Music Monday

cute! this is the artists grandma in the video.

Dreams

lately, they've been very vivid, almost Technicolor, in fact. Usually I dream that it is night, a vast dark world without color.

But twice I've dreamt of the most perfect house, cool, large, old. Many rooms, a big garden. A built-in television from the 1950s, with a metal tag identifying the maker. I can't make out the words. Wide windowsills outdoors, concrete. Outside it is cool, a bit overcast. There is a room set up as a nursery, left from the previous owners. I leave it that way, though there aren't any babies, and I don't need a child's room. Maybe this house was built in the 1920s? I feel so at home in it.

Last night I was dreaming of my mother and another house, or rather an old storefront such as you might see in Vermont. All of a sudden a flock of white owls swept around me, settled into a tree, and watched me coolly. They had round, blue eyes. They weren't large, like a Snowy Owl. More the size of a Saw-Whet Owl

The hoot of an owl in a dream is ominous, but owls seem to symbolize wisdom and virtue. Are changes on the way? I'd like to know if the house dream and the owls are connected.

Ten years of things Southern

Ten years this summer I will have lived in the South, after driving all the long way down from New England, through the vastness that is Virginia.

Before then, either I had never heard of or I had heard only vaguely of or never encountered:

banana pudding
pulled pork
double first names
last names as first names, especially for girls (Kelso, Carver . . . MADISON)
luminous springs, with so many shades of red and pink that I never realized were possible
no hint of Mud Season
winter that lasts from Christmas to New Year's
two flakes of snow empty the grocery shelves of bread and milk
three flakes empty the parking lot of cars but leave carts asunder
grocery carts are not carts—they're buggies
smoking in the grocery store (at the beginning of my tenure; could that actually have been?!)
Southern Man hair
the Cotton Ball (!)
May Day (!!)
how blue it is to be so in a red state
upon meeting someone, being asked who my people are
upon meeting someone, being asked where I go to church
adult Sunday School
crepe myrtle
cicadas
being called Mrs. Tut-Tut by all and sundry, from children to adults
okra
collards
college football fans
meat and three
Ted Turner

a foray into film making

A short film by L:

Updates, various, sort of

Radishes making headway in the pots on the deck, above.


Little lettuce mix, too.


Last Thursday, L and I went to Atlanta to see Junot Díaz and Anita Desai read. Plus we went out to dinner at a Thai restaurant and stayed overnight! A true splurge.



Here's a video of Junot:



A little of Anita Desai:



We also had TV with HBO in our room, where we watched something alarmingly fascinating called Taxi Cab Confessions.

We had planned to go to Knitch and various other shops in Virginia Highlands, but it was TEEMING so hard we scuttled up the highway home. After being honked at several times for being in the wrong lane. Sorry Atlantans!

Music Monday!!

Music Monday

i love this movie! i saw it with some of my friends and we all cried, along with everyone else in the theatre.
-L

sauerkraut

Just a very brief post on my success—yes, that's right, success—creating sauerkraut. All for only one dollar and nineteen cents.

Last Friday, I shredded a large head of cabbage, layered it in a giant Hellman's mayonnaise jar with salt, put a piece waxed paper over and a weight on top. Then a blue tea towel I received over all. We pressed on the weight whenever we happened by and added some water the second day because the cabbage hadn't exuded enough of its own juices.

We followed a combination of techniques (neither not much different from the other) from these two books:

Theme Thursday: Vegetable

This year, we are growing, or attempting to grow, vegetables from seed. Here the scheme is to keep the cats away by letting the seedlings start above their eye line. Tomatoes cherry and Rutgers, sweet peppers, basil, parsley, and dill started last weekend. Perhaps a bit late.

sewn in pots: beets, lettuce, carrots:

Radishes, planted two weeks ago; chicken wire scheme working like a charm so far. No squirrels or cats.



