I hope February 2009 comes soon

Don’t ask me why, but for some reason today, I was reminiscing about my trips through England and I remembered a certain town we’d driven by, but did not stop. It had one peculiar, somewhat defining feature: the church steeple was crooked.

A quick Google search served up a link to VisitSouthShropshire.co.uk where I determined that yes, that must’ve been the town. We’d driven through that area only once and at the time, I didn’t see a sign bearing the town name…or at least if there was one, I didn’t see it. We drove by the outskirts on our way to a castle, no doubt. Although, I don’t believe we’ve been to the castle nearby at Ludlow, so I honestly don’t remember where we were headed.

Anyhow, on their “Filmed in South Shropshire” page, I found the following trailer and love it. I love British movies, castles, re-enactments (although I’m not active), all that stuff, so I really can’t wait until February 2009 for this movie to come out… Enjoy Faintheart!

Because it’s Friday…

I’m gonna do something I don’t normally do and post a video that I found on YouTube. I don’t recall the exact surfing path I used to get there, but hey, that’s the fun of the internet, right? Anyway, I found this particularly amazing and astounding and wonder if there are contemporary acts out there which are similar to this 1933 piece featuring Ben Dova atop a skyscraper in New York City doing acrobatics without wires, a net, etc…

I love Fridays. I dunno why. Time for some more tea.

Video Teaser for Otherness: Rift

Check this out!

I Think. I Can’t.

For an experiment (and because I really didn’t know what was wrong and had exhausted my resources), I’d made a little video which I posted at CarCrazyCentral.com in hopes that someone might know what my car was suffering from. Here it is again…

And their advice worked! I felt confident about diving in and dropping the tranny even though I’d never done it before. I knew it’d be a lot of work, but as long as it needed being done in order to fix the problem, I was completely willing to do it. And here’s what happened…

Never again will I trust Jason with a torque wrench. I love him dearly, but unless he’s willing to go through what I did in order to fix the car (he’s not), he is no longer allowed to use a torque wrench on my car. I let him do stuff that isn’t as critical or is easy to get at, but nothing that involves dropping a tranny or pulling a motor. I’ve learned my lesson!!!!

Beyond that, here’s a funny little story that happened during the flexplate fiasco:

I was under the car, trying to line up the tranny on the jack to the engine and I was really having a hard time. I only weigh a hundred pounds, so I don’t have a lot of leverage unless I’m grabbing onto something under the car. Yoga has made me immensely stronger, but come on, I’m too little to effective all the time.

So, there I am, under the car. The tranny pan had been leaking forever and the whole underside was not just grimy, it was slippery, too. Every time I tried to grab something while fighting with the tranny, my hand–or foot–would slip. I sighed in defeat and crawled out from under the car. I was so pissed, I didn’t pay attention to how well I wiped off my shoes or my hands as I went inside to ask for Jason’s help in getting the tranny lined up so I could put a few bolts in.

Well, during that expedition, I made a nice little footprint path from the garage to the living room–on our white carpet. Needless to say, he wasn’t thrilled. At the moment, getting my car back together was way more important than dirt on the carpet, so I mollified him with, “I’ll clean the carpet tomorrow if you help me get the tranny lined up.” He was still pissed, but we got the tranny in and he even stuck around to help bolt up the exhaust and get the starter back in.

Later that day, I called Eddie. He’s got miracle cures for stuff like dirty carpets. He told me to use some OxyClean with a little laundry detergent in order to get the the carpet to come clean…maybe.

The next day, I set about doing that. It worked great! So great, in fact, it left clean spots! Grrrrr…

While Jason wasn’t thrilled about that, either, it did prompt us to go out and buy a carpet cleaner. Ignoring the ‘use only our brand cleaner’ bullshit warning in the owner’s manual, he used Eddie’s recipe of OxyClean and laundry detergent and did the whole house!

We’d been considering getting tile or at least replacing the carpet, but thanks to Eddie, my mishap and Jason, our carpet has never been whiter…

This is one of the many reasons I love cars. That little tranny foray saved us probably ten grand in unnecessary home improvement money!

Spinning Wheels

This was before all the fun started. I like the array of cars and sportbike in the background. I felt like I was definitely in for loads of fun.

I’ll be posting more videos at CarCrazyCentral, but for now, notice my big grin…? I was sitting in the backseat while my Buddy Jim Wilkey from Wagon Train Productions drifted the car every which way and then some.

What a New Year!

We’re into the new year by only a couple weeks and I’m already smokin’ busy. I’ve been editing video like it’s going out of style. Wineass.com is still my primary editing gig. I’m lovin’ it.

I don’t have much more to report just yet.

I think I might have a broken crankshaft in my Mustang Fastback. I’ll be tearing her open shortly to see if that really is the case. I both hope it is and hope it isn’t. I hope it is because that’s what it sounds like and I hope that opening it up will show me that’s all that’s wrong. I hope it isn’t because…well…who wants a busted crankshaft in their engine?

I’ll be snapping pics of the whole ordeal, of course.

busy girl

After cancan-ing my little heart out at WorldCon last month and then enjoying a visit from my parental units this past week, I’m pretty darn exhausted, but pleased.

