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.  

THE NEW SINK

Okay, so I haven't been writing, and wait til you see just how exciting this entry is.  It kind of starts on Sunday, when we were house volunteers on the Sacramento Old City Association tour.  This is an annual tour that is a fund raiser for SOCA.  The tour is usually put together to highlight a certain neighborhood, and is quite dependent on getting people to volunteer to let about a thousand people wander through their house in a day. 

We were volunteering in a really nice house.  It wasn't very busy, among other things because it was house #7 on the tour and people usually will start with whatever is number 1 and work their way up to the higher numbers.  And we were there for the first two hours.  So we were mostly sitting around talking, admiring the furniture and how cool the house was and just generally kicking back and having a good time. 

The problem wth events like these is that people spend a lot of time getting their houses just perfect for the tour, so at the end of the day, you've seen lots of cool furnishings, nifty old houses and (mostly) nice remodeling.  In fact, one of the houses we toured turned out to be our house, and I didn't even realize it until we got in the kitchen and they had pushed the refrigerator into the closet just like we have.  This house was also on a bigger lot than ours, and the owners in the 1940's had added an annex onto the back, which removed the little room that we sanctimoniously call the library because it has built-in bookshelves, but  where we actually spend endless hours sitting in front of the boob we use for our endless watching of television.

Anyway, once we got home, things start looking pretty shabby to us, especially our kitchen snk which is missing most of the original enamel and is impossible to get clean.  We still like the tile and don't want to put a more modern thing like granite countertops or whatever the countertop du jour is, so we figured we'd replace the sink and probably have to replace all the tile because tile would get broken while the job was being done.  Oh yes, and the garbage disposal more or less has totally rusted out.  

The next day I called our regular plumber -- when you have an old house you practically have a plumber on retainer, and asked what the procedure would be for getting a new disposal, replacing the sink and replacing whatever tile got broken in the replacing.  He gave us a quote, told us what size sink to buy and where might be a good place to buy new fixtures, and told us to have our tile guy come and take the old tile out and then come back the next day and replace the tile.    We called our tile guy, Azim, who did our bathroom floor almost 5 years ago as it turns out, and he said he could install the sink, do the tile, and he'd be done and all the plumber would have to do is connect up the sink and install the disposal. 

Anyway, we told Azim to do all the work he wanted to, which included replacing the bathroom tiles the idiot handyman broke while he was doing a  lame job of repairing a light about a year ago. 

And obviously business is slow, because that was yesterday, and Azim and his helper showed up this morning, took the old tile out around the sink, went to the plumbing supply and picked up the new sink and fixtures, put the sink in (which was an inch bigger than the old one)  didn't break any collateral tiles,  regrouted the whole countertop, so it looks like new, and all we have to do is wait for the plumber to come tomorrow.  We got a pretty cool faucet, which is in this picture but isn't actually connected up yet.  

Looks pretty cool, but we have a tendency to leave fruit sitting there and rotting, spilling coffee and not wiping it up, ditto with cranberry juice, all of which stain the grout, but for now, it looks pretty cool.  We'll see how long we can keep it that way. 

Life in the arts

In my never-ending quest to make it appear that I have an interesting life, when in fact I mostly spend my time going for a walk, going to the gym, watching time disappear through my laptop, and eating at the same two sandwich shops, today will be a catalog of my artistic endeavors for the week.  Paltry though they are.

Sunday Lynda and I went to the Gem Faire and as usual, I got carried away.  I have possibly the most well beaded closet in the world, since mostly I buy stuff and then never make anything.  But I have fun buying.  Who wouldn't love this?

I did make a couple of necklaces after I came home, and got a couple of shoes for Babes, but mostly all the bead stuff is still sitting on the card table, where I have a working space of approximately 36 square inches (for those of you who don't do higher math like I do, that's a space 6" by 6").

