Dandelyon's Worlds

Yesterday left me sad, having missed the aurora (again) and thinking on a kerfluffle in the local filk community (at least, I hope it will prove to be merely a brief fuss), and issues in a different musical group (I got to listen to an elderly man tell me that he knows what racism is because he uses Hitler's definition (!) and people don't get to change meanings of words (!) and I lost my temper with him, not that he cared.) My music communities are my social lifeline, so these things are very troubling to me. I headed to bed only to have sleep escape me for hours, despite pointing my brain elsewhere by doing duolinguo and reading frivolous fiction and petting a purring cat.

After dawn, I almost gave up and went outside to work in the garden, except it was cold out there, and I was already feeling cold. Finally I fell asleep. Happily, in my dreams, I was at a Worldcon with many friendly filkers around me, with lots of singing and friendly interactions. I particularly remember singing with someone with a very lovely deep voice. I woke feeling healed and hopeful. I hope that dream is a good omen for things going forward. (And many thanks to the filkers who came to my dream Worldcon, and sang and chatted and were good company.)

I got some of the plants I bought on Saturday in the ground, but not all of them. Waking after 3 pm leaves a very limited amount of outdoor time after doing things like getting dressed and eating breakfast, especially with clouds blowing in and rain arriving before sunset. But I now have cucumber plants in the garden! I'm still hoping the stores get Cherokee Purple tomatoes in, but I have some other tomato varieties out there, and some squash too. A few Ausilio peppers. And pea seedlings, finally. Soon I'll have to plant beans too, but they are truly a warm weather plant; no point in planting them until it's warm enough for them to germinate instead of rotting in the ground.

We are also moving some of the now-abundant wood violets that have moved inward from the borders of the garden from where they would be crowding the vegetables to other places in the yard, to make other border areas look nice and maybe to encourage the grass to stay out of where we're planting flowers and/or vegetables. It makes me smile to see all the little purple flowers! Of course, they only bloom in spring, but right now there's a lot of them, even more than dandelions.

And I got to chat with my daughter for Mother's Day (twice even, because she was hanging out at my sister's house and the first call got interrupted by dinner). She's doing well, and is past the probation period of her new job and is taking a training that she's excited about now that the new job will pay for it. So, all in all, a better day than yesterday.

This post-covid crap is horrible. I'm behind on everything possible.

On Saturday, I (very slowly) got the tomato plants we bought Friday into the ground while listening to the Festival of the Living Rooms concerts; My Angel got the squash and hostas planted. (I had daydreams of getting some more showy shade plants to put under the mulberry tree, but My Angel likes hostas, and they were on sale and placed easy-to-find at the store. I then very slowly got the gardening tools and stool inside, and planned to plant cucumber (seeds, sadly the store had no plants) on Sunday. The weather laughed at me and provided chilly rain all day.

Today (Monday), I had a late breakfast, did the Cologard thing (which left me exhausted--again, this is a dreadful virus. I'm not even testing positive any more! I so very much did not need this!) Anyway, the cat wanted me to lay down and pet her. I did, and fell asleep for more than three hours. It was too dark for planting cucumbers by then. Hopefully tomorrow.

There's lots of roses out there, but I have not got out to properly photograph them, much less do pruning and weeding.

I did manage to do a little singing during the Festival, though. Friday, singing was really hard. I just didn't have enough breath. I had some focus, though, and did some painting. On Saturday and Sunday singing was better, but I didn't have much focus for it. People said I sounded good, though! In between songs, I mindlessly deleted old political and sales e-mails that were too boring to bother with before. There's still way too many of them, but I zapped thousands.

It was very pleasant listening to so many friends singing to me, sitting in my living room and doing almost nothing. But in a better world, it could have been very pleasant singing lots of songs and getting something else done in between turns. Very pleasant indeed!

I never did get back out to take more pictures of the wonderful-smelling roses, but I got this shot of one of the first ones last week. I'll try for more tomorrow, if I'm feelig up to it.

