pedanther

1. A pretty slim fiction log, this month. In particular, I think this may be the first month since I started that I had no completed books to list. It's been kind of a stressful month, and the books I have on the go are mostly ones I'm reading more out of a sense of obligation than because I'm actively enjoying them, so they didn't work as a way to escape from stress. (Apart from the Discworld novel, obviously, but I'm reading that one on a schedule with a reading group, and it happens that we ended the month with one section to go.)

Although the first section of the fiction log doesn't tell the whole story, because I did read one novel-length work this month: Triptych, a Star Wars fanwork set after The Force Awakens. (This not-telling-the-whole-story is precisely why I started including novel-length fanworks in the log, of course.) It was an effective stress escape while it lasted, and comes to an emotionally satisfying conclusion (although not, I think, one that will turn out to bear much resemblance to whatever the films end up doing).


2. One of the sources of stress has been that for the past year I have been president of the brass band, a situation I have completely failed to mention here because it doesn't reflect any actual achievement on my part except being the slowest to dodge. Everybody agrees that the president is an important position that needs to be filled, but nobody in the band wants to be the person who actually fills it. I didn't want to do it even before I was pushed into it, and now that I've actually given it a go and found myself unsuited to it, I really don't want to do it. There were times -- plural -- when I was finding it so stressful that I had to talk myself down from dramatically announcing my resignation not only from the presidency but also from the band and flouncing out of the rehearsal hall, never to return. We had the AGM recently, and I managed to dodge better this time, so hopefully things will be less stressful from now on.


3. This month has also been crunch time for the annual performing arts festival, which started last weekend. We're sticking with last year's arrangement where all the singers are on one weekend and all the instrumental performances are on a second weekend, with separate adjudicators for each. The vocal weekend went really well, with the adjudicator also running a couple of good workshops. There was less going on in the experienced solo sections than usual because a couple of people who usually enter those have left town since last year. Maybe this is a sign that next year I need to act on my perennial threat to enter the solo sections myself.


4. Another thing we're getting into crunch time for is the next Rep Club production I'm involved in. I mentioned that there's an improv group going again, and we have a couple of performances coming up. What's making it interesting is that in addition to the usual sort of improv scene games, where a couple of people go on stage and improvise a single scene, we're going to be featuring a long-form improv, which will run for multiple scenes, include all the actors, and hopefully end up with some kind of comprehensible storyline pulling the whole thing together.


5. Toastmasters annual Table Topics and Humorous Speech Contests. Entered the Table Topics contest, won, advanced to Area finals, didn't win. Probably just as well; not sure if I'm going to be free for the Division finals.

Anyway, I'm thinking about letting go of Toastmasters entirely. I've advanced to a level where a person really needs to invest time and energy to keep getting something out of it -- or rather, I advanced to that level about two years ago and haven't progressed since. And the thing is, I don't think I have the time and enery to spare: I'm using it on other things that matter more to me, like the Rep Club. The last year or so, it's seemed like I've had something else on every night there's been a Toastmasters meeting, and the couple of meetings I've been to I've been very aware that I'm rusty and not making up for lost time, let alone advancing. So I think it might be time for me to acknowledge that Toastmasters has been a valuable part of my life that I've gained a lot from, but isn't something I need to keep holding on to.

1. This week I have five Christmas/end-of-year social events in six days; in no particular order: work, the Rep Club, the other theatre group that isn't the Rep Club, Toastmasters, and the brass band. Three of those have already happened, and all of them were on evenings when I would have had to give them a miss or leave early if I'd been in the Christmas Show, as I was saying last entry, which would have been regrettable.

Also on the list of things I'd have had to miss out on: going to see the WA Symphony Orchestra's annual public concert with the family. (Does that count as an end-of-year social event? I'm inclined to say not, because nobody fed me.)


2. The choral group I mentioned joining has finished up for the year. I've been enjoying it and will definitely be back next year.


3. I have been to two charity book sales recently. I donated a box of books to the first one, so I came out with a net decrease in the number of books taking up space in my house. Win!

A significant amount of the box I donated consisted of duplicate copies, many of them a result of seeing a book at a sale and going "I've always wanted a copy of that" and then finding when I got home that I already had one in the to-read pile. I managed to do it again at both of these sales, so I've already made a start on the next box...


4. So far since the new $5 note was released, I've only had one pass into my hands. It was weird and disconcerting and I spent it in the very next shop I went into so that I wouldn't have to keep looking at it.


5. At work, my computer finally got old and unreliable enough that the boss felt obliged to find room in the budget for a new one. This meant leapfrogging from Windows XP (yes, it was that old) to Windows 10, which despite my reservations has been relatively un-horrible. The worst of it were some initial issues with the wireless keyboard, which seem to have sorted themselves out, and a weird tendency to reboot itself without notice, which I think has been fixed now that I've tracked down the option switch that was set to "Reboot immediately after installing a system update" (the documentation says that that option will still wait until the computer is standing idle, but such was not my experience).

There's also the unanticipated side-effect that my computer at home, which had always felt speedy and powerful compared to the one at work, is now by comparison showing its age and small memory.

1. Theatre News (subclass Acting in the):

As you may have guessed from the fiction log, the Rep Club's next big production will be the musical Oliver!. I've been in a bunch of musicals for the same director over the last decade or so, so I had what turned out to be the shortest audition I've ever done - didn't need to monologue, didn't need to sing, didn't need to dance, just needed to answer one question. I was a bit disappointed about the singing, since I'd put quite a bit of effort into my audition piece, but in the circumstances I think I'll survive.

The one question was: "Do you feel up to taking on the role of Fagin?"


2. Toastmasters News:

I entered both the Evaluation contest and the International Speech contest this year. The International Speech contest is the feeder contest for the World Championship of Public Speaking, and I've never entered it before. I only entered it this year because I gave a project speech last year which several people spontaneously told me was good enough for the contest, and because being a contestant meant I was exempt from being made to help organise it.

I won both contests at the club level, but at the area level I was beaten by the respective entrants from the college students' club. In a way, that was a relief, because it means I don't have to worry about finding time out of Oliver! rehearsals to attend the division and district contests. Let alone how inconvenient it would have been to qualify for the World Championship - not that I think that would have happened; the speech wasn't that good.


4. Theatre News (subclass Going to the):

I went to Perth to see The Lion King with my sister before it closed, because I've heard so much about how it's staged and who knows if it'll ever come this way again. There were bits that didn't quite work, but it was an impressive experience and on the whole I'm glad I went. Some of the puppets were astonishing. (Also astonishing, in a different way: the antipodean actor playing Timon's attempt at a New Jersey accent, which drifted as far south as Texas at one point.)

One side-note on the trip: It was the first time I'd been on the train since my international jetsetting Christmas holiday. Until I spent all that time on aeroplanes, I'd never really appreciated how much legroom you get on the train.


4. TV News:

The third season of Sherlock has aired here - actually, it aired last year, but then it was on against Foyle's War; this time it wasn't, and I had to decide whether I actually wanted to watch it. After carefully considering everything I'd heard about the third season and the Christmas special, I decided I didn't.

Also, the third season of Agents of SHIELD has started airing here; I watched a few episodes, then realised I wasn't actually all that interested, and stopped.

In happier TV news, the revived Danger Mouse started airing here this week, and I'm enjoying it immensely.


5. Theatre News (subclass Movie):

When I went to see The Force Awakens for the second time, it was preceded by a long trailer for the upcoming Batman/Superman movie. It kind of left me feeling like I'd seen the whole movie, and pretty much confirmed that I have no interest in actually seeing the whole movie.

Which leads me to a second side-note about my recent train trip: At one point, when I wasn't feeling motivated to do anything more brain-intensive, I watched the in-flight (if that's the word) movie, which was The Man From UNCLE. I have no idea how well it serves as an adaptation of the TV series, which I've never seen (yes, it's a shocking lacuna), but at one point I found myself thinking that Henry Cavill would probably do pretty well if he were cast as Superman, before remembering that he had been.

I woke up this morning feeling cheerful and relaxed and generally as if a great weight of responsibility had been removed from my shoulders. This was because one had.

For each Toastmasters meeting, there's one person for running the meeting, and yesterday's meeting it was my turn. The actual meeting-running bit - introducing people, keeping the event flowing, that sort of thing - wasn't a problem, but the role also includes the preparation work - finding people to fill the meeting roles, finding out who's going to be there and who isn't, and so on - and although it turned out all right in the end this time, I always find that part painful and difficult.

