Hiya!

If you’ve been reading me a while, you probably also know that I’m mostly a writer and a geek and an amateur musician. You may also know that periodically I like to take pictures on my iPhone.

Up till now I’ve generally posted my pics both on Facebook and on Flickr. I’ve been using the latter site in particular because while I’m active on Facebook, I also want to have a way for people who aren’t on Facebook to actually see what pictures I take.

This has been lovely up till now. The problem, though, is that as of January 2019 Flickr is moving to a model of allowing free accounts only 1,000 pictures and/or videos. My problem: I have over 1,400 photos there.

Now I have two considerations before me:

  1. I don’t quite care enough about Flickr to want to pony up for a Pro account there.
  2. I do actually have my very own web server.

So this is me playing around with using annathepiper.org as a place to archive older photos. Right now I’m using a WordPress plugin called FooGallery, which offers some really nice UI for album-creating and gallery-creating purposes.

I don’t expect this to be high-traffic. If I turn out to be wrong, I’ll have to tweak the gallery functionality accordingly, and/or post significantly smaller pics than what I can pull off my phone. (Because y’all don’t really need to be downloading full 8 megapixel pics off my phone, do you? Though if you like one of my photos and you DO want the full version, hey, that’s what Dropbox is for.)

Anyhow, let’s see how this works.

My very first fiddle lesson!

On Saturday I had the great pleasure of visiting Lisa Ornstein for my very first lesson on the fiddle. And to my amused surprise, I didn’t play a single note on the instrument.
Yet I had a couple of hours of deeply satisfying conversation and instruction! So what did I do if I didn’t actually play anything?
A lot of exactly why I wanted to engage an experienced teacher: i.e., a lot of going over the overall anatomy of the instrument and the bow, to talk about what goes into making them and how they work. And a lot discussion of proper stance, both sitting and standing, and proper ways to hold both the instrument and the bow. I very much wanted to sit down with someone who knew what they were doing to go over this stuff, just because the violin does intimidate me a bit, and taking the time to examine it in detail helps address that problem. If I know something, it becomes less scary!
And as part of trying to make all that discussion stick in my brain, I’m writing it up now for all of you! There will also be pictures!
Continue reading “My very first fiddle lesson!”

Behold the coming of the Hair Shenanigans!

Internets! This past August I promised you that if Faerie Blood cracked 300 sales, I would dye my hair. And now, since that milestone was reached, today I have made good on my promise!

This is the second time I’ve ever had my hair colored, ever, and getting it professionally done was a big change from the one time we did it back in Kentucky with a home coloring kit. That was a weird strawberry blonde color that ultimately didn’t look quite natural on me, but it looked like it should have been natural on somebody. I figure if I’m going to put weird colors on my head, screw it, go with colors you just aren’t going to find in nature. :D

Blue and green were my colors of choice, as those are my two favorite colors, and the stylist agreed that they’d work well with my coloring. I got the work done by Jade at Scream Salon in downtown Seattle–the same woman who does Dara’s vivid fire-engine red. Jade was very amused by the contrast between Dara having a “warm” color and me rocking the “cool” tones, though, you can make a real strong argument for the shades of blue and green we selected being very warm.

I chose to do a few different shades, with highlight-type blocks hiding underneath my actual hair color. This seemed easier on my hair, and also avoids the problem of my roots growing out and therefore losing the color. Plus, having bits of brilliant color lurking in my otherwise blonde hair seemed to fit me well personality-wise. So now, depending on which angle you look at me from, you’ll get different bits of color!

Jade used bleach on the bits of my hair that she colored, and used the second lowest amount necessary just because my hair’s pretty pale to begin with–and I’m starting to go gray in front anyway. Which meant that when the bleaching was done, parts of my hair were lighter than it’s been since I was a little kid! And it also means that the bits of my hair that’ve gone gray in front turned into some neat highlights against the added color. Jade said as well that this is the brightest she’s seen the colors. My hair apparently took to this really well.

This was huge fun, and it’ll be neat to see how the color changes and fades. I may decide to keep doing this, I dunno yet. Paul says that if I do I should totally rock this brilliant dark blue that’s lurking on the right side of my head.

So here’s some of the after shots! This one shows the colors being kind of subtle:

You’d think, looking at that, that I had hardly any color at all. But you’d be WRONG.

And this one’s my favorite. You can see bits of the blue AND the green:

The full set is right over here!

EDITING TO ADD 1/3/2019: I had to move the pics off of Flickr, so now they’re on annathepiper.org. The links in this post have been changed accordingly.

Two more fun pics of me and De Temps Antan

Dara put up a few posts of her own detailing her POV of our adventures in Harrison Hot Springs, including a loverly picspam of various things we looked at. Including a couple of shots off of her camera of me and the boys of De Temps Antan!

