Showing posts with label playing music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label playing music. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Simple Pleasures - Rascal's Delight
Monday, October 14, 2013
Nashville
Where've I been? Nashville, Tennessee, seeing things country and sustainable. Steve had a conference to go to, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, no less, where he and his fellow Associate Director won an award.
Through the week we went to
John Hartford's grave. He wrote a song that Glen Campbell played endlessly and I can't remember, but Steve does. Hartford organized a special feature by his gravesite, a pergola, where musicians can go and play their music.
And yes, Steve did.
Steve and Susan sharing the award for excellence in innovative programme development. Yeah Canada. Yeah Steve.
We visited the Rhyman Museum, where the Old Opry was originally shown. For those of you who don't much like country music, the Ballet Russe, the Vatican Choir, Anna Pavlova (ballerina of great fame) and many others performers were onstage.
We saw Ricky Skagg. He started playing at the Old Opry when he was seven and he's now about 600 years old and looks it. I'm saying to myself, 'Who's Riky Skagg?" but everyone else is "Oh Wow". It was a fun experience to go to this old place. Very well maintained, amazing acoustics, cool interior, but the show on the stage. Mhe.
Except for the first night, when we collapsed around 7:30 pm (our time 9:30 but we'd been up since 5:00 am) we heard live music every night. It was everywhere. Steve was on top of where to go see who. Three others were with the Dalhousie Group. We had fun conversations, shopping and of course, professional activities during the day. I spent two days revising a short story and embroidering a linen shirt.
There are little stains from beads that rusted. I am using the stains as the centre of flowers. Re-use, Re-cover.
I have sent in a total of 45 pages to my writing mentor and have revised and rewritten and agonized over these for ages. Hopefully, the book is better, but at this juncture, it feels like it needs to be started from the very beginning again. It is interesting how a sentence now looks. I used to read a sentence and hope the meaning sunk in and be doubly grateful if I remembered the general gist of a story for more than a few weeks. These days, I read a sentence I have written and start to break out in hives. Is this what I meant to say. Is it relevant to the plot, is it in character, what about the big picture, the small picture, the five senses, which tense am I using? Am I consistent, am I consistently inconsistent where needed, and who the hell is Mavis? Actually, there isn't any Mavis anywhere in my writing, but Mavis now represents the "what the hell am I reading?" moment when I don't recall having written it.
For my own sanity, the expediency of getting this blog out most Mondays and not losing sight of Hot Flash Woman, all agonizing is forbidden in my blog-land. Write, save and hit the publish button. I own the publish button on this blog and if it's good enough for me, it's good enough to hit. I love the publish button. It doesn't argue with me.
Through the week we went to
And yes, Steve did.
We visited the Rhyman Museum, where the Old Opry was originally shown. For those of you who don't much like country music, the Ballet Russe, the Vatican Choir, Anna Pavlova (ballerina of great fame) and many others performers were onstage.
We saw Ricky Skagg. He started playing at the Old Opry when he was seven and he's now about 600 years old and looks it. I'm saying to myself, 'Who's Riky Skagg?" but everyone else is "Oh Wow". It was a fun experience to go to this old place. Very well maintained, amazing acoustics, cool interior, but the show on the stage. Mhe.
Except for the first night, when we collapsed around 7:30 pm (our time 9:30 but we'd been up since 5:00 am) we heard live music every night. It was everywhere. Steve was on top of where to go see who. Three others were with the Dalhousie Group. We had fun conversations, shopping and of course, professional activities during the day. I spent two days revising a short story and embroidering a linen shirt.
There are little stains from beads that rusted. I am using the stains as the centre of flowers. Re-use, Re-cover.
I have sent in a total of 45 pages to my writing mentor and have revised and rewritten and agonized over these for ages. Hopefully, the book is better, but at this juncture, it feels like it needs to be started from the very beginning again. It is interesting how a sentence now looks. I used to read a sentence and hope the meaning sunk in and be doubly grateful if I remembered the general gist of a story for more than a few weeks. These days, I read a sentence I have written and start to break out in hives. Is this what I meant to say. Is it relevant to the plot, is it in character, what about the big picture, the small picture, the five senses, which tense am I using? Am I consistent, am I consistently inconsistent where needed, and who the hell is Mavis? Actually, there isn't any Mavis anywhere in my writing, but Mavis now represents the "what the hell am I reading?" moment when I don't recall having written it.
