The One With the iPhone 2011 in Review

It has been nearly two months since I posted here. I am not going to try to make any excuses. I just plain didn’t have time. But I am kind of excited to start posting again. Breathing again. Maybe reading a book. Watching a movie or two. Tonight I was looking through the photos on my iPhone, and I decided to do a little review of 2011 from the point of view of my constant companion, the iPhone. We are so close I really should name him. These are about a tenth of the 400+ photos on my phone. Warning: Some of this is extremely random, and there were many events I completely failed to capture via phone. These are in chronological order, beginning in January. Here we go...

The funniest notification I have ever gotten on my phone (and something of which I must frequently remind myself):

My cute little primary people looking at a hymnbook together:

Pizookie party!

Eating a very strange dinner with a life-sized bust of the pope staring at me.

Driving past the L.A. Temple in the rain:

Right after getting my hair done. Wish I could blow-dry my hair like they do. Also, I have a HUGE nose.

Casey and Hannah right after their wedding!

Jimmer fever.

These are my new primary peeps. AWESOME.

My business partner.

A hotel stay in L.A. From my hotel window, I could see ten separate Lap Band billboards!

My crazy little nephews that look like little Harry Potters.

Four times this year I have been stuck on THIS freeway interchange in traffic. I sort of hyperventilate being stuck on a car suspended a hundred feet in the air.

I have to assume Skippy took this one. And the battle ensued.

A photo from my first of not one, but TWO trips to Missoula, Montana. Clark Fork River from downtown.

Photo shoot with two cameras. Way fun.

Waiting for fireworks to erupt on July 4 from Trabuco Mesa Park.

Writing out guitar chords for one of many songs for the CD.

Not sure why I shot this, but it is certainly true.

Cousins, and water.

Sisters.

Cupcake garden.

Taking a random ukelele for a test drive at Guitar Center.

Making a fruit display for a friend’s wedding.

Taco Tuesday!

Windmills near Palm Springs.

A couple cool shots of downtown Phoenix in 108-degree weather.

Hannah and Skippy at Five Guys, downtown Phoenix. Skippy’s first time... he loved the peanuts.

 J and J, Hannah, and baby Reeses waiting for bride and groom to come out.

Some of my favorite menfolk.

Beautiful daughter-in-law, DK (Darling Kevin)

Love this one of my grandson.

Second trip to Missoula, different place on the Clark Fork River. Worst trip of my life, but beautiful shot.

Walking at the lake in Rancho Santa Margarita. I did a lot of that this year.

Random Sunday shot.

This one is a little hard to explain. I don’t think I should try. Let’s just say when I am having a bad day I look at this on and have a good laugh.

Proof that we get a little fall color in Orange County.

Skip and Cam’s list for Santa.

Son and grandson. Awesomeness.

13 hours without electricity. Kind of dreamy. Did dishes by candlelight, made no-bake cookies, ordered pizza and watched movies on the iPad.

Saturday afternoon of concerts, spent helping Andrew and Melissa put up more lights and video for the second night of concerts. That is my grand piano up there on the stage... another crazy story there.

2011, just about done, and I am kind of relieved. I almost can’t believe all the stuff I did this year. 2012, bring it on. Just let me sleep a couple of days first.

The One Where She Opened the Store

I kind of thought that things would slow down just a little once I got my new Christmas CD shipped off to the duplicator. I was wrong. I don’t know why I ever think that!

But today was a very productive day. No, I didn’t get my kitchen clean... but I overhauled my website... click on the photo to check it out:

And I opened up the storefront to sell my new CDs... click on the photo to go to the store!

AND we started selling tickets to our Christmas concerts in December. If you want to come, you should run over and pick up your tickets right away. We will sell out! The dates are December 16th and 17th, and the tickets are the very low price of $5 each. You can buy them from the Archangel Records store along with the CDs. Click to buy:

I got about two hours of sleep last night. And about six the night before... so I’m going to get off the computer now and go pay attention to my family for a few hours before bed! Please go buy CDs and tickets, and please tell your friends!!! Woohoo!

