Supremely awesome people, reprise

That surprise that Dejah promised me if I showed up for this week’s session turned out to be THIS! If pictures are worth a thousand words, this one is worth at least an entire novella.

This is What an Awesome Band Looks Like
This is What an Awesome Band Looks Like

This was in fact the very poster I had given to Dejah myself, one of the extras sent to me by Susan! You guys, Dejah gave up her poster just so she could get it signed for me. How awesome is this? “Pour ANNA!” (heart) And aside from me blurring out Réjean Brunet’s signature a bit because it was actually legible (and I therefore was NOT going to put that publicly online), what you see here is exactly what I got.
I got a little happyteary at that. I may have played only like FIVE NOTES at that session, because I’m still pretty much in Absorb the Musical Ambience mode, but I’m here to tell you, Internets: BEST. SESSION. EVER. I gave Dejah a big thank-you hug. And after the session was over, I promptly came home and wrote all four of these boys a thank-you message on Facebook. In French.
I Keep This Up, I Might Actually Become Bilingual
I Keep This Up, I Might Actually Become Bilingual

We still don’t know why the car conked out on us–and and went down and fetched it from Kelso yesterday, since the mechanics there weren’t able to diagnose a proper fixable problem for us. I’m still surly at that car for making me miss the concert.
But getting this poster went a long, long, LONG way to making it all okay.

Anna and Dara get Canada-married, 3/2/2012

This being Part 2, and the biggest part by far, of my and userinfosolarbird‘s Grand Four Day Weekend of Marriage and Music!

Though that said, it was also actually one of the simplest days of the entire weekend. Here’s the thing, O Internets: if you’ve read Elfquest, you’ll know what I mean when I say that Dara and I got as close as you can get in real life to Recognition, and we went from 0 to lifemates in pretty much no time flat. For us, there’s no particular difference between that and being legally married. This entire affair therefore was a lot more about just reinforcing the legal status as far as Canada (and hopefully soon by extension, the state of Washington) was concerned, as opposed to any real change in status between us as far as we are concerned.

So I hope I won’t disappoint any of you all when I say that this was the most relaxed and groovy wedding ceremony ever! We didn’t dress up, and we didn’t exchange rings–though we probably would have done the latter if Dara didn’t have an issue with rings that keeps her from wearing them (she gets a mild claustrophobia reaction off of them).

Here’s how the whole thing went!

Continue reading “Anna and Dara get Canada-married, 3/2/2012”

Yule comes early!

I would like to issue public thanks to userinfomaellenkleth for the kind gift of a couple of 32GB memory cards, suitable for use in my nook!

This now means that the Nookronomicon is now outfitted with a TON more space. I’m thinking I’m going to put the Read books on the memory card, since access to files on it is noticeably slower than in main memory–but that’s fine since those will be lower priority books. The Read non-B&N books, anyway; I’m not sure if I want to bother to put the B&N books I’ve read there, since I’ve been just marking those as Archived on the device, which automatically removes them, and if I want them back I can just unarchive them. And I’ve got local copies on my computer.

This should be nifty, though! And now clearly I need LOTS MORE BOOKS to fill out all this nifty space. :D

Thanks very much, userinfomaellenkleth!

Most awesome fiddle player of the week

Y’all remember I was gushing over “Lanlaire” by Le Vent du Nord, right, and in particular over this video of it?
That vid was super-handy in letting me figure out a few things about the song. As I’d posted before, I was able to follow the melody on my piccolo and from there figured out what key it was in. Seeing Simon Beaudry’s guitar in the vid let me figure out what set of chords he was using–i.e., that he’s got to be using D minor chords if he’s capoed on 5. (Me, I punted to E minor chords capoed on 3, which are a lot easier for me; D minor is still giving me issues if I try to play chords at any given speed.)
What I could not figure out from the video, however, is what fiddle player Olivier Demers is playing on the bridge and on the outro; he’s playing too fast for me to follow. I tried letting TunePal on my iPad listen to the recording, and it had no idea what the tune was–which is not terribly surprising, since TunePal, helpful though it is, is fairly scattershot about how well it picks up on stuff.
Turns out though that there’s a reason it had no idea what that tune was.
See, I sorta kinda emailed M. Demers and asked him about the tune. *^_^*;; The LVN boys have email links on their bio pages on their site, so I looked at Olivier’s page on Saturday, went .oO (what the hell) to myself, and clickied! Told the gentleman I was a newbie session player and a new LVN fan, and asked if he could identify the tune for me so I could maybe look it up online and learn it. (Because it’s either that or I try to transcribe it, and then learn it that way, which’ll take me a lot longer. Because I can’t play by ear well enough to try to pick out a tune without the intermediate step of transcribing it out first.)
He emailed me back! And said he actually wrote the tune himself for the song! And said he’d send me the sheet music later since he didn’t have it on that computer!
I’ve heard from a couple different directions now (hiya, !) that the LVN boys are sweethearts, and this is clear proof. Olivier Demers for me is now this week’s most awesome fiddle player! I’m going to be fangirlishly squeeing about this all week, so y’all be warned. And then I’m going to see if I actually can transcribe the tune, because it’ll be an amusing exercise, if sheet music actually shows up in my inbox, to compare against it and see if I can get it right!
*squee!*

And oh yes, belated thanks!

It’s now a week after the fact, but I must give some public thanks to everybody who wished me such nice birthday wishes last weekend–whether on LJ, DW, Facebook, face-to-face, or what. In particular:

  • Thank you, userinfojennygriffee, for the lovely card!
  • Props to userinfotechnoshaman for getting me a signed copy of this, and a card as well!
  • Big smiles over to userinfojanne who actually hand-made me a book cover, with a suspiciously familiar face cross-stitched onto the front. How sweet was this? Handmade gift, people! <3
  • userinfomamishka knows me very, very, VERY well and sent me this awesome Han Solo shirt.
  • Extra big smiles to my beloved userinfosolarbird for the new instrument rack where the General, Rags, and my bouzouki Spring are all now residing! There’s room on it for my octave mandolin Autumn as well, although Autumn’s getting more play time at Dara’s hands these days.

This Guy Looks Familiar
This Guy Looks Familiar

My birthday technically isn’t even over yet, as userinfospazzkat‘s present is still pending! It’s been late showing up on the mail, although he informs me that he has been charged for it, so hopefully Whatever It Is will show up soon. I have my suspicions, and am dying to see if I am correct.

Thanks much to you all! I feel loved. <3