So yeah, Saturday in Vancouver has failed to suck. Made it safely up here to Chez cow, with hardly any wait time at all at the border. And today, we went out on various and sundry shopping sorts of excursions.
cow took solarbird and spazzkat and me over to the nearby HMV–which proved to be a way more fruitful visit this time around than on the two previous visits, because this time I actually scored an album by La Bottine Souriante! Also picked up one by the Punters, who I’ve been meaning to listen to anyway by way of introducing myself to more Newfoundland music; plus, this album has the magic words “Produced by Alan Doyle” on the back, so I’m figuring that’s a strong recommendation right there. Lastly, got one by the Rankins, since I like their track on Fire in the Kitchen.
Relatedly, cow also gave Dara and me a copy of hsifyppah‘s very first filk CD, Steel Cage Match. Looking forward to listening to this, in no small part because “I Fell Asleep (Reading the Silmarillion)” made me LOL, and also, I want to hear “Livejournal Shanty” too.
And, cow snagged me a couple of loaner copies of La Bottine Souriante albums from the Vancouver Public Library as well. These shall have to stand me until I can acquire actual copies of these albums–which I have now ordered from Amazon, since apparently Amazon’s actually stocked up on La Bottine Souriante a lot since the last time I looked. To wit, bitchin’. Or should that be bitchin-ez moi?
Anyway, aside from all this musical love, we stopped in at Little Sister’s, which is Vancouver’s oldest queer bookstore. Which was kind of neat. I walked out with a novel called Salt Fish Girl which sounded interesting to me and SFnal (it mentions shapechanging and biotechnology), even though it doesn’t call itself a science fiction novel. I told the dude at the counter that I was a bit surprised that they didn’t have Tanya Huff in their (teeny) fantasy section, given that she’s a queer Canadian author and that she has a whole trilogy of books starring a queer boy, set in Vancouver even! He thought that was cool, so who knows, maybe they’ll stock ’em. Also, they had a big black Labrador-lookin’ doggie who reminded me a lot of Sheriff, the doggie who lives along the goat trail.
OH OH OH, also, they had a magazine on the rack there with a cover blurb about an interview with the actress Alex Hedison. Wait a minute, I thought, Hedison? She did look suspiciously familiar, so I thumbed into the zine to check the interview–and yep, that there was the daughter of David Hedison, my very own Captain Crane from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. And she’s not only queer, she’s the former partner of Ellen DeGeneres! That’s some pretty high-profile queer there.
And after that, cow went back to his place while Dara and Paul and I proceeded to hop on the bus and head down to the Asian-heavy community in Richmond, where they have a couple of largish Japanese/Chinese/Asian-friendly shopping mails. That was neat. Quite a bit of flashbacks to Japan there what with the layout of the stores and the sorts of stuff they sold. We snagged a couple of gifts for folks, had tasty lunch and later on tasty yogurt, and eventually staggered back to Chez cow for zzz’s.
We’ll be heading to Steamworks for tasty food in a little bit, and to meet up with gerimaple and possibly also elfmaid. Which should be a fine closer to a pretty fine day indeed.
Well, my web page seems to finally be properly back online, or at least in terms of being accessible on the web. I’m still having to clear up some issues left over from the hack attack–pulling a lot of index files out of backup to replace the versions that got hacked. I will also be taking this opportunity to straighten up some stuff that’s out of date anyway, and doing my best to improve the mirror dump over to my alternate site on drizzle.com. So if y’all see anything broken, this’ll be why.
In the meantime, I want to note one small change that I did make to the mirror site while the main site was down, and that was adding the link for Aaron Heinig’s site Blissful Bamboo Flutes to the Music page. More updates as they happen!
A new link added to my Music page: Man Wolf’s Flutes, courtesy of the owner of said site kindly contacting me by email to tell me he liked my page. He’s in Texas, and he makes flutes. Check him out. :)
Okay folks — it’s a whole year (or two, depending on who’s counting) too late to be my New Millennium webpage. But well hey. I got the urge to change things around here again, get rid of a lot of content I won’t be updating anymore, move some stuff up a level in order to make it easier to find, give the place a whole new graphical scheme, and fix a whole bunch of things that were broken.
In honor of all of these changes I have bought myself my very own shiny new domain name, which points to this place now: www.annathepiper.org. My usual address will still get here, of course, but I always rather wanted my own domain name, too. It’s up and running, everybody, so please feel free to use it in your bookmarks. Here’s the nitty gritty on everything I’ve changed around, though:
Almost all of my MUSH character pages have been removed, since I am no longer playing AetherMUSH. Instead, I have set up a directory for old characters in my MUSH section, and have pages summarizing my various alts on various MUSHes there that I’ve played over the years. The exception is old characters from Two Moons MUSH, which are still chronicled in detail in the Two Moons section of the site.
All my old logs are still up and available to be read, though. All logs not from Two Moons live in the MUSH section now, in the old logs section. I will still periodically update this part of my page as time and whim dictate, since I do still have a bunch of unedited logs I haven’t gotten around to posting, but the priority on this has gone down. Old logs pertaining to Two Moons MUSH as well as the set of logs for the only active roleplay I’m doing right now, which is for the Seafarers group of sailors on that game, can be found in the Two Moons section.
My small pages for Great Big Sea and 30 Odd Foot of Grunts have been moved up a level out of the Music section, to make finding them easier.
Speaking of music, I’ve also added a formal top-level link for the section of my site devoted to my jamming group, Three Good Measures.
Y’know those little blurbs on the main index, or up at the top of my sub-pages, that change when you roll your pointer over the menu graphics? Well, those weren’t ever centered right in Netscape, and they weren’t showing up at all on Opera, both of which rather drove me batty. So I did a lot of restructuring of stuff under the hood to eliminate those problems, and I should be looking okay on all three of those browsers now (or at least, up through IE 6, Opera 6, and Netscape 4.79; I haven’t tested against Netscape 6.x, because I haven’t bothered to actually install it on my personal machine. Anybody out there use Netscape 6.x and wanna tell me if I look okay on that browser, drop me a line).
Pretty much all the other top-level pages have been updated in some form or other, links checked for validity and such. And the Sitemap has been duly updated to reflect the overall changed status of the site. If you need to find something, that remains the best place to look.
I’ve tested the updated site on IE 5.5, Netscape 4.79, and Opera 6, at resolutions 1024×768, 800×600, and 640×480. If you’re using a different browser or a different resolution and see anything that looks broken, or, for that matter, if you see anything that looks broken in general, drop me a line and let me know!
And I hope y’all like the redecorating I’ve done around here!
EDITING TO ADD 11/3/2019: Removed the link off of 30 Odd Foot of Grunts in the third bullet point in the list in this post, because that page is no longer active.
Added a new link for Stellar Flutes to my Music page — and a whole bunch of new Great Big Sea pictures to my Great Big Sea pictures page, for your Singin’ Newfoundlander Ogling pleasure.
Updated Janis Neville’s link on my Kith & Kin page; moved Star Wars MUSH to the section of Former MUSHes on my main MUSH page; moved Julian to the Old Characters page as I retired him on 10/31/01, and moved his Logs link to the Old RP Logs page as well; updated my picture on my Bio page (four words: “Anna the Vampire Slayer”). And I’ve updated my Music page — made a separate page for my favorite artists and bands, another separate page for music I have written, and a new page listing each and every one of my musical instruments. Because I CAN! The Sitemap has been updated accordingly.
cow