Pop up books, pop up bulbs, and a whole lot of republishing posts and podcasts

Posted On February 6, 2021

Where to start this week… a lot of my “work” time was spent right here or on related sites.

I spent all evening Thursday uploading more than 100 Zamo the Destroyer episodes to my Soundcloud after doing the unlimited storage space upgrade. I had had the first 97 episodes there already, so that’s now up to date.

Once upon a time, that site also had all the episodes of Under My Skin (more on that in a sec…), but I’d deleted them along the way while the show was on hiatus. All are available on my Mixcloud, which has now been updated to include the new episode of UMS and the 10 most recent Zamos that were missing.

I’ve also been through this blog and republished a bunch of old content, including many (but not all) posts of old episodes of UMS, at least up to the point in November 2015 when all the posts vanished from the corrupted/hacked export of the old version of this blog.

I might get around to reposting the missing episodes in the gap and backdating them appropriately, but then again… meh… life’s too short.

Ditto old episodes of Zamo – all are on the Zamo website and the Mixcloud and the Soundcloud, so I probably won’t bother regurgitating them here.

I also re-posted whatever posts I had of my old radio show, The Vampire’s Ball, running from late 2014 to when I ended the show at the end of April 2015.

But back to Under My Skin: Because I decided to revive it, having thought of doing a new podcast in a similar vein, but what’s the point of a new podcast when the old one can be relaunched?

I will try to do it every Wednesday from now on. There were bumpers for in between the various segments, but at the moment I can’t find the hard drive those should be on, so I’m just doing it all verbally until I find the bumpers.

UMS used to be a brutally mean joke kinda show, and it likely still will be. I mean, I had a joke in the new episode about this Duran Duran tour book for the Astronaut reunion tour that has a couple pop-up pages in the front and I joked they should have done that on one of their old tour books before the bassist went to rehab so they could have had a pop up bathroom stall with a pop up John Taylor and pop up lines of blow, perhaps with a little slidable paper tab so you could pull his nose along the coke lines.

Mean, but so what, it’s funny. The verbal beatings will continue until I have something better to do with my time.

The actual tour book with the pop-up pages (OK, only the first two) arrived today (after I recorded and posted the new UMS episode, of course):

I may make fun of them because they’re ridiculous, but I still love them. And I love this sort of shit with the pull out pieces and all that jazz… kinda like I loved those Griffin & Sabine books back in the day with the little pull-out notes and all.

And it wasn’t just a DD tour book that arrived this week, either:

Stickers! LOL…

Somewhere in an alternative reality, the version of me that did those first few UMS episodes, especially 7 and 8, is screeching in horror that she ends up not only owning, but enjoying this sort of thing. (Or rather: this sort of thing from that particular band.)

Anyway, this brings me up to two weekly podcasts. Probably that will stay that way, but never say never; back in December I was chatting with my brother about either doing a podcast version of The Vampire’s Ball again (to be posted on Mixcloud as well as Spotify) or my old mixtape-style one, Mind of maQLu Radio. (And yes, there’s a bunch of those that vanished in the corrupted site black hole.)

We’ll see, though… those sorts of shows work best when one gives a shit about new releases and frankly I don’t right now. Plus I have a lot of other projects in development and there’s the whole going-back-to-school-thing in September which will crunch my time. So a faux radio show might be more of a 2022 project.

Speaking of which, the university has now received all my transcripts except for one from BCIT which is in the mail and of course my high school grades. At least today there was the option on the checklist to upload an unofficial PDF of my high school grades (which I did have because I downloaded one for myself whilst ordering the official version to be mailed to them), so that covers my ass at least somewhat with the whole processing times and fingers crossed that the mail actually does their job thing. And BCIT was ordered 3 weeks ago so they should have it soon.

So, that seems to be progressing nicely. Three weeks until transcript deadline. I have until April to tweak the last few things on my portfolio and get that sent in, will try to get all that done sometime next week… -ish…

Spring is starting to be sprung here in the Cowichan Valley, at least at my house. There’s still some winter jasmine going, but now the snowdrops have joined them in bloom, at least the first batch of them since they seem to come in waves.

And some of my hellebores have opened up.

I even got my first dwarf iris open today.

I expect the openings might slow down this week since we’re due to be -1 most nights for a week and a half. But still.

As every year, there have been a few casualties to slug damage amongst the irises. I’ll need to put out some iron bait to kill the little bastards so they don’t wreck my other bulbs as well.

I’ve also been yanking grass rhizomes that have been trying to reclaim my flowerbeds as mentioned before. And chopping down last year’s spent flower stalks.

And I got suckered in by the camellias and had to bring yet another home, this one “Freedom Bell” and the only spot left with enough shade for it is the very back corner, but hey, as it grows, I’ll be able to see it from the front of the Japanese side garden of my house and I can see it from the upstairs hall windows.

Lastly in garden news, I decided that the pond is going to go this summer. I don’t want to risk getting hurt trying to keep the damn thing clean, and I could use the planting space (thinking of putting a nice winter daphne in that spot, which will grow to fill half of it at least, and I can fill in the rest with more hellebores and bulbs for spring color, then slap in some impatiens and begonias for the summer.

What else… I’m down 7 lbs since New Year’s and thus it was time for the monthly ritual of opening up the underbed storage bins full of too-small clothes and trying on the next smallest size. This month it resulted in a big pile of stuff to be put back into my closet, including 2 pairs of pants, 6 pairs of leggings, 2 tank tops, and 6 shirts.

Also there was one pair of pants I should have started wearing around Christmas because they were now too loose and wearing them grocery shopping resulted in pushing the cart with one hand and pulling my pants up with the other every step, lol…

In weirder clothes news, I was waiting on a white Marilyn Monroe-style dress for one of the dolls in that weird sitcom-y web series I’m working on. Instead, the package revealed this: