For example, last night’s concert began with Schubert, included some Brahms and Wagner, and ended with… a Wizard of Oz medley. WTF?

Anyway, last night’s concert was the first time I’ve ever been able to shoot video of it. And of course, I youtube’d it so I could showcase my precious snowflake If you listen very carefully during the Scarecrow’s theme in the Oz medley, you can hear the kidlet’s clarinet. Briefly.

Why the hell would NPR want to interview me? Good question. Luck of the Google search NPR has a series of features called In Character where they explore “indelible American characters” in-depth. One character they will be exploring is Jack Bauer. Woohoo! One Google search later and Pam found my 24 fansite, 24addict.com. She emailed, asked if she could chat with me, I said, “Let me think about it.” Just kidding, I actually said, “…” and blinked a lot before my brain started working again and I said, “Umm, yes please ”

So sometime in March, I’ll be babbling like a squeeing fangirl about the virtues of Jack Bauer And the best part of the whole experience for me is getting a tiny taste of what it feels like to be the interviewee. It was way cool. Many thanks to Pam Fessler for the opportunity and to Brett Erickson for coming down to record it all. I had fun once I got over the nerves.

So now when I publish my book and head off to do book tours, I’ll be totally prepared

I was looking this old photograph yesterday of the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. It’s a great photo. But it got me thinking about the one in 1989 that hit SF. So I did a little ficlet on it, which I knocked out in about 10 minutes, and a few minutes later, I noticed that it was showing up as the featured story on ficlets.com. That was a pleasant surprise

During that earthquake, I was working at a video store in Marina, CA which is a couple hours south of SF on Monterey Bay. My sister was hanging out with our neighbours, and my parents were at Candlestick up in the city to see the World Series. Then the quake hit.

What I couldn’t fit into the ficlet is that when the first shock passed, my boss and I scrambled through the debris of the store checking on any customers. I had to step into the little section o’ porn to make sure no one had been knocked out by When Larry Ate Sally, and then aftershocks started to hit us.

We didn’t think it was safe to stay in the store so we ran outside – directly underneath the cement overhang that was over the sidewalk (the store was in a strip mall.) Not too clever eh? But it did not come crashing down on us. I do remember, the waterbed sensation then. Felt like the earth was rolling. I watched my car rock like it was trying to do the Wave. It was surreal as hell.

That’s all I remember until I got home. I don’t remember if I went back into the store, I don’t even remember how I got home. All I remember was trying to find my sister and when we were reunited we spent frantic hours trying to contact the G’s back here in GI but could not get through. I heard rumours about the damage in SF, especially that the Bay Bridge had collapsed which scared me bigtime. My parents had to travel on that to get home. We had no idea where they were, if they were safe or if they were on their way to the bottom of San Francisco Bay.

In the end, they arrived home, safe and sound. But it took them around 12 hours or so to do it. But we were all okay, everyone we loved was okay, our house was okay. We were very lucky.

The aftermath was pretty devastating around us. The whole of Monterey seemed to be spared and I found out later it was because much of it sits on a granite base which had absorbed much of the shock. But the further up the coast you went, towards Santa Cruz, or the further inland, and it was a different story. Once-proud houses collapsed into haphazard zigzags of wood and glass. Whole buildings imploded. Bridges fell. A lot of people died.

I really hope that’s the only natural disaster I have to go through. Then again, I live in Tornado Alley so the chances of that are slim.

I messed with it last night trying to get a shot of Shannon’s hands as she played her guitar but the light in my room is so ambient (just like I like it) that she either came out paler than pale with the flash, or bright orange without it. I might try again in sunlight or something.

The pic above is just this little wire fiddly toy I mess with at my desk when I’m waiting for programs or pages to load on the comp. But this is fun! I might see if it would work with the photo option on my videocamera too. It has a zoom and my digital cam does not (told you, crappy camera. Want a better one.)