My only non art event for the week was the fun trip we made to the factory stores at Vacaville to go to the prestigious Fresh Choice restaurant.  Well, okay, so the place isn't prestigious, but what's better than that is that it's a get together with my remaining three best friends from high school, and we meet there because it's halfway between our various homes.  And they'll let us sit there all afternoon.  And while we're sitting there, we can keep going back to the buffet table, so that lunch goes on for 3 hours, and seems to involve multiple desserts.  We have a great time, because when you get older, it's really nice to have someone that connects you back to your youth, especially if, like me, you don't have any living relatives.  This time we shared baby pictures, which were all new to us, because we mostly met in 7th grade. 

But back to the high-flying art.  Thursday is Hot Lunch in the park.  This is a free concert at lunchtime, acoss the street from Hot Italian.  Hot Italian is a relatively new restaurant in midtown with a rather limited menu -- no spaghetti at this place -- but using quality and fresh ingredients.  They serve most of their dishes as either salads, pizzas or panini.  Hmmm, I seem to be confusing food with art.  I suppose they are both rather intertwined, the same way functionality and design are on Mac products. 

But back to the high-flying art.  Thursday is Hot Lunch in the park.  This is a free concert at lunchtime, acoss the street from Hot Italian.  Hot Italian is a relatively new restaurant in midtown with a rather limited menu -- no spaghetti at this place -- but using quality and fresh ingredients.  They serve most of their dishes as either salads, pizzas or panini.  Again, I digress.  This Thursday's  group featured Gillian Underwood, who I managed not to get a picture of, but here's the  rest of the band and the crowd. 
Anyway, it was fun, relaxing and good music.  And we had a nice Hot Italian box lunch and it was free!

I've been suffering a little bit of cat withdrawal since we came back from Martha's.  Her two cats are so nice, and Julia, in particular is demanding but funny and adorable.  As we were walking over to Hot Lunch in the Park, we met this cat with a remarkably similar look and personality to Julia -- came right up to us on the street and demanded to be petted.  I thought I hadn't seen any cats here in California with Julia's particular fur type, grey striped with an undercurrent of red, but this cat had the same fur, and relatively similar markings.  Not to mention a very similar personality. 

And my final foray into the arts today was to participate in the Run for the Arts, an annual event to raise money for the arts.  About 1200 people signed up, though the highest number I saw on a jersey was 1012, but lots of people only sign up to donate.  I managed to finish the grueling 5K in 52 minutes, coming in in 840th place.  Some of these are runs and some are walks -- this was advertised as both, but clearly there were a lot of runners.  I was definitely a walker.  And in my defense, I will say that I stopped at a garage sale along the way.  There were some 15-year-old ballet dancers in front of me wearing tutus and they were just too cute for words.  Every time they got to a mile marker they would do cute ballerina stuff around it, or they would walk along and then do a few jetes eleves so it was fun just being around them.  I had planned to walk with Gaeann from CALS, but I couldn't find her when I got there.  They also had lots of booths of various arts organizations, some giving away tickets to their upcoming productions, some just advertising, or the fun one, a booth where they let you play handchimes.

Since my head was completely in the clouds from all my high artistic experiences, I did a really dumb thing.  I let Mike borrow my car and he didn't put the cover on it, so I had to wash it.  Hate, hate, hate that job.  Decided I'd also wash the cover.  It can only be washed with the hose, and then you have to hang it up to dry.  Normally I do this with two ladders, since I don't have a solar laundry drying device.  However the cover is getting old and is rapidly approaching equal parts duct tape and fabric, and anyway I was too lazy to get out the ladders, and it was pretty hot, so I thought I'd just rinse it off and let it dry on a sunny spot on the grass.  So I put it on the only sunny spot on the grass and hosed it off.  Which, of course, made the grass underneath wet, and therefore no longer a good place to dry the cover.  DUH.  So then I had to take it across the street, where I was worried someone would come by and steal it.  Then I was able to use the matrimonial air motion device which got it dried a little faster.  At least I'm done with those two jobs for six months. 