Last weekend was Filk-OntariNo, the online version of Filk Ontario, so I attended from my living room.

It is so rewarding, after spending a month working hard on writing songs, to have people to sing with. It's better, of course, in person, in large part because internet lag prevents people from singing and playing along with you. But when you're at home there is no worry about driving home, or how many instruments you can bring, or even whether you can find allergen-free food to eat.

But I digress.

There was so much wonderful music, and I sang a lot! The zoom functions are really good at preventing filk hogging--most of the zoom filks are moderated, and people use the raise hand function, so there's no jumping in twice as fast as anybody else, unless, of course, the other people aren't raising their hands at whatever moment it is.

And I was all tuned up and my voice was doing great, and I still have new FAWM songs that people haven't heard (not counting the ones than I'm not yet ready to perform live), so when there weren't many people raising their hands, I did. Filling in lulls is a good thing, generally speaking. That seems to be better at inspiring people to sing than long silences or chatting.
I started out on Friday trying to follow my resolution to put songs back in their 3-ring binders after I sang them, but that didn't last long and then I had a pile of songs I'd sung already, like I usually do. I ended up with a thick stack, and kind of randomly decided to make a list.

To my surprise, I sang over 40 songs! 3/4 of those were my songs, and most of those were FAWM songs (14 from this year). Two were Iron Penguin contest songs--the Iron Penguin is an annual challenge at Filk Ontario, where you are given five words, one of which is always penguin, early in the con. The challenge is to include all the words in the song and then sing it for whoever shows up.

I did enter the Iron Penguin contest, as I usually do, and didn't win or place, but I have a new song I really like and will sing again, and that is always a personal win.

I played so much guitar, both onscreen and practicing, that my shoulder started to hurt (where the degenerative tendonitis and arthritis are) when I put my arm over even my slimmest guitar, so I tuned the autoharps and kept going (they let me hold my upper arm closer to my body, so that wasn't irritating the shoulder).

And my voice was just fine through the whole thing, which was such a blessing.

All in all, it was so much fun!

If someone wants to read the list it's here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-great-80696652

I am working on getting my songs up on Patreon as well -- lyric posts are always public.  www.patreon.com/Wyld_Dandelyon  Songs are generally posted under the song title, or you can search on hashtags filk and song.  I plan to be posting songs on Bandcamp soon, and will be revising my level descriptions to include downloadable mp3s for patrons soon too. 

So, right now I'm told Bandcamp is the way to go, for self-publishing music. And I now am developing the skills to record myself, so I went to look at setting up an account, which I was told is totally simple.

And the first page, almost the first line, asked for my band name.

And I stopped and stared at that. I'd always figured I'd go with my name if I managed to do a solo album, but lately I've been following the rising career of a musician named Deirdre Murphy in Ireland. And you know, that would probably be OK, she's going for a much more mainstream music career than I'd be planning, but for some things, disambiguation is a good thing.

And it also occurs to me that I've been using the name Wyld Dandelyon for a very long time now, and that it wouldn't make a bad band name, especially for a filker (since filkers use the dandelion as our symbol). Never mind that I didn't create it to be a band name.

Well, I don't have to decide today.

People's thoughts, opinions, relevant experience, and ideas about what I should keep in mind as I decide, are all welcome at this point.

Challenge #4

In your own space, make a list of things that you wish existed in fandom or elsewhere, and/or that you'd like someone to create or do for you.

So, things I wish for, besides the general stuff like more time and more health and more money, all of which matter, and none of which are gonna happen.  I have all the time in the world, just like everybody else, even if the chronic illness means I so often can't do as much as I want with it.  I also will acknowledge that some of the things I wish for aren't possible, or are so vanishingly unlikely that either way, I'm acknowledging that it's OK to want things you will never get, and it's also OK to express that wish as your truth, regardless of the realities of living in this world.

So, I'll list a few things, the stuff that comes to mind right now.  But my biggest impossible wish is for a TARDIS.  It would make going to cons with my instruments so very much easier!

