Geneva in the OC Spelling Bee

Last night was the all Orange County Spelling Bee semi-finals (for grades 6, 7, and 8). It's a written test, so all the kids have the same words -- 20 "regular" and 2 "bonus" tie-breakers. Out of 150 kids, only 2 spelled 'em all right. Geneva misspelled only one of the bonus words, everyone else misspelled one or more of the regular words. This essentially put her in third place in the room, I reckon. The bonus word she missed was "edentulous", meaning "lacking teeth". Nobody in the room ever heard of it, but apparently two kids guessed better than Geneva (or I) did.

They cut it off at 17 words spelled right, so there's 55 kids that'll be coming to the oral finals on Saturday morning. Two years ago, she came in 9th, and got $50 for her trouble. Last year she choked, and misspelled "slaughter", just 'cuz of nerves. Hopefully, this year she'll be a little less stressed.

Personally, I think these written tests are better gauges of who's the best speller (if such a thing is worth determining, especially these days). Mainly it seems more fair for all the kids get the same words. And it's easier to spell on paper than just reciting letters in the air. When is spelling out loud a necessary skill? Not to mention the stress of standing up in front of a crowd to do it.

If you're curious, here's the whole list: quizmaster, charcoal, lettuce, transaction, shale, irregular, aloof, prehistory, nozzle, diagonal, liturgy, optimism, casualty, vanilla, foolocracy, atrophy, azalea, recyclable, atoll, euphonious, with edentulous and predecessor as bonus words. (By the way, even Word's spelling dictionary has never heard of "foolocracy", but apparently it's in the Webster's they use to judge.)

K&W - MV 17Feb2005

A little better and a little worse than last time. The better part is that, for the first time ever, the "regulars" weren't there, so there was no loud talking while I was trying to sing. The worse part is that I mixed (or, more accurately, failed to mix) the sound properly, so the vocal was way louder than the guitars (or, as Warren would have it, the guitars were way quieter than the vocal).

I guess I was partially being paranoid of feedback from my guitar, since it was the maiden run of my new, inside-guitar mic system. These are famous for feedback problems, so I was keeping it kind of quiet at first, and never remembered to revisit it. Of course, from where I'm standing, I hear the acoustic output of my guitar so it wasn't "way too quiet" to me, but there wasn't enough of it coming out of the speakers, so the room sound was embarrassingly bad. I know this 'cuz I did the mic-in-front-of-a-speaker trick for the recording, and most of it is unlistenable.

The other part is that, unless I can't hear what I'm doing, I just get into the performing part and completely forget about tinkering with the sound. And I guess I could hear the vocal (like, a lot!) and my guitar too (part in the speakers, and part acoustically), so off I went. And I never worry about Warren's volume, since he has lots of knobs to play with if he wants to get louder or softer -- I figure he's where he wants to be. Still, I feel like an idiot for doing the whole gig, oblivious to the terrible sound...

A few of the softer songs turned out semi-OK on the recording, although I couldn't find my mic and so had to use the store's, which seems to have an odd sound. Anyway, I guess I sang quieter on those songs, so the mix isn't so wrong. It was the first outing for "Alison", a song I've been strumming through for years, but finally realized that I could transpose it down a little for my voice (duh), and play it with a simple fingerpick pattern -- it sounds pretty nice that way (to me, anyway). The hardest part is *not* to imitate Elvis Costello's voice/accent/delivery when you're singing it. "Funny", not "Fuh-neh". I guess that's the one I'm gonna post as "Song of the Week" on the website.

We did have two old Toshiba friends show up, Sandy Crowley (with her daughter) and Marc Tanguay. Sandy asked for all the country songs -- who knew?

I also brazenly cleared off a small table of books, moved it into the main passageway toward the exit doors, and put the CDs and tip jar out there "where no decent soul could miss it", to quote Gordon Lightfoot. It increased our usual near-zero tip level at that store to $30-something, and moved 6 or 7 CDs.

Father-Daughter Roller Skating

The Girl Scouts put on an annual Father-Daughter event, and this year it was roller skating, with a "70's" theme. This apparently meant "disco", but since nobody still has their white Travolta-suit, I don't know what they expected of us. I wore jeans and my old "hippie tie", which I actually *wore* through most of the 70's, and after Daleen cracked out the high school yearbooks (prompting gales of laughter from the girls), Acacia went with jeans and a "peasant blouse". 70's, but not "disco". Whatever.

