This is not so much about Bailey, rather about me and bringing home the fact that I am still learning how to ride.  I don’t think you ever stop learning, but tonight that fact was brought home pretty clearly.  I rode Lotta, Mel’s horse (my co-worker), in a lesson, and holy crap you can’t stop riding that mare  for a second.  I thought North could be hard to ride, but Lotta is a  constant on your toes kinda riding.  North takes you by surprise sometimes with his spooks, and I have all kinds of bad habits because of that.  He is also a fairly stiff, (and therefore does not go straight), old horse, and as such, I ride crooked to make up for it.  I didn’t realize until tonight just how crooked I am at times to compensate for North.  But I am so use to North, and his way of going,  and we are pretty in tune so it’s easy in a way.   Riding a completely different type of horse was a wake up call.  You have to ride every single step.  I’m starting to relearn things that I thought I knew, such as the half-halt, following with your hands, and ‘thinking’ into a transition.  It’s pretty amazing to have a good coach who can actually see that your right hip is crooked, and that your back is not following.  I wish I’d had this caliber of a coach/instructor way back when!  But better late than never!

I am really sleepy today, but then I made pulao and while it didn’t help with the sleepy, it did get me inspired to see what other things I could make. And then I found the Vah Chef. And this video:

This is my new favorite YouTube thing.

So, week two, and I missed Monday. Off the wagon already? Well, yes and no. I had intentions of blogging yesterday, of weaving a tale of magical weekend visits from St Nicholas. Of a happy homey day spent baking biscuits. Christmas tree ones. With green icing.

But I didn’t. Instead, yesterday became a day I know I’ll remember forever, yet I wish I could bury my head in the sand and forget. The day my world was rocked to it’s very foundations. The C word. Someone very dear to me. So please excuse me if I’m a bit lax in keeping up the blog-a-long, everything is kind of a jumble at the minute. Or maybe I’ll craft and create and blog my way through the days to keep my overactive mind off the subject that consumes it.

I just want this week to be over.

And the final post for today is about props too. As I mentionned before, I am currently playing through beyond the mountains of madness with my players and I (of course) made some props to add to the gaming experience…

This little post is there to indicate you that I updated many of the posts presenting prints with some new pictures and even some of the original matrix that were used to print these. Here are the links to the posts : post1  post2  post3  post4

…also for those who are interested  in home-made instruments, I made this little one last weekend. It is an electrified thumb piano :

Pemmican is the staple protein food for both men and animals in the Antarctic. It is made from a mixture of beef tallow, dried ground meat, wheat germs, molasses and cod liver oil. To every one thousands of this mixture are added two pints of lemon squeezings. This mixture is then shaped into compressed one pound blocks, wrapped in waxed paper or tinfoil, and frozen solid. The block are fed to dogs without preparation. for expedition members, the blocks are dropped into stew pots as the quickest way to cook them.

As promised, after having put the pemmican label for download here, I did a little tutorial with photos to show how you can turn these labels, some styrofoam and a bit of time into a realistic prop that will certainly add to the ambiance of your next arctic related call of cthulhu game.
Fisrt, the materials and tools needed are :
materials :
1-a block of styrofoam at least 3″ x 3″ x 7″ for one pemmican block (note : styrofoam sheets are smaller than 3″ so you can glue two pieces together using wood glue to achieve the good size)
2-some printed pemmican labels that can be found here
3-brown acrylic paint, I used transparent burnt umber for this one
4-a piece of waxed paper
5-acrylic medium and varnish, gloss is better
6-tea, coffee or iron buff to age paper

tools :
1-ruler
2-pencil
3-exacto cutter or knife
4-any kind of wood saw or hot wire cutter
5-sandpaper
6-brush

Once you’ve gathered all these things, you can start building you pemmican block.
Step one : take your prepared block of styrofoam and mark the dimensions of you future block on it, reffering to the label, I put approximately 1 inch more each side of the label, the height and width of the block should be around 3″.

Step two : take your saw and cut your marked block following the lines you just did, I know, cutting styrofoam is messy…

Step three : Take you freshly cut piece of foam and some sandpaper (100 grit or coarser is fine) and sand down the corners and the sides of your block to make it look more like it was shaped by hand.