Part of it is low-level stuff like the fact that involves a lot of telephoning people, which is something I always dread unless I'm phoning somebody I know really well. (One of the guys at Toastmasters says this is because I have a DISC C personality and C personalities always have trouble with phones because they depend on body language in conversations. He's a professional life coach, so he says stuff like that a lot.) In this case, that was exacerbated by the fact that this was a meeting of the new dinner-meeting club, so I really don't know most of the members yet.

But it's also because planning and arranging the meeting is the kind of large and complicated task that is best broken into bits and spread out over several weeks, and that's a skill set I've never really learned. When I was a kid, the world was divided into things I found easy to do and things I wasn't interested in doing, but I was a smart kid and the pool of things I found easy to do was large enough to get me most of the way through high school, in the advanced stream even, before I started running aground on things I didn't find easy but needed to do anyway. (Ugh, essays. In retrospect, I feel sorry for my English tutor; she was probably good at helping people learn English, but that wasn't actually the thing I needed help learning, and we never got on.)

I'm still getting a handle on the shape of the problem, never mind managing to figure out where I can learn to fix it, and in the mean time what I usually do is procrastinate wildly until the shadow of the deadline looms over me, and then panic and try to get the whole thing done in the last 24 or 48 hours. And, because I'm still quite smart, that often works. Or at least doesn't fall apart too badly. On anything that's really mattered. At least, anything that I wasn't able to convince myself afterward didn't really matter.

And it's probably best not to look too hard at what happens when there isn't a set deadline to give me that kickstart...

1. Our season of short plays has opened and closed, with positive responses from the people who came to see it. We got a good write-up in the local paper, both in the sense that the reviewer liked it and in the sense that everyone's names were spelled right and it didn't give away too many of the good surprises. (If I'd been directing one of the other plays, I'd have been annoyed about some of the moments chosen for the accompanying photo spread, but fortunately my own play was immune to being spoiled in that manner.) The reviewer said that of the three plays the one I directed was his favourite, which I'm inclined to attribute to the quality of the script, and showed the best acting, which I'm prepared to take some credit for.

After it was over, I spent about a week not stirring from home except to go to work and band practice, and I'm not letting myself get roped into any more theatrical productions until June.


2. We've had the second round of the Toastmasters speech evaluation contest, with winners from three club contests competing against each other. This year, for the first time, I was competing as a winner of a club contest. I didn't win the area contest, but I'm not too bothered; just getting there was an achievement, and anyway I wouldn't have been able to make it to the third round, the division contest, this weekend, so I wouldn't have advanced any further regardless. The winner of the division contest will go on to compete in the final round at the District Convention in early June. (Which I'm on the organising committee for, and that's another reason I'm not committing to any more theatre before then.)


3. The final season of Foyle's War aired here recently - at least, they say it's the final season, but they've said that before. More than once. The war that the title theoretically refers to ended two final seasons ago, not that I'm complaining. (At least it hasn't become one of those wartime series where the war drags on longer than it did in reality so they can fit more seasons in; that trick only works if the series is set vaguely "during the war", and Foyle's War has always been tied to specific historical events, which is one of the things I like about it.) I'm actually really glad we got this final season, because it leaves us in a much better place than the last final season did; not entirely happy, but considerably more hopeful.


4. One of the things I like about reading fanfic is that it can offer new ways of looking at things that one might not have thought of before.

For instance, I recently read a Doctor Who fic that starts with a fresh look at "The End of Time", Ten's regeneration reluctance, and the extended companion farewell tour, through the lens of "The Time of the Doctor":

He doesn't want to go.

Coward, the Master called him, and maybe it's true, because he's terrified. Imagine him, of all people, frightened of change. But it's different this time. Twelve regenerations to a Time Lord, and the last one may have been non-standard, but it counts, and so does the one he tries to tell himself wasn't really him. He can feel the evidence inside him, irrefutable: some vital part of him busy using itself up.

Twelve regenerations, and he's just shoved the only people capable of giving him more back into their time lock. So this is the last time he'll ever experience this, and he's not going to go gentle. No, this last time, Death is going to have a fight on its hands.