Lettuce mix appearing on cue:

Finally, plot 18 at the community garden a few weeks ago. D has turned in manure and mulch, and is planning on doing so again today. Some of the plants we started are to be transplanted here (or seedlings purchased, if the seeds don't sprout). D has already met several other gardeners here, and has had quite a convivial time. We were 7th on the waiting list for this 25 x 3 foot plot, so I was surprised to get a call in February saying we could claim it if we wanted. The CSA we had been sharing just got too expensive for us this year; we've had a downturn in our own economy, so we are looking forward to the sweat equity involved here. The result will be that much sweeter.



Two excellent sources of information and recipes. I recommend them both.

Music Monday!

This is a song that we found because we watched The Visitor the other day and loved the drumming. Looking on its website, we found that all the music was inspired by Fela Kuti

COOL!
-L

Saturday

Frank, coming home last summer.

Yesterday, our local animal shelter, to sweeten the deal, started offering black cat adoptions for only $13.00 per (to honor Friday the 13th and to dispel any phobias about black cats). I love my black and tuxie cats. They are without peer in the realm.

I was reading this Mary Oliver poem the other day; click to read it yourself, if you wish:


I do eat Marmite; here is my jar.


What D and I bustled around doing this afternoon. The outside looks pretty good, no? Baguettes are pretty pricey around here, so we thought we'd use our pizza stone and sweat equity to try our hand at homemade. Tempeh bar b cue in the pot.


i think my blogging deflation may be over; i've been working on a v. downbeat nursing manual, and it will be done tomorrow. yea. plus I received an award from E!

Music Monday!

Music Monday!

this is pretty, maybe a little too church-y though!!!
-L

Sunday

There is snow today, but temperatures in the seventies by the end of the week.

I am glad I have work to do, both inside and out. We spent the afternoon yesterday cleaning up the herb garden, pulling up spent seed heads, cutting back the butterfly bush.

Prayer
–Galway Kinnell

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

Theme Thursday: Toys

Wolfgang's father, Leopold, wrote the Toy Symphony, more formally known as Cassation in G for Orchestra and Toys. Toys of the period are some of the instruments. We used to have a very old LP of this. Where it is, I do not know. Here is one orchestra's interpretation of it from YouTube:

Music Monday (later in the day than usual)

I like this song! I know I already posted a song by this band before but I think that they are good enough to post another. I hope you agree.
-L

Ohio college tour

February 10-15, 2009

With much trepidation, I started out from far below the Mason-Dixon line to venture forth with L. Since her school wouldn't allow her to take Tuesday off before Winterim officially began, we got as far as Cincinnati the first night. Which was OK. We had a lovely time, especially as L was able to see all the excitement on cable tv she misses around here. We had to downsize, not because of L, but D couldn't not leave MSNBC, CNN, etc. alone for 5 seconds.



The next day we drove up to Gambier to see Kenyon College. We stayed at the lovely Gambier House, just across the way. We were surprised to learn that the area around Kenyon has the largest concentration of Amish in the country. L got the photo below on our way to getting lost. Luckily, a car was stopped in the middle of a back road; the driver and his wife had just spotted two eagles. When we asked him where Kenyon was, he said, "Heck, I'm not doing anything. Follow me!" so we did.



It was unseasonably warm during this visit. L was the only tourer, so she went out without me with her student guide.

Here is Kenyon's admissions building, John Crowe Ransom being honored with the statues of crows on top. Until I scanned the link, I had not realized that Ransom was himself a Tennessee native.




Angels on campus:

Oberlin College,



Oberlin was the best, and not just because I got to stay with Kim of Mouse Medicine two nights, one while L was staying at Oberlin and the other with L. Kim did it all: drove us around, went on a very cold tour of Case Western, taking pictures all the while, made dinner, gave a tour of Cleveland, stopping at a candy store in Cleveland Heights, in the midst of pre–Valentine's Day mayhem; Gallucci's ("Your Italian Grocer Since 1912"); as well as the amazing West Side Market. I got to meet lovely Em and F, and all the cats (except one). Our trip would not have been anywhere near as fun, informative, and vibrant without Kim!

