catching up … on sleep!

I’m several days behind. Oops. No excuses for slipping this far, though there was a birthday party for a recently-turned 11-year-old, with 16 guests, an intensive bear-stuffing-and-decorating craft, a movie (Kit Kitteridge), and a sleepover where hardly anyone slept. One guest proclaimed to me, “Steph always has the best birthday parties of the whole year!” and “This [bear] is the best craft ever!” Kudos to Steph’s dad for establishing such a strong birthday-party-throwing reputation. Then there was about 12 hours of novel contract homework with said 11-year-old on Sunday, where she worked on the related tasks while her dad and I took turns reading the novel aloud to her. Dad had a meeting in the evening so I stayed to feed and read to the sweet, busy girl. 

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And on top of this, I’ve been having LOTS of conversations about books and music, but mostly books. So here’s a review of the key conversations:

FRIDAY

Conversation: email, Peggy, Vice Principal of Harry Sayers School in Abbotsford, booked Kathleen for a full day of presentations in May at our full asking price. A very good moment!

Conversation: email, Lynette of PicPocket Books. I sent her all of the files for BlueBeary.

Conversationsssssssss: Kathleen was on fire catching up on her emails! I received about 20 messages from her in one day!

MONDAY

Conversation: my massage therapist declared that I’m doing very well with recovering from December’s car accident and that she believes I’ll come out of this healing process stronger than I was before this whiplash. We talked about how I’ll need to learn to hold the guitar differently and that it will be better than ever.

Conversation: Kathleen Busch in Victoria. This was a simple conversation via email:

ME: Still want me [to sing] for the weekend of Palm Sunday? I made a decision on the weekend that frees up most of my weekends from now until Easter.

HER: Yup!

Conversation: A timely email led to a very late Skype call with my friend Crystal in China. We talked about goals for personal growth and business. And as it was a video call, I was able to see her two younger children dance and prance around where the camera could see them. :)

TUESDAY

Conversation: Mike Michalowiz: my contribution to the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur blog was posted today: http://bit.ly/BizIdeas. Scroll down looking for the icon of BlueBeary. 

Conversation: Kathleen by phone, trying to figure out Twitter’s relationship to her Facebook accounts, generally catching up.

Conversation: Roy Salmond of Whitewater Studios in BC, by phone, about the possibility of doing the iPhone app voiceover in his studio. What is a voiceover? It’s the narration of the story—the reading soundtrack to go with the pictures. We’re planning that Kathleen will do her own voiceovers.

Interestingly, Roy & his wife know our illustrator Rebekah’s family quite well. Another potentially amazing connection: Roy’s wife Gayle is a children’s writer, working primarily with Wind and Tide, apparently the largest preschool company in Canada. She has written some curriculum and children’s books for them, and has done four albums of songs & vignettes. Hmmm … Roy & I talked about other possible formats and applications for the voiceover. Whether we end up recording in Roy’s studio or now, this was like a valuable 1/2 hour free consultation!

You know there were more, but technically it’s Wednesday already and I’m yawning, so it’s time for me to sleep in order to get up and have more conversations tomorrow!