My Summer Vacation

Obviously my blog has languished, but if Cardinal O'Malley can do a blog, doggone it so can I!

We did not actually get a summer vacation, but we did get three nice weekends on Martha's Vineyard, where we overlapped the vacations of other people, such as my brother and his family, and my cousin (whom I invited to share my vacation with me before it turned into a not-vacation).

Despite the vacation being compressed into brief bursts, we have some good memories that are blog-worthy:

Ctenaphores
These translucent, phosphorescent jellyfish appeared in vast drifts this summer. I went out onto the dock with my brother and his family after dark and swished a fishing net through them, making swirls of light. My kindergarten-age niece danced along the water's edge and everywhere she stepped were bursts of brightness.





Yacht Magic Carpet
This was my second trip on this boat. It's a 1959 Alden yawl that spends the summers in Edgartown Harbor in Martha's Vineyard taking passengers out for day sails three times a day. This time we went on the afternoon sail with my cousin. The conditions were perfect and I got to steer a lot!
http://www.sailmagiccarpet.com/

Photos of Squid
The Sculpin Gallery in Edgartown is very near the Chappaquiddick Ferry and we go by it all the time. This year they had a fine photography exhibit featuring the work of Benjamin McCormick, a guy who takes underwater pictures that you immediately think, "How did he do that?" In particular we were struck by the pictures that showcased the beauty of the squid, magnified many times.
www.benjaminmccormick.com

Avocet
One interest my cousin and I share is an interest in birds. We went walking on the beach one afternoon on the thin strip of sand that separates Martha's Vineyard from Chappaquiddick at the bottom of Katama Bay and saw a bunch of long-legged wading birds. The ones with the yellow legs were Yellowlegs (we are beginning birdwatchers), but what about the one with the distinctive upturned bill? Wasn't that the one in the book....my cousin affirmed that it was an Avocet as they get lots of them in California. Turns out it was a rare appearance on the island for the bird!
http://www.mvgazette.com/features/bird_news/?document=20060728_bird_news

Ali Toure
No, he did not visit the island and in fact, is deceased, but we did get to introduce my cousin to his music. Our favorite album remains Talking Timbuktu. Great soundtrack for a vacation!

Italian Charms

This is another kind of embarrassing fetish. I was completely unaware of Italian charms until I saw a bracelet on the wrist of a fellow competitor at a dog show. She had a bracelet of interlocked metal links, each one with a tiny colorful enamel panel listing each of her dog's many titles. There was a CH (champion), UD (utility dog), a tiny little poodle head, a birthstone, a jump to signify agility, and so on. For about three seconds I thought it was really stupid, and then I wanted one for myself.

At the next show I was at one of the vendors was selling the bracelets and charms displayed in rows in a large flat glass case. Each little square has a springy hook on one side and a bar on the other side. With a little fiddling you can hook them together to form a bracelet. You can also get watches and keychains. I decided to start with a poodle charm, a CH charm, a CD charm, and a RN (rally novice) charm. Then I had to get the rest of the links to complete my bracelet.

I fell right into their trap and had to get more charms right away. Dog's birthstone? Symbols for his activities? What about a little sheep to commemorate his herding experiences?

Truth to tell, Italian charms are a fad that is on the wane. Dog people are rarely on the cutting edge of real world fashion. I found a great site that had a big sale on. Since I was saving so much, of course that enabled me to order more! I only wanted the enamel charms, not the rather nasty looking laser charms or the cheesy looking photo charms. And what could be more fun than to build a bracelet that commemorated each of my interests? So I snapped up a little dragonfly for my Gabaldon addiction, another poodle, this time a dog in profile...

I wear my bracelet to shows and other dog-related events. So far no one has really noticed it, but I notice other people wearing theirs even though I haven't said anything. The metal links pinch my skin when I put it on, and when it tugs on things, making it hard to forget I'm wearing it.

Just recently the Ladies of Lallybroch had a fundraiser for "Desi's Kids". I admit I was not attentive to Desi's Kids for the first year or so I was involved with Lallybroch. I knew it was our queen Judie's pet charity, but I thought it was sponsored by some lame celebrity or something. Turns out Desi's Kids is a micro-charity in honor of Judie's son Desmond who was killed in his early twenties in Thailand. Funds from Desi's Kids are channeled to larger charities that help women and children in the developing world. And of course I'm all about that. And this is a unique, exclusive Lallybroch charm featuring the charming painting of Lallybroch that is the gateway to the LOL website.

