Sewing and other things

Another lovely day of sewing and other odd tasks. I know that I needed another bag. The one that I have is about to fall apart. There was no way around this. The other rub is that the young kids that joined this Brigade are now older and can do more stuff. And the cadet bags most of them are using are not big enough for the equipment they now must use. On the up side it does mean they are all progressing. On the down side it is work I have to do.

I picked up the canvas webbing and buckles that are needed for the bags. I am still very short on snaps. So that means a trip to the lovely Parker Button Company in the morning. The ladies there are nice and very tolerant of my odd sewing needs. Frankly the folk at Jo Ann’s are getting up my nose. There is one lady who is stunned every time I go in that I can sew. I mean come on. She does not have to remember me personally, still, she could pretend I am not a Martian when she sees me.

I should take a picture of my bag and load it on this thing. It looks just like the ones from before. I am fairly proud of the bags we are using. In the last couple years the only think that had changed is the handle so they are more comfortable on the shoulder.

I have taken on another project now that I have complete a few. I am the President of my Choir this year. It is an administrative position and I have no creative control over the choir. So there is not chance I will destroy it. I have decided to keep a blog about the choir. I am messing around with the format of it. I will put a link up to it when I like it.

On the creative end of the choir thing I am learning a nice and simple song that I might be the lead on. It is entitle God is my Everything. You can Google it. I am not sure if I am going to put up my performance of the song. We do record the services but for the interweb I would have to have someone take a video of what I am doing. Well maybe one of the sempi could do that during the service. I will have to think about that.

Back to the choir blog. I have been writing out the entries one day and going over them the next. The hope is that they will be more coherent than my entries here. Well that is the hope anyway. Also I will be putting up the songs we are going to sing and a vid from youtube if there is one. I am also sure there will be some of my ramblings on about Gospel Music.

Hmmmmmmmm I am sure there is something that I am forgetting. I will have to ramble about that at a later time. Be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice.

On bus surrounded by college girls,too much perfume. Smell will improve when i puke on them

More Book Stuff

The Last Great General is plugging along. In this book there are basically five main characters. And four of them interact with each other.

There is Evangeline Booth who is 12 at this point. She as been joined with a highly advanced war ship and is wicked smart and has extra human abilities. He best friend is Yamato Yukawa who is the computer for another powerful war ships. She has a physical android bady that makes her look like a teen age girl. There is also Commissioner Samuel Logan Brengle who was a real person. He was a Prophet in The Salvation Army. And much of what the Salvos are today is thanks to his writings. He and the two girls are thrown into the future where they have to solve a temporal problem. The other character in this group is Admiral McRandal who is about to be installed as the President of a new United States. It is his history that disappears.

Added to this mix is Catherine Mason a Salvation Army officer from the future who commanded on the salvo’s ships that can travel through time. She started off the story with Evangeline, Yamato and Brengle. When they get thrown into the future she is separated from them. In the first book her companion is the hologram from her ship. I have written about Mason and the relationship she has with her hologram. So I am having no trouble with that.

The problem that I am having is with Brengle and the girls. Brengle is much older than Evangeline but his life was lived in the past. He is the one that gives us perspective on what is happening in the future. on a personal level I think he would try and be some kind of father to Evangeline. Also I would think that a man from the past would have a problem with her only friend being a computer. He is never fully comfortable with Mason who is not entirely Human. So how would he feel about a super smart kid in charge of a powerful warship?

On the up side I have given myself a break on the accents. Evangeline, Brengle and McRnadal are Americans. Yamato is a computer that speaks perfect English. The only dialect I have to deal with is Mason and I am fairly certain I have her down.

Well it is something that I will have to slog through. be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice.

