More Music!

Music Monday: Asleep at the Wheel

I do love Texas swing, plus I feel I've been asleep at the wheel of this bus. Blogging has taken a back seat to other pursuits, so I'm making amends:

Theme Thursday: Green

Well, of course I'm writing about going green. Which we have been working toward for many years. In New England, we were recycling probably long before many people were doing so in the South; in fact, it was mandated there. There was some grumbling at the dump (rechristened the transfer station), esp. when a shattering was heard upon heaving a bag into the depths of the bin. But everyone gets used to rinsing out glass, flattening cardboard, crushing aluminum.

Even there, we were regulars at the Brattleboro Farmers Market, more medieval fair than vegetable display. I think it was one of the few in the area at that time. We always came away with something unusual (then) or at least hard to come by. We also had our own garden, in which we also grew the unusual (then) or hard to come by. Celeriac did fantastically well; if only we had known what to do with it. Last year, we commenced again in the community vegetable patch, and we're looking forward to a better year here in the sticky southern heat

I suggest moving forward by staying put: eating locally grown food as much as possible, encouraging those who aren't yet farming organically to implement those methods by talking with them AND buying their produce. We are lucky to have Sequatchie Cove Farm and others within a hundred mile radius. There are many bloggers getting out the word: I just discovered GOOD, which I have to catch up on. Eat Real and FarmPlate on Facbook are at opposite ends of the country, but have lots of good information to share.

Greenward!

music monday!!!

Theme Thursday: Bottle

The word bottle led me to think about cellar holes.

Rambles in the woods in New England can often mean coming upon a sunken patch, with what looks like a stone wall around part of it. It's fairly regular in shape, and always has a lilac bravely holding on, somewhere nearby, even as the forest closes in. When I was a child, we found some of these in the Vermont forests around where we lived during part of the year. There are old roads, tracks, logging roads to explore. Going deep. Sometimes alone. Smell the moss, swim in the sunless green. Cracking twig just off to the left. A deer? or a bear . . .

Just off to the left again. There. The place where a house once stood. Then you start to root around. The dump is never very far from the back door. You find a cup handle, a broken plate. A spoon! But always bottles. Patent medicine usually. The turquoise faded. Or brown. sometimes clear. An intact one a prize.


New Hampshire
–Donald Hall

A bear sleeps in a cellar hole; pine needles
heap over a granite doorstep; a well brims
with acorns and the broken leaves of an oak
which grew where an anvil rusted in a forge.

Inside an anvil, inside a bear, inside a leaf,
a bark of rust grows on the tree of a gas pump;
EAT signs gather like leaves in the shallow
cellars of diners; a wildcat waits for deer

on the roof of a car. Blacktop buckled by frost
starts goldenrod from the highway. Fat honey bees
meander among raspberries, where a quarrel
of vines crawls into the spilled body of a plane

Music Monday!

What the kids are listening to, II:



Yeasayer's Ambling Alp

Theme Thursday: Bell

this was running all through my dreams last night. L used to watch Meet Me in St. Louis on video as a tiny child:



But I'll really be ringing a bell at 2 pm for Barry! Barry, I hope you've seen the last of that place.

Music Monday!

NRBQ, for those who knew

Theme Thursday: Mirror

There are two ways of spreading light: to be
The candle or the mirror that reflects it.
–E. Wharton

Here it is, Theme Thursday again. I had such plans for this theme, too. Genes appearing as mirrors of ancestors, or more recently, grandmothers. The Distant Mirror of the Middle Ages. The silvering mirror in my bathroom that give back a ghostly sort of reflection.

Then, BANG! Thursday has whirled around the carousel of the week again and presented itself in front of me. Well, I can supply a link to a program I try to remember to listen to every Friday evening (or Sunday morning, whenever).

Gene Zeiger

poet, writer, teacher, encourager.

Genie, I wish I'd known

Music Monday!

What the kids are listening to:

Oatmeal Chocolate Cookie recipe

Here you go, e and Betty!

