Madcap Month is finally over!

Warning: links galore, but I figure it condenses the post a bit, and hope you don't mind clicking a few times here and there rather than have me write a mile-long post ;-)

Okay, whew, it hasn't *quite* been a month since my last post ;-) At the beginning of the month (of May!), I'd predicted on my Tumblr site that May was going to be a helluva busy month. And it has been. It's just now barely let up.

Mother's Day services (which were held in a movie theater because the church building was in the Jesusita Fire evacuation zone) brought this delightful video clip: "Mom" to the William Tell Overture

After the fire madness died down, life returned to normal... that is to say, back to the hectic schedule. This post summarizes that week: Strawberry Festival, Persian/Polish wedding (complete with belly-dancing!), Todd's birthday and a read-in at Todd's school.

So what happened next? A 3-day weekend, thank God! It came in handy, because we needed that extra day to... well catch up on chores as well as rest. Saturday the 23rd brought I Madonnari, the annual chalk-painting festival, on the grounds of the Santa Barbara Mission. I'd never gone, but this year, both our company and Todd's karate school had purchased squares. Todd got to help color his karate school's square with a hand-tracing that looked more like a baseball mitt ;-) Next day we traveled to LA to celebrate Todd's birthday with the family at Allan's sister's house. Todd was more talkative with Allan's family, which was great to see.

The following week was Todd's karate tournament, where he took 3rd place in his age group (well, 3rd out of 4 kids :-P) followed by yet *another* birthday celebration-- this time, the kiddie one at the playground in our apartment complex. We invited his 4 classmates (plus their siblings) and 2 other kids. Unfortunately, only 1 classmate made it to the party. Luckily she brought her kid brother along, or else it would've been a REALLY small celebration. Still, it was loads of fun, and still pretty exhausting looking after 3 kids (what would it have been like if the expected 8-10 had showed up!) Todd had fun, and that was the main thing :-)

I also treated myself to a present: a digital USB microphone to pursue a latent hobby that's recently found an outlet: online karaoke! Here is the mic-- click on the photo for a link to its Amazon site. It arrived in the mail a week ago and I went to town with it. See, normally I'd just use my laptop's built-in mic, which is good quality, but which unfortunately captures the sound of the fan too well (those of you who were there at the New Year's Yahoo chat will remember the sound). Earlier this year I got a cheap analog mic, which makes me sound absolutely tinny. Then Allan got a headset with a built-in mic, and that improved the quality, but those headphones HURT my ears! Too tight! This post summarizes the differences.

The two karaoke sites I frequent are:

• Myspace (formerly kSolo): http://ksolo.myspace.com/hellykwee
• Singsnap: http://www.singsnap.com/snap/member/hellykwee

I haven't had a chance to use my new mic on Singsnap yet, but there are a few songs up on Myspace with it. I even purchased a membership (just for one month, for the time being, to test drive it) on Myspace Karaoke so I could try out the premium features, like pitch change, audio effects and unlimited recordings. So far it's been well worth the money, as over half of my favorite songs are too low/high for me to sing at their normal key. I also plan on buying a 1-month membership on Singsnap, as they have a pretty vast library of songs, and there seems to be little overlap between the Singsnap and Myspace libraries.

Anyway... yeah. Online karaoke has been keeping me busy this past week (y'know, the first week after the madcap month ended), and I'm having SUCH a blast with it! Come try it out for yourself if you're so inclined. And if you sing on Singsnap, we could even record duets! :-D

My apologies for the long delay in posting. I've even let my Tumblr blog lapse a bit, though not as bad as this one. You can always check there for the latest scoop and bit-sized updates. Be sure to bookmark it! ;-)