Home of the Autographed Cat

Gwnewch y pethau bychain

Questions and Answers

Not many people had anything they wanted to ask me, alas, but I promised answers to those who did, so here they are. Feel free to go back and ask more if you want.

Would you please comment more frequently? It feels like we rarely interact any more.

Yeah, um…*blush* I’ve been really bad about this recently, and I’m working to get better at it. Mostly, I just went through a period where I was really withdrawn, and wrapped up in my own stuff and not really paying enough attention to everything else in my life. I regret that, but I can’t undo it, so all I can do is work to re-establish good habits.

It’s not personal. I sometimes get behind and just don’t catch up, and sometimes I see something I mean to reply to, mark it for later, and then space on it. I’ve even done this with far more important correspondence, to the point that I had someone ask me why I wasn’t answering any of their email, and I blinked in surprise and said “I haven’t?”, then went back and found four consecutive messages I’d failed to actually acknowledge.

Long story short: I’ll try. You remain dear to me.

How did you start making music?

Any day now, I hope to find out… *grin*

I’ve always been interested in music, though I never had any musical training in my younger years. If you left me near a piano, though, I’d sit down and play with the keys, trying to work out the puzzle behind them. I never did learn to play it, although I got pretty good at making a sort of tuneless avant-garde jazz that amused myself, though it likely drove anyone else within earshot insane.

When I was 16, I took money from my first real job over the summer and bought an electric guitar. It was a Rickenbacker 230 Hamburg (six-string solidbody electric), and I got it for a criminal price from a guy who needed the money quickly to buy a keyboard for a gig his band had coming up and was selling his least-used guitar for a fraction of its value. But I never really learned to play it, and didn’t have anyone to teach me. So when I was moving to Georgia, I sold it to help finance the move, and regretted it ever since. I kept telling myself that I’d get around to buying another guitar and actually learn to play it, but I kept putting it off until 1998, when a near-death experience convinced me that the time to get around to the things you want to do is now. I went out and bought Fenris, a Fender 12 string acoustic (the one I still play), and enrolled in a class to get the basics. Since then, I’m largely self taught, though I’ve been looking about for someone to help me get past the plateau I’m on and move up to the next level. At some point, I’d like to also get another electric guitar, and indulge the part of me that always wanted to be a rock star.

Are there any sports that you like to watch?

There are some sports I enjoy a great deal. Alpine skiing and figure skating hold my interest completely during the Winter Olympics, for instance. I was at one time an avid baseball enthusiast, but in recent years I’ve not taken the time to really keep up with it, and since I never watch live TV anymore, the chances I’ll stumble across a game and stop to watch it are remote.

Having said all that, if someone I’m with is really into a sport, I will almost always enjoy watching it WITH them, even if it’s not something I’d necessarily watch on my own. I have very fond memories of watching World Cup soccer with elgecko, or cricket with fleetfootmike. There’s something wonderfully communal about sport, and, when you think about it, that’s really the whole point of being a fan of something; being part of a larger community of people who share that enthusiasm. I might find myself more into a sport if there was someone nearby in my life who was also enthusiastic.

(I recently did attend a baseball game; I got tickets from my employer in a drawing, and took kitanzi. It was a great deal of fun, though I probably enjoyed it rather a bit more than she did.)

If anyone still wants to ask something, the link is at the top. (Or you can comment here, but I’m not screening replies on this entry. *grin*)

Amusing Out of Context Note

This morning at work, I was scanning through our tickets report to see if there were any open issues of interest to me, and the following notation on one of the workorders made me giggle uncontrollably for reasons that would probably not immediately make sense to anyone else in the office. A co-worker, indicating he was going to contact a customer to coordinate work on his cable modem plant, wrote:

“I am going to be getting with Charlie on MTA configs and upgrades later today.”

Will he ever return?

Oh, The Places You’ve Lived!

As a reminder, I’m still taking questions in this previous post. Help me generate content! Ask me impertinent things! You know you want to.

But for the moment, here’s the latest dance craze: where was I living during each of the last few census periods:

1971
I was nine months old, and quite likely living in a house somewhere in Williamston with my mom, and probably my dad. I don’t actually know when they split, as it predates my conscious memory.

1981
We were living in a house outside of Williamston on Wildcat Road (which may at that point in time still officially been “Rural Route 4”. There were only a few houses right there, and we were surrounded by fields and forest. Due to the vacant lot next to our house, I had what amounted to an enormous yard. There was an enormous outbuilding behind our house that I turned into my personal domain. It was a great place to be eleven years old.

1991
I was living in Athens, Georgia with stars_and_magic, in a 2BR duplex on Ramble Hills Way. Ramble Hills was a square circle, on which we were in a back corner, and they’d obviously planned to add a second block, because there was a dirt road that ran from our corner several hundred yards, across, and then back to connect with the opposite corner. On either side of the dirt road was forest, and blackberry brambles ran all along the edge of the woods. We made homemade blackberry cobbler a lot.