We had a great time. I got the feel for it back after 10 minutes or so, and was zooming all over the place -- and Acacia's always been a good skater. Geneva came along to help with the picture-taking setup, and seemed to have fun doing that. She only got to skate for the last 20 minutes or so, but she didn't seem disappointed.

Fun music, too. "Brick House", "Play The Funky Music", etc. Fun to skate to.

K&W - Yorba Linda 04Feb2006

Tough one, this time. I had this great new scheme for the amplifier setup that turned out to be a disaster. We've been using the stores' amps, 'cuz they have a Monitor output jack that I'd been connecting to the computer to record, but we'd decided to try recording through a microphone put up near one of the speakers, to (hopefully) get a more balanced and "live" sound on the recording.

Well and good, but it means that we'd have my amp (with its internal speaker) in the middle, and the store's two speakers on the left and right. Lots of speakers should be good, but, anticipating possible feedback problems, I prepared my amp with a "speaker cutoff" mechanism, which the Carvin people neglected to include. Unfortunately, I didn't do the proper testing, and we found out that cutting the internal speaker also cut the External Speaker jack! So I had to leave my amp's speakers enabled, which (as I eventually realized), since it was pointed backwards at the wall behind, was feeding us a very boomy, bad, bad, sound.

We tinkered with the controls between songs, over and over, until I finally figured out that it was the StageMate's sound that was screwing everything up. We replaced my amp with the store's "brain" (no built-in speaker), and, Wow!, much better.

So, basically the whole first half was a loss, 'cuz when the sound's bad and I can't hear myself or anything except how terrible it is, I just can't perform. The sound "to the room" wasn't as bad as what we were hearing (according to the recording), but I was completely distracted by it and blew words and chords, left and right.

But, once we swapped the amp, it was all uphill from there, and we did pretty good. I thought "Love Has No Pride" went particularly well, and I've posted it as the Song of the Week on the webpage. Warren liked "You Were On My Mind", so maybe I'll remember to post that one as next week's Song, since we're not playing anywhere next weekend.

We did get a bit of appreciation at the end -- some nice ladies that were there chatting quietly the whole night thanked us, and apparently took home some CDs. We usually don't move any CDs at all at that store (nor get much in the way of tips), but in my "Thanks for coming" speech, I mentioned the CDs "if anybody wants one on the way out", and all 5 K&W discs disappeared, and a "Bears" one as well. And, oddly enough, money appeared in the jar, too. I'll have to do that again...

And, for the first time ever, someone went to the web address on the CD, found the "Send us a message" link, and did! The entire text:

I really enjoyed your performance tonight! I have your CD of children's music. I am currently in the teaching credential program, and as soon as I am a teacher I plan to use your music in my classroom. Great music!
Thanks,
Devin

Amazing! Especially after how terrible we were at the beginning...

K&W - MV 21Jan2006

It went pretty good, again. The sound tends to be pretty good there, and Warren was at the controls of the amp. He likes it up quite a bit louder than I do (or, more accurately, he's braver to "fill the room" than I am), and when it's nice and loud you get this "Voice of God" effect, and that's really fun.

Unfortunately, Mission Viejo has developed a "cast of regulars" that are there, seemingly, literally every night (one guy mentioned having seen "Jim & Warren" the previous night). That's OK, of course, and they seem to be in the right age bracket to like the tunes we do, but they pretty much think they own the place so they talk, loudly, all the time, during the songs. It seems terribly rude to me, but I suppose from their viewpoint, I'm being terribly rude to invade "their" space and start making a bunch of amplified noise.

Problem is, it's *really* distracting, and takes a great force of will for me to just power on ahead and try not to notice the commotion. It's really hard, and keeps dragging me out of my "suspension of fear" that allows me to be up there singing at all. "Dues", I guess.

On the upside, I brought my electric guitar for the first time, and used it for the more "rock" songs. That was pretty fun, and worked out well. Unfortunately, we were trying yet another recording method, so although it sounded OK in the room, the recording is unbalanced. Oh, well, there's plenty more chances, and with all the distraction, they probably weren't my best performances anyway.