1.  I got a looper from another filker, but I don't have the technical skills to set it up.  I'm sure there's a you tube video, but I'm still struggling to get my house back in order after the roof leaks and get my bedroom painted and still be doing music and writing (and maybe painting again soon).  I have a friend who said he'd come over and help me get things set up, but with covid and his own creative projects it hasn't happened yet.

2.  I'd love to find a remote (probably via zoom) role playing game to play in, something with an emphasis on roleplaying rather than fighting or rules-lawyering.

3.  I want more than one FAWM event in the year.  Certainly I couldn't sustain that level of focus on just one of my creative endeavors year-round, but I find the playfulness, inspiration, and creative connection of that event very valuable and energizing. 

4.  I want NaNoWriMo to happen in some other month than November.  November is just way too busy every single year for it to work as well for me as, say, January would.

So, I've been participating in filk circles via zoom, and I got tired of seeing my face from below, so I bought one of those simple plastic gadgets for raising a computer higher on a table. They usually advertise them as lap desks for skinny teenagers or school kids, and maybe I could also use it for watching stuff in bed, though not quite as pictured on the box.

But anyway, what I discovered was that if I put my words and chords on a page in landscape mode, it sits on the keyboard really nicely, right below where I want to be looking so I can see the audience reaction when I know a song well enough to process extra input. So I've been going over songs that I want to sing in the open circles and songs I might want to put on the set list for my Philcon concert, and reformatting them to a two-column landscape format.

In the process, I've found songs that I thought I had in digital format, but actually only have on paper (and rectified that for some of them). But I also found a filk I wrote in February 2016, right before the current occupant of the White House started being the Republican front runner. I was very excited about learning to play this song, and spent a significant amount of time figuring out how to play it on guitar.

By this, I mean figuring out how the original artist had played it (more than one way, actually) and making notes about one of those ways, that my short fingers would be able to just manage if I practiced it a lot, and I planned to do that practice, so I could sing both the original and my filk of it. I was excited about it, I remember that now.

But until I found it (without the notes about how to play the guitar part), I'd forgotten completely about it.



I remember 2016, my growing horror about the person so many Republican preferred to the woman some of my friends dismissed as a "boring grandma". I remain horrified that people would vote for such a blatant con man with such terrible morals. The more I learned about him, the more appalled I was, and the more I hated seeing him on the television, hearing the horrible, hateful things he said and all the lies he told. It was and remains traumatic.

And I learned so many good things about Hillary Clinton, and about how the GOP had been spreading lies about her for her whole life. Seeing how the news people treated her like an inconsequential woman even though she'd been Secretary of State and a U.S. Senator, and treating the con man who'd bankrupted multiple businesses as a man of stature, over and over. That was traumatic too.

I remember picking up a needle and thread, mending clothes, sewing dozens of patches on a silk coat that I loved that was falling apart, calming my fears and praying. I remember wanting to crawl into bed and just stay there when November rolled around, but I'd committed to being at Windycon, doing panels and other things, so I got out of bed, packed for the convention, and headed out into the world.

But I don't remember what I was doing with my fingers to start learning to play this song. I know I wrote notes somewhere, and who knows--I may find them someday. But I don't have them now.

There've been other things in the intervening years, house disasters and financial worries and my Mom getting sick (emphysema and lung cancer, too advanced for treatment), and the daily assault of a man who wants all the attention all the time, has no moral compass whatsoever, and who wants to keep the adulation of people who openly espouse racist, sexist, and other equally horrible -ist beliefs. And now Covid-19.

But I've found this song again, and I want to sing it, so I'm back watching you-tube videos of the original artist, staring at his fingers, trying to do stuff my fingers don't know how to do yet. The way I see it, I should've been singing this song for four years now, and I haven't been. I can't undo any part of the past four years (and if it could, I'd use that power for more important things than this), but I can at least get back to working on this song now.