He knows what he wants to do with the time he has left, and he has to do it now, because there's no telling how much time he'll have left, after. And no telling what kind of man he'll become.

So he visits them, one by one: the people he's loved, the people he's failed to do right by.

The fic is And at the End, a Garden by AstroGirl, and the rest of it is good too.


5. Video link of the month: John Oliver presents: Infrastructure: The Movie

"You cannot tell me that you are not interested in this, because every summer people flock to see our infrastructure threatened by terrorists or aliens, but we should care just as much when it's under threat from the inevitable passage of time. The problem is, no one has made a blockbuster movie about the importance of routine maintenance and repair. Or they hadn't - until now..."

(If you want to skip straight to the hypothetical action movie, that begins at 17:10. The preamble is worth sitting through if you have the time, though.)

1. We've entered the final week of rehearsals for The Duchess of Coolgardie. We still haven't had a full run-through without anything going wrong, or a full run-through with all of the sound and lighting cues in, but on the whole I think it's coming together quite well.


2. Once Duchess is over it will be time to start rehearsals for the annual Christmas show, which I've already been talked into signing on for. I will be playing a stuffy British colonel leading an expedition into Darkest Africa, which means the moustache is probably going to be sticking around a while longer. (Though I've been toying with the idea of shaving this moustache off and growing another one, as a symbolic point of distinction between the two characters.)


3. Another Toastmasters event I had to miss because of Duchess rehearsals was the area final of the Humorous Speech and Table Topics Contests. That was a milestone because the areas have recently been rearranged due to the new clubs starting here. It used to be that we were the only club within a 500km radius, and shared our "area" with three clubs in another city 600km away, which meant a long commute for the area final more years than not. Now we're in an area consisting of three local clubs and one distant club, and the situation is reversed.


4. Here's one reason I don't enjoy clothing shopping: last time I did it, I tried on a dozen items of clothing to find one pair of trousers that fit. (And a few more things that I bought anyway, even though they didn't quite fit, so that I could feel like I'd accomplished something, and now will have to suffer through wearing.) And I'm often unsure, when something doesn't quite fit, whether it's slightly too big, or slightly too small, or just plain the wrong shape for me. Maybe I'd be able to get the hang of it with practice. But it's difficult getting the practice when I don't enjoy clothing shopping.


5. Marvel Comics recently announced that it will soon be publishing an ongoing comic headlined by Squirrel Girl, one of their lesser-known characters who's most famous as the subject of a running joke about how she keeps running up against villains who theoretically outmatch her and emerging victorious. My favourite reaction to the news was from someone on Tumblr who pointed out that there's no reason to doubt the viability of an ongoing series about a character in a funny-looking rodent outfit who can defeat every opponent no matter how powerful... since it's worked pretty well for Batman so far.

1. How is it only today that I learn that Groot, the large tree-like alien in the new Marvel movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, is played, or at least voiced, by the same actor who voiced the title character in The Iron Giant? This is important information!


2. I've finished playing through the storyline in Lego Marvel Super Heroes, which leaves the part of the game that involves wandering around Manhattan finding all the side quests: foiling bank robberies, helping citizens in distress, and so on. The "helping citizens in distress" bits range from appropriately superheroic to things like finding lost pets and helping little old ladies cross the road. (Also, for some reason, at least two people having trouble getting a taxi to stop for them, the correct solution to which is apparently to steal a taxi and drive them to their destination oneself. Super heroic.)

[edit: I belatedly realise that you're probably supposed to use one of the passenger vehicles you get as a reward for other side quests. But finding the nearest taxi and stealing it is usually easier than remembering where your own vehicles are parked, anyway.]

One amusing aspect is that, because the sidequests don't take into account which character one happens to be playing at the moment -- the free play portion of the game lets you switch at will between any of the available characters, including villains, and to an extent encourages spending a little time as each of them to learn their capabilities -- the juxtapositions can sometimes be rather incongruous. My two favourite examples from my own playing are the time a little old lady calmly requested assistance from Spider-Man's nightmarish evil counterpart Venom, and the time the X-Men casually asked Magneto to help them repel an attack by his own League of Evil Mutants.