Otherness: Rift comes out in less than two months and I’m beside myself with glee!

‘Course there’s also tons of work to be done in preparation for that big day, but one step at a time is all I can handle right now.

As I’ve blogged before, I’m currently producing a wine review video podcast website at www.wineass.com and good golly has that kept me busy in such an awesome way. I love to learn and much learning I have done. Perhaps there’s a novel or two in the experience as well.

And I’ve been sewing… Not just my Leeloo {from 5th Element}-Does-Cancan costume (still awaiting pictures ’cause we had a camera meltdown at WorldCon). I’m trying to shovel out my beautiful craft room and in order to do that, these projects new and old need to either be finished or tossed.

I’m votin’ for finished.

First up: A pair of jungle green satin pants with a royal blue lace overlay–complete with appliques. Sounds kinda bizarre, huh? It probably will be. I’m not far enough along to know for sure!

Pardon my little chuckle here, but I’m multi-tasking… I’m exporting a freshly edited video while blogging and while waiting for my iron to heat up. I feel like some odd combination of techno/textile geekage has come over me.

And I LOVE it!

Life changes, sometimes quickly

I haven’t forsaken my blog, I swear it. I just got very sick and then very busy. During those sick weeks, my life sort of got rearranged…for the better, but it’s just not the same thing it was before RT.

Part of the change was because I agreed to do something rather odd… I agreed to dance the Cancan while costumed as Leeloo from the Fifth Element. Come to WorldCon and catch the costume Masquerade. The show I’m dancing in is the half-time show.

Yeah. Not only am I soooooo not a dancer, I also had to build my costume. Believe me, cancan dresses are quite involved. I’m about half way through construction and while I love it, good grief, what a lot of work!

But the one thing I can say for certain is that I’m learning a lot. A helluva lot.

Also, in the life changing department, Jason and I plus a couple friends have started up a wine review site featuring video podcasts. We’re trying to break the barrier between wine snobs and the general public. We don’t want to use colorful language (ie. our reviewer would never describe the ‘nose’ of a wine, he’d say, “smells like…”) and we want to be accessible to everyone, not just people with boatloads of money.

See for yourself at wineass.com.

I’ve learned so much just in these last couple months, it’s incredible. I have learned how to edit video and sew a mean pair of bloomers.

But, I tell ya, I can’t wait until September…or at least until after WorldCon so that my life can chill out and get back to…uh…well…”normal”.

Sometimes a girl’s gotta vent

I’ll try not to let this be too much of a rant, but darn it all I think I’m justified. (Give me a minute or two, that feeling might pass.)

Anyhow, I’m already published as part of a team, but I also want to write some novels on my own. Okay, no biggie, right? Well, the oddities and antics have seriously begun now that I’m receiving lots of rejection letters.

Not that I’m bent over all the rejections. They don’t surprise me at all. I’ve been exposed to the actor’s life where the rejections are even higher and more scathing. I’ve also been privy to some of Jason’s letters and his trials and tribulations, too. So, getting rejection letters is not a big deal to me.

It’s their content or lack thereof, their politeness or lack thereof, etc. that’s causing this little rant.

I’ve gotten quite a range in different styles from different agents–some of which I won’t submit anything else to because I really did screw up in thinking my work might fit what they represent, others were just plain rude and even if I wrote what they represent, I wouldn’t want someone so rude representing my work.

But without naming names, etc. I need to get one particular irritation out in the open…

It’s mainly about the form letter, but a special breed of form letter–the partial page.

Okay, I send in a full page query and get back a half page form. That’s fine.

I send a full page and get back a third page form. That’s fine.

I send a full page and get back a quarter page form. Even that’s fine, too.

But when the agent’s listing requires the query to include a synopsis and first three chapters, how the hell is it okay to reply with a form rejection that is only about a twelfth of a page. Yes, a twelfth. It’s only slightly larger than my business card!

What’s worse is that I’ve received full page rejections with less written on them, but for some reason that was okay. The fact that I got the full page–without more than a “no, thanks”–honestly didn’t bother me. But if I send out about 40 pages and get a twelfth of a page back, why on earth would I want that person representing me?

I do find it bizarre that in a few instances all I sent was a query and I’ve received rejections with more than one paragraph on them–more than simply, “We’re not interested.”–and those made my day. Those are people whom I’d want representing me whether they’d sent a form letter or a personal response.

Even a form letter says a lot about an agent just by the way it was written. I don’t care that I was sent a form letter–if I didn’t write a unique piece of work in their eyes, why should they send me a unique reply–I care what the content is. I’ve always thought that being nice is good business practice. Being polite is even better.

Really, I’m the one who bled on the pages and dangled them out there like naughty laundry on a front yard clothes line. I should be prepared to suffer the consequences. But if a neighbor had come by, pulled down all the clothes, tossed them in the trash and left a note that simply read, “What were you thinking? Are you really that stupid?” isn’t that a bit harsh? Personally, if my neighbor were to be displaying the naughty wares, I’d knock up and say, “You might wanna put those in the backyard where you and your husband can enjoy them more.”

But hey, that’s me.

And I feel much better now!

I wish I knew when the mailman actually arrives because I can’t wait to see what rejections (or hopefully requests for partials) I’ve gotten today!