Phoenician Shores

33 weeks

stjarna — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 21:25:07 +0000

I am 33 weeks pregnant. I have had a pretty uneventful pregnancy, for which I am glad. It has been more uncomfortable than I imagined, however, and I am pretty much ready for it to be over. Things have been working out pretty well so far.

I have enough leave saved up to supplement my maternity leave benefits to allow me to draw 100% salary for 12 weeks. Yay!
My supervisor is being super cool about me being pregnant and taking 3 months for maternity leave. Yay!
Santino is being awesome. I am so glad I am having a baby with him. So far it has made our relationship better. I know that a baby will add stress to our relationship, yet I am confident that our bond is strong enough to withstand it.
One of my best friends, Shobha, is also pregnant and due a week after me. It’s nice to be going through this alongside her.
My mom is very excited, and is throwing me a baby shower. I almost never have social gatherings because it makes me nervous to be the center of attention for them – but I am indulging this time.
The birth center where I am giving birth is AMAZING and I have grown to really like my mid-wife.

I found out that my insurance covers giving birth at the birth center. YAY! That means I will be getting a fat check back a few weeks after the baby gets here so I can shop for baby stuff + have some left over to fund our next record label release.

I just picked out the bedding I want to get for Ian’s nursery. Since we have a pond on our property and live alongside all of the pond creatures who inhabit it, I think it will be really cute to have a pond theme for the nursery. I will be buying and decorating it while I am on maternity leave with the money we get back from the insurance company. Here is the bedding I am getting, but with a white crib instead:

One of the walls in the room is already the dark teal color in the bedding, so I think it is going to look cool.

We already have a co-sleeper so the baby will be sleeping in our room w/ us for the first couple of months… after that we would like to have our privacy back and for him to have his own space. I am making my current art/studio into a nursery, too – so I will still have my desk w/ my synthesizers and audio gear in there on one wall, but I am replacing the futon with his crib and taking down my drawing table (it’s designed to be folded away) and getting a rocking chair and ottoman so I will have a comfy place to breastfeed. I figure he won’t mind sharing the room w/ me. I can sit in there and make music while he is in there (w/ headphones sometimes and at other times not). Our plan over the next two years is to invest in a more professional desk for two in our main music studio so I can move over there. The current desk in my art studio is a small white one, and will be perfect for Ian as he grows up.
I met a lady who makes cloth diapers, and she is going to let me pick out fabric and appliques and make me custom ones!
I’m not really that scared about labor. I know it’s probably going to REALLY hurt, but it might not. I’ve done a lot of reading and I feel pretty educated about what’s going to happen. I am taking a hypnobirthing class starting this month so I can get prepared.
I have only gained 15 lbs so far, which isn’t bad at all. Everyone tells me that I will lose it all really quickly after labor and from breastfeeding. Many women get into the best shape of their lives after having a baby, and I intend for that to happen to me.

AIPH

stjarna — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:50:55 +0000

When I enrolled in college when I was 19 years old, I did not really do a lot of research or apply to different colleges to try to get into the best place. My life was in extreme turmoil from my senior year of high school until my first fall semester at the Art Institute of Philadelphia. Going to college to me was an desperate escape, and as soon as the first college came along that looked appealing, I jumped on it without a second thought. Even though I was a straight A & B student through most of my k-12 schooling and was in many gifted programs, when I got to high school I became apathetic. I still excelled in art, math, and music ( I was good at history, too) … but this was just because I really enjoyed these subjects and I was naturally gifted in them. In everything else I started flailing. I was more interested in shopping for clothes, hanging out with my friends, talking on the phone, being with my boyfriends and attending parties and clubs than doing homework or studying. Add to that my dad had an alcohol and drug addiction and my parents fought constantly (sometimes almost to the death) – I really didn’t have a chance in regard to staying on the right track to get into a great college the year after I graduated high school.

Of course, my apathy carried over after graduation. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I picked architecture and signed up for classes at a community college the autumn after I graduated high school and worked full time while I was going. It wasn’t very enthralling, to say the least. I remember I took a couple interesting classes – but what was most interesting was meeting a guy that had a really great collection of industrial cds. Even though I was not interested in him, he was interested in me and tried to woo me by letting me borrow about 10 of them. I was able to copy most of them to blank cassette tape. Before the internet, getting a hold of cool underground music was a much more rare and special occurrence. That was pretty much all I got out of my one semester of community college, besides an English 101 credit.