No Magic in Pittsburgh

There is no magic in Pittsburgh. I remember lamenting last year that there was no real juggling group in the city. And then after looking around we found the rather nice group at CMU. There are basically two groups that have magic clubs. There is the International Brotherhood of Magician (IBM) and Society of American Magicians (SAM). Neither group appear to have a strong club in Pittsburgh. One did have a club that met and then their meeting place fell apart. I do not know if they are meeting anymore. The other I went to a meeting in the fall that was advertised and no one showed up. So either that club fell apart or they skipped a meeting and did not retract their internet ads. Either way it does not look good for either one of them

On top of that I am certain that neither have any young membership. We had this fight with the COAI last year and I do not look forward to having it with the SAMs or IBM. So what are we supposed to do. I know none of the colleges have anything. Historically this is not something that is done by college kids. It looks like this may be something that we will have to pull together ourselves.

Maybe we could do something with the COAI. We could try and do a monthly meeting. The only draw back is that I do not know how many of them are into magic. I know the President is but he is the only one that I know of.

On the knitting front I am working on a stocking cap just so that I have something to knit. It has been a month or so and I just needed to knit something outside the knitting classes. I may do some truly ugly fair isle just to have something hard to do in the hat. I am sure that what ever this turns out o be there will be a truly ugly pom pom on top of it.

Well that is it from Pittsburgh for the moment. Be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice.

Random Stuff

Today I had the pleasure of working on a French Door. It is nearly a hundred years old and made of nice wood. It was water damaged once upon a time and had to be restained. The good folks at Miller Hardware in Mt. Oliver helped me out with the color and it came out rather nice. Now it matches the rest of the room that has it’s original wood work.

On other fronts I am still working on the clown bags. I have a couple full size apparatus bags and a couple apprentice bags that need made. The shoulder straps on these things are a killer to make. They are heavily padded and have a couple pockets and a tie down for rings. One end of the handle also has to be anchored into the Juggling Baton Pocket. So it is a tricky bit of sewing with the machine. Still, it is really worth it. We are looking at a new apparatus bag that is just a scaled up version of the Apprentice bag. It is easier to make and does not have a separate juggling baton pocket. Some of our folks think it has a neater look.

Myself I am still partial to the ones like mine. Frankly if I were not the one making them I think we would have switched to the newer kind of bag. I do hope that people in my troupe are not sticking with the old style bag just to keep me happy. Walk will be the first person in our group with the new style Apparatus Bag. I know that he would not carry a bag that he did not like to spare my feelings and yearning for tradition. Either way I have probably all ready put too much thought into this.

The juggling at CMU has started up again. It looks as if their weekly meeting is going to go to Tuesdays. We will have to miss this one because it will conflict with our practice at Second Baptist. On the up side they are still having Sunday at 3:00 PM that fits nicely into our schedule. Over the fall and early winter this became a nice fellowship for the jugglers in our Brigade. I am also certain that it is behind the new interest in juggling with in our group. I knew that seeing people who could really juggle would spark interest. Now if only we could find a functioning magic group in the area.

Bored on the bus. Thought I would share the boredom

Working my way home from chior. Snow little Bus slow

A r e y o u i n P i t t s b u r g h

@ m o o n k a n a : i t i s s n o w i n g . .&e . ( y u k i d a . .&e . ) i t i s s n o w i n g h e r e a s .

It's snowin in Pittsburgh. This is a mes 4 people in Florida

Glass half empty

@neiltyson: In 5-billion yrs the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day. - astrophysts gl

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People Who Think I am Weird or Everyone Besides Me.

It is odd how people view you. Something that you are doing that is perfectly rational to you appears very weird to people that are looking at you. For those that do not know me personally I have what some might thing are some strange habits.

For one I am working on a series of books that it looks like I will never write or publish. I have spent years researching the plots and developing the characters. I stated doing this when I was a kid. Those books were centered around a Character McRandal and they were written in blue composition books. There are about thirty of those composition books and they are locked away in storage. Everything that is in them is not on my computer. Actually this is the seventh computer that that data that started off on five and quarter inch floppy disks no resides. It is also on a data card that is smaller than a dime. Somewhere with the blue composition books is a shoe box full of those floppy disks. Actually it is two shoe boxes duct taped together so they are large enough for those disks. I am sure those disks are no longer any good. Well they might be but I do not have a computer that can read them.

