Janet Croft

Today, Allison and I are having lunch with Janet Croft, the Head of Access Services Department, University Libraries at the University of Oklahoma. I first met Janet online when she became interested in the virtual community that formed when I read Lord of the Rings for the first time and posted Web reports about it. Her primary research area is the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, but she's also interested in aspects of popular culture like online communities. She and Jay Shorten (also from the University of Oklahoma) are presenting a paper at a conference at the Sheraton Centre today, the title of which is "Reading Lord of the Rings: The Final Attempt": An Analysis of a Web Community. (Janet says she'll be posting the paper online soon, so I'll link to it when she does)

Anyway, Janet has been kind enough to invite Allison and me to attend the presentation of her paper this afternoon. I'm looking forward to meeting her in person! Report tomorrow.

Allison, Jodi and I had a great Urban Tapestry practice last night. They liked my Mediterranean Stew, yay! For dessert, we had frozen yogurt, seedcake (homemade by Allison, inspired by a conversation on our Tolkien boards), and double chocolate cookies (I baked these using chocolate I got from Joey Shoji).

We got a ton of practising done in the evening. We're performing in a Canadiana round robin on Friday night at FilKONtario, so had fun working up a version of "Goin' Up" by Great Big Sea (I'm playing penny whistle on this), "After The Gold Rush" (Neil Young), "All The King's Men" (Tom Cochrane), probably will work on some Bruce Cockburn next week. I taught them a Secret New song I've been working on, and I'm SUPER tickled by the results so far. Allison and Jodi are incredible, I have to say...by the end of the practice, we had three part harmonies going!

I tend to get overly excited when this sort of thing happens; I'm sure Jodi and Allison are highly amused when I start jumping up and down and yelling, "OH MY GOD THIS SOUNDS SO COOL YOU GUYS ARE SO COOL" over and over again. But you have to understand how incredibly satisfying it is for me to write a song that I'm pretty happy with and then have it turn into so much MORE when all three of us start working on it.

Ok, I'll stop gushing now.

We also worked briefly on Dot Com Survivor. I wrote this last year...it's seems somewhat outdated now, but I figure it'll be fun to perform anyway. :-)

Today's Blatherpic:

Me reading Lord of the Rings at the cottage last summer.