one piece than any money I could have made on this gig).  I called the show manager, who was very clearly upset.  But in the end, he understood, and told me that depending on who showed up, they might just do a concert of highlights from the opera.  Good idea, I thought, as I packed up my things and started my journey home.

In the ten miles between the restaurant and my house, I don’t think I drove faster than 25 MPH.  It’s possible that when I got on the highway, I was cruising at 30, but that was definitely my top speed.  And when I got home, Ray told me he was happy I was safe, and I wrapped myself in my cocoon of blankets and sipped hot tea.

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It’s That Time Again

It’s time for change.

Yes, I have now grown bored with my blog theme and uploaded a new one. Let me know what you think…I kind of think the bird is cute, but I have several other themes that I might experiment with, so if you check back in a few days, the look of the site may change.

I’m also writing with some shameless self-promotion, and I do hope you forgive me, because I’m actually really excited about it. I’ve recently been singing with a new choir in Philadelphia called The Crossing, as I’m sure those of you who have been following along my adventures for a while realize. They’re the group I went to Italy with this past summer, and we’ve had a number of really wonderful concerts in the past few months.

This most recent concert, a world premiere of a piece called An Epiphany Vespers by Kile Smith, was very well-received, by the critics and audiences alike. And luckily, the concert was filmed and now available for the entire world to see on YouTube. And so I will show it here.

It’s really hard to see me, since I’m the second person from the left at the very end of the line, but there is a point where the camera zooms in and you can see me at least somewhat.

So if you liked what you saw and heard, and you’d like to be kept in the loop as to what, when, and where we will be performing next, please visit The Crossing’s upcoming concerts list and join the new emailing list.

Oh, hey, did I mention you can make tax-deductible donations to the Crossing as well? At the moment, all the singers are putting their time and extraordinary talent in for the love of the ensemble, friendship, and music, and are only splitting the box office receipts after expenses, so your money would be helping yours truly, if only indirectly.

Okay, I’m done with the shameless self-promotion. The next thing I post will be something much more witty, I promise.

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Another Year, Another Dollar

Happy New Year! I know I should probably write something about new year’s resolutions and all that stuff, but this year, I’ve decided that I’m not going to have any resolutions, since I never keep them anyway.

I’ve been exceedingly busy this past Christmas season, what with performing in three Philadelphia Singers concerts and one Crossing concert, not to mention Christmas caroling. Oh, and did I mention I’m taking over said Christmas caroling company? Yeah, I was doing administration, HR, and payroll, while the current owner did sales. The deal isn’t done yet, but hopefully next year I’ll be running the whole thing myself, and by the time December 2008 comes around, it’ll be a well-oiled machine. Hopefully.

I did manage to get myself sick sometime around Thanksgiving, and I never really shook the after-effects of the bug. I’m still suffering from post-nasal drip, which is making me cough, and thus harming my voice. Very, very bad news, folks. My biggest problem is that I normally have quite a bit of time after Christmas to rest up and heal for the next round of concerts, but not this time! I’m currently in rehearsal for a Crossing concert with Piffaro (Jan. 5 & 6…come see us!) and then a barrage of Philly Singers performances of a Jennifer Higdon world premiere. So I’ve been in rehearsals since the day after Christmas, and I’ve only had New Year’s eve and New Year’s day off for some much-needed rest.

Of course, during all this craziness, my cat, Scratchy (no, not Itchy, who had the toxoplasmosis…Itchy is better, by the way, although his head is still a little bit sideways and probably will be permanently), got a urinary obstruction (essentially bladder stones), and we had to take him to the emergency room. He had to stay there for two nights with a catheter up his you-know-what, which, according to the attending vet, caused him to be “grumpy.” No kidding. Anyway, he is home now, and we have to keep both him and his brother (since they eat each other’s food) on a special diet formulated to raise the acidity of the urine in order to break up the crystals. They also have to be fed only canned food (it hydrates them and dilutes the urine) for the next two weeks, and man, that stuff is expensive!

Oddly enough, from all I’ve read and all the vets have told me, urinary crystals, or FLUTD, are pretty common in male cats of Scratchy’s age (he’s 5 years old). But when I went into the pet store, out of the myriad of cat foods, I only found one brand that made a canned formula suited to his condition. Oh, there were about two or three different dry types, but because I’ve been cautioned to keep Scratchy as hydrated as possible during the next two weeks, canned is all he should eat. So Purina has the monopoly on cats with urinary tract disorders. It’s either that or get the really expensive prescription stuff from the vet’s office. Oy.

Ray keeps telling me the cats are going to have to go out and get themselves jobs if they’re going to keep spending all of our money. I’m beginning to think he’s right. It’s definitely a good thing that I’m working so much.

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I Rest My Case

I made a mistake in my last post. It’s not an Eagles quarterback, it’s a Cowboys quarterback…which might actually be worse, especially around here. Those people are just asking for a beating.

