MY BOGGY BLOG: find your way through the murk

Page 450

That's about where I'm at in the 750 page Harry Potter book that came out Friday night. We have one book in our family and so we have to share, and so I can't read it constantly myself. We do get to share a bit less than we thought because 1) DD stayed up all night and finished the book at 9 am Saturday morning, and 2) DH cheated and didn't tell us until late Saturday that he'd already read the book before it came out--- he found the copy online that someone had photographed each page of the book and he finished before we left for the party on Friday night! Hey, not fair! And then he had to do this tricky thing of going to the party at Barnes & Noble as "Cousin Barny Weasley," because we had red hairspray and he didn't think he looked enough like Arthur Weasley to be him (and I was going as Molly Weasley, and we got 15 year old DS to also spray his hair red and go as Ron, although he was so embarrassed to be in a costume he almost washed it all off before going). Now, we thought he was just being funny because there is no "Barny Weasley" in the books.... however, he was being clever to see if anyone else had pre-read the book because Harry is disguised as a red-haired guy for a wedding in the 7th book, and he goes as "Barny Weasley." So clever...

It still pissed me off that he read it early! But at least now we don't have to share the book with me. It's down to me and older DS (younger DS really doesn't want to read it--- he'd rather listen to the book on tape).

And so I've been having this odd weekend, because I've been staying away from the media totally. I'm afraid to hear someone say, "Harry's dead," or "Harry's not dead," so I'm not listening to the radio, watching TV, reading the paper. It's very quiet here. I usually have this woman's talk radio on all the time, which my family isn't always thrilled about, but I find it entertaining. It's been kinda nice to have the world be quiet, to not listen to anything but a CD in the car, to just live in the world of Harry Potter for a few days.

BTW, the book is really good and I'm enjoying it immensely. I can't wait to steal the book back from older DS!

Shelling

I have a new appreciation for peas. Usually when we eat them, I just open a bag from the freezer and pour a few hundred into a pot and boil 'em up. These are a great improvement on the peas I grew up with-- those pale, gummy canned peas. My sister L hated peas, and who could blame her? But everyone in our family eats peas.

Today at the farmer's market I happened on "shelling peas," or English peas. These are peas in the pod that you have to shell-- the pod is inedible. We've had lots of varieties of sugar snap peas and their relations, where you do eat the pod, and they're good raw or cooked. But I've never had shelling peas. It immediately brought to mind an aura of old-fashionedness, of women in cotten dresses shelling peas on the front porch with a basket in their laps. I also flashed to a Julia Child's show I once saw in which she cooked freshly shelled peas and exclaimed about them. Intrigued, I paid my $3 and took a small box.

I am a sucker for old-fashioned experiences. I've read alll the Little House on the Prairie books numerous times and I've tried cooking a few things out of the Little House Cook Book. I've made my own bread, I've cultured my own yogurt. I've washed cloth diapers and lived to tell about it (though I did have a washing machine and dryer, which makes a big difference!) (and my DH has canonized himself for being a dad who washed and diapered kids in cloth diapers because of his crazy wife!). I like trying to make things from scratch. So shelling peas seemed like a little thing I could try.

Well, I don't think I'll ever open a bag of peas again without pause. Okay, I know in our modern times there are machines that shell commerical peas (I looked it up, kinda cool), so there wasn't any little old lady with a basket on her lap shelling the peas that are in my freezer. But just the little pile of pods I had took quite awhile to shell. And the pile of resulting peas is not that big!! But it was rather contemplative work, fingers pulling the string and pulling open the pods, then popping the peas out into the bowl. Jinx the Cat was curious and he came up and sniffed all over while I worked, then sat on the plastic bag where I was throwing the used pods (he likes to sit on plastic bags. And newspaper. When you're reading it). He also had some fun chewing on a full pod and playing with it like a mouse. He's in his I'll-Play-With-Anything-Bored-Cat-Mode.

But he was nice company and the fan was blowing a breeze, so we sat together in the quiet. I bet those peas will taste good tonight!