And I will sing it. Not this weekend. Maybe not this month--and with NaNo coming up, maybe not next month either. But one of these days, once I've finished figuring it out and practiced enough that I can do it justice, I will.

and has been since yesterday.

So I'm going to go re-read the short story that came to me earlier today, before I realized time was getting away from me and if I wanted to go to the house filk, we had to get going!

I could do another F post instead, I suppose, which would be F is for Filk - the most vital and interesting folk music community I've found. Of course, I'm biased, and have been since I found filk back as a teenager. I've found many friends in the filk community, as well as lots of good music and stories shared.

The filk was small, but there was some good music, and a chance to catch up with what's been happening with some friends, including medical problems, a car accident that totaled the car but happily didn't injure my friend, classes taken with the plan of a change of occupation, and somebody's grand-daughter announced an impromptu singing contest, giving the winner she chose the grand prize--a stick of gum! (I was interested that in announcing winners, the non-singing spouse/SOs of singers were considered part of the winning team.)

Kids often give you a window on the values they're seeing around them, but the image they mirror for you isn't always what you expect it to be!

I've been fighting off some bug, apparently, and it finally left me open to getting a bronchial infection which traveled up into the sinuses. I finally got in to see my doctor this morning, and started antibiotics, and while my head cleared and I became less exhausted feeling, it turned my nose into a faucet. I'm in no shape to enjoy a filk, and certainly don't want to share what I've got.

*sigh*

I missed another recent house filk taking My Angel to have a tooth abscess lanced.

And of course, the disruption of My Angel falling and splitting her head open while I wasn't near enough to help (except over the phone) is still too-fresh in my mind.

I know that I've been dealing with the allergies and asthma and related stuff like being susceptible to these dumb infections for pretty much my whole life, but that doesn't make it less of a drag when it happens.

I know tomorrow I'll be feeling more energetic, and might even be up to going out--but tomorrow, there won't be a filk to go to.

In other news, I got a Kindle Fire, and someone sent me a mobi file, but although the kindle app on my computer can read it, the kindle itself can't. I'm confused! Am I missing something obvious because my brain is infection-addled, or what?

So, the fan GOH at Windycon decided to bring a guest, a harpist who had never been to a filk.

Such things happen, you say, and of course that's true.

But go thou and look at her Kickstarter campaign video--she made this and started raising money to make cool filk videos before ever going to a science fiction convention: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1242097495/erin-hill-the-sci-fi-harp-girl-makes-a-music-video

I got to be part of her first filk ever!  Thanks, Hugh!

Go, check her out, regardless of whether you have money to support her efforts. 

I was wondering why I've been so tired the last few days. Stress of a new job? Plausible. So, Saturday I slept in, and got up to do a few online and at-home chores, and spent some time submitting stories--enough to not only make my 10 submissions for the month for the first time this year, but to nearly fill up the empty spots for last month too. And I got another "your story made it past the first read" note, making two stories being held at anthologies I'd really love to be in right now.

Then I dressed to go to the housefilk, realized I needed to online-pay a bill before I left, and started to yawn.

I hadn't been up that long! How could I be tired?

My Angel and I headed out the door with instruments, got in the car and I started to sneeze. There was this delicate floral aroma -- "Angel, are you" *sneeze* *sneeze* "wearing perfume?"

"No! When do I wear perfume?"

. . . Spring Allergens!

I stopped at the side of the road to spray my nose with allergy medicine--an advantage of the new diet is I can use those more often without getting nosebleeds, and we headed onward.

I spent most of the next day asleep, or functionally asleep. I totally forgot my plan to do readings on Beltaine. My phone reminded me of my plan to submit a story to one of the online magazines, but their submissions page says both "we are currently closed" and "we will reopen to submissions on May 1". I broke down and sent a query today. I'd really like to send that story there next, but if they're staying closed, I don't want the story lost in electronic limbo.

The Muse Fusion might be this weekend; if it's not, and the allergies abate a bit, maybe I'll do readings then.

In the meantime, Happy Spring Pollen Season, everyone!