some random images

seen in a coffee shop

april 20 at my house

me and my guy

graffiti

man with a harp guitar

you don't see that every day.

i have a little cup of grass on the windowsill near my desk.

of course i do.

because my mom used little cups of grass as table decorations at easter. and she was so excited about it, showing us how you can "mow" it.

yes, she calls it mowing, even though you're just trimming it with your scissors. but you know, to keep it in really nice shape (and who doesn't love carefully manicured grass?) it needs daily care of some sort.

one of my friends said "that's not a houseplant. that's a PET."

fine, whatever.

so a few weeks ago when i was going to NEFFA, i had to bring my cup o' grass with me. so barb and i are getting into the elevator and i'm holding the cup o' grass in my hand and a guy gets on and he takes a look at me and says "now, there's something you don't see every day."

spit out the bones

i was riding along on a trail at catamount, working on my mapping project and also looking for forage.  i didn't find the things i was specifically looking for, but i did find this most excellent gnawed bone and some really cool owl pellet.

i am going to have to carry some small baggies so i can collect owl pellets and take a look inside them later.

cookie day

i make a lot of cookies at my house these days. go ahead, blame it on MB.

anyway, i got it into my head to make some experimental savory cookies, cheese thumbprints with onion jam.

so... they're kind of shortbready. i think if i make them again i will make them something with more tooth, but experimental is just that.

the jam is good, though.

the black flavor is onion jam with a balsamic reduction and mustard, the red flavor is tomato rosemary onion jam, and the yellow is honey apricot onion.

they're pretty, and reasonably tasty, if you like savory cookies.

i do.

MB does.

that's all that counts, really.

yesterday at catamount

i ride a lot of the time at catamount family outdoor center in williston. yes, it costs money to ride there, but the thing about it is that it is a crowning jewle of greenspace in vermont's most populous county, in a town with all the big box stores and a lot of sprawl.

and because of the way the land is laid out and because of how it's been cared for over years, it is many diverse and protected habitats. it's kind of stunning, really.

and they have races for runners and for mountain bikes and for cyclocross and run camps and programs.

me, i'm the lady you meet on the trails, the one who can give you directions and help you find a trail you will enjoy. i will also check to see if you have your trail pass. it's what i do.

anyway, i was there yesterday and it's still early season and i am riding slow and tentatively because that's how i always ride until i get my legs, plus this winter the time at which i stopped getting a lot of daily exercise coincided with the time at which i started making a lot of cookies.

of course it's because of MB, but it's not really appropriate to lay blame with MB. when you get slow and fat and weak it's nobody's fault but your own.

so here's about two minutes coming down a trail.

dances for everybody

recently i was at NEFFA. i like to dance a lot there, and beginner dances have live music. sunday morning i went to a family contradance, which means it's simple dances, nongendered, and suitable for anyone who shows up, including tiny children.

here's some video of me dancing with a woman and a tiny child i assumed was a grandchild.

don't tell me how to feel.

cabbages and kings

a week or two ago i took it upon myself to make some of the food of my people: cabbage and dumplings.

it's simple to do, and delicious, if you like cabbage.

you take a head of green cabbage and chop it up. toss it in a pan with a whole mess of hotted up butter. and an onion or two.

while it cooks, make some flour and water dumplings. flour, water, salt. throw little globs of it in boiling water until they float to the top.

then lay those puppies on your cooked cabbage and you are all set.

but second day.

second day the fun starts.

take those leftover boiled dumplings and fry one side of them in a pan with butter. when they brown a little, flip them over and toss some leftover cabbage on top of them. fry two eggs beside them and by the time the eggs are cooked, the cabbage will be hot and the other side of the dumplings will be brown and you scoop the cabbage and dumplings into a dish and lay the eggs over them and oh, my.

good.

your hot wife

i have a friend whose wife i call "your hot wife".

it's sort of a joke, because i have never met his wife but i was telling him that i find professional competence to be very attractive.

and his wife had some kinda high powered job, until she took a new job that has some title like "judge" in front of it.

but she's spending a month in a major north american city for some training, and even though i've never met her, she's been very kind to me.

plus my friend loves her.

so i sent her a box of butterscotch cookies.

because when you're far from home, someone should send you cookies.

slightly disturbing

this winter i was in a park near my house and i saw a jar full of some cloudy thing balanced on a branch. it had a note under it, written on birch bark.

i'm just telling you what i saw, without providing any commentary.

here's the jar:

it was very cold out, so the contents had frozen and cracked the glass.

very gingerly, i unfolded and read the note. none of my business of course, but -hello!- in a public park.

my hand obscures the last names of the (presumably) children.

