Music Welcome to Snewscast. The podcast designed to help you fall asleep. Find us on Snewscast.com and listen to us. Wherever you listen to podcasts.

Hold on, N. What's going on here?

What? I thought this was an N episode.

No. No, this is most definitely a V episode.

Are you sure about that?

Says in the episode description.

It most certainly does not look.

But what it does say is that it's our 1,000th episode. Wait. What? Yep. Are you telling me we've read 1,000 bedtime stories? Well, there's been some reruns, sure. And some episodes get split. But if you factor in the times, we've had to record twice because someone forgot to turn the mic on. You promised to never bring that up. Too late. Part of the lore now. How about we start this off with a montage of brought to you by's? Our favorites? I think it might be hard to parse through 1,000 brought to you by's. But sure, let's say favorite. This episode is brought to you by a crisp tang in the air. White pebbled cavern floors, unconventional fashion, wild unicorns, thoughtless, thoughtless Lydia, silver bathtubs, the mysterious regions above the clouds, the sounds of a tennis ball, Vali. Watching a meteor shower with your friends. Waking up to a snowstorm and going back to bed. By all the cats out there so relaxed, their tongues stick out a little good. Say n, what's the story behind the brought to you buys anyway? I mean I know, but for the sake of our listeners Just sort of an idea to immediately shift your mind onto something else, some small concept. Neat. Yeah, and we first just thought of pleasant sayings, but somewhere around the 500th episode, I think we switched to some phrase within the episode itself, sort of like an easter egg, kind of like how when you're watching a movie and they name drop the title. So tonight, we'll be having a bit of meta fun. Talk a bit about the show and our history. To be honest, I'm not sure how well this will function as a sleep story episode, but you only get to a thousand episodes once, so thank you for indulging us.

Yes, thank you dear listeners. Shall we transition here? I think it may already be happening. Quick question V, do you have this part memorized or do you still need to read it? to read it. Let's find out. And my eyes are closed. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bed. Now, let's get cozy. I mean take a few deep breaths now that my eyes are open and I can see. So a snooze cast episode always has three parts.

The intro, the tuck track, which was perfectly read by V, and of course the story part, which is where we are now. And before we transitioned here, we had mentioned our dear listeners. Yes. I wanted to take a moment to speak about our dear listeners and not rush it.

That's right.

We know there's a lot of voices out there.

The fact that you've chosen to fall asleep with ours, we don't take that lightly.