3. It took me a while to get around to seeing the second How to Train Your Dragon movie; maybe I should have left it a bit longer, because a few days after I saw it I found myself rewatching the first movie on TV. Oh well. I don't think anything was badly harmed by doing it that way around.


4. Since I mentioned that I have been unable to attend Toastmasters recently due to having something else on the same day, I have been to two Toastmasters meetings, though neither on my home club's usual day. One was at the new Gourmet club, which meets monthly over dinner; I enjoyed that, and intend to go again next month. The second was this weekend; there were a couple of higher-level officials in town to do club officer training for the three local clubs, so we had a combined meeting and potluck dinner with people attending from all three clubs. I ran Table Topics for the meeting, or as I announced it, Iron Chef Table Topics, in which each speaker is given a mystery ingredient and immediately has to spend two minutes talking about what meal they're going to prepare with that ingredient.


5. I've mentioned before that I enjoy cryptic crossword puzzles because a good cryptic clue can be satisfying in the same way as a really bad pun, and that sometimes I'll be stuck on a clue for a long time and then one day pick it up again and immediately see the answer. This one is a case in point:

Resort city is half a mile, pal, from Paris (5)

1. Having got the brass band competition out of the way, I've got time for acting again. I'm in rehearsals for a production that opens at the end of June, and after that it'll be straight into rehearsals for another production opening in October.

The June production is the stage adaptation of 'Allo 'Allo, in which I will be playing an amusing Nazi. It's a bit of a departure for me, in that it's being put on by what I think of, and have occasionally referred to here, as "the other local theatre group". I've been to see some of their shows, and learned from their workshops, but this is the first time I've been in one of their productions.

The October production is a staging of a 115-year-old West End melodrama called The Duchess of Coolgardie, which was given a topical spin by taking as its setting the gold rush that was going on in Western Australia at the time. This will be the first time it's been put on in the part of the world where it's set. Being a melodrama, most of the characters are broad stereotypes, and the supporting cast are mainly distinguished by being The Irish One, The Yorkshire One, and so on. (Also, The Aboriginal One, who occasionally wanders into talking more like The Native American One when the authors have a lapse of concentration.) I've been cast as the villain; it's not clear yet whether moustache-twirling will be involved, but I've already found a stage direction calling for me to laugh sardonically at the heroes' misfortune.


2. The Rep Club's most recent production, the one which I didn't audition for because brass band competition, was The Importance of Being Earnest. I have a feeling that anybody who knew much about Victorian dress, behaviour, or interior decoration would have picked up a lot of lapses in those areas, but it was pleasantly entertaining, and it got major props from me for playing the butlers straight. (Every professional production I've seen in years has cast physical-comedy actors as the butlers and let them wander around upstaging Wilde's dialogue with slapstick sight gags. Drives me nuts, and I can't imagine why the directors thought that would be a good idea.)


3. Back at the brass band, there are deliberations afoot regarding shifting some of the players to new positions, to cover gaps left by players leaving and what have you over the past few years. (When we were at the competition, we had guests from friendly bands, including a few temporarily-returned ex-members, helping to bring us up to full strength.) I have been approached about possibly being shifted not only to a different position but to a different instrument.

There are two things to note here: The first is that every brass intrument except the trombone is built on the same basic system, so if you know how to play one it doesn't take long to learn a different one, if the one you know isn't the trombone. The second is that the only brass instrument I've ever learned to play is the trombone.

Actually, the conceptual leap was the difficult bit; now that I've actually started learning the new instrument it's going pretty smoothly, and I may actually be up to speed on it by the time they decide whether they want me to play it or not.

(I'm still not entirely convinced they're going to end up shifting me off trombone. It's not that there's a shortage of players: even without counting me, there are more players who identify trombone as their preferred instrument than there are trombone positions, which is one of the things that triggered the deliberations. It's just that when the trombone players were polled on which position they would prefer to play, given free choice, all of them except me wanted the same one.)


4. I have given another project speech at Toastmasters, this one on the subject of Nancy Pearl's Doorways into Reading, which I have written about here before.

I have one more project speech to do and then I will qualify as an official Competent Communicator. If I do it before the end of June, I'll boost the club's standing in the annual assessment of club performance. I don't think that's going to happen, though, partly because I'm not sure I'm going to be available for any of the June meetings, and partly because the requirement for the final project speech is to be inspiring, and I have no ideas for a topic I could be inspiring on.