That got me to thinking about Firefly/Serenity and how I haven't found a satisfactory charm for that. I was looking for Chinese character for Serenity, or a little rocket ship, but to no avail. This week I did some creative Googling and found a Firefly charm on eBay, for a reasonable price. Did I mention that I'm a cheapskate, which is why, for example, I don't have a licensed MLB Boston Red Sox charm.

What I like about the charms is their talismanic nature. Even though I love words and love streams of words and long descriptive flows of words, I also love symbols and icons. On the Weight Watchers website users choose up to three little icons as part of their signature. I remember choosing the key, for Lifetime Member (seems a lifetime ago, but there it is), the yoga symbol (because I was practicing yoga regularly at that time) and the dog symbol. I loved the idea of choosing the little tiles to represent me, and I still do. I like the idea of a sequence of little tiles better than one "avatar".

Here are some of my favorite Italian charms links:
www.pugster.com
www.charmingdogs.com
www.myjewelthief.com

Kilt Rippers

I suppose it's not a coincidence that I'm writing this while I am in the beginning chapters of a Real Book with Literary Merit (Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe). I was going to preface this entry with an explanation of how I turn to "kilt rippers" as a diversion from the serious literature I read. Then I thought back to the books I've been reading over the past year and I was hard pressed to think of one that was "serious". Nick Hornby? Definitely not the Dresden Files or the other zillion mysteries I've been reading. But still, I do get tired of dead bodies and the standard detective formula and a nice formulaic romance can be just the thing. It's kind of like turning from potato chips to cupcakes.

It's definitely a side effect of having read Diana Gabaldon that the kilt ripper has become an appealing (sub)genre to me. My consumption of general romance books is low, but I am much more likely to pick up a book entitled "Taming the Highland Princess" or "Charming the Highland Warrior" - not at full price, honest, but at Goodwill or in the revolving mass market paperback racks at the library. "Winning the Highland Lass" has only a superficial resemblance to Gabaldon in having a brawny Highland idealized male and an initially unwilling heroine, often a sassenach, in a Scottish setting. But y'know, it's a little bit of Jamie we can call our very own without any of the thinking required by Gabaldon's work. Oooh, Laird Malcolm, you can do the thinking for both of us!

Here are some favorite series:

Karen Marie Moning -Beyond the Highland Mist; To Tame a Highland Warrior; The Highlander's Touch; Kiss of the Highlander; The Dark Highlander; The Immortal Highlander (see, I am not making these names up!)
Lynn Kurland- A Dance Through Time; The Very Thought of You; Veils of Time; A Knight's Vow; Opposites Attract; Christmas Spirits; My Heart Stood Still; A Garden in the Rain (in this case I've only read the last one)
Janet Chapman - Charming the Highlander, Loving the Highlander, Wedding the Highlander, Tempting the Highlander, Only With a Highlander.

What I'm Singing

The Cambridge Community Chorus is embarking into uncharted waters. We have commissioned a piece from Luis Bacalov, the composer of Misa Tango, one of our best concerts ever. To reminisce for a moment, that was the concert that we performed to a sold-out Sanders Theatre. We had a fantastic bandoneon soloist from New York, we flew Maestro Bacalov in from Italy, and we had tango dancers on stage during intermission.

So our chorus struck a deal with Bacalov to compose a new piece just for us. I guess we must not have sung that badly. The "piece" turned out to be settings of four psalms plus a Finale.

The psalms Bacalov selected are:

10: a rant against the Lord hoping for some smiting of the wicked, whose wickedness is much dwelt upon
22: another psalm of disappointment and despair with some optimism
23: very famous; we are the happy sheep
92: upbeat; forseeing a happy ending even though the wicked flourish

The text is sung in six - count 'em - six languages: English (our vernacular), Spanish (Bacalov's mother tongue), Latin (the language associated with Christian ritual), Italian (Bacalov's home tongue), Hebrew (Bacalov's language of faith) and Aramaic (for one phrase, the words Jesus spoke from the cross). The chorus has had a little trouble adapting to all those different sounds in our mouths.

More difficult than the languages has been the tempi. The piece switches from 3/4, to 2/4, to 4/4, to 7/16! Or, as we call it in Cambridge, 1-2-3,1-2,1-2).

It's been very exciting charting new musical territory, preparing a piece that no one has ever heard before. Usually with these famous classical pieces people have sung or played or heard them before. I usually buy a recording to practice with so I can learn my part in the context of the whole composition. Here, we are sailing undiscovered seas and neither the director or the orchestra knows how it is "supposed" to sound. When we first rehearsed with the orchestra last week I was completely blown away and missed lots of entrances.

Here's the Wikipedia article on time signatures. Note what is probably the most famous song to use an offbeat time: Dave Brubeck's Take Five. There are some other popular songs with unexpected time signatures: Pink Floyd's Money, for one. Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill also uses an odd one: 7/4.

