New Year, plus Christmas

I hope everyone survived the New Year parties. Joyce and I went to the party at Lytheria in Milwaukee. The annual ritual of the funny TV commercials video, an hour or so of the best, or sometimes worst, of the art, was enjoyable as always. Lots of food, as always. Lots of people, many of whom I see pretty much only at these parties.

We had a nice little filk circle on the third floor, with Emory, tigertoy, Art, Sue, Jim, Barisha, Joyce, me, and various listeners dropping by from time to time. Phil and Art got into a Longcore dual, to see who would run out of Moonwulf songs first. I think it was pretty much a tie.

In an effort to do something completely different, I sang the Hockey Monkey Song. In German. Thanks to Urban Tapestry and aryana_filker for making that possible. I have, by the way, a handy tip for any of you considering singing a song in a language that you have been studying for about two weeks and which you, essentially, don’t speak: Pick a slower song! Still, it was tons of fun. Also fun, and well-received, was Aryana’s Lullaby for Larean, which I also (what the heck) sang the first verse to in German. I have an adorable little niece, just five weeks old, who, like me at that age, sleeps occasionally but mostly cries, so I’ve been looking for lullabies, on the theory that I’m going to end up needing them someday. A bilingual lullaby is great. My goal is to eventually teach little Heidi to sing songs in languages that her parents don’t speak. Crazy Uncle Mike, indeed.

Since Joyce was away in Louisiana over Christmas, we delayed the opening of gifts until today. I now have Das Keyboard, a computer keyboard with no markings whatsoever on the keys. It is an all-black keyboard (“Darth Vader approved”), the only markings being the labels for the three lights and the “Das Keyboard” in the corner. You can’t get much cooler than this. It’s a pretty nice feeling keyboard, too.

Joyce likes her fancy Lamy Pico tiny ball-point pen, her very bright LED flashlight, and her puzzle of an origami-style folding plastic drinking cup.

There is turkey in the oven now and a nice dinner planned.

Whale bits

I turned on the television, at a more-or-less random time, and got a random line from whatever show happened to be on whatever channel was on. The first words I heard? “Whale foreskin upholstery.” And bizarrely, I knew exactly what they were talking about, the famous whale foreskin leather seats on the Aristotle Onassis yacht. It is an example of the kind of thing that proves you are rich, but I wonder how that worked exactly. It only proves you are rich if people know what it is, but how exactly do you bring that up in conversation? I mean, now, even people like me know about it, but at first, how exactly did he let guests know? How did they react? You’d think that would be a bit repellent. Does anyone really want to sit there?