Happy 4th of July

We just got back from fireworks... it is amazing sometimes how advantageous our neighborhood of choice has turned out to be. We live close to West River Road, a few miles south of downtown Minneapolis. We can drive a few minutes down the river road to get near the Stone Arch Bridge, where you can see great fireworks. This time we sat on the new grassy hill that is in a park next to the new Guthrie Theatre-- another advantage, that the award-winning Guthrie moved from the other side of town to the river road, so now to see amazing theatre, we drive 5 minutes. Even though we've been having a drought, the hill was luxuriously green and soft, and we were able to park just a block away. We lazed about on blankets, reading books, waiting for the fireworks to start. No mosquitos (!), which is quite a miracle for the beginning of July. I guess that's one of the good things about the lack of rain.

The fireworks were beautiful, and I snickered at the sight of the 3 East African young men who were sitting in a row in front of me-- for the first 10 minutes of the fireworks, they each held their cell phones up to the sky, presumably taking pictures on their phones. It just seemed one of those weird, modern-day moments-- it isn't enough to just watch and enjoy fireworks anymore, we have to record them on technology. I could watch the fireworks as I sat behind them, on their little screens, in triplicate!

It really was a lovely day. We went to the beach at Lake Nokomis, our first beach excursion this year. I'd been looking forward to lazing about on a blanket in the sand and reading a book (there's a theme here, I guess!), and we all did that, going in for swims when we got hot. We had a picnic lunch and the only annoyances were the lifeguards who must constantly yell over their megaphones to tell people to not do this or that, and the $35 parking ticket we got-- Ouch! We simply had forgotten that this is a pay lot now, since we used to be able to go to city lakes and park for free. The signage isn't good at Lake Nokomis and you had to find the pay station (we didn't walk by it) and get a receipt to put on your wind shield. By the time we remembered that you had to pay for parking, it was too late.

And then we went to a BBQ at the home of DH's elderly friend, a former professor of the U who has been running his own role-play gaming in his basement once a week for more than 20 years. He has a BBQ every 4th of July and we have been going for years and years. It was a small crowd this year, just 10 of us, and it was made less fun by the professor having health troubles... he's been declining for years but he had a fall last night and so only sat with us at the table for a short time before he went upstairs to his comfortable resting place. That was too bad. But we made the best of it and had some good chats and good food for the rest of the time.

So today, all my extrovert needs for socializing and fun were met! A busy day, very fun, and I can still hear the popping of individual fireworks in the distance. Younger DS thought he had found some sparklers in a drawer, so I took him outside to light them but unfortunately we discovered they were incense sticks!

And thanks to seeing the musical "1776" on Sunday, I did think about the Declaration of Independence and our founding fathers many times today. And I try to remember what is good about America... there is still a lot of good, even if I see so much evidence of corruption and greed. I believe in change, and I think America can be as great as John Adams and Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson envisioned. Happy 4th!

Moi, Patriotic?

Last night we got to go see a musical at The Guthrie, "1776." The tickets were courtesy of Project Success, which provides free theatre tickets to certain schools in the city where students might not be able to be exposed to theatre if they had to buy the tickets on their own. We have seen so many great performances over the years thanks to Project Success, since both our elementary and high school are recipients of this great organization.

I think I remember seeing a movie of "1776" on television 20 years ago, remembering it as a funny, cheerful story with long songs. It, of course, is all about the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and it manages to make the topic fun and personality-driven. Like most people, I know the bare-bones story of the writing of it by Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and John Adams being big names associated with it, and John Hancock being the big signature to go on it. But the play was great on filling on all these details, like John Adams being a little guy with a big mouth who was the primary driver of the movement toward independence, how it was decided that the vote had to be unanimous, how much dissent there was towards it at first, how fragile a thing our independene was, almost not getting all the votes and almost never coming to be. All told through entertaining musical numbers!

It was really good to see the play just a few days before July 4th, because it reminded me of what our country is really all about, how it started and what was important to our founding fathers that is still important to most Americans today (excepting our current administration, who abuses many of the rights in our Declaration all the time!). It reminded me of how hard so many people fought for our country back then, and all the talk of war in the play tragically echoed the war we are now fighting against Iraq. So much has changed and so much has not changed. All the loss of life and all the struggles are still happening and it was very sobering.