The One With Those Hats My Mom Knit

The One Where I Hit My Head on a Rock

It is 1:30 a.m. and I need a break from mixing songs. I just spent a half hour in my car over at the lake. Why? Because it has a nice Bose sound system (the car, not the lake), and I wanted to hear a burn of the whole CD to check for problems. Did I find problems? YES. It is kind of an eye-opening... or maybe ear-opening experience. So I have a list of things to work on for every song. But I need a short break, so I am going to throw two random thoughts out there.

The first one is that when I am tired I do strange and sometimes not-so-good things. For instance, I just hit my head on a rock hard enough that it is bleeding through my hair. Yes, a rock. We have a pillar on the way into our house, right by the front door, that is paved in rocks, which have sharp edges that stick out. I bent over to pick something up in the dark just now, and misjudged where the edge of the pillar was, and just about knocked myself out when I stood up again. I don’t think that is something I would do if I was caught up on sleep.

Next random thought: I have some favorite moments on this new CD. Not just songs... yes, I have favorite songs too. But there are some “moments” that are pretty much amazing. There is one in the duet that Rachel and Kevin sing called “What Would You Say” where they are singing in full voice, and Rachel’s vocals carry out and Kevin does this kind of “flip” on the end of his, that just gets me. Another one was a surprise that happened just yesterday. “Santa’s Really There” is a song I have been dreading because I wasn’t sure what I could possibly do to give it the cool jazzy sound it needed. And then yesterday a Marine named Charlie Arbalaez showed up on my doorstep with his saxophone. He gave this song so much attitude. When I am listening to it I almost feel like I can play sax, or like I AM playing it. And there are two or three “moments” in that song where no matter how tired or down I am feeling (and believe me there have been plenty of both this weekend!) I find myself smiling... almost laughing, because it is so fun, what Charlie did with it. Away in a Manger... this one has two “moments.” The first one is the vocals on a key change. It makes me smile every time I hear it (I decline to mention why at this moment), and the second is right after the key change, where the song almost starts sounding like Riverdance, thanks to some awesome post-production by Kevin Anthony.

The last “moment” that comes to mind right now is in the song “That’s My King.” This one got a rescue from the Marines as well. Bob Siletzky (I think Sergeant Bob Siletzky) from the San Diego Marine Band lent his trumpet skills to this one. I am kind of proud of the arranging I did on this one, with the trumpets. Garry knew since the middle of summer that he wanted horns for it, and so I have been coming up with this arrangement in my head, and to hear it with real trumpet... wow. But the moment. Okay, so the moment comes right before the last chorus. Garry sings from the point of view of a man in Bethlehem the night the Savior is born, and he spends that night searching for the baby, but without ever finding him. Right before the last chorus, the music builds as he sings, “Though I didn’t get to see the babe, or hold him in my arms, I can marvel at the gift he freely gives...” and for me that may be the best moment of the whole CD. There are times when I am listening to a live music performance and when the sound is so big that it just seems to live in me, rather than being something at a distance, then I feel this swell of emotion. That is what happens every time I get to that moment in the song. And believe me when I tell you I have listened to this song probably sixty times just this weekend alone... and it still works, every single time. Or maybe I just got hit in the head by a rock. Oh, yeah.

Well, it is now 1:47. Fifteen minutes’ break, over. Time to finish this thing. I know this sounds crazy but I have to make all the changes I wrote down, burn another CD and then go sit in my car and listen again. Edit, burn, listen, repeat.... and repeat. I am so tired, but we are going to make our deadline tomorrow! That means you will have CDs to buy a week before Thanksgiving! And I think I can safely say that it is going to be good enough that you might have a few “moments” of your own when you listen. Thanks everyone, for being so supportive as we have attempted to do this crazy task of writing, recording and producing a CD this year, and the crazier stunt of putting on concerts as well. It has been a wild ride.