Knitting Update

So far I have made: 2 hats, 1 tea cozy, and a short scarf. Here's the link for Jessie's hat. Now I am working on a sweater. I have the back and most of the front done.

Knitting seems to be a very effective pastime for me when I can't do anything else. It works well at family gatherings, when I don't have sparkling new conversations to initiate, and on car trips (when I'm not driving). I love reading, but there are times when either my reading is constantly interrupted so it's pointless, or it's a rude time to read (see "family gathering" above). I'll post pictures when done,

Boids...filthy, stinkin' boids

For the last few years Walter and I have become increasingly interested in birds. Both of us have always been interested in the natural world. Because we work in wind energy, we hear about bird and animal life at wind sites and get to learn weird trivia like that prairie chickens won't nest if there are any structures casting shadows within a half a mile, so their habitat is right out for windfarms. Our official birding career was triggered by a wind energy seminar in Vermont. The consulting biologist was explaining to the attendees how the wind site was deemed out of the path of migratory flyways. He showed a slide of the established flyways overlaid on a map of the site. The migratory map was of the entire east coast, and showed the bird highways converging into bird interstates. Three bird interstates merged into one on the coast on the border of New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania: Cape May.

Like most universities, Cornell sends out a brochure of exotic tours to entice affluent alumni. You can tour the pyramids with a Cornell archaeologist, go to the theatre in London with a theater arts professor or a dozen other destinations. Some of cheapest trips in the brochure are the birding weekends, with Cornell ornithology professors from the world-famous Lab of Ornithology (or as the insiders racily term it, the "Lab of O"). It was a wonderful coincidence that not long after learning about the bird freeways, I saw that Cornell was planning a fall migration trip to Cape May. So I signed us up. We were so novice that we brought one pair of compact binoculars between us. I spent most of day one completely miserable about not seeing any birds, between sharing the binoculars and not doing very well with the compact ones. Then we made a stop at an Audubon center where they sold binoculars, and with the guidance of an actual ornithology professor I bought some fantastic binoculars. They are waterproof, relatively lightweight, and very light-gathering. Suddenly the trip was wonderful and I was seeing yellow-rumped warblers (actually very common, but our first recognizable warbler), kinglets, and all kinds of other cool birds. The now canon Sibley's Guide had just come out, and the trip leaders were very enthusiastic about it, to the point of quoting from the foreward in the field. So when we got home I ordered it, and we were equipped. On our next trip to Martha's Vineyard, a winter trip, we were pumped, driving around in our "portable heated bird blind" and discovering the overwintering birds of the Island. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Since that first trip we have been on two others - a migration season trip to Chincoteague and Assateague (always wanted to see those ponies anyway) and a longer trip to San Diego (turns out they make you sing the Alma Mater at the conclusion of longer trips). We have also started bringing our binoculars everywhere we go, which has led to some very gratifying sightings, especially far from home. One of the most magical places we ever did independent birdwatching (or "looking at birds" as I stubbornly call it, do distinguish us from the khaki-clad lifelisters) was Balmorhea Texas, an artesian spring/Civilian Conservation Corps project in West Texas. In this oasis, we saw the vermilion flycatcher, the pyrrhuloxia, and also a very cool watersnake/fish encounter.

I've been working on this post on and off for over a month (blush). But what inspired me to finish was another trip to Texas where we saw two cool new birds. One was the scissor-tailed flycatcher. Actually Walter's seen them at bit at wind sites in Oklahoma. The most remarkable thing to me about this fairly rare bird is that we spotted it on the grounds of DFW airport. We saw an American redstart within the Dallas city limits too, so it just goes to show it pays to keep your eyes open.

Flylady is my master now

Walter was in California last week, and when he came back I naturally went into a last minute frenzy cleaning the house. Strangely I had been keeping pretty tidy while he was away, and for some reason I decided to shine my sink as the final touch in the kitchen. This was very strange, because normally I don't really clean the sink. I clean things that are in it, I wash down the chunky bits, but I really don't clean the sink itself. Years ago I heard about Flylady via some Internet group I was in and shining your sink is the cornerstone of the Flylady system - no kidding.

My interest in shining the sink (and we have a lovely stainless steel sink that I sent away for special because I just had to have it) got me thinking about the other parts of the Flylady program, and I started reading her website, and signed up after three days of flirting with the idea of joining the Flylady cult.

It doesn't cost anything (although I am sure she would be pleased if I bought some of her products).

So far I have been sneaking around doing my sink shining, bed making, and bathroom swiping. It's a little embarrassing.