What are Santa and the Grinch doing to that poor reindeer? And Frosty, there’s no need to bow down to others just because they’re human and you’re not! This is a sad state of affairs, dear reader…a sad state of affairs.

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Deck the Lawn with Tacky Blow-Ups

Dear neighbors and all the folks in America who have decided to get into the Christmas spirit with large inflatable figures on their lawns,

It’s one thing to celebrate the holiday season by stringing your house and trees with lights.  I think they are very cheery and lighten my evening whenever I see lit houses.  Those reindeer that are made of Christmas lights are lovely (and I was tickled when I passed a house where the two reindeer had been arranged in a rather lewd position, although I’m sure that was probably some prank pulled off by local kids).  I even like some manger scenes, when done tastefully.

But what makes you think I want to see four or five 15-foot inflatable Santas in a row on my way home?  The amount of time and energy you must spend blowing up those dolls can probably be better put to use finishing your Christmas shopping or volunteering at a soup kitchen.

And while you might think you’re done inflating those things at 5 or 6 in the evening, I can tell you with all certainty that by 9:30 they are halfway deflated, and that by morning they are completely flat.  So the idea that passers-by might be cheered by a large Mickey Mouse with a Santa hat smiling and waving at them doesn’t hold water, since by the time I drive by, poor Mickey looks like he’s been hitting the eggnog a little too much.

And is it really necessary to have Santa, an inflatable sleigh, and an Eagles quarterback?  I know I live in the land of the Eagles fans, who are, by definition, a little bit nuts, but can you dial it back just a little bit?  For the kids?  Who wants to drive by a 15-foot generic football player that looks like he’s about to throw up rather than throw the ball, while an anemic Santa has overturned his sleigh?

Take some time to look at your house from an outsider’s perspective.  Look at it, not when you come home from work, but right after you watch Survivor.  Then look at your electric bill and think about how much money you might save if you just got rid of the inflatable dolls.  You could give that money to those charities that have been soliciting you these past couple of weeks, and then you could feel much better about yourself this season, and I would feel much better about you as well.

This has been a public service announcement.

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Can’t sleep…astronauts will eat me…

I should be in bed right now, catching up on all the sleep I’ve been missing over the last few days. I should be dreaming all the dreams I haven’t been dreaming, and I should have gone to bed two hours ago when I was moderately sleepy, instead of staying up and catching up on the crack TV I’ve been TiVo-ing for the last week or so.

But I’m not. I can’t sleep, so I figured I’d come onto the computer and blog, mostly because I know I haven’t been blogging for a while, which Neenyd reminded me on Saturday. Has it really been a month? Sheesh.

Cat update: Itchy’s still no better, although he’s off the ear medication. We now lovingly call him the “sideways” cat, since he constantly tilts his head to the right. He’s been managing with his disability so well that we let him outside, but he can’t get up and down the stairs by himself, so we (read: I) have to pick him up and carry him in and out of the house. He enjoys being outside, though, and I figure as long as the weather’s nice, it’s not so bad. I’m going to make another appointment with the vet, though, just in case there is something else they can do to make him “normal” again.

In the news: Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor is the first Malaysian to go into space. When I heard the story on BBC World News this morning, I actually thought he was also the first Muslim in space, but apparently I was wrong about that. He is, however, the first Muslim to be observing Ramadan in space, and he actually got the Islamic National Fatwa Council to write up a whole handbook on how to pray, fast, and otherwise observe Ramadan properly in space.

This is just another reason why I don’t like organized religion: they spend all this time and energy working out the correct way to pray instead of actually manifesting those prayers into something tangible, like helping the poor or working on peace in the Middle East or doing something about the atrocities in Darfur.

Argh.  Okay, back to bed again…maybe I’ll try counting sheep.

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Success!

After a full week of being outside, Itchy has decided to come home.

This is a HUGE relief to me, since I have been outside every single morning and evening with bowls of food, trying to coax him back, and I have the mosquito bites to prove it (by the way, there’s something about NJ that makes things grow extremely large…including mutant extra-large mosquitoes!). I had even started falling into a depression about this situation, mostly because I wasn’t getting very much sleep (getting up at 6:30 in the morning to spend a half hour outside, and then going outside again close to midnight) .

Itchy started off being very shy (as I wrote about before), but hunger started overriding his fear, and he would come up only when I had set the bowl about arm’s reach away. Then yesterday he wasn’t around for breakfast or dinner, and I started to think that he had either gotten completely lost and disoriented or perhaps had gone off somewhere to die. Scratchy was looking concerned all night, too, because off he went in search of his brother once again as I went to bed.

This morning, I got up and called for the cats, and I heard Itchy’s distinctive, familiar, somewhat annoying meow. He appeared by one of the bushes and walked right up to the stairs, something that he hasn’t done since he ran off. I walked slowly down the stairs, food in hand, and he waited for me to set it down by my feet and let me pet him while he ate. I was shocked. So was Scratchy, I think!