To be continued…

Feeling (and acting) unstuck.

stjarna — Thu, 12 May 2011 15:23:37 +0000

So, one of my problems over the past two or three years is that I have been in a rut in certain aspects of my life: mainly organization of my stuff. It’s not like I have been totally messy. To the casual observer I am pretty neat, but I have not been my true organization freak self. I’ve also been in a rut with creativity. This is connected to my organization rut. When I organize things, it comes from a place of creativity.

For the past few months, I have been slowly breaking out of my rut. I feel inspired to organize my stuff. I am getting rid of things I don’t need and reorganizing things I had long forgotten about. These actions seem to be building towards breaking through my art/creativity rut. I am ecstatic about this!

I think part of the reason for the rut busting is my “nesting” instinct is kicking it. Whatever works!

Baby Ian

stjarna — Fri, 06 May 2011 16:57:49 +0000

For weeks I had been having dreams that I am pregnant with a girl. I even dreamed of what she looked like as an infant and as five year old, and one night I dreamed of her name. Of course I shared all of these dreams with Santino and we started building expectations that we were having a daughter. We kept flippantly mentioning that we could be wrong, and that it COULD in fact be a boy, but I really thought my intuition was telling me that I was carrying a girl.

Boy were we shocked when we went to get a gender ultrasound at 21 weeks and found out that we are having a boy! We left the diagnostic center in a bit of a daze, realizing that we were experiencing a paradigm shift.

Now that we have had over a month for the news to settle in, we are ecstatic about our little boy. I have been having intuitive flashes of him smiling, laughing and playing. We have been daydreaming about the fun we are going to have playing with him in the woods behind our house. We have the perfect environment for a little boy. I’ve been picking up clothes for him and they are SO CUTE. Adidas makes a line of clothes for babies and toddlers, and all of the newborn clothes have cute little baby animals on them.

As the weeks roll on I am feeling more connected with him as he wiggles, squirms and pokes in my tummy. I am sure that he knows his daddy’s voice because every time Santino comes home at night and we talk Ian gets excited and starts moving about as if to let us know that he is there.

I just entered my third trimester and am slowly acclimating to the uncomfortableness. Our trip to San Francisco was fun but it was also stressful and honestly if I could go back I probably wouldn’t have done it again as it cost way more than I had anticipated. Also, the whole mercury retrograde debacle caused a bunch of stress that was very annoying. All in all I am glad to be back in Virginia. The weather is so beautiful right now and the colors of nature SO VIBRANT.

We still haven’t settled on a middle name. I am not sure why this is so hard! I think I need to go buy a baby name book.

Mercury Retrograde

stjarna — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 23:38:30 +0000

So, today I am having the worst mercury retrograde experience of my life. I should be in San Francisco right now, but we missed board our flight in Richmond this morning by ONE MINUTE and have been put on standy-by and bumped from flight to flight all day. We did make it to Dallas, TX but it’s 6:34 CST right now as I right this. That means we have been either on a plane or in an airport of over 13 hours. The prospect of getting to San Francisco tonight is not looking good. There was another flight from Dallas to San Francisco which was canceled and therefore there are about 160 other people on standby too. We already have out hotel in Santa Clara paid for tonight, and the mobile conference I am going to starts tomorrow at 9:00 AM!!! This sucks and Santino and I are both grumpy and not having a good time. We have two more chances to make a flight tonight before we have to stay in a hotel and get up tomorrow morning and try again. Ugghhhhh!!!

I am NEVER traveling during mercury retrograde ever again if I can help it!

Selekta Stjarna vs. Little Miss Gumball – DJ set from stressfactor.co.uk | 2/20/11

stjarna — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 16:43:42 +0000

Three weekends ago I traveled to Washington D.C. to hang out w/ my friend Shobha and guess DJ on her bi-weekly radio show. The other guest whom I was supposed to play alongside with had to cancel at the last moment, so Shobha filled his place. Even though I originally was going to do one long DJ set, we we decided to tag team. I am really happy we did! Shobha and I were joking about how much we have come a long was since we both started to learn how to spin 16 years ago! When we were roommates in college we would stay up all night, hang out and spin records… but honestly we were still figuring things out and trainwrecked A LOT. LOL. Another crazy thing is that Shobha is also expecting a baby and our due dates are the same week in August!