I particularly like this one, of my reaction when I got called out for being a double agent for Le Vent du Nord, since I was wearing their T-shirt:

LOL
Quebec Boys are Amused When I Explode from LOL

Go click over to Dara’s post to see the other one, of me and Éric Beaudry, current holder of the title of Anna’s Favorite Bouzouki Player from Quebec!

Look what I got! :)

Y’all remember my and Dara’s friends userinfomaellenkleth and userinfosiestabear, right? The fine ladies with whom Dara and I snagged us an encore from Le Vent du Nord last year? Well, they scored themselves some of the super-fancy deluxe backstage tickets to a Great Big Sea show on the current tour–AND! Because they love me and want me to be happy, they got me a shirt!

SIGNED BY THE B’YS THEMSELVES.

Alert persons may note that this is actually the exact shirt I just bought at the Seattle show this past March. But that’s QUITE OKAY. Because seriously, if you’re handed a shirt signed by the members of Great Big Sea, I am here to tell you that the LAST thing you want to do is wash it. Because it would make the signatures sad. And we can’t have that, now can we? So my belovedest of Daras informs me that there are in fact frames for T-shirts. I will be acquiring this t-shirt one. And in the meantime, please behold the T-shirt signature goodness!

THANK YOU userinfomaellenkleth and userinfosiestabear! <3 I love you too!

Internets, I give you my new author pic

At the day job this afternoon, my team’s having a little party for our lead dev’s birthday! The theme is mustaches, so there are cookies and cupcakes with mustaches decorating them. And they brought in fake mustaches (the box for which was helpfully labelled EMERGENCY MUSTACHES, y’know, for all your whisker-impairment needs) for all of us to wear.

However, nobody said how we were supposed to wear them. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a QA engineer demonstrating ‘boundary testing’!

Mustache Hat
Mustache Hat

Sneak peek: pics of Great Big Sea at the Moore!

The full show writeup is on the way, but for those of you who haven’t already seen me post these pics to the social networks, behold! My first attempt at getting a full shot of pics of the B’ys on my phone!

These were taken from Stage Bob in the second row, so we were pretty darned close to the stage. I was able to only get a small number of good shots, though–most of the songs were too brightly lit from my vantage point to get clear shots, especially given my newbie skill level. I don’t have a very steady hand yet either.

But! I did get several kinda okay shots during “The Mermaid” and one or two on other songs as well. The sparkly thing hanging off of Séan’s mic stand is actually a mobile saying “GBS XX”, which someone gave to the band as a gift before the show! Plus, there are quite a few shots of the crowd immediately around and above me, during the intermission between sets!

You can see all of the pics on my annathepiper.org site!

EDITING TO ADD 1/1/2019: Edited this post to point at the pics on annathepiper.org, as I have moved them from Flickr over to my own site.

Fun with rainbows!

So there I was taking a nap yesterday afternoon before we all scampered off to see Skyfall, when I jolted awake hearing userinfosolarbird charge down the stairs yelling “LOOK OUTSIDE RIGHT NOW!”

Groggily, I did so, and perked up when I saw a rainbow out the library window! Which was lovely and all–except Dara was way more excited than a single rainbow warranted. And I heard her yelling about three of them. So I shook myself awake, stepped out onto the porch, and saw THIS.

That's Some Pot of Gold
That’s Some Pot of Gold

I had never seen a rainbow skewing off at an angle like that–double rainbows, sure, but never a triple configuration like that! So I grabbed the iPad and snapped a whole bunch of pics. This was one of my better ones. Dara, being way better at taking pictures than I am, got even better ones which she posted here and here (Dreamwidth), or if you want the LJ mirrors of the posts, they’re here and here!

Dara reported that Facebook had theorized that the third rainbow was caused by reflecting off of Lake Washington, a theory supported when Cliff Mass, our local weather guru, posted about it here! One of his readers sent in a pic of the rainbows from a different viewpoint, too, so that pic’s flipped around!

So very, very cool. It’s wacky fun like this that recharges my ability to deal with Seattle’s rainy falls and winters. And I swear this is going into a book at some point, because it was a sight full of magic.

OMG, I’m TINY

My sister Sarah just sent around a whole fleet of old pictures of various members of our family, including a couple of very, very, VERY TINY me! Like this one, wherein it is demonstrated that even at a very tiny age, I liked to have books in my lap.

Tiny Anna is Tiny
Tiny Anna is Tiny

And then there’s this one, of me and my mother, circa 1971. She really did look like me. Except with a bigger forehead. I come by my GIGANTIC HEAD honest!

My Mother and Me
My Mother and Me

A very late but AWESOME birthday present

userinfospazzkat has been lamenting to me for the last two months that the present he’d ordered for my birthday was sadly, sadly overdue–but as of tonight, the present finally arrived! And now I can relay to you that the War Against the Piggies has turned PLUSH!

Angry Plushies
Angry Plushies

These are insanely adorable. And I want to build them Lego structures so I can knock them down again with them! Or maybe Jenga blocks! Or Lincoln Logs! :D