Step four : remove all dust form the sanding and prepare your acrylic paint by mixing it with a little bit of water to make it more fluid. Paint the entire block takign care to vary the intensity of the brown over the whole surface, let it dry.

step five : While the paint is drying take a cutting board and the waxed paper roll and cut a section 13″ long (3″ for the four sizes plus an extra of 4″) and set it aside with the rest.

Step six : Now that the paint on your block has dried, take the acrylic medium and paint some of it on one of the sides of the block, stick the waxed paper to the side, taking care to keep the extra parts of paper on the two sides equal, also let a 1″ distance from the side of the block. Turn your block so the waxed paper in lying on your table and paint the next side with acrylic medium. Stick the paper to it and continue like that for all the sides of the block until it is entirely wrapped like in the picture.

Step seven : Paint the sides of your block with acrylic medium and fold the first section of paper so a part of it stick to the block and the rest forms a triangle shape, apply more medium and stick that triangle to the block forming a new triangle. repeat until a little piece of paper is left and stick this piece to the other side of the block with acrylic medium, repeat for the other side. apply some more acrylic medium on the folds of the sides to make them more sturdy, let the medium dry.

Step eight : Cut one of the pemmican labels and stick it to the side of the block with apparent folds so it holds the entire wrapping, set aside to dry.

Step nine : go to your kitchen and find some dark black tea and prepare a tass, go back to your now dry block and with a brush apply tea uniformely to the label, wait until it dries and repapply some on the sides if the label, make some drips and scrape the corners of the label to simulate the light damaging occasioned by the handling and shipping of the pemmican block, for this step you can also refer to my article on paper aging here.

Step ten : admire your realisation and use for whatever use you found for it : ambiance enhancer for a game, decoration element for your room, book holder, amateur lovecraftian movie prop, etc.

I hope you enjoyed reading through this tutorial and maybe realising one of these pemmican block props. i know that I’m not posting a lot of material which is prop related these times but I might come back to it soon.

No tablet used. Only a mouse, a computer, a monitor, MS paint, and skills.

/sarcasm And I am not a procrastinator. I just sometimes leave some stuff incomplete for a while, because sometimes I have want to do other things.

EDIT: Aw darn it. When I uploaded it, the picture became all blurry. Meh.

Sorry dude, if you came here for a tacky Jew joke, I don’t know any. I grew up in a redneck neighborhood that was more or less sans Jewish. Except for my friend Charles’ dad when I was 11. I’m not sure he was Jewish, but he once gave me a sandwich with brown mustard on it. He was from Rochester, NY, so I assumed that he was of Hebrew descent, and that brown mustard was a cultural thing.

I think very little about religion, but in the last two weeks, three people actual have ‘come out’ to me as being Jewish. I suppose they weren’t hiding it per se, but they specifically identified themselves as Jews to me. I’m not sure why. I figure I’m either A) throwing off some kind of Jew hater vibe and they are defiant (which makes me sad, I’m a lover not a hater…unless you’re elderly) or B) I’ve got some kick ass pheromones that convince people to tell the truth (but only if you’re Jewish, and trying to disguise your religious/ethnic background…quite the lame superpower).

I’ve done nothing to educate myself about the Jewish faith. Everything I know comes from Schindler’s List, School Ties, and Seinfeld.

I will summarize what I think I know (this will not be fact checked, feel free to correct me in the comments):

1. Jews are good at football

2. They are funny

3. At thirteen or so there is a Mitzvah.

4. If only your dad is Jewish, you ain’t Jewish

5. They eat a soup with some kind of cracker ball

6. They claim Moses AND Jesus among their alumni base. I went to TSU and we have Oprah.

7. The skullcap is called a yarmulke. Yarmulke may be Yiddish for skullcap

8. They don’t have X-mas, the have Hanukkah (Free Tip: XM Channel 28 is Hanukkah music throughout the season)

9. According to Law and Order:SVU if you’re Orthodox it’s better to be a pedophile than a fornicator. When has episodic TV ever been wrong?

10. The dudes get their sausage cut presumably leading many males to forgo converting later in life.

11. They seem to enjoy the top (the toy, not the position, sicko) more than most. Why they are made of clay, I can’t fathom.

I still don’t know any jokes.

I have one gay joke though. Did you hear the one about the gay guy who says no?

Epic theatre, that is.

This is a story about how Della Galton rescued me.