5. Today's Google Doodle on the Australian Google homepage pays tribute to cartoonist and puppeteer Norman Hethrington, creator of one of Australia's most-loved children's television shows (also, with a suitable amount of hand-waving, arguably the long-running science fiction TV series in the world).

1. I attended a concert headlined by John Schumann and the Vagabond Crew, whereof I have now seen Schumann's "I Was Only Nineteen" performed live by a line-up including the man himself and at least one of the people who backed him on the original single thirty years ago.


2. I had the opportunity to introduce a group of my brass band colleagues to the game Werewolf. Several professed themselves uncertain at first, but they enjoyed the game once they got the hang of it, and at least a couple have expressed an interest in playing again sometime if suitable circumstances present themselves.


3. The Rep Club's big musical for next year will be The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee; auditions were held this month so we can get a head start on learning the songs before rehearsals start in earnest after the Christmas/New Year break.


4. I took part in a quiz night with a group of friends, and upheld the proud family tradition of coming in second place at quiz nights. We like to think that we were the moral victors, because the team that beat us took advantage of a scheme by which large donations to the cause that the quiz night was raising funds for would be rewarded with extra points. (On the other hand, we were technically over the specified team size, though two of the team-members were only there to socialise and provide moral support, and proudly announced at the end that they hadn't answered a single question between them.)


5. Yesterday was the Toastmasters club's annual International Speech Contest and Evaluation Contest. I entered the evaluation contest, as usual, and this year came third, my best result to date; I even managed to present my evaluation in the proper structure, with a conclusion and everything. This year, I was also co-organizer and emcee of the International Speech Contest, which meant that for me the very best part of the whole event was waking up the next morning and realizing that for the first time in several days I didn't have any rushing-around-preparing to do.

It's been a Toastmasters-heavy few weeks, actually.

The usual schedule is that we have two meetings a month, or one meeting every two weeks, which is not always the same thing; in some months the weekday in question occurs five times, and then we have to decide whether we're going to have a third meeting that month.

July was just such a month, and we decided to have the third meeting, with the result that the last meeting of July was followed only a week later by the first meeting of August. And then that was rapidly followed by one of the two annual contest days.

I was the rostered MC for the last meeting in July, which I wrote about last time.

I ended up being the MC for the first meeting in August as well, because the rostered person had to cancel at short notice and I was the most available person to fill in. Weirdly, it was much less stressful, despite having only an hour to prepare. Having all the procedures and things fresh from last week helped a great deal, of course. (And perhaps having only an hour to prepare was as much a help as a hindrance; there was no time to panic, and there was the thought that if the organisation hadn't been done properly before the thing came into my hands, it couldn't be my fault this time.)

The meeting itself went quite well, although it was a bit odd in its own way. I've mentioned before a meeting where a lot of people were away and the members were almost outnumbered by the guests; at this meeting, though I didn't count, I'm pretty sure the guests actually did outnumber the members present. (There have been some outreach efforts going on, so we had a bunch of people showing up to see what Toastmasters was like, and they happened to do it at what would otherwise have been a small, quiet meeting. I have hopes that some of them will come back in a few weeks to see what a fully-stocked meeting looks like.)

As you may recall, Toastmaster contests come in pairs, and yesterday it was the Humorous Speech (5-7 minutes, prepared in advance) and the Table Topics (1-2 minutes, ex tempore). As usual, I entered the Table Topics contest and failed to place, but did better than last year. This year my strengths were body language and use of stage space, as well as finding an idiosyncratic twist on the topic; my major weakness, as usual, was failure to develop the speech with supporting details and just sort of trailing off at the end instead of finding a solid conclusion. I feel I should acknowledge the contest organizer, who set a topic question that included two or three sentences of scene-setting; the time it took to announce (and, in accordance with the rules, it was announced twice through in its entirety) was extremely valuable thinking time.

The Humorous Speech contest was also memorable. There were two competitors, one of whom had stepped up less than 24 hours before the contest started. She's also one of our newer members, so what with one thing and the other she was feeling quite nervous before the contest. And then she won. (The other speech was more polished, but less laugh-out-loud funny.)

In the end, I think everybody had a good time, which is arguably the important thing.