Two loves: Ida and my fiddle.

I've been playing the fiddle for about 7 years now. The first two years were misery. I thought I sounded awful. Learning any concrete song was like trying to use chopsticks for the first time again. The one thing I eventually developed was an excellent ear for melody, and the ability to follow along in a lilting sort of rhythm.

I was always painfully aware that my fiddling lacked the drive, the rhythm, the flexibility of true old-time fiddling. But, I could play along with many of the songs we played, and eventually I thought it sounded okay (but not great) when I played along with the melody.

Enter Chris.

Chris is a local banjo-player and fiddler with a band called "Bueno Avenue String Band." He plays a rollicking, loosey-goosey, good-time fiddle that I found myself wishing I could replicate. We've played music a few times together now, he's given me some excellent tips on old-time fiddling, showed me how to cross-tune my fiddle, and all of a sudden I'm having a hell of a lot of fun listening to fiddle music, thinking about how the sound is created, and then trying to come up with my own phrasing on my fiddle. So far, the tunes I've learned are: "Cherry River Line," "Black Eyed Daisy," "Over the Waterfall," "Willow Garden," and most recently, "Cluck Old Hen."

All of this makes me very happy.

As for Ida, we had an impromptu photo shoot night when she was tired and lying on the bed. I started taking pictures and it was like she was posing in the most adorable positions on purpose so that I could take pictures with my iphone. I think she was a plus-size model in some previous life. Here are a few other pictures from our shoot:


Of course, I would be remiss to write a blog entry about loves without mentioning Shed and Molly. I'm damn lucky to have them. It's good to remember that right now, with my work future on uncertain ground. If all else fails, I can become an itinerant fiddler, and train Shed and Ida to dance around like monkeys as I saw a tune and Molly backs us up on rhythm guitar.

In Love Like...

I was thinking this morning about why it is that some cds don't hit you until months, years, decades after you first acquire them. This is a topic I've discussed many times with my brother Thomas, (who writes about music on his blogs--casket, shroud, and grave and per diem) because we're always giving each other music, and only months later finding ourselves really loving it.

This has been on my mind recently because I put on an old cd by the Avett Brothers in my car, the other day, and ended up falling in love with at least 3 songs that I had never noticed before. I got the cd about 3 years ago, when I was a DJ at KRCL. In those days, with KRCL's huge library of music, I was always scrounging up albums, copying them, finding one song I liked to play on the show, and then moving on to the next cd. That's one problem with DJing--I have a compulsion to keep finding new artists, new songs, new sounds. That means that I often move through cds quickly, mining songs and not paying attention to the cd as a whole. The Avett Brothers' cd, "A Carolina Jubilee," provided me with a song that I loved, and which I played on the show. I think once I heard this one song, I stopped listening to the record:

This week, with the cd in my car on my commute to work, I've discovered 3 new songs that I cannot believe I didn't fall immediately in love with before.

and

Right now these songs seem so obviously FANTASTIC, that I can't believe I didn't like them when I heard the album for the very first time. But no, except for "Love Like the Movies," I thought I didn't like this album. Why is that? I have no clear explanation except for this one possibility: at the time, I was listening to a lot of music by the Magnetic Fields that Thomas had passed on to me. Not surprisingly, "Love Like the Movies" is the most Magnetic Fields-y song on "A Carolina Jubilee." Perhaps music sounds different depending on what other music you've been listening to at the time. Kind of like with food and wines. Certain flavors can overwhelm others, making them taste weak and simplistic, but if you try that flavor alone, or in combination with similar ingredients, it will suddenly taste amazing.

Attn: Avett Brothers

You taste amazing!

Ambitions

In seventh grade English, today, one of the girls was giving back massages to her friends. (And no, she wasn't supposed to be doing this, but it was during group work and there is always that awkward 5 minutes at the end of group work when the fast groups are done and slow ones are still working--what's a bored seventh grader in a fast group to do in this situation? Give back rubs, of course!) This girl was really getting into the back massage; I mean, she was using her elbows and everything. I was impressed.

I asked her, "Hey, Lindsay, are you going to be a massage therapist when you grow up?"

"No," she said, "but I want to own a salon. And be a brain surgeon."


Did I mention I teach at a private school?

For further enlightenment, listen to the song "I Want a Pony" by Candypants.

School: What a Shame

It's the end of a school day, and I have just said good bye to a class of rowdy and confused seventh graders. It's amazing how much school and teaching absorbs from my life. Teaching children is a bit like this, sometimes:


Your life is a bucket filled with water.

70-80 children come along with sponges and throw them into your bucket.
Their sponges absorb all your water.

At the end of the transaction, your bucket is empty.

Then you have to take their sponges home with you and grade them.

Okay, so that's a pretty bleak picture of teaching. It's not always true. Sometimes, they don't even bother to throw in their sponges. Sometimes they just sit around throwing their sponges at each other.

It was a hard last period of the day. Time for this bucket to go home and get refilled.

