Bill Roper's Journal

Made some good progress at work today, writing some tools that we can use to fix the problem that we're currently having. Tomorrow, we'll start filling in the blanks using those new tools.

And Gretchen and I have managed to submit Pegasus Nominating Ballots before the deadline, which is now very, very close. :)

Tomorrow is the first performance of the fall play over at the high school and I have now purchased our tickets. Sam and Bonnie are coming to join us, which should be fun.

Tomorrow is also when the recycling goes out and we have a lifetime supply of cardboard that needs to be broken down for recycling. This would be simpler if we weren't going to the play, but we will figure out how to make this work.

In other news, I have been tapped to cover a song in the Pegasus Concert at OVFF and I have tapped K to accompany me. This should *also* be fun!

Most of the gear that I unpacked for NOVFF (I could look up the correct spelling, but I'm being lazy :) ) is now packed up and ready to be put back in storage. If nothing else, packing that is faster than packing a dealer table.

It was good to see a lot of you online.

I am hauling a mic and a guitar cable upstairs. There's a spare interface floating around, so with that, I may show up online more often.

We'll see how it goes. :)

And thanks again to everyone who nominated "Apology" for a Pegasus. We didn't win, but that's ok. It's fun just having the chance to get up on stage and play for y'all.

Next year, let's do it in person. :)

The Pegasus tech check went well today, so we should be good to proceed.

Sadly, QE found a bug in the patch at work, so instead of working on what I'd planned to, I ended up patching the patch. It was a whole one line of code, but that's the way it goes some times.

I *was* able to help one of my co-workers figure out exactly where a particular change in behavior in the product had come from (happily, it was deliberate), so we were able to put that to bed.

Speaking of bed, the Braves have beaten the Dodgers, so I think I'll go to bed now.

Not a lot to report today. Halloween decorating proceeds apace. Some laundry was laundered.

And a *second* dog toy was flung (accidentally) onto the roof today. We are hoping to recover them when they come to clean the gutters out in about a month.

In other news, both the furnace and chimney were checked out on Saturday morning. The heat was turned on Saturday night, because it's been getting cold around here. Meanwhile, I need to go down and cut down the scrap wood from the fence. It's old untreated cedar. It should burn nicely.

And I pulled out the guitar. I played a number of songs, including "Apology", because practice is a good thing, especially when you're pulling it out direct from memory with no cheat sheets. Other than the complete crash and burn at the beginning of verse three when Ruby came trotting by with one of her new dog toys and distracted Gretchen completely, it went pretty well.

Maybe we should put Ruby in her kennel for the concert...

I have been massively distracted by the absence of our cat for the last few days, but I *did* want to remember to thank everyone who nominated me for a Pegasus Award for "Teenage Popsicle Girl" (as well as Erica and Steve, who work very hard to make sure that the cake makes it out of the oven intact). A friend of mine long ago told me that he thought that the song was a "funny once". It has turned out to be one of the more enduring songs on my list, which is a happy thing.

I had once thought about writing a song based on Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations". I will never write that song now... :)

I'm slightly late (but only slightly) in saying how delighted I am to be nominated for a Pegasus Award in the Best Time Related category for my song, "One Last Dance". Thanks to everyone who thought of me! (And it's going to be a tough little category, as is the rest of the ballot, which you can find here.)

In related news, let me shill again for Barry Childs-Helton for Best Writer/Composer as he is, in my opinion, the best fannish songwriter to have never won the award -- although there are some other folks I can think of who are in the running. :)

One of the things that happened during the weeks that we were busy being sick around here was really nice.

daisy_knotwise and I were nominated for a Pegasus award for Best Classic Filksong for Apology.

Thanks to everyone who thought of us! (Because, you know, I don't think you ever get too old for positive reinforcement. Or as Gretchen frequently reminds me, "We should write another duet." Well, yes. Yes, we should...)

The annual Pegasus Award nominating ballot will be closing soon. If you're a member of the filk community, let me suggest that you go nominate and -- having nominated -- remember to vote.

Let me also suggest one thing that you should consider nominating and voting for: Juanita Coulson's classic song, "Chess" in the Best Classic Song category, which seems to me like a fine place to be nominating a classic song. Darn near tautological.

"Chess" suffers from several problems that have made it difficult for it to win a Pegasus Award, although -- as you'll see at the link! -- it has been nominated more than once. First, it is egregiously out of print. It's certainly possible to win a Pegasus Award when no one can actually get a copy of the song, but it never actually helps.

Second, because it is annoyingly difficult to sing and play, it doesn't get covered a lot, so people don't hear it in filk circles. It is to the point where Juanita pretty much can't play it any more unless she's having a good day and that's a shame, because it is a lovely song. It is one of very few songs that I know that are anchored by an E7sus4 chord and a C9-5 chord. (The other, just for the record, is "Lunatic Moon", which I wrote while learning "Chess" partly because I wanted to see what else I could do with those perfectly good chords. :) )

But, damn, it is a classic song, because it was one of the very first filk songs out there that went places melodically that other filk songs feared to tread. (The only other one that I can think of off the top of my head is Juanita's lovely setting of Heinlein's lyrics for "Grand Canal".) It was operatic in construction and tone.

No, more than that: it was space opera, space opera on the grand scale.

And Juanita did all this in the 1970s, when most of us were busily wailing away and bouncing between Am and G and their little friends. "Chess" was the ground breaker, getting out there in front and showing us where we could go.

One-by-one, we followed. And filk is richer for it.

For those reasons, "Chess" deserves to win a Pegasus Award.

But there's more that I need to mention. I'm a baseball fan. I'm a Cardinals fan, despite having lived in Chicago for thirty years now.

That didn't stop me from recognizing that former Chicago Cub, Ron Santo, belonged in the Baseball Hall of Fame. But he never got in, waiting year after year, until he finally died.

Yesterday, Ron Santo was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Posthumously.

Juanita Coulson has never, ever won a Pegasus Award, which I find almost incomprehensible. And there is an unknown, but finite, amount of time that Juanita will be around -- as she periodically reminds me when we discuss her long-delayed album that I'm working on. :) (In good humor, I will add, just so we're clear on that.)

"Chess" is a song that deserves to win a Pegasus Award. Juanita deserves to win a Pegasus Award.

Maybe we could try to do something about this in the near future?

Thanks for reading!

I am stupidly thrilled that "Too Many Years" has been nominated for a Pegasus Award in the Best Romantic Song category for 2011. For a great many reasons, I'd be hard-pressed to name another song of mine that I more wanted to see on a Pegasus ballot.

You can find sound clips for all of the nominated songs, performers, and composers here. If you're interested in the Pegasus Awards, you should go listen to them. (If not, you might like to go listen to them anyway, because there's a lot of darned fine filk -- darned fine music, for those of you who are less than thrilled by "filk" :) -- sampled there.) And there is nothing that I like better than an informed voter. :)

My slippery memory tells me that the only time that "Too Many Years" appeared on an album was back on the Cactuscon Choruses cassette tape that came out right after the song was written. At that time, daisy_knotwise was still married to her first husband, while I was still unmarried. A wedding and two divorces later, Gretchen and I finally got married to the right person back on August 27, 1994, only seven years after I wrote the song.

You'd think we could have done a better job of figuring things out sooner, wouldn't you?

I intend to put out an album some time that will include "Too Many Years" as the title track. Work and two little girls are slowing the process down. :)

But in the meantime, I needed a sound clip of the song for the Pegasus site. So I went down to the basement and recorded the complete scratch track.

And you can hear it here.

Thanks, everyone. I appreciate it.