Yeah, there have been times, many, many times, where your kind words,

your stories, your encouragement, they've kept us going. We hear from people all around the world from every kind of background, and sometimes someone will share that they've been going through something incredibly hard, and that somehow our little show has helped them through it. Some of you have been with us since the beginning. And some of you only found us this year. What began as a LARC has turned into the bedtime routine for thousands of people. And we'd like to thank everyone who's taken the time to reach out. I thought for tonight our 1,000th episode, we'd take a little stroll down memory lane. I'm sure we've shared this before, but Vee, would you give a brief synopsis of how snooze cast actually started? It was one of those ideas we had floating around for a while, at least a couple of years before we finally did something with it. Around the same time, you came up with that idea for an ice cream truck that only served small, bite-sized cones, like flights of ice cream. Little ice bites, still a solid idea. Well, honestly, not your worst. But around 2017 or 2018, we had our own little two-person book club that met every night around 9.30pm. That's right. And we would take turns reading chapters to each other of whatever book we were reading at the time. Yeah, except one of us kept falling asleep during the story. Yes, one of us did. We won't say who though, but it was me. We read a lot of great stories during that time. Everything from classic to modern fiction. One of my favorites I think was when we read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson around Halloween time. Perhaps the impetus for our annual classic horror sleep story series. There's just something so satisfying about reading or listening to Kozy Horror in October. I agree, but going back a step, we sat with the idea of snooze cast for a long time before we took action. Two years, I think, at some point in late 2018, I ordered, or maybe it was you, one of those giant posted notes. And we put it up in our living room and we started mapping out how we wanted to actually approach it. And one of the big things I Remember in big block letters was consistency. We wrote every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And we've never missed a day. Well, we certainly haven't always been on time, but we've always tried. Listeners have sometimes told us that they thought snooze cast is bigger than it is from an operational standpoint. But just to mention here, it's essentially just V&I with some very much needed help from our assistant Nora. Shout out to Nora. We couldn't do it without you and you know it. Absolutely. So in addition to Nora, V&I handled pretty much the whole gamut, and we've done it through some major life events. We've gone through job changes, getting married, buying a house, having two kids. And through it all, we've done our best to keep snooze cast going because we know how much it means to you. And it means just as much to us, to be honest. Which is why it's tricky when we hear from listeners about why we have ads. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to. But it's absolutely necessary to keep snooze-cast running. But that's why we've tried to give our listeners options. Yeah. For anyone who prefers an ad-free experience, There's always the option to sign up for a snooze cast plus and snooze cast plus to lux. It gives you access to all of our stories without ads for a low monthly subscription. And I didn't even mean for that to turn into a plug. I just wanted to say that behind the scenes, there are real operational costs from podcast hosting to replacing recording equipment and software tool subscriptions. Just keeping things running takes a fair bit of effort and resources. And I'll have to just slide us back here again at the beginning of 2019. We just went for it. Don Quijote being our first story. Any particular reason we chose that one? Honestly, I don't remember. Me either. We definitely have much more of a plan now, though, in terms of ongoing stories, original stories, and one-offs with how they're spaced out within a month. Speaking of original stories, is there one that's your favorite? Hmm. I think it would have to be Maggie's start date. Hey, that's mine too. Yeah. I love how you referenced other of your pet stories in that one. Oh yeah. Yeah. I was working on a whole pet universe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's funny to look back because things were pretty quiet those first couple of months. I don't think we had especially high expectations. And we just wanted to make something we thought other people might like and that we would like to listen to it fall asleep. Do you remember how in our first apartment, we ended up running the mic cable into the closet since the clothes made for a nice, makeshift acoustic panels when one of us was recording? Yeah. And then in our second apartment, we'd always forget that Thursdays at 6 p.m. meant a full chorus of lawn mowers from the landscapers. We'd set up to record and then suddenly leafflowers. Every time we never learned. Around that time, if you listen closely on good headphones, you might hear an occasional sound of our old dog Murphy stretching or our baby IV waking up from a nap. Ah, those are the days. What do you suppose the future holds for snooze cast V? No one knows for sure, but the good news is there's still lots and lots of good old books to discover. I thought it might be fun now if we did a little Q and A. Three questions and answers from each of us. Yes. Sounds good to me. How about I ask you first? Do you have a favorite story you've read on snoozecast? That is very hard to answer, but I think one of the most memorable experiences for me were all of the books that we read completely from beginning to end and how many of them, pretty much all of them I've never read before. And so as I was reading it, recording it, it was, I was experiencing it in real time for the first time as well. And especially towards the end of some of those books, there's some parts that I was unexpectedly very moved by and emotional. A lot of them are like that. If you hear the final episode on some of the series, I'm like holding back sobs of joy and wisdomfulness.

I remember one was Heidi.

That has a special place in my heart,

but there were so many like that.