One of my courses this term is Writing for the Stage. A lion also attends classes, although he hasn’t said much:

The B6 Lion

But… it’s my first diploma-level course, and as such the mark will contribute to my final degree grading, so I really want to do well…

The first assignment wasn’t too bad, but I’ve been struggling with the second one for weeks. I have to write a fifteen-minute epic play. Now, epic theatre aims to make the audience think about the message of the play, which is usually political or social in nature. It is about ordinary people trying to do their best in extraordinary situations. The audience is aware at all times that they are watching a play, they don’t engage with the characters, and the playwright, director and actors all go to great lengths to ensure this is the case.

So not only do I have to come up with a story to tell, but it has to have a message, and it has to be set in a context of external upheaval of some sort. And on top of that, I’ve got to write the characters so that the audience doesn’t identify with them.

This is different to just about everything I’ve ever written! It’s very scary… and I was floundering. I just couldn’t come up with anything epic enough. No message, no characters, no desperate situation, nothing. So I trudged into Caffe Nero this morning and snuggled into my usual corner with my usual two diet cokes, and stared at a blank page of my notebook for a while.

Then I started writing. I didn’t want to set it in the context of war – no real reason, mainly a matter of principle. What horrible things are going on outside people’s control at the moment? Ah, I know, recession. So let’s have an Ordinary Bod who’s been hurt badly by the credit crunch, and then maybe an MP who tries to help Bod out, MP discovers he can’t do anything because the system is corrupt and evil… ta-da…

No.

Nonono.

That’s rubbish. I know I’m not supposed to emotionally identify with the characters, but I can’t even rationally work out what’s going on and why. And the message is so cliched. And I’m blowed if I can come up with any flesh to put on the bones of this deformed monstrosity.

So I stared at my now-full page, and scribbled it out in a fit of pique.

Time to go back to basics. Rather than start with a global context, let’s start with a character and a problem…

Hang on a minute, that rings a bell. At Caerleon, Della Galton gave us a fantastic tool for generating short stories. Come up with a load of random characters and a load of random problems, pick one of each and go. And the character we had to write about was a gravedigger – which is ultimately appropriate for epic theatre, isn’t it?

Hoorah!

So I wrote down ‘Gravedigger’. Then I thought, what would give a gravedigger a problem?

I sneezed. Snot, yuck. People looking sidelong at me to make sure I caught all the germs in a tissue which I then discarded before disinfecting my hands and every other exposed bit of skin.

Genius!

Pandemic!

I have my story. Well, at least I have the beginnings of one. So I’d better go and write the play now. I may regale you with a scene from it in due course, as long as you promise not to become emotionally involved with any of the characters.

Today I am thinking about Birthdays? Why? Because my youngest son officially becomes an adult today. Blake is 18. We have had a few rough years, he and I. This birthday was one I was afraid might never come.  I was always afraid he would become a statistic, that he might hurt himself.  Blake has bi-polar disorder, and for many years when he was younger, he was out of control. People with mental illness are more prone to hurting themselves or others. Medication was our savior.

I believe when a person is sick that there is medicine to make it better, then you should take it. But because his problem was ADHD and bi-polar disorder, many people thought medicine was bad.  Just the opposite is true. Having the proper medicine gave Blake the chance to grow up, and to learn to control himself. I think many people over look mental illness as a real disease, and think taking meds is a sign of weakness.  I took all kinds of flack for giving him medication and putting him in the hospital when needed.  I spent years fight teachers and special education problems that were not a good fit for him.  Those were rough years.

Now he chooses not to take medicine, but he also hasn’t had a manic episode in a very long time.  He still has more energy than five people. He talks faster than most people think (he got that from me), but he is not the same person he was a few years ago.  He has also learned a lot about self-control and his illness.

What he is going to do with himself in the future I don’t know.  But we made it this far, and he seems to be headed in a good direction.  It’s been a long hard road, and probably it will be again. We are family and we will get through it.

Happy Birthday!!!

I bet you thought I would never post anything here that has to do with art.

This is a sketch of my mabinogi character, if you don’t know what mabinogi is, then read a the post a couple posts down. Yes, I know, I’m obsessed with Mabinogi. But just wait until you see how bad my TWEWY addiction is.

Click for full size. I’ll post the finished product later. It takes me a couple days to draw a full masterpiece. This is what I’ve finished so far.