Here’s a couple others I did with a mucho better camera. This is Sid the Wily Gnome who guards my monitor (Ok so I like tacky gnomes. I just don’t let my daughter anywhere near them):

Like this clock:

Which opens up into a jewelry box:

Originally, it sold for $40 I think. Guess how much I picked it up for. Go on, guess. Ok I’ll tell you: $7. Seven measly bucks. I think that might be the best bargain for something I didn’t really need EVAR! It’s pretty shiny though. I love it.

Last night, Shannon and I went to see Chelsea Clinton speak at the local HoJo. Nebraska is holding its first Democratic Caucuses this weekend so Barack and Clinton are paying attention to us. Granted Barack actually came to us and spoke in Omaha yesterday and Hillary sent her daughter. I’m not really fussed about that. Some people feel slighted but I didn’t.

I sort of had to twist Shannon’s arm a bit to get her to come with me to see Chelsea but after it was over, she actually thanked me for bringing her. She was impressed by Chelsea, as was I. The woman is well-spoken and incredibly well-informed about her mother’s policies. I’m so glad I went.

I’m still on the fence, but my feet are dangling on Hillary’s side.

I got hit with a whopper of a migraine on Saturday. Woke up with the bastard and it maintained a steady drumbeat against my skull all day. When it finally began to ease up I was left feeling weak and sort of fevery. At least, I think I had a slight fever. My thermometer is broken. All I know is I went from chills to sweating, all day yesterday and I had zero energy to do anything.

So now it’s Monday and in waking up 45 minutes before the damn alarm I discover that I’m still not feeling “right.” I feel weird. So I’m staying home from work and I intend to bury myself under the covers and read/sleep and only get up to make tea. Unfortunately, the kidlet has also woken up this morning to find she’s not feeling so hot either. So she’s staying home as well and we get to be whiny and irritating together.

So why am I blogging instead of snuggling up under the aforementioned blankies? Because I’m killing time. I can’t call her school to excuse her absence for another 45 minutes and I know if I crawl into bed I will fall asleep. I can’t believe they don’t have a messaging system set up. That’s just irritating.

I took the footage thinking that we would probably do a story on the storm in the morning newscast and it would be nice to have some b-roll. And it did get used, which was cool since it’s the first time I shot video for the cast AND I used my little pink digicam to do it.

Then I went to lunch. I stepped outside, prepared to do battle with the high wind and blowing snow only to be blinded by clear blue, sunny skies. Le sigh. It’s still cold and windy, but it’s just weird to go from the wicked weather this morning to calm and sunny a few hours later.

If anyone out there on the Tubes has suggestions for a decent (and by decent I mean free) video converter that will convert .asf files into .mov files, can you email me or leave a comment or something? Or if you know why a Sony DXG 506v digicam doesn’t seem to come with the right codecs to display video shot in .mov format, can you let me in on the secret? I’ve googled til I can google no more and can’t figure out the issue and it’s the only thing about my little cam that pisses me off.

Shan’s never really expressed an interest in wanting to learn how to makes this noise until today when her French teacher teased her about her inability to roll her R’s. Ever since she showed up at work after school and told me she had been sitting in my breakroom attempting to do it it’s been nothing but rrrrrrrrrr’s all evening. My tongue is numb. But, it’s been hiLARIOUS because both of us were rrrrrrr-ing all around The Walmart as we shopped and on the ride home.

If you can’t imagine what we may have sounded like as we browsed the frozen food section, please play this MP3 about 150 times in a row (Just do my bandwidth a favour and right-click on the link and save-as to your desktop, kthxbye)

That was 3 hours ago. She’s currently out in the living room watching Family Guy and making that weird little chirp like she’s trying to jumpstart her tongue. It’s most amusing

Feel free to right-click and save as:

Captain John Mix

I am actually playing with a tune that *doesn’t* have any audio clips in it, but it’s slow-going. I think it’s more fun (for me anyway) to work in the clips.