1. thank you for what you've done with the dark omen. I am thankful and will return favors (mostly) as you please.

mostly. you make deals with the devil and you don't get to decide how far you will go. this applies to all kinds of devils, real and metaphorical.

still, i wonder what my neighborhood children have got themselves up into.

easter at mom's

we're all expected to show up at mom's for easter ham, nevermind that mom is both and atheist and a vegetarian.

i was going to hold this until i had the unabridged video version ass well, but here you go.

whatsis

here's a blast from the past; i found this in my boxes of stuff that got packed up from my classroom. it's one of the cooler bits and pieces i own.

you know what it is, this?

it's a salesman's' case. for brass instrument mouthpieces. there's one missing from the case because it's in my trumpet case.

i bought it from a guy i know a long time ago for about twenty dollars. i only needed one mouthpiece, but he had this cool case.

he also had a problem with accumulating too much musical stuff and his wife rather insisted he periodically sell things to make room.

so this happened

it was a long time ago.

and if you want to have direct communication with people, it's really hard to have it with the night staff.

attendance haiku

back in the day i used to leave little poems for val when she came to pick up the afternoon attendance.

because attendance taking is more fun if you compose a little poem about it on the spot each day.

here's one:

at attendance time

all the students are present

although two were late.

so i went for a haircut..

worksheet

here's another thing from the laughing academy.

they were hard, those days in the fishbowl.

copywriting

a long time ago while i was enrolled at the laughing academy, we were all given a big piece of paper and asked to make advertisements for ourselves.

i think it was intended to be some kind of affirmation thingy, like recognizing your positive qualities so you can sell yourself to the world. and maybe yourself.

i'll just tell you that while many scholars at the laughing academy have self-esteem problems, i am not one of them.

bob and edna streamside

because you all need a guided meditation.

ride in my pocket - bolton notch

last monday when i said i was going for a bike ride, my little friends the exiles told me to take them with me in my pocket.

it's a thing we say kind of often, because of the nature of or friendships, which mostly occur in a format you can take with you on your phone.

going somewhere cool? take us in your pocket! going to do something hard? take us in your pocket!

it's nice to have pocket friends.

so when i said i was going to ride up the notch, my friends said to take them in my pocket so they could stick their heads out on the fast parts.

that kind of begged for me to take video.

braided cord

i told you guys i was going to get to posting about that cord.

it was quite a project and my little friends the exiles had to hear about it for a LOOOOONG time while i worked on it and wouldn't tell anybody what it was.

ok, so it went in the famous box for MB.

it's a thirteen strand braided cord, and i said i'd post something about how it was made.

there's a video of me working the disc loom for a while, and there's a video of me finishing the project.

what's in the box???

ok, ok. i'm catching up.

a while ago some of the other exiles were asking "what's in the box?" you know, like they do.

i was making a box to send to MB, and of course the first person who gets to see what's in the box is MB, whether the exiles want to know about it or not.

so here's the photo of the contents. and of course, you want to know what's in all those little packages. so. starting bottom left and moving clockwise:

a bag of cute little whole wheat cheese crackers.
a bag of hand pies, in both grape and apple flavors.
a bag of precious little handmade cream caramels, assorted flavors
a mix cd, because of course.
a copt of my cd, mixed nuts and other true stories
a bag of vegan thumbnail cookies (delicious and nutritious!!)
beneath that is a letter. (black ink on sensible grey paper, of course)
next to the cookies is a black thing i'm not explaining. (ok, it's a hat. wrapped up tight.)
below that, wrapped, up, is a cute little zipper pull made with UV beads
two little knicknacks wrapped in bright paper
an 802 sticker, because we have only one area code here in vermont. it's a point of pride.
a woven cord. i'll tell you more about that in another post.
to the left of that, at bottom, some amber colored candies that glow under blacklight
center: a field guide to the flavors of the caramels, because MB said "i want to learn them by feel the way you know them."

and you know. MB.

two views

some weeks ago i had the opportunity to be wandering the streets at night far from my home.

there's no point not telling you where i was; certainly you know.

alone on a cold night, with no plan or direction. fantastic.

the thing is, i am in love.