Bubbles poured, drinks flowed. The dress was gorgeous and so was Adele, the beautiful bride. Tawa Baptist Church witnessed these guys tie the knot, a local church to the happy couple and Gear homestead got the food and drinks moving for their reception. It was a hot sunny day with harsh light, but  remote flash helped us out by using heavy backlighting and soft fill. The wedding party were getting into it and having fun and Thomas and Adele were great subjects to shoot. Relaxed, not too contrived. Friends, family, laughter, and bubbles. A winning formula!

Links
http://www.pcc.govt.nz/A-Z-Services/Gear-Homestead
http://www.tawabaptist.wellington.net.nz/

So… all quiet on the norhern front for a while. Between swine flu (twice!), multiple weddings (none my own), getting engaged, toilet training the cats and helping to organise York Pride, I’ve found little time to keep on top of my updates. I am still here though, still writing and still plodding on with my various endeavours.

I’ve decided that rather than posting each piece of writing as a separate page, I’ll have a tag/category with which to find all my work. Be it poetry, short fiction or random prose of an indeterminate nature, it can now be found in the ‘pieces’ category.

I will upload by back catalogue over time so keep checking back and enjoy.

uPlaya recently caught up with Auddy Award-winner Nancy Casteele while on the road to international songwriter festivals in the southern United States. This Belgium singer and songwriter currently resides in Nashville, but will spend the next year busily traveling across America and Europe for concerts, music festivals, music video shoots, and performances on radio and television, all while writing and recording her next album. As she reminisces about riding her bike to the Conservatory of Kortrijk for evening music classes as an excited 12-year-old, her life-long passion for music seeps through the trained, sweet-as-honey voice …

uPlaya.com: Tell us about the Conservatory.

Nancy Casteele: When I was about 12, I really knew I wanted to make music, so I asked my parents if I could go to the Conservatory. My mom thought it was just something else I wanted to try out and it took me about a year to convince them to let me go. I started taking classes after school – I was in there four nights a week studying music and it was great! I had good results – after the first report came in, my parents could tell that I was serious about it.

uPlaya.com: Describe the moment you knew you would become a musician.

Nancy Casteele: There was absolutely a moment. It was a strange moment, I will never forget it in my life. One day I drove my bike through the little park on the way to a rehearsal for a band I was singing in. I looked at the rehearsal room and it was like an epiphany. It wasn’t just like, ‘I want to be a musician’, it was more like knowing. It’s like I knew that was going to be my future. And so far, so good.

uPlaya.com: What would you say your music is most known for?

Nancy Casteele: The one word that I hear over and over from people in an audience after I perform live is the word “refreshing”. That is how it strikes people.

uPlaya.com: Who/What is your inspiration?

Nancy Casteele: These days my inspiration is my father, whom I lost three years ago … Musically, I have many examples of who inspires me. When I was a little girl, I was crazy about Whitney Houston! These days I love Sting, Norah Jones … my taste in music is very wide. It goes all the way from Santana to Nat King Cole to Billy Holiday to Patsy Cline, and a whole lot in between!

uPlaya.com: Tell me about your most recent song, “All In One You.”

Nancy Casteele: I wrote the song with Craig Carr, who is a wonderful writer. A man I was working with took the song to Warner Brothers in Holland, and Warner Brothers loved it. They said go back and record it and produce it, and I ended up signing a record deal based upon that. They had not even heard me live, it was really that song that got me that record deal. They sent me to Budapest to film a video for the song. It was a great week. I learned so much and the song became the fastest climber of the charts in Holland. It opened many doors in Holland and Belgium, and eventually here because what I did over there helped me here.

uPlaya.com: Your songs have been amazingly successful on the HSS technology – three Platinums – Wow! And now, I am so excited to tell you that “All In One You” has scored an 8.2, so now you’ve got four Platinum Auddys!

Nancy Casteele: Oh wow that’s amazing! That’s awesome, thank you!

uPlaya.com: What can we expect in the future?

Nancy Casteele: Hopefully, a lot of live concerts. I would love to travel in a tour bus – one that I could take my dog with me, of course! I would love to perform live for audiences that know the words to my songs. That’s my hope.

uPlaya.com: Anything else you would like to share with your fans?

Nancy Casteele: I want to say that I feel extremely blessed to do what I do … I’m so lucky to touch people’s hearts somehow with what comes so naturally to me. I just want listeners to know that it’s because of people that have a passion for music and put energy in that passion that we get to do what we do. It’s a beautiful cycle, so thank you all.

