rollerblading mishap

Jeff had a rollerblading accident yesterday and bruised his back and possibly one of his lungs; we spent five hours in Mount Sinai Hospital last night. He's okay but very sore. He's home today recuperating.

Also, Allison is having problems with her ISP and is offline for the first time that I can remember! Hopefully she will be back by tonight.

Sorry, haven't had a chance to post any more post-FKO stuff. If any of you have FKO reports on your sites, please let me know and I'll link to them from here. More later, hopefully...

post rollerblading

Jeff stayed home work again today. A bit of a rough night (he had trouble sleeping because of the pain); we're both fairly brain-dead today.

Allison & Jodi are coming over tonight and we're going out for dinner with David Goulden; should be fun if I can stay conscious! :-) Thanks for the good wishes in blatherchat, everyone.

Allison's back in email, yay!

Good luck to Gary E., who has an important exam tomorrow, also to Scott Snyder, who is in California doing interviews today and tomorrow! And sympathies to Annie Walker, who found a crack in Uriel, her harp! :-(

duct tape man

Fun get-together last night with Allison, Jodi, and David. A & J & I finally got to sing a song for David that I wrote for him several years ago called Duct Tape Man...David did most of the sound engineering for our CD, and used duct tape a lot (once he used it to tape up my mouth! hmph...). Went to Swiss Chalet for dinner; Jeff joined us partway through. Came back to the apartment afterwards and talked a while over a bottle of grape/plum wine (a gift from Paul Kwinn, a sort of thank-you for lending Puzzlebox their keyboard at FKO) and trying out interesting snack-bits from an Interfilk package I bought at the FKO auction (donated by Diana Huey).

Many thanks, by the way, to Ellen Kranzer who bought our Activity Fun Graffiti Book at the Interfilk auction! It went for about $115, I think.

I've posted some of our new songs on the web, by the way, including The Truth Is Out There (my X-Files song),
Battle On! (Xena song by Allison; we did this as a one-shot at FilKONtario), Ich Mag Shokolade (by Debbie in honour of Juliane Honisch and Kerstin Droge (can someone please tell me how I can get the umlaut symbol?)).

I'll be picking up FKO pics tonight and will post a few. Also, I never did get around to posting the California pics in my report. I am having hard disk space problems, and may have to take off some photos from the UT site. If you want to take a look at the California pics before I remove them, however, they are at:
http://www.inkspot.com/blatherings/articles/calif98pics/.

Going to a Musical Box concert tonight with Jeff, if his back holds out. :-)

slava's snowstorm

Enormously grateful thanks to David Goulden for solving my HTML problem. David gets the TECHNONERDBOY AWARD for this week, and all the fame and glory this title entails.

*SPOILER: don't read the following if you plan on seeing Slava's Snowstorm in the theatre in Toronto*

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Went to Slava's Snowstorm at the Princess of Wales Theatre with my friend Cathy on Monday. Interesting show, though I probably wouldn't have gone out of my way to buy tickets for it if it hadn't been included in the subscriber package. The show is basically a sophisticated clown act, in the Cirque Du Soleil vein. My favourite scene was near the end, when Slava was struggling against a raging blizzard. As dramatic music swelled over the speakers, the audience squinted against sudden blinding lights as we were deluged by the howling gale (with help from super-powerful fan blowers near the front and a tissue paper snowstorm). The effect was quite remarkable...if it wasn't for the fact that we were sitting in a heated theatre, it really DID feel as if you were in a blizzard. As the gale subsided somewhat, about 4-5 giant colourful balls were pushed out into the audience and we spent the next 15-20 minutes or so bouncing these around as the "snow" continued to fall. Lots of fun. Jeff's still complaining about the bits of tissue paper he keeps finding around our apartment.

Last night, Jeff and I FINALLY got to see Titanic, woohoo! As I mentioned before, we've tried to see this three times in the past couple weeks, but the show was always sold out. Anyway, the film broke halfway through (we got an unscheduled fifteen minute intermission), but they managed to get it going again. Great flick! Everything I was hoped it would be, though I ran out of kleenex near the end of the movie. :-)

musical box

Musical Box was fun, and I actually recognized most of the songs. :-) They are a Genesis clone band, apparently doing everything with uncanny authenticity (Jeff is a major Genesis fan and was quite blown away by how accurate everything was). Ran into local filker Ed LeBel (from Vampire's Kitchen). After the concert, our friend Brian turned to me and asked, "So how does it feel to be one of the two women in the audience?" :-) He was exaggerating, of course, but he was right about the male-female ratio attending the concert.

Jeff's feeling better now, though he's still taking painkillers and using a heating pad thingy at night. We might be able to go pick up my new bike today, though I don't think we'll be going on any bike rides.

Thanks for the advice on umlauts. Here is a test:

Umlaut using option-O then U: ˆ (looks right in my editor)

Umlaut using cut-paste from Steve Brinich's message: ˆ

Hm...neither seems to look right when viewed by Netscape.