Nearly forgot! Good
Pixel-Stained Technopeasant
Day, everybody!
What? Haiku count, too,
In this celebration of
giving away reads.
An impressive delight of trains, and connections, even in those places where a very short connection is thinkable!
We hugely enjoyed the portions of our traveling in France that were by train in the summer of 2007: the regular run from Paris to Cahors, and the astonishingly quick TGV from Avignon back to Paris.
My only (so far) trip through Netherlands south to Rome was with my family, on a tour bus, and took several days. The ride through the Alps and down through the Dolomites was as astonishing and amazing and wonderful as you all describe: wow! And yes, Glacier National Park, particularly the Road to the Sun, is as wonderful.
Eroding no matter with what languor...
Tunes! Get-cher red-hot sizzling medieval springtime tunes here!
Check it out: one of our number made great recording of our concert, In Bucca al Lupo, last Friday night, March 6, and has plunked the tracks up as a podcast. The songs are 12 - 15th C. French & Spanish, and we had a whole lot of fun singing them - one of those concerts when you get to the end and someone asks, Can we do it all aGAIN?
From the Amazing DW:
There's a podcast URL for In Bocca al Lupo! If you start iTunes, and pull down Advanced / Subscribe to Podcast, and enter the following URL:
https://projectpoint.buzzsaw.com/brillig/music/InBoccaAlLupo/podcast.xml?public
You will be rewarded with the dulcet sounds of our concert earlier this week, plus some archival blasts from the past.
Enjoy!
--D
In Bocca al Lupo means "into the mouth of the wolf" - which is what Italians say to someone going on stage, like we'd say "break a leg".
--of course, by blasts from the past, D. means there's also last spring's concert (which I wasn't around for) and also bunch of learning tools/practice pieces that you can ignore unless you're curious as to how 20 people can rehearse four times and sing like this. Some of these, Revecy Venir du Printemps and Janequin's Chant des Oyseaux, a subset of Friday's group of us sang together in the Middle of Nowhere, La Toulzanie, up the river Lot from Cahors in southern France summer of 2007.)
Wonderful, the kind of recording you can do when there's reliable electricity.
Please forgive Barbara for dropping a chair in the middle of Revecy because rolling your eyes at her wouldn't make any difference...
It is, of course, all the fault of the esteemed Shira Kammen, Early Music maven that she is, for pulling us & the music all together, and being a part of the ensemble Cançonièr.
Enjoy, dear ones.
I'm in!
While we're listing good ideas:
* plant a garden
* nurture a fruit tree (or several).
Lovely things come in true dwarf stock these days, and grow quite happily in a big pot. Lucky for us, the house we're renting has this tremendous old fig in the front yard, and we've thus met quite a few folks who knew the current owners grandparents. Fruit trees make for excellent ways to get to know the neighbors, who are likely to have different fruits to swap.
and in case this hasn't already made the rounds of this corner of the net, we've had great fun with this walkability-score gizmo:
http://walkscore.com/index.shtml
I love it when knitting breaks forth in the Fluorosphere, and fibery filks? Bliss!
I've joined the Ravelry group, and made my hellos.
oddballs? Those are thrums, a word I adore.
Chris Baldwin's Little Dee archives are worth delving into, especially the Rogues of Wool sequence from about a year and a half ago, and Vachel the vulture's early knitting adventures. "What are you making?" "Tank cosy." It might be noted that pal Rosemary Brock who has snapped up the originals of so many of these fiber-related comics is one of the movers-n-shakers in the Black Sheep Handweavers Guild on the Peninsula / SF Bay Area.
@73: Brenda Dayne's splendid podcast about knitting and, as here, really about all of life, surely deserves a link: http://www.cast-on.com/
The episode with the Elinor Kapp interview re her book Rigmaroles & Ragamuffins: Unpicking words we derive from textiles, is in Episode 73: The Poetry of Code. Be warned, even if you don't knit, you may well find yourselves entranced with over three years' worth of archived podcasts.
I don't post often, and am slow at composing villanelles (which I adore) but it can't be said often enough: I love this place. You folks roc*.
*look it up. it is a pune, or a play on words, since we haven't had a spinning game yet.
Oops, that was a Bentley woman, and not a Kimber, who led out the Abbots (one t) Bromley Horn dance in the 1890s. My copy of Elaine Bradtke's monograph on the dance and its history is buried in a box of treasures currently, but I would point the interested to herself, who may be found in the library at the English Folk Dance & Song Society.
I also love her comment on concern for the demise of the morris: "Piffle."
If nothing else, that poorly thought out press release from the Ring to the Beeb has certainly provoked discussion on beyond the Morris Dancing Discussion List, or MDDL and even the English Country Dance Mailing List (between which there is some significant overlap), it's lovely to see the refutation of Morris carry on over here at Making Light!
Re the White Rats' (Experimental) Morris and the sewing on of bells: Yes, they dance the Folsom Street Fair, and while I forget her name, the woman in the photo is a splendid (young!) dancer with them. The fellow in the photo with the ferret is not someone I've ever met or seen in conjunction with the team, tho. They use a sub-cut surgical suture of something that looks like fishing twine, and squicked me out a whole lot less once I'd seen it. (No. And I don't believe I shall, but thanks.)
The Dead Ringers, an invitation reunion house-party and dance tour team that Jocelyn Reynolds puts together on Hallowe'en weekend actually appears to predate Pratchett's Lords and Ladies description of the Other Morris by a year, and still gets together annually.
It's true, rams, but the reason no one dances the Stick and Bucket dance is that the tune Mrs. Widgery's Lodger has been completely suppressed. Even though it MUST be a bouncy jig!
The whole rubbish about "Morris was traditionally male only" that the Ring holds on to so tightly was, pardon me, crap when Sharp and others were promoting the dance in the early 1900s; In a lesser-known Shakespearean (co-written?) play, there's a morris side of men and women (with a rude-tailed Bavian for a hobby-fool); in the 1890s when the usual family member who led the Abbotts Bromley Horn Dance was sick, it's on record that a woman of the Kimber family (I don't have the article in front of me, or electronically - Ann may have been her name) led out the dance.
So - definitely, all the Ring is clinging to and mourning the death of is cold ash (and nonsense at that).
Morris is alive and well, and the youngun's are indeed dancing it! Some of the elders dancing out here in the Bay Area put the middle-aged morris dancers to shame, or at least on our toes - there are dancers out here in their 70s who can, and do, jump higher than I can, partly why I stay tucked behind my fiddle.
Rymenhild @192 -
Thank you, that's exactly what I was apparently-only-a-quarter remembering.
AKICWML.
-Ruth
O dearling Fluorosphere of Knowledge; I'm reaching in my brain for Le Guin's four word/layers of defining strangers/aliens, and not finding what or where they are.
Any of you recall off the tops of your brains?
re Tim @20, In C: That's fabulous. When are we getting together to play it, and how many other folks can we scrounge together to do so?
re cyhzf @108.III: lovely!
re Catullus/Cthulu mashup @183: eeeeek!
I do love this place, and all the people who do read and write hereupon. My years of French tipped me to a couple o' these, but the whole tenor of the game just has me beaming from ear to ear, and eager for real morning to come, so I can show it to my Latin scholar sweetie who lies gently snoring in the next room.
Göd Yule!
Solstice night we stayed up all night with the Pagans and kindled a new fire in the morning (those firestarters that are basically a lump of magnesium with flint, where you carve off a little heap of magnesium flakes into the rest of the tinder, are COOL.)
Last night, an Italian style seafood dinner for the extended family of choice at our place, followed by the opening of Silly Solstice Stocking Stuffers; visiting with s'more dear friends who stopped by; thence to the Downstairs dearlings and waking to Edna's pecan rolls made by son Kurt this year (Edna's playing in the kitchen with the corn pudding now); piles of goodies were opened up and oohed over (the Girl Genius Goggles for Kurt were an especial hit. Mind you he's the same mid-40s as I, and does the funny Mad Scientist voices just fine).
Blessings of Christmas, Yule, and all the Festivals of Twinkly Lights (and eyes, and hearts).
You all are, individually and collectively, a Treasure in my life. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
More knitterly than bookbinderish this morning, I offer this hilarious tidbit, related to Mafia as reportedly played at Virtual Paradise: "Sock Wars!"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119766934184930123.html?mod=todays_us_nonsub_page_one
-hee.
In Praise of Teresa's Winter Pie
and Creative Play in the Kitchen
Sausage and leeks acquired, check. piecrust; got lazy and bought, this time, home-made likes time to rest a little. Syd @1, one brand of pie crust is much like another so go with whatever's on sale.
Our own winter savory and thyme instead of the saffron (this time); and --
There's this generous pear tree in the yard of our new place. Something like a Bartlett. I cut up the good bits of two that had fallen and bruised a smidge in the rainstorm the other day, and carmelized them lightly in the butter that went on to become Rouxful, and made a thick floury roux since it works so easily and well for me and left out the tapioca. I think pre-carmelizing the pears helped things be just the proper amount of moist in the cooking-as-pie stage, as well. The pear works beautifully with the sausage, leeks and all, oh, My.
What a wonderful springboard recipe! I do think we'll have it again and again with dlight variations on the theme (we also buy our saffron in the one-ounce tins, and save the tins for beading / sewing supplies).
Verdict: YUM!!!
Linkmeister, The only thing slightly out of true with your post @580 is the tense of the final sentence. FC *still* plays interesting music, very well.
Today we're cooking potatoes, whomping up some muhamarra (roasted red peppers, walnuts, toasted and ground cumin, pomegranate juice reduction, some cayenne if you wish. Why isn't this at least as popular as hummus, we wonder?); the mince pie with mince we put up including the green tomatoes of the end of the 2006 season, and a fresh pear from the tree in the yard of the new house; poppyseed cookies with the mince pie crust leftovers-yum; and a Three Sisters warm thing concoction to put that lovely triumverate grown in fields together - corn, bean, and squash - and celebrated at harvest feasts centuries before my Puritan ancestors arrived; gathering with dear friends (Marina's doing the Bird, Kurt the gravy, and so on down the line of friends and chosen-family).
Tomorrow we're cooking - first feast in the new place! Praises be on your and Jon Singer's heads, with a few joyful shape-note harmonies thrown in for old times' sake - tomorrow's bird is in cold water in a cooler in the tub as we speak, and we hope 'twill be thawed fine for tomorrow's baking --eek! I've made a couple of epi loaves, and if you know how many years it's been since I've baked, you'll begin to get an idea of how much I love this house. We're also doing the Three Sisters Thing here, a salad with fennel and oranges from the blood orange tree inna pot on our porch (it made the move beautifully), another mince pie, roasted root veggies based on gold potatoes, garnet yams, and a couple of fresh rutabagas I found with NO WAX on them.
--And all the goodies and trimmings that 'round the table go.
Gracia!
We had the chance to take the TGV in France this summer. A cheap 10-minute ride to the edge of town by bus to the station, 2:40 from Avignon to Paris' Gare de l'Est, across the river from the Jardin des plantes; walking distance to our hotel with our handy luggage from REI with the stowaway/pull-out backpack straps, or two stops and two blocks on the metro. It was all above-grade, and/or with high enough walls to keep cows from straying onto the tracks, while also giving a nice view. Incredible. Delightful.
I'd love to ride rail like that in CA.
My comfort level for choosing to drive rather than fly has gotten to be about 13-15 hours from the Bay Area; That's Tucson southward or Portland northward from here, generally in a day-and-a-half rather than the one long day push.
--Ru,
--not abi, Xopher, Tania, nor Fromme the land of Squeak.
@28 make that an endorsement of MULTIPLE layers of cottons, and your coat and hat good against wet / wind as well. Though the temperatures can get chilly, the biggest difference between a Seattle cold and a Minneapolis cold temperature is the lower humidity of the latter. Not necessarily the sort of detail a person can count on one's Friend Google to mention, Seth.
Greg #24: indeed there are Flying Karamazov Brothers, going strong since the late 1970s, working their way sideways from Ren Faires to stage show environments. "hup ho, they juggle!" - and warm up, or used to, by juggling in 5/4 time, and things like that. Nice folks. Glad to see they're taking the fun to Europe and China, I haven't looked at their website in years! Thank you.
Sarah @7,
If you're staying in the Radisson downtown, there's a bus that runs Very Often between downtown and the U of MN: the MTC 16 route -- http://www.metrotransit.org/serviceInfo/route016.asp -- take anything North on Hennepin Ave (out the hotel door to the west, heading to your right) to Washington Ave, where the 16 runs; get a transfer from the first bus driver. In general you can transfer up to 3 times, but not so as to make a round trip. The 16 bus runs about every 10 minutes.
If you'll be in the Radisson University Hotel, you can hop on the free inter-campus shuttle to the West Bank parts of the Law School (the library, unless they've moved it, is on the West Bank; though they have done some splendid building of things since my days at the U). These also run about every 7 to 15 minutes, depending on the time of day. There's an upper deck, complete with glass-enclosed portions to cut the wind, for pedestrians/cyclists on the Washington Avenue Bridge, which is what goes between the East and West Banks of the U over the Mississippi. You can avoid the collapsed I-35W and likely now overcrowded Cedar Ave / 10th Street Bridge (which does have a walkway separated from the roadway very well) by again taking the intercampus bus over towards Dinkytown, which is worth strolling through (bookstores, music, restaurants, etc.) but not likely on your main path for work/hotel.
Enjoy Minneapolis!
The transit website above also has all the info you need for finding your way around the Twin Cities by transit. If you're flying in, and will be between downtown and the school, don't bother to rent a car; take the light rail from the airport, it's around $1.50 (or $2 at rush hour) and the buses/train take dollar bills and any coins.
Emma's advice @20 about numerous light cotton and a windbreaker set of layers rather than the too-light blouse under a too-heavy sweater is absolutely right on; if it's chilly, also remember to drink extra water since the cold precipitates water vapor out to a very dry atmosphere. Do take a long scarf, wrap once tight for warmth and once loose for a breather-pocket that pre-warms your next inhale (a little).
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 8 |
| 2008 | 4 |
| 2007 | 13 |
| 2006 | 25 |
| 2005 | 4 |
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