Downtown Cleveland main library:



The view from the Children's Department; this visit was also my first viewing of a Great Lake. Erie is at the horizon.



The Mouse's most comfortable futon; two regulars stake their claim:




On the morning we left, we were greeted by:



But we made it away without incident to our final destination, Earlham College.

This was a great tour, the first one that we saw several colleges, so could compare them on site, so to say. Plus I've got to say it was a great mother/daughter trip; I couldn't have done it without L's navigational skills .

Socks the cat

In memoriam for first Tuxedo under the Clinton administration. Socks would have turned 20 this year. He had been adopted in Arkansas when Chelsea was a little girl. Clinton's former secretary, Betty Currie, had cared for Socks since 2001. Socks had been suffering from a cancer of the mouth and jaw.

Theme Thursday: Library

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. – Cicero

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. – Chinese Proverb

Library
by Valerie Worth

No need even
To take out
A book: only
Go inside
And savor
The heady
Dry breath of
Ink and paper,
Or stand and
Listen to the
Silent twitter
Of a billion
Tiny busy
Black words.

-From All the Small Poems and Fourteen More. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994, p. 163. taken from poetryforchildren.blogspot.com 10/23/2006

I would say that it has been the library that has saved me. Not just once, but over and over, in different towns and cities down the decades.

The first one I remember going to was on Long Island, and it seems that it was housed in a basement, because I don't remember any windows. But I do remember getting my first library card there. It had a little metal strip on it that must have been used to make an impression on something—the cards in the books? I can't remember.

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book. – Author Unknown

In elementary school, during the summer, I spent a good deal of time in the Children's Room (in the building, above). For a painfully shy child, the library opens a door to swirling worlds where the words on the page sometimes can't keep up with the images in the mind. Read Thimble Summer, if you haven't. Chapter 5, "Locked In," is about being so caught up in reading that two girls don't even realize that the librarian has locked up and gone home for the night. That author also created the wonderful Melendy family. The Edward Eager books; LM Boston's Green Knowe series (I was lucky enough to visit the actual house and meet Lucy Boston's daughter-in-law); EC Spykman's Cares family (if any one knows where to get a copy of The Wild Angels, let me know); Eleanor Estes; Eleanor Farjeon's The Little Bookroom . . . well, I could go on.

High school: I would spend many an afternoon downstairs in the To Be Discarded section of the Bellevue Avenue branch, reading all sorts of odd ball books. I could never get a job there, though, as library jobs were the most coveted. (I cleaned houses instead.) However, since 7th grade, L has been lucky enough to have volunteered every other Saturday in our local library up here.

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. – Shelby Foote

College; the library was a good place to hide out, way upstairs in the stacks, reading instead of doing whatever assignment was due.

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. . . . In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. – Germaine Greer

When L was just a kindergartner, I worked at the library in the next town over as the library assistant. The Librarian, who truly truly put the patrons first in everything, was nevertheless a Luddite who refused to get rid of the card catalog and hid the computer in the basement until the last possible moment. I think a library trustee struggled up the stairs with it. But after it was set up, it was hidden away in the most inconvenient part of the building. Even now, when I went to the library's web site for this post, I found that it is still "under construction." Ha! Every patron had his or her own library number, and most people were affronted if I didn't know theirs by heart. So I soon learned.

That library was all things—the hand-off spot for divorced parents, a rendez-vous point for various dates, studying, political fomenting. You name it.

What would I do without the library? Here, because of budget cuts and the anti-intellectualism of the County Commissioners, the downtown library is no longer open on a Sunday. When it was, there was nothing like a grey winter afternoon, spent perusing the stacks. And the payoff a satisfying armload to dump and dip into.

A good book has no ending. – R.D. Cumming

Music Monday

We listen to this song a lot when we are driving!
I had fun in ohio, more coming from tut-tut on that front.
-L