For my own sanity, the expediency of getting this blog out most Mondays and not losing sight of Hot Flash Woman, all agonizing is forbidden in my blog-land. Write, save and hit the publish button. I own the publish button on this blog and if it's good enough for me, it's good enough to hit. I love the publish button. It doesn't argue with me.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
ZE day, that wasn't so bad
Really, that wasn't so bad.
Luckily, all the laundry had been caught up enough that I didn't have to make good my intentions to do a load of laundry in the sink in cold water. We've been to cottages and camping enough for me to know that washing ones' own and one's beloved's underpants is generally cause for tension. It can be done but it ain't that good for the soul.
I had a cold sponge bath, I didn't turn on any lights until well into the day, didn't listen to music but did play my recorder. There was one moment of complete forgetfulness when I sat down while the dinner was cooking and turned on the TV but quickly remembered that I had pledged to read.
Earlier in the day I had a crisis of conscience. I had determined that I would work on the loom, putting on a new project. I have this new thing called a Trapeze that allows a single person to get the warp onto the loom without messing up the tension. Ordinarily I would have to bribe a child to come home for dinner in exchange for holding the warp while I wind it on to the loom. I took a course on how to do this back in April and the one time I attempted it back at home, it was an unholy disaster. The crisis was that I have excellent instructional photos on my computer and I had pledged not to turn it on.
I paced around a bit, did some distracting chores and had an argument that went something like this;
"You (meaning me) can't turn the computer on, that would be cheating."
"Yeah, but that means you (meaning me) can't get any work done, no writing because the computer is off, no weaving because...the computer is off."
"There must be something else that you could do that is still in the nature of studio work that doesn't involve the computer."
"You could spin, but that's really leisure time stuff. In order for this experiment to work, you should be exploring be how to consolidate work that involves a plug versus work that doesn't involve a plug. Going off to knit or spin isn't working."
"......"
"Turn the bloody thing on and get to work!"
So I did. I felt bad about it all day long. Maybe I should have been better prepared, maybe I should have printed those images into a booklet so I don't have to keep returning to the computer. No conclusions were reached about this breach of pledge.
I went to the Sustainability class to see how the students responded.
Many of them took the bus to school, or walked, several took cold showers, several were writing their notes for the day and a few had done alternative things that weren't given discussion time. The professors had the lights in the room dimmed and gave up 15 mintues of lecture time for discussion.
One of the students, on the on-line discussion board had made a comment along the lines that doing something symbolic once a year was a waste of everyone's time and focus and why not get together and sing "Kumbya"? Steve decided that this was a challenge so he found the music and offered to sing "Kumbya" with any student who wanted to. Kate and Hailey (I might have the wrong name there) were the only two brave souls, but they did it! And I laughed.
That night Steve and I explored how to have a relaxing evening without the TV or music playing. We went for a walk around the neighbourhood and did the dishes together (in cold water)(the dishes were in the water, we weren't) The banjo/recorder duet attempt turned into a guitar/recorder duet and had its amusing moments. Steve is very quick at sight reading, so he was able to read the Baroque music I had found much faster than I could and when he switched to playing chords, I became completely lost. I couldn't figure out the chord changes in relation to the melody and so we switched to some blue grass kind of music. We had attempted this duet business last winter so I had seen the music before. Still, I was slower and not clear on the chord changes relative to the melodies. Things became stormy. Actually, I became stormy.
We shifted to making tea and coffee and reading or knitting. We had a discussion on how does a person take the day's experiences and experiments and move them alongside for the rest of the year or life. As I mentioned, we have done many of the easy things to reduce footprints. That means we are looking at tough life style changes. It is clear that because our whole society is very plugged in, it is very difficult to get paying work done without a computer. We survived nicely without the cell phone or any other hand-held devices so that will remain off our things to own. The most logical next step for us is to determine if a solar water heater is the way to change up how we heat water for showers etc. After awhile we switched to the read aloud book we had decided upon. We were sure we had the second book in the Arthur Ransome series Swallows and Amazons but couldn't find it. We then looked for Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling but that seems to be in the attic. Don't go there after dark if you value your life. We settled on Centerburg Tales by Robert McCloskey. Short stories about Homer Price's life in 1950's middle America, rather soft but amusing, nostalgic-ish and not too challenging for the end of the day. When we look for read alouds they don't have to be childrens books but they can't be a lot of work. The reader is usually tired by day's end and the listener is usually asleep. That would be me. I think I snored.