The One Where Steve Changed My Life

When I was a young mother, only twenty-one years old, Steve Jobs changed my life. He made it possible for me to quit my full-time job as a legal secretary and stay home with my babies. This was my computer:

Don’t laugh... it was a magical time for personal computing. I rode the leading edge of what was lovingly named “desktop publishing.” Over the next eight years, while raising five small boys and trying to keep my house in one piece, I worked hours every day and night, setting type and designing graphics for individuals, small businesses, and even the Irvine Company, which was, and is, quite large in Orange County.

I learned a lot of things. I learned to work well with men. In fact, one day Donny Osmond came to my little apartment and met with me about typesetting his fan club newsletter! (I know, weird fact, right?) I learned that when a two-year-old puts multiple floppy disks into a computer disk drive, that the disk drive must then be replaced. I learned that I was a hard worker, and if that I had to, I could pull all-nighters and finish a job in order to feed my family. I learned that there were few people who shared that work ethic, and that I could not duplicate myself... no matter how hard I tried to find motivated individuals who wanted to make extra money, they would likely not pull an all-nighter, even if it meant making a few hundred dollars in a night that would help make ends meet for their own family! Those years of crazy hard work at a young age helped to make me a very strong, independent and entrepeneurial person, and made me realize that I never want to work for someone besides myself. I learned that I could always think of a way to earn money when it was necessary.

I also learned that I love the written word. I actually enjoyed setting type on the computer and I love fonts and typefaces of all kinds. I haven’t been a typesetter in many years, but I still love those beautiful letters. I have been working today on the typography for the CD cover. Here are some of the ideas I came up with. I can’t wait until you see the artwork that my friend Claudine is creating (think European stone angels!) but as you can see from these samples, there is also art in the words. Which do you like?

The One With the Missionary and the Song

A friend of mine is serving a two-year full-time mission for our church. If you are not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) then you may not know that missionaries don’t get to call home or have much contact with their families while they are gone. A weekly letter by e-mail is the usual permitted contact. I read the letters that my friend sends to his family each week, and he is such a humble young man that I often find his letters to be thought-provoking and moving.

This week’s letter was so profound that I kept it in my e-mail inbox, and I have found myself re-reading several times since I received it on Monday. Since I don’t technically have Elder M’s permission to forward it, I won’t use any names or identifying information, but I really want to share this with you tonight.

“We got to have a really cool experience this last week, we met a girl named K____.  Unfortunately we met K in the Hospital.  When i first walked in it frightened me. We didnt know what to expect because some one called us and just told us to visit the hospital.  Both of K’s eyes were black and all the white in her eyes were replaced with Blood red.  She seem week as she sat in her bed.  Her mother began to tell us what happened.  K was assaulted in her home, the suspect choked her till he thought she was dead.  She had two strokes and is left partially blind and has memory problems, she cant remember the last two months of her life and the doctors say it will not come back.  Now i know this is graphic and sad but i want to tell you about our experience.
This Girl, a sophmore in high school, is one of the sweetest people i have ever met.  She has such a positive attitude it was astounding.  I was shocked at how happy she was even in her situation.  My companion said, "If you ask just right, Elder M will sing a hymn for you"  she then said, "Will you sing for me?"  So i did.  I sang the song i am a child of God and she mouthed every word as i sang all the verses.  K was in her high school choir and loved to sing but because of what happened she cant just yet.  I felt as i sang that i was her mouth.  That she was singing the words through me.  It was an amazing experience,  words can do no justice.  K’s spirit was so overwhelming and i came away from our meeting as a changed person.  you and i are so  blessed.
     one of my blessings is you... whoever is reading this.  I  am blessed to have you in my life.  I am grateful for your prayers and support.  For you love and your letters.  You have blessed my life beyond measure.
  I love You!”