Check out the music video for Nancy’s latest, “All In One You”!

In May of 2009 Nancy signed with Huber Entertainment Group in Minneapolis and is recording under the Butterfly Label.

I truly believe the world has gone mad.

We were watching the news last night, and I finally asked my husband to turn it off. I simply could not stand to listen any longer to the inane babbling of so called “experts” spouting off about how much the economy has improved and how many jobs have been saved, etc.

I’m not sure where these people live, but they need a good, healthy dose of reality.

Things have not improved and are not getting better for the vast majority of Americans!

We personally know people who have lost their jobs in the past year, or have already been told they will be laid off within the next few weeks. Where my husband works, 10 people were laid off just this week. We are hoping and praying he will be able to continue working.

This is not green shoots!

Then yesterday, I saw/heard/read where the great “O” held a job summit, because he is apparently clueless as to why things continue to slide downhill despite the continuous printing of fake money to throw at the problem.

Hey Washington – here’s a newsflash for you. Get out of our lives! You have done nothing but exacerbate the problems. We are taxed to death, over-regulated, and tired beyond belief of the stupidity coming from our elected officials.

The geniuses running our country think it’s a grand idea to force people to purchase health insurance or face penalties and fines. People are broke now – let’s tax them further. Do I think healthcare could be run more efficiently, is there waste within the system, and should there be something to help people who cannot get coverage? Yes, I do. However, that does not mean that what we currently have should be trashed. I do not believe people should be penalized if they don’t have insurance. Cramming this mess down our throats is a recipe for disaster, and I keep wondering how much more the American people can and will take.

Money is tight for everybody, yet that is not enough for Washington. They also have the supremely insane cap and trade bill to consider. Raising everyone’s electric bill by double or triple would surely solve our problems, wouldn’t it? They have no qualms zipping around the world in high dollar jets burning up millions of dollars in fuel and dumping more pollution into the air, but heaven forbid a family rake and burn leaves in their yard without a permit, or use two rolls of toilet paper a week. I suppose we can wipe our rears with the spotted owls (or maybe pages from the healthcare bill) when the good stuff is gone.

Some people have lost everything already – their jobs, homes, retirement, any savings they might have had. Our elected officials are so completely out of touch with mainstream America that they can’t begin to fathom what is going on in households across this land. People are having trouble putting food on the table, much less think about how to buy a Christmas gift for their child.

If they had taken the combined TARP and Stimulus packages and divided it up between the families in the U.S., there would have been a huge rebound in the economy. People would’ve actually had money to spend, and employers would’ve been able to hire people to work. Mortgages would’ve been paid, and banks would have plenty of money. (And unlike Washington, I firmly believe people can put their own money to use better than the politicians can.)

I have zero sympathy for career politicians who are blowing through our tax dollars faster than we can produce them, and have no idea what it is like to try to raise a family on $35,000.00 to $40,000.00 a year. They can’t and won’t live like common people do. It’s beneath them, although it is by the sweat of our brows that they live like kings and queens.

Something is frighteningly wrong with the system.

It is not a Democrat or Republican problem. They are equally corrupt and incompetent.

Tell you what. When Congress is willing to take a cut in pay and live like us, go on the same healthcare system they themselves are proposing for us, live in a house equivalent to ours, and try to pay their basic bills (electric, gas, water, etc) on the same salary plus try to feed and clothe their children on said salary, then we might be willing to listen to what they have to say.

Until then – they can lump it. I, for one, am tired of listening to their babble.

They spent three weeks staring at this:

Why do I get the feeling they stared at it, tapped their pencils on their yellow legal pads, picked their noses, flicked it behind their chairs and said “Yup, looks good lets do it.”

Click here for the clear as mud step-by-step breakdown.

Because damn … that’s a lot of stuff, which can be summarized this way:

1. The central government’s a sham.
2. Roughly a dozen warlords each control their little piece of the country, and they all more or less hate each other, don’t even think they’re about to trust the central government, because everyone knows it’s a sham to begin with.
3. Which works on our side, because these factions will never band together to drive us out for good.
4. Economy … what economy?

And finally …

5. We’ve been there for 8 years and still don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on.

The only plan Obama needed to think about was how fast can we get the hell out of there.