off in the corner? the one with the grey sweater, that's me.

and i can't remember how to get back home, because even though i know where i am (steps of the public library), all i remember is that the place i am going is on seventh OR eighth, and that the cross street has a four in it. or a three.

i thought: this would be an incredible place to go out of my head. easy to do. almost tempting. but bad, you know?

i wandered a long time and finally the street furniture looked familiar.

i went inside.

modren

no, it's not a typo. it's a family thing. my mother always says she wants to me a "modren girl".

a log time ago i needed an external drive to read and write cds and dvds. it seemed exotic and fancy then.

and expensive.

and then i had those drives IN all my machines, but of course my new desktop machine does not have one.

and i thought: no problem! i have an old cd.dvd drive that's working just fine!! but no. of course it has to be cabled with firewire, which has been deprecated. seriously. it has two firewire jacks and RCA plugs. THAT'S how old it is.

anyway, i had to by a new drive, which it turns out you can do now for under $25. and it's uh, smaller.

so yay.

two drives

this thing is good.

last week i had to make mashed potatoes for something and i made way more than i needed so i could use up the potatoes while they were still good.

and i didn't just make mashed potatoes. i made MASHED POTATOES. with butter and heavy cream and cream cheese, because i also had some heavy cream and cream cheese that needed using.

there are a lot of things you can do with leftover mashed potatoes.

what i did on the first day was take a slice of my brick-o'-potatoes and pan fry it on one side in butter (a lot of butter), flip it when it was browned, toss cheese on top of it, and then fry a pair of eggs next to it in the pan.

i tossed it in the dish, potatoes on the bottom, eggs on top.

it was SO good.

SO good.

the second day, there was really nothing to do but make that thing again. repeat until all the potatoes are gone.

you know, just in case you cholesterol levels are not high enough.

...which is a thing i joked about until at the end of the week i went to see my doctor for a regular type appointment and she said my cholesterol levels, blood sugar, and blood pressure were all significantly better than they've been in years.

she didn't really want to hear about the eggs, potatoes and cheese.

but you do.

and no, that's not an arty presentation. i ate lunch at my desk. because, you know, i'm a composer. so i guess, yeah, it's arty. but really i couldn't be arsed to clean off my desk to take the picture.

don't come to my door.

i'm kind of an asshole sometimes.

some people came and left a little piece of religious crap in my door yesterday, so i took a red marker to it and taped it up to my door at eye level, where it can be seen from the street.

sign of spring

this is how you know it's spring here: these signs go up all over.

actually, they go up on every dirt road and at the town line on any dirt road.

up to the tower

the bolton valley ski resort is not on bolton mountain. if you're on the chairlift, bolton mountain is the one behind you. the skiing happens on ricker mountain, although not right at the summit but off the shoulders.

vista peak looks like a summit, but it's not. i don't know how they decide what is and is not a whole mountain.





anyway, i went on a little hike up to the tower so that MB and the others could see it.

here's my video:

good morning, mud season!

in mud season, in the afternoons, all the dirt roads and driveways are soft. overnight sometimes they stiffen up.

last thursday afternoon it was very warm and things were very soft and in the early hours of friday the temperatures plunged back below zero, so friday morning the most dsitinctive sound around the neighborhood was the sound of tires spinning.

i came out of the house to go skiing and a neighbor couple was trying to push one of their cars out of the ice in which it was stuck so he could go to work.

i offered to help.

you know, because it's what you do.

since i was about to go skiing, i was already wearing my gopro on a chest harness and the guy said "are you going to gopro this for us?" and i said that i hadn't been going to, but i could.




if you're looking at that video, all the things that look like puddles? they are solid ice. they WERE puddles thursday afternoon, but not so much after the freeze.

so then after we got the car loose and they went inside, i discovered my transmission had frozen.

this is a problem that requires a little push.

*knock knock*

"hey, guess what?"
"your car needs a push?"
"bingo."
"be right out."

so we got that sorted and i went skiing.

mud season.

look inside!

nearly a year ago i had to go to the nice doctor and let him have a little look at the inside of my stomach and esophagus because i have a little reflux problem and while a reflux problem isn't in and of itself so terrible, if you're doing damage in there, it can be Very Bad.

despite the reflux, i am healthy and pink.

so yay.

and i have nice pictures. maybe i will use them for my christmas card.