There is not much I can say to add to that. It just makes me so grateful for this missionary, and for all that I have. I am so grateful to be working on music right now and to be creating a really amazing Christmas CD that will honor my Savior Jesus Christ. I am so lucky to have a voice, and ears that hear and fingers that make music. I am so blessed to have a family who loves and supports me. I am so blessed to have my music partner with whom I could write so many great new songs and produce them into something that will be meaningful. I pray K____ will make a full recovery, and that she will find her own voice again soon.

Another Totally Random One

Just a few stray thoughts today.

1. I hate it when... I buy something on eBay that I really need and it looks like a great bargain, and then I realize that the seller is in Hong Kong and it is going to take three weeks to arrive, and when it does, it will be a cheap imitation that falls apart the first time I use it. I am a very experienced eBayer, and yet I still make this mistake from time to time. This week’s: new padded covers for my studio headphones. They are horrible.

2. I love these Betsey Johnson boots:

3. By this weekend roughly half of my children will be married. How did this happen?

4. Do you know of anyone who wants a family or individual photo session? Engagements? Bridals? I would love to book a few shoots in this next month! I am reasonably priced and fun, too. :) Click on the photo below to link to the sample gallery.

5. This begins my third week of being home alone during the day, and it is a little bit freaky how my house makes noises all by itself like there is someone walking around upstairs. Just saying.

The One Where She Begged (Again)

I have been putting in ten- to twelve-hour days on my new Christmas CD. It is scary, exhausting, exhilarating, and way outside my comfort zone. My business partner, Garry and I have to be finished by the end of October, which leaves us roughly five weeks to finish, and while we have made headway on each of the 13 songs, there is not a single one that is finished and put to bed.

I am not trying to brag here, but I need to express to you that this is going to be SO COOL. My last CD was really fun, but I basically recorded 13 songs that I had already written over the last ten years. This CD is a brand-new effort with all-new songs and arrangements of traditional numbers that Garry and I have created just in the last year. I am so proud of them... I can’t believe I am saying this, but there is not a single song out of 13, where I think to myself, wow, that one didn’t really turn out as well as the others. Each one is a little gift! I can not wait to share it with you.

For now, I am going to ask you for a favor. I need to increase the amount of people I can reach for this CD. I am going to try a few different things to accomplish that, and I will tell you more about that later... but for this week, I would like to pass the 1,000 mark for my Facebook fans. I am currently at 810. Only about half of those 810 are my Facebook friends, which means that half of my own Facebook friends haven’t even “liked” the page yet! So please, if you are a Facebook person, please click here to “like” my page. I would appreciate that so much, even if you are not my Facebook friend. For that matter, I would love to be your Facebook friend as well, so please feel free to send me a friend request! But regardless, please please please help me and “like” the page, here:

Secondly, if I have any friends in the blogosphere who would be willing to use their blogs to forward my request for more Facebook fans, I would love that. If you do, please be so kind as to leave me a comment with the name of your blog so that I know who you are! (I can e-mail you a link with the “like” button if you want it!) You have no idea what that would mean to me.

Thank you! Please, while you are over there, click on the “Band Profile” link on the left side of the Archangel Records page, and you can listen to tons of our songs and watch our videos from there. Enjoy...

The One Where You Get Spotified

In the category of cool things you probably haven’t ever heard of: Spotify.

I love iTunes. It has changed the way we listen to music, forever. I don’t like to pirate music, movies or software. I would rather pay a fair (hopefully low) price for it and just own it. The drawbacks to iTunes are expense and storage... I had to clear my iTunes library off my computer in order to have more disk space for our Archangel music project, and moving the library to an external hard drive freed up about 330GB of disk space! That is half the capacity of my computer’s internal hard disk. The new “Cloud” from iTunes is changing that... now you can store songs, apps and TV shows in the Cloud instead of keeping them on your own storage. But at some point you have to wonder, do I really need to own all of this music that I may not even listen to next year, or even next month?