I learned a lot in the details of the musical. And I felt the patriotism, the cherishing of our freedom and our rights, rise inside me in the final moments when the continental congress was signing the Declaration. It was a powerful moment. Patriotism is a loaded word nowadays and very misused, even abused, especially by those who would have us dumb down our rights. Even if some are warping and skewing the sentiments and the rights and the issues in our country, we should still hold America dear. We are a great nation, and we had great and humble beginnings in 1776. I have to believe we can somehow leave the corruption behind and become a greater nation than we have been in recent times.

Thanks to "1776," I will think about the real reason for the holiday this July 4th.

Stringing Along

Today I finally, after about a few years of thinking about it, I took out my old guitar and put new strings on it. This was no small feat. I haven't played a guitar in over 20 years, I can't remember much about it. I don't remember the chords I used to play, or which strings go with which notes. But I knew the guitar needed new strings if someone was going to play it, so finally I looked it up on the Internet, googling "how to string a guitar." The directions all seemed confusing, the diagrams didn't make sense, but with the help of DH who is an engineer at heart and good at figuring out how to make things work, I put all new strings on my old guitar. Accomplishment!

I learned to play the guitar when I was about 13 years old. I had taken 5 years of piano lessons and even though I was good at it, the teacher was beginning to bug me. She had started thinking of me as her star pupil and was making me enter piano competitions, and the competitions made me nervous. I decided to quit... in retrospect, I wish my parents had just gotten me another piano teacher who suited me better, but I just quit. I wanted to try playing the guitar, so I got them to sign me up for group lessons at Schmidt Music. All students got to use a guitar for the duration of the 8 week class.

The teacher was a tall young guy with a deep voice and I big busy moustache. He taught us chords and finger picking and songs, and it was in this class that I learned some Bob Dylan songs I'd never heard before. Everyone in the class sang along as we strummed and twanged along. I liked playing the guitar and had visions of myself becoming a singer, a performer. Somehow through some reward programs, I got my parents to buy me the guitar I coveted, one with a rounded plastic back and a orange and red flamey color on the front.

I learned to play songs and sing along. I tried writing some of my own songs, horribly bad but fun to sing. I had some vision of myself becoming a lead guitar player in a band in the future, so I got my parents to let me take private lead guitar lessons at Schmidt. I remember the lessons but I really didn't have any clue about lead guitar and I didn't learn anything practical that I can recall.

My shining moment with the guitar was when I played in front of a crowd at our church's summer Fun Festival. There was a stage and a few of the kids who were in the church youth choir with me were performing a few songs that the choir director had worked on us special-- singing in harmony "Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy," "I Am Woman Hear Me Roar," and "When You Begin the Beguine." I found that I had trouble holding my notes and not slipping up to the soprano part when I sang in harmony... I still need someone else singing my part to guide me! But after the 3 of us girls sang, then I took my seat on a chair, got my guitar and performed all by msyelf.

I don't remember what I played, except that I know I sang an Eagle's song and a few others. I don't remember how I felt performing, except that it seemed like I was just singing into a void. People clapped, but it felt odd to put my voice out there. Afterwards, I got many compliments about my singing and my voice.

By the time I went to college, I stopped playing the guitar. I think in part, it was because I no longer had the dream of being on stage playing and singing... it had been a fantasy, a dream that helped me get through some troubled times. Also, I never really had good guitar instruction after that one 8-week class. I didn't know what I was doing besides strumming, and I found that frustrating.

Two weeks ago, I was helping younger DS visit the neighbor's to cat-sit while they were away. They had a guitar and he started to strum it and play around on it. I had already thought it would be good to get my old guitar out. I always get inspired by seeing the Indigo Girls play their guitars in concert-- now that's the kind of guitar playing I should have learned! I had a pack of new strings that I'd bought from Target about a year ago.

So now it's done! I found some nifty tune-your-guitar websites that give you the tones for each of the strings, I looked up some chords. Oh man, have I forgotten a lot! It's hard to get my fingers into the right positions. But now there's a chance, now there's a possibility. I'm going to look in the boxes upstairs for my old course materials from that 8-week class. I know I saved them. Maybe I'll be able to pick out some Bob Dyland sometime this summer!