GE junction

pyloric antrum

bulb

duodenum

stomach, reflexed view

bonus pay

so i was cleaning up, because occasionally i pick up my shit and put it away.

and for some reason i decided to actually go THROUGH a pile of papers instead of throwing them out wholesale.

good thing, too.

tick tock

so for christmas everyone in my family got a lovely little plush toy.

yes, i got a tick.

we all got something equally lovely.

there'a a company called giant microbes.  you're welcome.

roulette

when you live alone, you can play games that would make you an asshole if you lived with someone.

like toilet paper roulette, in which you decided to live dangerously by seeing if you really do have enough for next time.

of course you leave all the spare rolls downstair, because it isn't much sport if you have them handy.

yeah.

if you play that game and you live alone, you are maybe just bored.

or lazy.

it you play it and you live with someone, you're an asshole.

rude awakening

this morning i went down to the kitchem to get my breakfast and found a dead mouse in my oven.

ick.

and then when i went to remove it, it BROKE into two parts of dead mouse. i am not sure why that didn't make me gag. maybe too early in the morning to think about it.

so. on today's list: vacuum out the oven and heat it up real hot.

there are not photos. you're welcome.

aubade

a little while ago i posted a good morning song for one of my little online friends in our slack channel. ze said it was like having a personal good morning, which is sweet. so i have gotten in the habit of uploading a new song from my catalog every day for the morning music.

it's a nice little ritual, and also it's a way for me to look at the body of my work, which i am only just reclaiming.

the one from yesterday is one i'm a little excited to see again. it was the first thing i wrote for my new teacher when i came to study at college. he told me to go away and come back next week with something written for clarinet trio, so i wrote this, a series of short pieces in some different styles.

he was pleased.

and like the phoenix

well, my machine didn't exactly rise from the ashes, but i have a shiny new machine on my desk. i am still figuring out how to get all the things from the old one onto the new one.

most of it seems to be going without argument.

and the processor on the new machine is so lightning fast that i barely know what to do with myself.


in other news, i mailed out some mystery packages, one of which arrived at its destination yesterday.

one will arrive today.

we'll see about the others.

death on a desk

well, i was almost finished editing some video i wanted to show you.

i say "almost", because i got to the end of the project and decided that i wanted to re-shoot all the footage and make it nicer. plus for some reason with all the footage i shot, i was missing an important part, so i was actually just getting ready to scrap the project but then for some reason i decided to go into my files to get a song that i wrote years ago because i want to rework it a little for new purposes and that's when my desktop machine died.

so suckage.

good news: i had good backups, mostly.

and it's not a surprise: for the last week there have been behavioral indications that made me think "is my computer dying?"

yep.

dying.

well, shit.

one song, two versions

what i haven't really told you here is that i lost faith. that may be strange because when i GOT faith, i was not shy to tell you.

it wasn't so much that i lost faith, but given the way i had been thrown out of my church combined with the increasing stress of maintaining all those cognitive dissonances, i walked away from it.

i feel better now, but i also kind of miss it because parts of it were very appealing.

i wrote a lot of church music, though, and even though i feel a vague embarrassment about it now, some of it is still pretty decent work.

the other thing that happened to me is that at about the time i was getting thrown out of my church, i lost my musical voice. my heart was broken and i had devoted the whole of my art to the church and all of a sudden music went right out of my life.

if you are a composer, you think in music. you hear snips and notes and phrases just as you go along in your day. you think in songs. you have a song for unloading the dishwasher, or because it's cold out.

and then one day music was gone from me.

i didn't sing, didn't play, didn't think in music, didn't hear it in my mind, and didn't even care to listen to it.

but recently two things happened. i acquired a young (to me) friend who is a very skilled musician. and you know how you do with new friends: you share the things you have in common.

and i found myself saying "i used to be a musician." and i wanted to share my work, to show who i used to be. and music was less foreign.

but then i fell in love.

and i am still not ready to talk to you about that, but all of a sudden i wanted to bring out all of my work, the good and the bad and say "this is who i was, who i AM", and i wanted suddenly to play music and listen to it and make mixtapes (even though you don't put them on tape any more) because i used to think in music and i used to express love through music and without music i did not have my whole toolset.

so music and i are not quite at home again, but we are having a renewed acquaintance.

and i was looking through my files and i found this song, in two versions. they are strikingly different, i think.

glows in the dark

back in december some of my little internet friends were talking about cool sciencey things and i was also in the middle of a candymaking frenzy and somebody or other came across some recipes for candies that fluoresce under blacklight and i thought i'd try my hand at it.

the key is that quinine fluoresces under blacklight, so tonic water does, too.

and if you make your candy with enough tonic water in it, it will also flouresce.

it's hard to cook it to the point that it will be solid without the sugar caramelizing a little too dark to make the glowy effect dim, but look at these. don't they have the most fantastic golden color?

new shoes

so my stepmother bought these shoes, but they didn't fit her quite right. she's shopped enough for me to know they'd fit me, so she sent them along.

they're like my barn boots, only ankle high.

kind of perfect.

plus spiffy looking.

snohaus, day 4

i'm feeling kind of drug-out and tired today, so i think i will maybe not work snohaus today even thought the conditions are good.

but here's a short video.

thursday morning on cobrass

righty-o.

so check this out: i am posting TWO DAYS IN A ROW.

my life is a little different these days and i am not prepared to talk about it here yet, but someday i'm sure i will.

meantime, i've been taken out of my normal routine and i'm getting used to having a new routine. it's becoming comfortable as i learn it.

last thursday it was fantastic skiing up on the mountain, and i shot some video of some runs. this is the best one.

it's the full run down cobrass, which is a pretty trail and last thrsday it was just about as nice as i've ever seen it.

it is begun.

snohaus 2015 got its official start on saturday.

it's very slow going in the beginning, because base building does not look cool in any way.

but you need a base, you know?

so i keep the gallery here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/50555362@N05/sets/72157650190603039

it will update with construction, and now i'm going to go update the sidebar to link to this year's snohaus.

last year the documentation of the awesome structure was poor on account of the hard drive meltdown, but this year we ought to be OK.

random photos

it's nothing like a real post, but bit by bit i'm pulling myself together.


here are some random photos from my desktop.

rare picture of me doing homework, circa 1980

waking up from a nap, circa 1982

fallen out of chair, 1986

formal portrait, 1986

sunrise from my bedroom last week

view from cobrass, at bolton valley

revulsion

yesterday at the traffic light for the southbound on ramp at exit 16, the driver in the car in front of me opened his door, vomited onto the road, and turned left onto the interstate as if nothing unusual had happened.

meanwhile, over here, i'm feeling kind of labile and raw.

it's snowing, but it's too warm out, at least down here by my house. up on the mountain it's probably fine.

i have some projects in my kitchen, some projects on my worktable.

sooner or later i will find the energy to write to you about them.

today

today is my grandmother's funeral.

instead of thinking too hard about how i feel, i'm thinking about what i will wear, and the 118 mile drive each way, and the one geocache i have to find on the way because i'm still finding a cache a day and maybe that's crazy, but it's a thing like that that can keep you going.

if we don't count thanksgiving (and i don't) the last time i went to sit with my grandmother and visit was november 7, which seems a long time ago.

she spent a lot of the fall alternating between being in pretty good shape considering and degenerating, unable to make sense of what time of day it was, or what season it was.

it was a lucky thing for me that i could arrange some trips to go have adventures by day and then come tell her about them in the afternoons, and lucky i was out having adventures on the landscape of her youth.

if i went in the day to lowell lake state park, she would tell me of the days before it was a park and the family used to go for a summer day and stay all day. if i went to ludlow spring she would tell of how on a hot summer day her father would put all the kids in the car and go to get water and also stop for ice cream besides.

november 7, i learned that last day i sat with her, had been her wedding anniversary. i hadn't really known her husband.

see, mine is a blended family. ruth was my grandmother by my mother's second marriage, so while she was very much a grandmother to me, anything that came before the intersection of our families didn't matter much.

i'd met her husband once or twice, but he died pretty early on so i wan't attached to him.

it was a long time ago.

but this last november 7 i was sitting with her and she was telling the story as if it were yesterday. she told me about the dinner they had and the dress she wore and she remembered the date. "it was the seventh of november," she said.

"today is november 7th." i told her.

"it is? well."

and we sat a while in silence.

pause

hey guys.

it;s been a little bit of an emotional rollercoaster over here for me, so while i am still thinking of you and i still have pictures and things to show you, i'm not quite organized enough to post them.

my house hit an epic climax of slovenliness last week, and if i have any extra energy i need to straighten up around here.

but i have pics from new year's eve and i'm still going to tell you about the aborted camping trip and maybe even work my things back to things i promised to tell you LAST year.

sooner or later, you know?