2001
I was living in a 2BR townhouse in Norcross, Georgia, with stars_and_magic, on Weyden Court. We had moved here after our previous apartment building burned down. There was an enormous basement, and a reasonable amount of backyard, including a largish empty field nearby. Toward the end of the year, K. and I split up, and I moved in with telynor for a few months before getting my own apartment.

2011
Living in an apartment on Windward Place in Alpharetta with kitanzi. We’re having a housefilk on Saturday, so everyone come on over. 🙂

Question time!

Meme vectored from tigerbright:

Apparently, March is question month. If you’d like to ask me a
question, I’ll do my best to answer, either truthfully or not. I
reserve the right to answer in private or a filtered post if I think
that’s fitting, and any lies will be bolded. Comments to this post are
screened.

Since replying to comments means unscreening them, I’ll reply in a
separate post later today or tomorrow unless you say in your comment that I can
unscreen.

(Meme text reproduced verbatim, but I’ll add that I’ll answer almost any question truthfully.)

Whatever Happened To The Best New Artist

In a thread over on Facebook, one of my friends was lamenting that alt-rock darlings Mumford and Sons (who I think are awesome) didn’t win the Best New Artist Grammy, and complaining she’d never even heard of the winner, Esperanza Spalding. I commented that while I’d have been happy to see Mumford take the prize, it’s no crime for Spalding to win, because she’s utterly amazing, and encouraged her to check Spalding out before dismissing her.

Someone else in the thread replied, “It’s probably just as well. The Best New Artist Grammy is the Kiss of Deathâ„¢ for your career.”

Now, that’s received wisdom. Everyone knows its true. Win Best New Artist, and collect your free ticket to Obscurityville. And it struck me to wonder, is it true? I mean, everyone KNOWS that it’s true, but is it, you know, factually true?

So, in one of those flashes of inspiration that always seem like a good idea at the time, I decided to find out.

Below the cut, you will find my exhaustively researched (read: I just spent the last three and a half hours on Wikipedia) report on every winner of the Best New Artist Grammy since the establishment of the award in 1959, with an eye towards determining if, in fact, the myth of career-destroying doom was justified.

QOTD

“Human beings took our animal need for palatable food … and turned it into chocolate souffles with salted caramel cream. We took our ability to co-operate as a social species … and turned it into craft circles and bowling leagues and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We took our capacity to make and use tools … and turned it into the Apollo moon landing. We took our uniquely precise ability to communicate through language … and turned it into King Lear.

None of these things are necessary for survival and reproduction. That is exactly what makes them so splendid. When we take our basic evolutionary wiring and transform it into something far beyond any prosaic matters of survival and reproduction … that’s when humanity is at its best. That’s when we show ourselves to be capable of creating meaning and joy, for ourselves and for one another. That’s when we’re most uniquely human.

And the same is true for sex. Human beings have a deep, hard-wired urge to replicate our DNA, instilled in us by millions of years of evolution. And we’ve turned it into an intense and delightful form of communication, intimacy, creativity, community, personal expression, transcendence, joy, pleasure, and love. Regardless of whether any DNA gets replicated in the process.

Why should we see this as sinful? What makes this any different from chocolate souffles and King Lear?”
–Greta Christina

(via Sex Is Not The Enemy)

Shameless reminder…

Jut a few more days to leave me a valentine.

My Valentinr - autographedcat
Get your own valentinr

100 Truths

I’m swiping this from Heather M. elsewhere on the net, just because you can never have too many facts about me.

100 Truths about me…

RULES: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 100 Truths about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. Tagged means “I’m interested in knowing what are your 100 truths”.

It’s that time of year again

So do feel free to leave me a valentine, if you’re inclined to do so.

My Valentinr - autographedcat
Get your own valentinr

A moment of spring in the dead of winter

Often, people who live in other parts of the country who are planning to attend Gafilk for the first time will innocently ask me: “So, what kind of weather should I expect?”

My typical answer is: “I have no idea.”

This isn’t because I’ve not been here long enough to know the trends. I’ve lived in north Georgia, for better or for worse, for the last 20 years. The problem is that Georgia loses its little weather mind in the winter.

Three weeks ago, Atlanta was hit with a snowstorm that left us paralysed for nearly a week, causing Gafilk to essentially be a 4 day con for many people. Today, it is bright and clear and 70F (21C) outside. It won’t last, but it’s absolutely gorgeous outside.

Taking advantage of the sudden moment of spring, kitanzi and I walked down to the CVS to pick up a prescription I had to get. It’s almost exactly a mile from here to there, with just enough incline to make it interesting. Along the way, we saw a hawk making lazy circles on an updraft across the street from where we were walking. It was just too gorgeous a day to spend all of it inside.

It’s been a pretty lazy weekend, otherwise. Went to the gym yesterday because I didn’t go on Friday, and did a bit of shopping for necessary clothing, but otherwise, there’s not much to report.

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