Here’s the mix for download. This is probably going to me my last all vinyl set for a while as Santino and I got Traktor Scratch and I will most likely use it to play digital releases in the future. It’s an awesome technology as it has vinyl controllers so you can spin the digital tracks just as if they were vinyl releases.:

DOWNLOAD:

http://www.selektastjarna.com/mp3/DCRR_20Feb11-Stjarna-Gumball.mp3

Selekta Stjarna (Techno Bass) vs. Little Miss Gumball (Techno)
Broadcast live on stressfactor.co.uk

Feb. 20, 2011

Tracklist:

Selekta Stjarna (00:00 – 36:00)

Little Miss Gumball (36:00 – 1:19:00)

Japanese Telecom – Character Maps (Perspects Mix)
Ramadanman & Appleblim – Void 23
Layo & Bushwacka – White Rhino
Steve Lawler – Distrait (Nick Curly & Gorge Remix)
Marco Carola – The Move
Click Box – Fun K Mouth (Original Mix)
The Martin Brothers – Dum (Nat Self Remix)
Maetrik feat. Sabb – Marinda (feat. Sabb)

Selekta Stjarna (1:19:00 – 1:58:00)

Eon – Phaze Test (String Phase) | Electron Industries

Little Miss Gumball (1:58:00 – 2:56:00)

Matria Truth – Quantum Dream (Nebo Kak Nebo)
Matthew Dear – You Put a Smell on Me ( Nicolas Jaar Remix)
Art Department – Without You (Extended 12″ Mix)
Jennifer Cardini & Shonky – Tuesday Paranoia
Luca Lozano & Sacha Robotti – Bartok (Siopis Remix)
Rainer Werner Bassfinder – Minimal Scarf Fuckers Drown (Original Mix)
Hobo – Obesity
The Royal We – Party Guilt
Ray Okpara feat. Nikki – Brainows (Lauhaus & Boris Werner Remix)
DJ Hell feat. Bryan Ferry – U Can Dance

New FBI Recordings website

stjarna — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 01:22:26 +0000

For the past year(?) or so, I am not really sure how long I have been working on it on and off, I have been building a new website for our record label. We finally launched it a couple of weeks ago when we announced our new release FBI006 – Kosmozo – The Search!

http://www.fbirecordings.net

This was the first time that I have used WordPress to build an entire website, and I like it quite a bit. I wanted to do it this way so Santino would be able to update the content himself. It was kind of a pain with the old website when I had to do everything. I also love WordPress’s selection of plug-ins. I plan on adding a store eventually! Yay! This has been a huge milestone for us. It feels like the record label has come back to life.

Back in 2008 we released FBI004 – Dark Vektor – Inteligencia Colectiva on 300 copies of clear/black vinyl and because vinyl sales have gone down so much over the past few years as DJs switch to digital formats, we lost quite a bit of money on it. We have never quite regained all of the capital we have built up since. With FBI005 – Mandroid – Anti-Gravity Machines we did 100 CDs, 12″ vinyl through a record cutting service in France, and digital formats. With FBI006 we just did the record cutting service and digital. It doesn’t cost us any money this way, but it’s not as exciting as doing a full vinyl pressing. With FBI007 we are planning on doing a 100 record pressing + digital now that record pressing plants are offering this smaller amount (you used to be able to do no less than 300). We are excited about getting back into the vinyl business. I can’t help but be a vinyl enthusiast.

I’m having a baby.

stjarna — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:59:28 +0000

So I found out in December that I am having a baby in August. As of today I am 16 weeks and 3 days pregnant! I have been fighting major bouts of nausea, fatigue and headaches for the first 16 weeks but I am most definitely feeling much better now that I am well into my second trimester. Thank goodness because it was rough for a while! I haven’t been exercising much since I first started to feel crappy, but today I took steps to change all that by joining a very luxurious gym that is great at catering to pregnant women and new moms. I go to my first prenatal yoga class on Tuesday and I am super excited to try out the salt water swimming pool. I plan on having a natural birth in a new birthing center that is opening up locally in a couple of weeks. I am excited, nervous, afraid, deeply in awe at the change that is happening to me, and hopeful. I know that everything is going to work out okay like it always does. Things have seemed to be lining up for me perfectly so far. There’s no reason to think that the universe would not support us to help bring this new life into the world. I just don’t want to lose myself. As long as I strive for that, I think I will be okay.

Complaint about shallowness

stjarna — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 03:34:52 +0000

I can’t stand when people move from a smaller town to a big city, and then start to think they are too good to talk to the people they knew before. I’ve lived in small towns, big cities, suburbs and I know for a fact that just because one lives in a big city it doesn’t mean that you are cooler, more cultured, more intelligent etc. etc. I can’t stand how shallow people can be sometimes!

Career Development

stjarna — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 17:06:02 +0000

I have been at my current position at the University for almost three years, and have decided it is time to move on. As of the beginning of March I am going to be working in a different department – the Library! I am super psyched. I really feel like this is going to be such a good thing for my life and happiness.