Enter Spotify. Now, I like Pandora and I like iHeart Radio, and some of the other internet “radio stations” out there. But Spotify is different.

1. You can make playlists and listen to them online, without purchasing the music. So far in all my searches, there have only been a couple of songs I haven’t been able to get, and those were songs that are “album only” purchases on the iTunes store.

2. You don’t have to listen to all the songs that Pandora picks for you based on your specified preferences... you pick them out for yourself. For instance, the new Lady Antebellum album was released yesterday. It was immediately up on Spotify.

3. Spotify synchs with your iTunes library to make all of your existing playlists available in a very attractive interface.

4. If you upgrade from Spotify Free to Spotify Premium, all of your playlists can be available off-line and synch with your iPhone or other smartphone via a free app, so that you can listen to any of your songs anytime, anywhere. That means that for $9.99 a month, the price of one non-deluxe album on iTunes, you have access to every song, and none of the songs is taking up a single kilobyte of your own storage space.

5. Spotify links to Facebook so that any of your Facebook friends who have Spotify can access your playlists (should you elect to make them public, which I do), and you, theirs.

Why haven’t you heard of Spotify? Probably because it has been used internationally for the last two years, but only made it to the U.S. in the last few months. How do you get it? You have to receive an invitation. To request that invitation, you can click here or leave a comment on this post with your e-mail... I may have a few invitations left on my account.

Spotify. Go get it.

The One With the Sneak Peek

Hey! If you haven’t been following my other blog, this is the time to start. I am in the last few weeks of producing a new Christmas album, and I am starting to post sneak peeks and other fun stuff. The latest is a song I recorded with Tandy earlier in the week. Please go over and check it out... start following... and leave me some comments over there! Thank you. :)

Archangel Records Blog

The One With Skippy and the Full Frontal Nudity

Skippy is going to be baptized tomorrow. Last Sunday in church the kids were given a really cool object lesson about how watching and listening to unwholesome material can make our thoughts very muddy so that we can’t hear the Spirit. The visual was a clean, clear glass of water, and then another where several different food colors had been added to make the water murky. Skippy raised his hand and asked, “When you get baptized, do you get to pour out the dirty water and get clean water again?” I thought how sweet and innocent he is.

And then the next day I showed him a naked woman.

At this juncture, we can just stipulate that I am a bad parent. Skippy and I were home alone. I have been spending every waking moment at the computer working on music, and he begged to watch a show with me on TV, and I took an hour break to oblige. I love sci-fi and he does too, of late, and I figured Stargate SG-1 would be a fun one to watch. It ran for something like fourteen seasons, and I saw most of them. So we queued it up on Netflix and started watching. Bad mom alert: I was also kind of sort of checking my e-mail at the same time. I glanced up from my e-mail, and there they were. Breasts. Very impressive ones, I might add. Startled, Skippy and I looked at each other wide-eyed, and he immediately covered his eyes. I grabbed the remote and started zipping through. Breasts, breasts, larger-than-life breasts.... pan down... and there it is. A whole naked woman.

I watched Stargate SG-1 for several years on Fox network. It was such a clean show as to be unrealistically sterile at times... and so it didn’t even cross my mind that the shows were originally aired on SHOWTIME, and it seems that premium stations have become nothing more than peddlers of pornography, even more so now than when Stargate originally aired. While I was shocked to see it, and even more dismayed that I showed it to my eight-year-old son, I suppose it was extremely tame compared to what HBO and Showtime offer today, which we found to be so disgusting that we won’t allow those stations in our home at any price.

I am also extremely disappointed with Netflix for not securing the edited-for-regular-network versions, and even more so because, as you can clearly see here in the screenshot which I just took from the Netflix website, the series is rated TV-14, which does not, according to the TV rating guidelines, permit nudity. The program, aired in its uncut format, would have to be rated TV-MA, which is the rating Showtime and HBO generally use (and with good reason) for all of their original programming.

Netflix is definitely going to hear about this from me.