Anyway for the last ten years I have been concentrating on some character that were secondary character in the McRandal stories. I have come to find them more interesting for many reasons. Their stories are in red composition books. They are not locked away because I have not entered all their data into this computer. In fact if any of those stories are going to be published it will probably be from the red notebooks.

Well that is not the thing that had to do with public perceptions. Someone on the bus noticed that I was writing in one of these composition books. They complained about my hand writing. They went on to say that they could not read it. I told them it is in a secret code so that no one could read what I was writing. In reality since my right hand was operated on my lousy hand writing has been even worse. And since I communicate via email I have not really taken the time to try and improve it.

This person then went on to state that I was writing on top of a computer. Why wasn’t I typing it into the computer since my hand writing is so bad. I told them it is top secret and that someone would have to kill them if I told them the reason.

I then put in my ear buds and started listening to music because I did not want to continue the conversation. Also I did not want to have to be rude to some that was being really rude already. Still, it is odd what people think of when they look at you.

I am also not really one for new year’s resolutions. If I think of something I have to change I usually try and change it while I am thinking of it. Well over Christmas I was thinking that I use a great deal of paper. I have shelves of red notebooks scraps of ideas for the clown text book and many other things. Well I decided to start using less paper. The note book computer that I am now using is light enough that I can carry it around every where. Also I have found one that I can adjust the screen to a brightness that does not annoy me over many long hours of editing stuff. So I should not longer have to print out the books to edit them. The only thing that I have not been able to give up the red note books. So I am on the bus using a computer as a table top to write something in a book with terrible and writing. Well this computer does have a full sized keyboard and is wider than my last couple note books. So it is just the right size to be used as a table top for a composition book.

On an unrelate3d subject I was just tweeted that Kevin Pollak’s chat show will be on hulu now. I will have to check that out. I always have to down load it. So it might be nice to see it on the hulu.

Be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice.

Eating Chinese Food with a clown from the troupe

Going to practise stilts in Homestead....rain rain go away

Little Tech Support

I am having trouble with my phone. It is a great phone and it does everything that I need it to do and then some. The issue is that I do not know how to do all the function. The instruction are written in a tiny font that you need a microscope to read. In the past when I do not know how to do something I would simply read the instructions and find out. Saldy this thing has it's detailed instruction online in some kind of ap that I cannot work. I have taken it in to the store and they do not know how to fix it.

Shortly after I got this thing one of the young people in the clown troupe showed me how to use the camera on it. Frankly I did not know half the features and cold not read them in the tiny text. So I just did not usethe camera. Now after fifteen minutes of a kid explaining it to me I can get the thing to work rather well. Or at least what I think passes for rather well.

Now I have been tweeting. I have figured out how to get the messages sent to my phone. There are a couple things I have learned through this. Paul Rudd , the Ozzy Foreign Minister, is the chattiest person I follow on twitter. Samuel Jackson does not swear half as much as I would think he does. Well there are other things but they are even less important that the swearing habits of a person I will never meet.

Actually one thing I do like to follow is the news feed from various organization, NYT, BBC and so on. Heck I do not even watch the news any more. I just read about though links on the phone. It is like having a phone that is always up to date. Great stuff.

The only draw back is that the think beeps every time a messag comes in. I have not figured out how to keep it from beeping. If i put it on silent then my phone does not ring. And the gizmo that vibrated in it does not work when it is in my coat pocket. Actually it does work. I just cannot feel it.
So I suppose I need to swallow my pride and go back to the kid in my group that taught me how to use my phone. Well you cannot have everything.

Be Safe out the and keep your stick on the ice.

Pointless Drivel

On one of the local broadcast channals they show several episodes of futurama on the week end. I was looking it up on the wikipedia. Apparently this show was canceled a couple of times. Then it came back on fox a couple of times not it is on the comedy channel. In this episode they have Henry Kissewnger's head in a jar. There is nothing like the K man in a jar.