There's nothing like finishing a good book. Nope. Okay, question two. What's your favorite comfort movie? Comfort movie? Yeah, like a cozy movie. I don't think I have like one cozy movie that I turn to on VHS and I get out the VCR for. Favorite is, you know, what's one you like? I do know people that have like a comfort movie like that. But what I would say is my comfort movie would be any old black and white or early color classic musical or romp paper, farce, any silly old classic movie with low stakes where I don't have to be so seriously watching it but can just be curled up and have it on while snacking and not have to pause it if I have to run to the bathroom. I remember now when you were pregnant we would often be searching for low stakes movies. And I love the old ones for low stakes because I'm not so much watching it to get completely immersed in the plot or anything, but rather I am fascinated with it for the time capsule element of just seeing how differently things were portrayed in the past. Great answer. Okay, third question. I might already know, I'm sure I do, the answer to some of these, but outside of parenting, work, and snooze cast, what's some of your favorite activities, V? I should certainly hope you would know given that we've lived together for like ever now. Well, you're my husband. But for our listeners, just like how the content on snooze cast or the topics are very diverse. That's the way I approach hobbies too. I love a lot of different things, but I guess one thing that might be interesting, mildly interesting, is that for exercise, besides yoga, two things that I love to do and I do regularly, at least a few times a week, are jumping on a rebounder, which if you don't know, is like a small adult-sized trampoline. Highly recommend it, it's so fun. I'll say that if you, when you think of the idea of that, if you haven't done it before, if it just thinking about it, seems like it would feel good to just jump. Yes, it is. And then the other one is hula-hooping or hoop dancing. I love to do that. I actually used to teach workshops on it to grown-ups and I still to this day do it in the privacy of my own home dancing to music and it's great exercise and it feels so good. You've taught Ivy a thing or two as well. I'm trying. Yeah. Yeah. I have plans. Now it's time to turn the tables. Ah, how the tables turn. Out of all of our nonfiction episodes, what is one that stands out to you? Oh boy, nonfiction. Like so one's about making bread in the 1800s. Oh my gosh. Not necessarily, but yes. Nonfiction from the past is always very interesting because they're, you know, working with incomplete information. Yeah. So you're like, don't want to lie on our episodes for accuracy, don't take notes. You're learning about how they predicted weather, you know, before modern technology, and they say it so confidently. I think, and I'm forgetting the name now, but I think our friend who would build the canoes, I feel like he probably could still build a very good canoe today that would stand up to modern canoeing would be my guess. Oh absolutely. That was the Woodcraft series. Right. What was his name? Like, Nip Chucker, something. Two different names I think. He like took on a pen name and we would have to look into it. I don't remember. He was a master. Yeah. What was it called? A woodsman, a wildman? So yeah.

So for a lot of the nonfiction that we read, I'm thinking, oh, that's not right. But that in itself, you know, something about media, I always find interesting is, you know, the meta narrative within in it of you learn what people thought back then.

So you're still learning something. You're not learning, you know, necessarily how to make bread correctly, although I'm sure some of those recipes definitely hold up still. But you're also learning what they thought at the time, which is quite interesting. That's the favorite complete series that you've read on snoozecast? I think I'll have to cheat a little bit here and say one that we haven't completed yet. But we're... I know what you're going to say. I thought you might. We're... I think we're, I don't know, something like three or four chapters away from being done, but Anne of Green Gables. There's just something about that story that I had never read it before. And quite a few of these, I've read before, I've read parts of before. I was in English major. So it's pretty familiar with a lot of them, but this one I never read, and I just think it's such a wonderful piece. It really is, and I love the way you read it. Thanks. If you weren't doing snooze cast anymore, what would you fill up all your free personal time with that you'd suddenly have? Wow, that's a really tough question. Like you, I find myself to have many varied interests outside of my job and parenting. I do a fair amount of writing in my spare time. I'll probably add a little bit more of that. There's a lot that we have to do in our yard. and our house still has quite a few things that need to be fixed up and renovated. So I'm sure that I'd get around a little bit more to that as well too. But overall a great question. Yeah. Thanks. Well, I think for the ending here, it might be interesting if we did a special joint reading. I think that's a fine idea. We've actually been kind of doing this for our children lately. Yeah. Generally, you'll handle the narration, and I'll do the voices for the dialogue.

So what's this story called? It's called the Midnight Bakery of Bramble Hollow and it begins now. The clock in the hallway had just struck ten when Iris Plinked awake.

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