SUNDAY, SWEET SUNDAY

Aside from the fact that I finally had to mow the lawn today (after only a month, but who's counting?) we had a pretty nice day.  I started out with my six-mile walk, stopped at the farmers market on the last leg and got some good veggies so I can implement my vegetable-friendly, low fat diet.

Then we went to the Antique Faire, which is every second Sunday under the freeway, and since it's only three blocks from the house, it seems downright unneighborly not to go.  And I really scored.  I got this wonderful, unfinished quilt that looks a little like a crazy quilt in small doses, but is more of a pattern quilt.  I'm going to recover the window seats that are basically a moth magnet.  The window seats as they are, are really wonderful, we had them made out of an oriental rug that was in kind of bad shape, but they attract moths to beat the band.  This quilt is more satins and silks, and since no one sits there, it doesn't really matter if it's more fragile than the wool.  Actually the wool is more fragile, because of the damn moths.   Of course, a person couldn't possibly be satisfied with just one thing at the antique mall.  I was kind of looking for the old lucite and bakelite buttons and stuff, but didn't find anything I really loved, and so actually didn't buy anything. 

Then I saw this old a.m. radio.  We used to have one on the top of our refrigerator when I was a kid and I always remember my dad listening to a show called MacElhattan in the morning.  The show even had a little theme song which I think was to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy, but I could be wrong about that.  Anyway, I had looked at one of these radios in NY, and they wanted $165 for it, and of course having tubes and such, it was quite heavy and not likely that I even wanted to carry it around all day in NY, much less drag it home.  And here was this one for only $20.  Whoopee.  It only gets AM, so I will probably never listen to it, unless of course they put MacElhattan in the morning back on instead of lunatic right wing Republicans.  It looks cute, though.  Now all I have to do is get a 50's refrigerator to go with it.  Actually, they do make new ones that have the 50's style but have separate freezing compartments and self-defrost.  But I think the $20 radio is a big enough investment.  Of course to get the appropriate look, I'd have to take all the magnets and notes off the refrigerator, and while that might happen for about 15 minutes, it's never going to be long term with me. 

My final win of the antique show was this Elmore Hubbard (not to be confused with L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology) scrapbook.  Last year we went to East Aurora NY and went to an elderhostel about Elmore Hubbard and Roycroft and early Arts and Crafts in the U.S.  Elbert made a fortune telling people to live good lives and be moderate and value the arts, even though he had a long affair and fathered a child with a woman not his wife and otherwise did quite a few racy things.  The scrap book is in mint condition, and was printed by Roycroft Press.  I have a couple of other smaller Philistine magazines that I bought in NY which will kind of go with it on the coffee table whenever the coffee table isn't covered with tea pots, harp tuners, music and reading glasses. 

The other thing I saw at the antique fair that I really liked and think I would like to put in the upstairs sunporch after we get the windows done is this cool little rattan love seat with leather seats.
But I didn't buy it today.  I'm waiting to see if we EVER get these windows done. 

Of course, the trip to the antique market didn't help my diet plans at all, because naturally we had to eat.  And you know the kind of food is available at places like that.  Actually we had a delicious pulled pork sandwich, but I doubt that it's on anybody's list of low-fat or healthy, or diet food. 

Also this weekend, and also really quite close to home, so again, we had to go just to be neighborly, was the Japanese food festival.  This is an annual event and fundraiser for the Buddhist church and a lot of fun as well.  We had planned on skipping it because it's usually very crowded, but decided to go at the last minute.  They were out of chicken teriyaki, so we ended up getting shrimp and vegetable tempura.  It was really wonderful, very crispy, not greasy, but again, not on anybody's list of healthy or low-fat food.  Since we got there towards the end of the three-day event I bought a couple of raffle tickets, since the first prize was $5000.  Believe it or not, I didn't win anything!