'
Luckily, all the laundry had been caught up enough that I didn't have to make good my intentions to do a load of laundry in the sink in cold water. We've been to cottages and camping enough for me to know that washing ones' own and one's beloved's underpants is generally cause for tension. It can be done but it ain't that good for the soul.
I had a cold sponge bath, I didn't turn on any lights until well into the day, didn't listen to music but did play my recorder. There was one moment of complete forgetfulness when I sat down while the dinner was cooking and turned on the TV but quickly remembered that I had pledged to read.
Earlier in the day I had a crisis of conscience. I had determined that I would work on the loom, putting on a new project. I have this new thing called a Trapeze that allows a single person to get the warp onto the loom without messing up the tension. Ordinarily I would have to bribe a child to come home for dinner in exchange for holding the warp while I wind it on to the loom. I took a course on how to do this back in April and the one time I attempted it back at home, it was an unholy disaster. The crisis was that I have excellent instructional photos on my computer and I had pledged not to turn it on.
I paced around a bit, did some distracting chores and had an argument that went something like this;
"You (meaning me) can't turn the computer on, that would be cheating."
"Yeah, but that means you (meaning me) can't get any work done, no writing because the computer is off, no weaving because...the computer is off."
"There must be something else that you could do that is still in the nature of studio work that doesn't involve the computer."
"You could spin, but that's really leisure time stuff. In order for this experiment to work, you should be exploring be how to consolidate work that involves a plug versus work that doesn't involve a plug. Going off to knit or spin isn't working."
"......"
"Turn the bloody thing on and get to work!"
So I did. I felt bad about it all day long. Maybe I should have been better prepared, maybe I should have printed those images into a booklet so I don't have to keep returning to the computer. No conclusions were reached about this breach of pledge.
I went to the Sustainability class to see how the students responded.
Many of them took the bus to school, or walked, several took cold showers, several were writing their notes for the day and a few had done alternative things that weren't given discussion time. The professors had the lights in the room dimmed and gave up 15 mintues of lecture time for discussion.
One of the students, on the on-line discussion board had made a comment along the lines that doing something symbolic once a year was a waste of everyone's time and focus and why not get together and sing "Kumbya"? Steve decided that this was a challenge so he found the music and offered to sing "Kumbya" with any student who wanted to. Kate and Hailey (I might have the wrong name there) were the only two brave souls, but they did it! And I laughed.
That night Steve and I explored how to have a relaxing evening without the TV or music playing. We went for a walk around the neighbourhood and did the dishes together (in cold water)(the dishes were in the water, we weren't) The banjo/recorder duet attempt turned into a guitar/recorder duet and had its amusing moments. Steve is very quick at sight reading, so he was able to read the Baroque music I had found much faster than I could and when he switched to playing chords, I became completely lost. I couldn't figure out the chord changes in relation to the melody and so we switched to some blue grass kind of music. We had attempted this duet business last winter so I had seen the music before. Still, I was slower and not clear on the chord changes relative to the melodies. Things became stormy. Actually, I became stormy.
We shifted to making tea and coffee and reading or knitting. We had a discussion on how does a person take the day's experiences and experiments and move them alongside for the rest of the year or life. As I mentioned, we have done many of the easy things to reduce footprints. That means we are looking at tough life style changes. It is clear that because our whole society is very plugged in, it is very difficult to get paying work done without a computer. We survived nicely without the cell phone or any other hand-held devices so that will remain off our things to own. The most logical next step for us is to determine if a solar water heater is the way to change up how we heat water for showers etc. After awhile we switched to the read aloud book we had decided upon. We were sure we had the second book in the Arthur Ransome series Swallows and Amazons but couldn't find it. We then looked for Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling but that seems to be in the attic. Don't go there after dark if you value your life. We settled on Centerburg Tales by Robert McCloskey. Short stories about Homer Price's life in 1950's middle America, rather soft but amusing, nostalgic-ish and not too challenging for the end of the day. When we look for read alouds they don't have to be childrens books but they can't be a lot of work. The reader is usually tired by day's end and the listener is usually asleep. That would be me. I think I snored.
'
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