From Mad Hungry, by Lucinda Scala Quinn

oven at 350 degrees F.

whisk together: 3/4 c flour, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 3/4 tsp coarse salt.

beat together, in another bowl, 8 Tblsp butter (1 stick), 6 Tblsp granulated sugar, 6 Tblsp light brown sugar, 1 large egg, 1/2 tsp vanilla extract, 1/4 tsp water.

Add flour mixture and stir to combine.

Stir in 1 c rolled oats (NOT quick) and 6 oz. semisweet chocolate chips.

Drop by teaspoonfuls onto buttered, rimmed baking sheets about an inch apart. Bake for about 10 mins. CHECK! ours got a bit dark. Still tasty, though.

college!

Oberlin College, class of 2014, welcomes L!!

Helen, I think Avery's Store are graduates.

5th Annual Cyberspace Poetry Slam

Solar Creation
by Charles Madge

The sun, of whose terrain we creatures are,
Is the director of all human love,
Unit of time, and circle round the earth.

And we are the commotion born of love
And slanted rays of that illustrious star,
Peregrine of the crowded fields of birth,

The crowded lane, the market and the tower.
Like sight in pictures, real at remove,
Such is our motion on dimensional earth.

Down by the river, where the ragged are,
Continuous the cries and noise of birth,
While to the muddy edge dark fishes move,

And over all, like death, or sloping hill,
Is nature, which is larger and more still.

Thanks, Reya, for inviting me!

Music Monday

Constance Amiot

snow

Snow day means baking oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, at least to L:

Reminds me of Narnia:

Sentries:

cozy

snow day. We are lucky we didn't lose power.

I haven't seen the snow come in so fast since living here; it was almost like New England. I had been spending a leisurely morning with a friend, prowling a yarn shop, out to lunch, and looking at L. Baskin prints in a gallery. When we were loitering at our cars, we noticed a few docile flakes drifting down. Ten minutes later, I was headed into the onslaught of the blowing snow! L was driving the front wheel drive van, useless on anything but a sunny summer day, really. She got home just in time.

Now enjoying oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and wondering why I just cannot pick up stitches correctly on this mitten thumb. Disturbing, really. You'd think I'd know better.

Snow pix tomorrow.

Friday

Awaiting a STORM! Meaning: panicked citizenry on the loose in search of bread, milk, and beer.

My tooth is not as bad as I first thought; although it has sheared off, and I'll still need the crown. (Or do I? Wish I knew more about what would happen if I didn't. Dentists can be cagey.)

Off to yoga before we are iced in. Or not. Depending.

Theme Thursday: Felt

Felt: past tense, or present tense, or a noun. Sort of an all-purpose word.

I remember having a little box imported from England, the Fuzzy Felt Hospital. (I still have it somewhere). It consisted of a little board topped with a felt-ish material, and little beds, pillows, nurse uniforms, heads, and other appendages that you could manipulate into sick bay scenarios.

Felt is satisfying to work with; it never frays or unravels, unlike nerves. It's actually fun to cut with pinking shears. I remember making many needle case covers with my grandmother. I have one of hers.

I'm made several felted bags (although I've read that felted is not the correct word in this case), which are enormous after you knit them. Shepherding them through their stint in the washing machine is a bit tense. You don't want them to get too small, but you want the fibers to shrink and mesh so that they are sturdy enough to take everyday abuse. L has one I made, not bad looking!

This bag is from the Amazon site for Pursenalities, by Eva Wiechmann, but is done in the pattern I knit for L

Here is a YouTube instructional video from the Crunchy Parent on how to make a felted wool ball. Notice cats in background:

energy

I'm editing a series of activities/tests for middle school science students, and the section I'm working on now has to do with the planets.

And then my tooth cracked apart.

Wait; there is a connection between the energy in the universe and my thought energy and this tooth event, but I'm slowly working my way toward it. My dreams lately have been wrapped up in animals, very concrete. argh. I'll just leave you with a picture while I try to muddle through.