halfpenny opera ended last week, and i’m going to really miss working with those people. it was a good show, they ended up paying me, which was more than i expected, and i made a bunch of contacts from it, including a for-sure job doing lights for drunk puppet night in january, and another for-sure job for a weekend in portland in february. seanjohn, halfpenny opera’s "mack the knife", really is giving up his evil ways and pursuing a job in real estate, although he’s still going to do the first friday cabaret, the next one of which is in feburary.

on the other hand, it’s almost december and i still don’t have a regular job… which is a good thing and a bad thing, as so many things in life are: there’s not much of a chance of my finding regular work, either as a tester or as a graphic artist, until at least february, because of the "holidays"… and the presence of those "holy-days" requires that i have had a job recently, so that i can afford the inevitable material glut that is their result, so my prospects for a "merry x-mas" are slim to none… which doesn’t matter much anyway because i don’t celebrate "x-mas", although a number of people who i hang around with, and who expect me to "be there for the holidays" (i.e. my inlaws) do…

on the other hand, i believe that the philharmonic is doing something for winterfeast, in december, plus i’ve more or less committed to going to bellingham for the art sharing, i believe that cirque de flambe is doing first night in spokane, and drunk puppet night is every weekend in january, so the fact that i don’t have a "real" job, once again, plays to my advantage… it’s too bad all these things don’t pay…

i lost two auctions on ebay. one for $250 worth of belt pouches, and the other for a proximity coat. neither of them are things that i particularly need, but they’re both things i could have put to good use.

i think magick, our australian sheperd, is trying to herd me. whenever monique is home, magick hangs around with her, regardless of where i am… and when i get up to go into the other room, or if i’ve been sitting in the other room for a while and make some noise, even a keyboard noise or something small like that, magick barks, and she barks loudly and sharply enough that my right arm jerks. it’s really irritating, especially since i can’t control the jerking, and it has affected my computer a couple of times as a result – i’m mousing with my right hand, magick barks, i jerk and the mouse drags the window to a place where i can’t access the menus. this is usually not a problem, because most of the applications i use have keyboard commands that i know, and i can just use the keyboard commands, but occasionally they have keyboard commands that i don’t know, and that’s where it gets to be a problem. there’s a possibility that we’ve found a solution, which we discovered over the past few nights (while monique was home sick), but if it is the solution, it’s going to mean training magick to do something other than barking, which will take a while.

check out Animusic… i got their DVD (which is fantastic, by the way) last year, and this year they sent me a web-coupon – EMN4 – which is good for $4 off anything at the animusic online store before 31 december. i’m not sure whether i’m going to use it or not (their new DVD isn’t available until sometime next year), and they said that it was okay to share the code number, as long as it was only used once per customer.