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jig

WOW! We returned home from a week's trip (including an unexpected day's delay out of Indianapolis due to Hurricane Fay) to find this bountiful harvest overloading the vines and plants in the back yard! It seems that while we were gone everything grew gangbusters, as if I injected the plants with steroids before I left. Not having the chance to pick any of this for a whole week, it turned into a haul.

We have the following vegetables sitting in the kitchen now...I just have to find room in the fridge for it all:


2 Japanese eggplant--a bit damaged from overwatering they received from when I was trying to sprout some seeds I planted nearby.
5 zucchini--including the largest I have harvested this year. What am I supposed to do with this mother? It will undoubtedly be tough and stringy inside, with huge seeds surrounded by dry pith. Perhaps I can salvage some of the flesh for...any ideas?





3 large green peppers--in addition, the pepper plants have at least 5 more new peppers growing to good sizes on each plant. I think I will make stuffed peppers with these ones, as the fresh flavor is a bit compromised when they get this big.







20 lemon cucumbers--most much huger, and many much more yellow than I've allowed them to grow before this week. I hope they still taste good! How are we going to eat all of these?




The regular (green) cucumbers I planted haven't done anything. They have been overtaken by basil plants, lemon cucumber and watermelon vines, and pepper plants. They get no sun! Poor things.



2 Watermelons--one a weird, stunted melon that didn't grow at all while we were gone. I figured I might as well pick it, just to see what it looks like inside. It was pale pink/yellow/white inside, but quite sweet, actually. The other melon I was trying to pick up out of the vines to show Molly and it just came off the vine. Hopefully it won't be too under ripe. I have another melon that was about the size of a golf ball when we left, and is now a lot bigger...perhaps the size of one of those crazy big walla walla onions...or a small sugar pumpkin. I think I'll leave this one on the vine until first frost...if I can.

And finally...15 tomatoes!

7 big beef (bright red)
6 brandywine (pinkish & yellow/green)
1 green zebra (yellow with green stripes)

AND

1 red chile--there are a ton more chiles on the plant, all green, but I should probably start picking them soon. This is the only one that turned red while we were gone. I've forgotten what variety of pepper they are. Perhaps serrano...usually when I see serranos in the store, they are green. I am curious to cut up this little red pepper and see what it tastes like.

I just realized that I forgot to check the cherry tomato plants. I'm sure there will be more to pick from them in the morning. I also have a feeling that in the fading light I may have missed som cucumbers and tomatoes. I am still waiting for ripe tomatoes on the Hawaiian pineapple plant and the black krim. I am also surprised that the zebra hadn't produced more ripe fruit while we were gone. Perhaps the light of day will reveal more to harvest tomorrow. Tonight, I'm putting all this in my fridge and going to bed.

A Knitting Post -- Two Gifts

Gift #1: You've heard of the Peace Train...introducing the Peace Envelope Purse.
It's a present for my 13 year old niece, who loves all things peace sign (as I did at that age, 21 years ago). It's also my first felted bag. I've heard a lot about them...but since I don't carry purses much, and have not the patience to knit anything larger, I have never attempted one.

The design is my own...except I took the peace sign chart from this website. Everything else I made up as I went along. I started at the point of the envelope flap, added 2-4 stitches every row or s0 until I reached 33 stitches (throwing a yarnover buttonhole in there along the way). At the end of the flap, I did a turning row (like you do for a hem) then I knitted a long rectangle with the peace sign chart on one side, and the contrast gray for the other, with another turning row in between them. I folded it, sewed up the sides and when I felted it (at 1:30 in the morning) it shrunk into this dandy envelope size. Then I decided it needed a tassle and a felted i-cord shoulder strap. The yarn was various worsted wools from my stash. The button is a knotted leather button I had in my sewing toolbox. And that's about it for the Peace Envelope Purse.

Gift #2: Pink and Green Baby Sweater
This is an old project that I pulled out of my stash to give to Molly's friend Brooks who just had a baby. Again, I designed this as I went (and can only hope it will fit an actual baby). The contrast edging is in seed stitch, and the body is in stockinette. There is no shaping at all...just a bunch of rectangles sewn together, but the squared/slit neck and the 3/4 sleeves makes it work (at least in my imagination). The yarn is all cotton--an apple-y green for the body and a 3 strand yarn of pink, orange, and green twisted into one yarn for the contrast edges. It really is quite fetching, I think. I'd love to see how it looks on an honest-real-life baby. If I ever get pictures from Brooks, I will post them. This is the problem with my knitting. I'm always knitting baby things and giving them away. I often forget to take pictures, and moms never seem to have time to take pictures of my knitted goods and send them my way (it's cool...I know it's hard and time-consuming to have a baby either feeding off you, throwing up all over you, or sleeping on you most of the time). So I've never really seen any of my baby projects in action. I hope someday I will see some in action on my own kid...but that's a tall order.

The crop is in...

PEAR or POTATO?