After he had had a few bites, and I had been petting him with him actually responding to my caresses, I picked him up and carried him upstairs to safety. Scratchy followed at a safe distance. When they were both inside, I put Itchy down and breathed a sigh of relief as they both descended on the food bowl.

Now I can actually give him his medicine. Maybe I’ll be able to help him out a little bit anyway.

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Feral Feline

Well, Itchy is still out and about in my garden. He made himself known late last night when I returned home from dinner. He was hungry, but he wouldn’t let me get close to him. I left some food out for him so he wouldn’t starve.

This morning, I tried to use food to get him to associate me with good things, and I tried again this evening. He’s gone seriously feral, and I now have to try to domesticate him again. Scratchy’s still looking out for him, but I think he’s starting to think his brother is a moron for not coming up the stairs and getting food in the house like normal (Itchy tried to climb the stairs but still does not have enough balance to even get up the first step).

Itchy won’t make a move towards the food or the water until Scratchy has investigated it. Also, Itchy has taken to following Scratchy around, which I think annoys Scratchy a little bit. Scratchy was feeling kind of frisky tonight and wanted to play with Itchy, so he tackled Itchy, who freaked out again, mostly because he’s still jumpy from all the falling down. I tried to tell Scratchy that wasn’t helping, but he stalked off in a snit because his brother was acting like a moron again, so I’m not sure how much he was actually listening to me.

All in all, though, Scratchy is on my side. He will come up to me in the middle of the garden while Itchy is watching and purr and rub up against me, as if to say, “See? She’s not so bad.” This is behavior that would have previously been unseemly for a macho cat like Scratchy.

The upshot of it is, I think this is going to take a lot of patience. I’m not going to leave food out again, because I want him to understand that if he wants food, he has to deal with me being there too. Sooner or later, he’ll get so hungry he won’t care. This evening he took about three or four bites of food before retreating to the bushes. But I’m not going to try touching him again until he gets REALLY comfortable with me being there.

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Kitty Update

I brought Itchy in to the vet on Thursday afternoon for a follow-up visit at the animal hospital (my regular vet was on vacation, and while he did call me to talk about the situation, there wasn’t much he could do over the phone) . The doctor was very nice, although she did admit that the problem with neurologic cats is that they’re incredibly difficult to diagnose.

She did check his ears, though, both of which have raging infections, so it may be that it’s as simple as treating the infection and maybe his sense of balance will be restored. She tested for FIV/FLV, which came out negative, and she reran the blood work (also still normal). If after the treatment for the ear infection is gone, she told me, we should test for toxoplasmosis, which is also treatable with antibiotics.

She’s also thinking that if it is none of the above, Itchy might have idiopathic vestibular disease, which is not a fatal problem, just disturbing, and nobody knows the cause of it, nor do they know a treatment for it. Sometimes it goes away on its own.

Of course, there’s always the chance that he received some sort of trauma to the head while he was out and there’s some sort of brain damage, and we could get an MRI and a CT scan, but that would involve going into Philly to the University of Penn, seeing a neurologist, putting him under general anesthesia, and shelling out a few thousand dollars for the specialist to tell us that they have no way of treating what he’s got. Can you guess that I’m hoping this all goes away on its own?

After the vet appointment, I brought him home and went out to get him some more kitty litter and a little kitty harness so we could go outside together. He has really wanted so badly to go out, ever since I brought him in, and since he hasn’t pooped, I figured he would be okay for me to take him out on a leash.

Boy was I wrong. He sat still for me to put the harness on him, but when we went outside and I sat him down, he raced for the bushes. When he felt the resistance from the leash, he FREAKED OUT. He was jumping up and down, doing acrobats, limbs flailing, claws out (he sliced my hand pretty deeply) , and he moved around so quickly and violently that the safety clips on the harness released, and he went running off into the night.

I am a terrible mommy. I should never have taken him out.

So now he is back outside. I saw him later that night, when he was under the bushes yowling like nobody’s business. I tried to go to him, but he wouldn’t let me near. I saw him again in the morning, when I brought some food out to him. He wouldn’t eat until I stepped far away from the food bowl. This afternoon after work, I tried to find him in his usual hiding places, but he wasn’t there.

The good thing is that Scratchy is just as concerned about Itchy as I am. The bad thing is that although Scratchy will be by my side while I’m in the garden, showing Itchy that I’m okay, he can’t pick up Itchy like I can, so he’s not really too much help right now. I went out again just now when I got home from rehearsal, and still no sign of Itchy. Scratchy has taken up his guard position at the bottom of the steps, on the lookout for his brother.

On the bright side, I’ve finally gotten a good night’s sleep. Also, I think the ear-cleaning has done something for his balance, because I was watching him outside, and although he’s still stumbling, he’s a little more confident in the way he is walking. Keep your fingers crossed that I will be able to charm him back inside tomorrow morning.