It does make me wonder what the future will actually be like. WEll I suppose the computer will be better and we will all have robots one day. Homefgully they will ot be alcohol jerks that steal from us. But really how is that any different from the uncles and cousins that we invite to thanksgiving against out wills.

I would like to think that in the future there will be feweer criminals. That would be nice. Maybe the criminals could be put into a vitual world where they steal from each other. The muderes could murder and murder over and over again. They would be happy and content in their woh little lawless world. We would call this magical land Cleveland.

Oh sorry there is already such a place. Well this Cleveland would not have the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Why and the heck is that there anyway. I cannot think of a single famous rock and roller from Cleveland. Heck the only song I can think of about cleveland is about how horrible it is that their river caught on fire. Really it was once so polluted that it caught on fire. And I am from Pitsburgh. WE know about poluting rivers. WEll oddly we have clened up out river and now they are safe to swim in and eat the fish from. I do not know if the same can be said about the Cayahoga River. Well I don't know what the point of any of that way.

Have fun out there and keep your stick on the ice.

Snow

It snowed today in Pittsburgh. There has not been much snow thus far. Today was the first day that we really got enough to cover the ground. It was little more than an inch. It did not even fully cover the grass. Even so it was the closest thing to snow that we have had in a while.

I was waiting for the bud today and there was a snow covered sandwich board sigh. After a few minutes someone came from inside the show and dusted off the sign. It was a sign for iced fruit drinks. If you cannot read your sign because of the snow you might not be selling that many frozen drinks on that day.

Anyway it was a nice brisk day. It was also nice to have an excuse to wear the really scarf. It had been hanging lonely on a hook near my door. Occasionally the cats would try and climb it but that was all of the action that it got.

I continue to work on the books. I have been feverishly working on the first one. I may have the first chapter ready soon. I think I may post it on line or something.

Well that is it for the moment. Be safe out there and keep you stick on the ice.

Blogging

As a younger person one of my great aspiration was to write the great American Novel. Now I do not care so much for that goal. It is not that it would not be nice. It is just that even if one does write it they are often not recognised until after they are dead. So my new goal is to write something that people will read. Namely something that people will buy., Thus I can mke a living doing something that is not that hard. And if enough people like it then I can afford to entertain myself most of the time.

For many years now I have ben trying to figure out what should be in that book. Now I think I know. It is simply a matter of writting it. Still, I am not sure that I am a good enough writter to create something that a bunch of people are going to read. So I think I should make a concerted effort to post on my blog every day. I am not making this a new years resolution. For one it is the 12 and I have only posted once on my blog. So that goal would be out the window. I am looking at it like juggling. I juggle most days. That way I keep up my skills. Do I juggle everyday? Of course not there are days that I am busy or have a lot of stuff to do.

So for the long time readers of my blog there may be more rambling about random stuff than there has been the last couple years. Frankly if you are here reading this then you have already stated you are willing to waste time. So please to continue to waste away, you time that is.

For those that are here looking for someing uplifting or wonderful. You probably should have figured that is not going to happen anytime soon.

Be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice.

High People

Once again I am at the bus stop. I am in the Oakland part of the city so there is wifi to be had. So I am on the internet blogging. I am such a technocrat. Well actually I am pretty far behind the times. I imagine that there are people who jhave been bloggin in public places for years at this point.
Anyway there are two guys not wearing enough clothing for the cold weather screaming about how high they are and various things that they claim they are going to do to woman. I have a feeling that neither of them are going to get close enough to a woman to carry out their threats.
They are also both asking to see me juggle because it is cold out. They are not paying attention or they would see that i am on my computer typing rude things about them on the internet. Actually I am not really typing aything rude here. I am just saying what is happening as they make fools of themselves.
Well what can you do? Ohh one of them just fell over. The other one is giggling at him. The one on the ground is annoyed at the one giggling at him. Apparently falling down is not part of the plan to meet women this evening. Well maybe if they keep it up they can meet a nice police woman.
Just checking in and letting you know what is going on in my world
Be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice