OUR FABULOUS NEW YEAR'S EVE

NEW BLOG ADDRESS FOR NEXT YEAR. www.lastyearoftheworld.blogspot.com. There will be no pictures, because I didn't take any, and for good reason. New Year's Eve, the night that is supposed to set the tone for the whole year at the stroke of midnight, was an even more ridiculous one than last year, where we sat and watched tv and had a glass of wine at midnight. there were similarities, however. But I digress. First of all, both John and I have colds, and I have adopted the male response to minor illness, which is to fall into a gigantic slump and assume I will never again be healthy, and that the spectre of death lurks just around the corner. Add to that the total chaos in the house because we just got new doors for the kitchen cabinets which need to be painted, and all the stuff that belongs in those cabinets is all over the house. The stuff needed to be out while the doors were installed, but doesn't need to be out any more, so I spent most of the day cleaning out the cabinets, which were obviously last cleaned when they were last painted, which was 2007, and then replacing the stuff. I don't want to cook anything, because the new wood is raw, and I don't want to get grease or water on them before they're painted. After I finished that job, Lynda came by and we went for a walk, and then she and I went to the Crocker to see the Clayton Bailey show, which was really nifty. http://www.crockerartmuseum.org/art/upcoming-exhibitions/624-clayton-baileys-world-of-wonders. (Sorry, I'm doing this on the iPad so I can't make the link live.). That is a really entertaining exhibit. For instance, did you know that Koehler, the plumbing fixture company, often has an artist in residence to use their plumbing products in art work? Following that, we came home, and fixed a dinner of bizarre soup made from the leftovers of Chinese dinner the night before. I would call it nutritious and leave it at that. About 9 pm Tim and Lynda came over with some cookies and we stood up in the sun porch and watched the early bird fireworks in old Sacramento through the trees. I wanted to take Lynda's picture, since she was in her bathrobe at 9 pm, but she was too smart for that. By midnight, John and I were still up, but barely, and didn't even want to bother opening wine, so we had some Martinellis and went back up in the sun porch and watched another set of fireworks through the trees. We also watched some neighbors who were again shooting off bottle rockets. So there's our big excitement. Just try to outdo that.

My Lovely Christmas Eve

Of course it wasn't what I expected, which was to sit around drinking hot buttered rum and basking in the fact that I had no Christmas shopping to do, I had all the stuff ready for Christmas dinner tomorrow, finally got the cards out, and maybe in the early afternoon I'd go over to the gym and sit in the jacuzzi.  Of course, that didn't happen.  To back up about a week, it started like this:
Jeremy, who is a good carpenter and who rebuilt our rotted rafter tails for us last year, came by looking for work.  we had thought of putting a gazebo in the backyard, because last year we bought a Japanese maple, but it gets way too much sun and fries in the summer.  As the conversation went on, it kind of drifted over to an overhang on the other side of the yard, where the focal point is our neighbor's corrugated garage wall.  We've tried various things to conceal it over  the years,  with various degrees of success.  So now, we're trying again.  This time, we had Jeremy build a fence near the wall, but god knows, not touching, because the woman who owns the property next door goes ballistic over just about anything.  So before he put up the fence, he painted the corrugated wall.  A nice dark green to fade into the background of anything we put there.  Then he built the aforementioned fence, and then he built the sort of trellis thing over it.  Don't quite know what to call it, but it will provide a little bit of shade on that side of the yard and maybe if we put shadecloth hanging down, we can move the poor Japanese maple over there and shield it during the summer. 

Anyway, he finished  it yesterday, and if you want to protect the wood, you have to put the oil finish  on while it's dry and when there isn't going to be any rain for a couple of days.   I'm not too sure that fog doesn't count in there or not, so, hoping there won't be any I decided to put the wood preservative on today.    John complained to start with, that it was too cold out, but this was just because he wants to sit around and read the paper and have coffee and watch football, and then maybe meander out in his regular clothes and start thinking about painting it.  Then, of course, he'll have to putz around for an hour getting organized, looking at the job, etc., and then he'll ruin everything he's wearing while he paints. 

To make a long story short, I started at 9:30, in my professional painter's jumpsuit, because I am a professional,  and didn't finish until about 4 pm.  I think he went out and raked some leaves or something, but now it's about 5:30, and other than helping me pick up the tarps, he basically did nothing. He's still watching football, or the news, or whatever other important thing he has to watch on tv, and kind of hanging around wondering what I'm going to fix for dinner, which is going to be leftovers from my birthday dinner at P.F. Chang's last night, when I damn well get around to it. 
We are going to go to St. Johns tonight because they have a wonderful christmas eve service at 10:30. 

I guess I have this whole thing about Christmas, because since I don't consider myself a religious person, I shouldn't be into Christmas, but I am, in a big way.  So I end up going to some kind of service on Christmas Eve, if I can ascertain that there's going to be a very high ratio of music to sermonizing (like about 20:1)   But there's no Christmas music I don't like and by Christmas, I still haven't had enough.  But we do nothing for Christmas with family, because Mike & Heather always go to Merced where there are lots of people who aren't weird, like we are.  And we do nothing religious, because we are heathens.  And we don't even exchange gifts because  -- well, I don't actually know why, but we quit when we used to go to Hawaii for Christmas and never went back to it.  So the runup to Christmas is really great, but Christmas itself is pretty much nothing.  Except tomorrow we're going to have the gang over for Christmas dinner so I think that will be fun.  They're actually the closest thing to family I have. 

Next week I take my car into get repaired.  Someone hit me doing VERY minor damage, but it's going to cost (him) $468 to fix it because they have to remove the bumper and bake it.  Zoe, Dodie, John and I are going to SF to see Pissaro's People at the Legion of Honor and Masters of Venice at the DeYoung.  Wednesday we're getting new kitchen cabinets. 

I also hope to have an update on rockin' art.  If you remember the story about the rocks in the fountain, I didn't like them, after I got them painted, so have decided to make pieces of art out of them and just leave them randomly around town. 

Rina's Christmas at school

Last night was Rina's school Christmas show.  I had a great time.  Not much to say about it.  Last year she was afraid to talk to Santa, this year she had no problem with it at all.  Nobody even had to urge her to go see him.  Just walked up there and sat down. 

I'm going to try to post this video, but I'm going to bed.  It's 22 seconds, but that usually means it takes about 45 minutes to upload on my ATT Snail connection.  I let this go on for three hours last night, and it didn't work.  So now it's Friday morning, and I'm going to try again.  Internet is even slower in the daytime, so I'm not hopeful.

Two hours later.  Hooray, it finally worked.  (Rina is the one in the back row with the white shirt on.)

It's All Music

Last year, after our semi pickup group, Baroque and Beyond, finished our last concert, we thought it would be a good idea to see if we could find something we might do in the summer, when those of our group with jobs thought would be a little less hectic. 

So we got together and made a CD with the idea of shopping it around to some wineries, many of which have tasting rooms around here, and thinking maybe we could get a gig during the summer. 

Now it's November, and Rominger Winery finally agreed to give us a try.  We were to play on a Friday from 5:30 to 7:30.  We managed to put together three rehearsals in preparation for this, although only one of those rehearsals included all the people in the group. 

We did get a nice program put together, and Phil, our violinist, was actually able to borrow and deliver a real harpsichord from UC Davis for the event.  That was pretty nice for me. 

As you can see from the picture, there was a huge crowd there.  If you look more closely, you can see John and Kathy's husband, Dave sitting at a table together.  One is reading a magazine, the other is texting.  The people at the next table seemed to be having an okay time though.  I think they didn't really make any money on our being there, since they, in fact paid us a little bit, but combined with the fact that they gave us wine, it just couldn't have worked out very well for them.  We had a good time, though.

Saturday John and I went over to Mike and Heather's new house to watch Rina while they went to birthing class.  We had a good time with Rina, which included putting all her animals in a tree.  It was fun, even though trying to lift her up to get the stuff into the tree kind of ended up with bashing her head into limbs and stuff.  They are obviously desperate for baby sitters or they would never have us around. 

After we left the baby sitting gig, we went over to the convention center for the holiday craft show (one of two really good ones that are put on every year before Christmas in Sacramento, the other one being the Creative Arts League/Crocker Museum show on Thanksgiving weekend.)  We got a couple of interesting things, and I met this cool artist named Elizabeth Hall, who designs very colorful, fun jewelry.  She immediately attracted my attention because her hair was red, yellow, green and blue.  And then I loved her jewelry.  Here's a picture of her wearing the necklace I bought. 

I wanted to go back the next day, but I had agreed to play with Charlotte in a talent show at her church.  Charlotte is a hammered dulcimer player, and I love the sound of hammered dulcimer with harp, so while I wasn't too much looking forward to being in a talent show, I was happy to be getting to play with Charlotte. 

We played two sets, one with the Cherry Tree Carol/Air the High Mountains/and riddle song; the other included Give me that Old Time Religion/Do Lord/Golden Slippers.  Golden Slippers is a great piece that Charlotte really has nailed and makes a great show ender.

It's also obvious from this picture that I really need to lose some weight.  I suppose better posture might help, but every time I see a picture of me playing the harp, I realize how fat I've gotten.  Ugh.

Halloween

Not much to say today so I'm just going to post some pictures of the party we went to last night.  John won the prize for most original costume as Van Gogh. 

He looks pretty good, doesn't he.  He actually let me color his hair with a rinse, and we tried to color his beard as well, though it wasn't really very long, so we had to mostly dye his face with it. 

I was hoping to get our pictures together, I wanted white hair in the picture, which I thought would be cute for our Christmas cards, me with white hair, he with red. 

Anyway, here are a bunch of other pictures from the party. 

This is the end of the Blue Moon party, but I'm going to add some pictures we took of Rina's preschool, Busy Bee when the kids went for their Halloween parade around the park across the street. 

She was a ghost and trying to be scary. 

They had a setup outside the preschool that was a cute place to take the kid's pictures in front of, so we got one nice posing ghost picture. 

The T shirt story

Last January when we were in Hawaii, we went to a craft fair and among all the kind of usual craft fair stuff, albeit this was with a Hawaiian flavor and hence somewhat different, there was a lady selling these great t-shirts that were decorated with painting and fabric, but they looked way more artistic than old lady, at least to me, though since I am an old lady, I sometimes have difficulty telling the difference. 

But these t-shirts were quite pretty, and some of them used kimono prints which added a kind of classy look to them, and then she painted on the cloth.   See last day in Paradise.

After we came home, I kept thinking about these shirts, but, of course, never got around to trying anything with them.  And then we were in NY, and I saw this cool lady at the flea market who was just dressed to the nines  and I thought about the artsy t-shirts again.  Well, in NY, just down the street from the flea market, there was a very cool fabric shop that catered to quilters, and I bought a bunch of fat quarters one of which had  a kind of NY cityscape, that I thought I might use for a design on a t-shirt eventually.  And as always happens with me and fabric, I put it away and forgot about it, or really not so much forgot about it as didn't have any brainstorms for what to do with it.  Because when I would look at this fabric, of course all I wanted to do was use the whole piece, and then what would I use it with? 

And then our harp circle was  going to play a little concert in the park on September 11, and we were supposed to wear red white and blue.  But I don't do red white and blue, because I don't particularly think September 11 is a day to wave the flag, but it is a day to remember people, especially those in NY, and I thought, "Aha, I'll put some of this cool New York fabric on a red shirt, and then I'm sort of seeming compliant, but I know I'm not. 

But I still couldn't figure out how to do it and make it look cool, so I did what any sane person would do and asked Lynda for her advice.  She's an artist, and therefore has a really good sense of design.  She suggested we cut pieces around the buildings and not use too much of it. 

Already by this time, I had realized that this wasn't really going to be an artistic shirt like the one in Hawaii, because I am too representational, but I did like how it kind of worked out by cutting around the buildings.   So we played around with it for awhile, and she could see it wasn't going to be a particularly artistic rendition and left before she got blamed for my lack of vision.  I did mention that she's pretty smart, didn't I? 

I started playing around with putting it on the shirt, and since the fabric is basically red, it didn't stand out much, so I found some black fabric lying around upstairs -- probably a leftover shroud from a previous murder or something -- and put it behind the buildings and it really kind of popped out.  Anyway, when I got finished, this is what the shirt looks like. 

I guess it's all right, but kind of what I wanted to do was incorporate the drawing, sort of like those painted leaves on the Hawaii shirt, but I don't know what to paint on a t-shirt with, and I'm not a painter.  Just before I started writing this blog, I photoshopped the drawing or painting or whatever that I would have liked to have put on the shirt, and this is what the "artistic" version would have looked like.  Maybe eventually someone will take pity on me and tell me how to do it.  Of course by then,  I'll have spilled mustard on the shirt and won't be able to wear it anymore anyway. 

REPAIRING THE CONCERTINA (almost)

In our harp circle, we thought it might be nice to have some sort of alternative sounds against all those harps, so I decided maybe I could add some easy chords with the concertina. 

I got the concertina out -- I've had it for about 30 years or so, John got it for me for Christmas the year we went to Mystic Seaport the first time and where a guy was playing it on the pier and I thought, "I could do that." 

As it turned out, I wasn't really very good at it.  I could play the chords, but it kind of escaped me about playing a melody with the chords.  On the other hand, I did get so I could do a passable version of Waltzing Matilda. 

But as time went by, the concertina got kind of sad sounding, and I didn't play it much.  Then about five or six years ago, we went to Cotati to see the accordion festival, and I realized that it was pretty easy to fix the buttons, and came home and fixed a few of them. 

So when I got it out,  I thought it would be pretty playable, but no, the buttons I didn't fix back then had now disintegrated.  So I took the thing apart and replaced the rest of the little sleeves. 

Each button has a little sleeve of rubber material aound it, (the black stuff in the picture) which holds the key up when it isn't engaged, and when the key is up, the hole is covered, meaning no air can get through, meaning there is no sound.  I found that the tubing that people use for oxygen was the right size, as long as you could cut it into pieces about a half inch long. 

Melva had given me some of this tubing, and I usually use it to make peyote stitch bead tubes.  So after I spent a couple of hours hunting for this tubing I started the project.  First you have to take the concertina apart, then you have to do whatever fixing you're going to do, then you have to put it back together again, because you can't tell whether you've fixed it unless you do that.  So there's a lot of taking it apart and putting it back together again.  I had a cutting tool but it seemed like I could actually cut the tubing better with the scissors. 

Once I got the melody buttons fixed, I discovered that some of the bass keys had kind of collapsed, so I took that side apart and just replaced all the little pieces of tubing, put it back together and even though all the keys were standing up, and the holes were apparently covered, it plays constantly, whether you press the buttons or not. 

 

I'm uploading a little video of how horrible it sounds now. All the notes are playing all the time, as if all the holes are open, which perhaps they are.  And my ADHD is such that I don't want to putz around with it anymore, I'm ready to move on to wrecking something else.  Maybe tomorrow at Tara.