Reasons it may be spring

It was beautiful today. I didn't even wear a coat to church, just a light sweater. We saw people riding bikes, people in shirtsleeves, kids in shorts. The sun warmed up the car so much that we turned off the heater and cracked the window.

Katie, bless her heart, picked up a flea or two somewhere. God knows how - she never goes outside, so either one attached itself to one of us, or it wiggled in through a less-than-tight window. We didn't actually see a flea, but rather "flea dirt" - which is the nice term for "blood-tinged flea poo". The vet gave her a pill, and dosed her with some goop, and we are trying to clean any place where we thing dormant pre-fleas may be hiding, which means "every square inch of your house, including curtains, closets, and under the bed." Yay.

Would some pretty music be nice about now? Yes, it would. Here are Alison Krauss, Yo-Yo Ma, and "The Wexford Carol".

I always wanted it, too

Singer Etta James is terminally ill with leukemia. Her doctor and her caretaker have asked for her fans to pray for her.

Godspeed, Miss James. This is one of my favorite songs ever.

Left-handed

 T had a meeting at a coffee shop this morning, so I took my sadly-neglected sketch book for entertainment. I've seen a couple of things recently about drawing with your non-dominant hand, and decided to give it a go with an old and ornate chair in the shop.



It is a modified contour drawing. In a contour drawing, you look at the subject, not the paper, and draw with a continuous line. I glanced at the paper occasionally to make sure I was close to the right spot, and allowed myself to move the pen to different places sometimes.

We have Sirius XM in the car, and one of the classical music stations goes all Christmas-y in December. It's good stuff, too - not a Bieber or a Mariah in sight. Yesterday, they played John Rutter's Shepherd's Pipe Carol, which is a song I always look forward to hearing. I love how happy and lilting it is. I would join any choir I knew was going to sing this.



The song may be unfamiliar to you, so here is a link to the lyrics.

Not Scrooges after all

T and I haven't put up a Christmas tree for years. We have one, but it is too big for our living room, and we just never got around to replacing it. But this year, we found a nice, and smaller, tree at Target, and after church today, T said, "Let's go get a tree."

It came pre-strung with lights, but just white ones. T wanted colored lights, so we added a strand of those, and now it is extremely well-lit. It took us three trips to three different Targets to get it displayed just right, and we are quite proud of our ingenuity in making a table from plastic storage boxes and a gold tablecloth.

To celebrate our decorating prowess, please enjoy Miss Angela Lansbury singing one of her hits.

December already?

I must have blinked and missed November. Now, all of a sudden, I need to start making tracks on getting T a Christmas present or two.

We bought an exercise bike recently, which required rearranging some of the basement. I put the spinning wheel up on a table to save floor space, and also to lessen the temptation for Katie to mess with it. I may need to rethink this strategy.

Since I took the picture a few minutes ago, she has actually fallen asleep right there, even though she is just inches from a soft, warm chair.

It's pledge time at our public TV station, and tonight I flipped on the TV to see Peter Noone doing Herman's Hermits' hits. When I was 11, a neighbor boy asked me if I would marry him when we were 14. I agreed, and decided that this would be Our Song. Sadly, my family moved away less than a year later, and that was the end of the romance. I still like the song, though.

Do-over Done

Last month, I posted a picture of some wool that I had spun very shortly after I learned how to spin. I decided to try respinning it into something more usable. Today, I finished plying it, and gave it a nice, hot bath to get it cleaner than it had been.



There's not a lot of it, maybe about 50 yards, so it's probably destined to be a stripe on something.

I have reached new lows in dental emergencies. About a week and a half ago, I broke some dental work while eating a cracker. Seriously, a cracker. I finally got in to see the dentist Wednesday, and he set me up with a temporary crown, since it will be a couple of weeks before the real one will be ready. Anyway, today I was eating soup - SOUP - and the crown popped off. Of course, the dentist is closed on Saturday. T took me to Walgreens, where we found a number of DIY tooth repair items. I managed to spackle the crown back into place, but I'm eating VERY gingerly.

Who better for today's musical selection than Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem? This is my absolute favorite song of theirs, largely because of Animal's contribution.


CHEEP! CHEEP! CHEEP!

My Soldiers

I am the daughter of a World War II era soldier.



I am the sister of a Vietnam era soldier.



I am also the great-great grandaughter of a Civil War soldier, the granddaughter of a World War I era soldier,  and the cousin of a Gulf War soldier.

To all who have served, I salute you.

I owe it to mom

As promised, we had snow, and I have to say it was a very unsatisfactory snow experience. It snowed overnight, so I didn't get to see it falling. By the time I woke up, it was a slushy mess, not pretty at all. We got the aggravation without the prettiness. What a rip-off.

T and I both had the day off, which was good, and we both had dental appointments, which was annoying, but not too bad. I broke a crown last week, and today was part one of getting it repaired. I'll be glad to have that done.

As we were driving back and forth to the dentist, we saw that Noodles & Company is finally open at the mall, so we went there for dinner. We discovered it in Indiana when we visited my family, and had been looking forward to them arriving in Iowa.

Tonight, I took a wild notion to bake some oatmeal cookies. I haven't baked oatmeal cookies in ages, but they are Terry's favorite cookie. He used to get them at The Bookstore Whose Name We No Longer Speak, and they had cranberries in them, as well as raisins, so I put cranberries in mine.

I read something today that was giving advice about how to learn to cook. It talked about reading recipes, understanding the "flow" of the preparation, making sure you have all of the ingredients, and so on. It occurred to me as I was mixing up the cookie dough that, even though it's not a regular activity for me, it was easy to pick up again because my mom started teaching me how to cook when I was a young child.

And later, I was crocheting, and I had the same realization. To the uninitiated, a crochet pattern must look like hieroglyphics. Because it's something I learned young, though, it doesn't take me long to figure out a pattern, even if I've gone years without thinking about crochet. Again, this is something I learned from my mom. Most of the things she taught me to do, I still know how to do, even if I do them irregularly. That's a nice legacy, don't you think?

It's autumn, and the moon is almost full, so what better time to end the day with Mr. Van Morrison?

Good morning!

No, really it's evening - a rainy, chilly evening, with the promise of snow overnight.

I gave this post its title because the peppy song I posted yesterday reminded me of my hands down, all-time favorite wake up song. Years ago, when I was living in a dumpy little apartment, I had an old portable radio that I kept in the bathroom, and I listened to it while I got ready for work. It was tuned to KIOA, the local oldies station. I was young enough then that they played music older than me. (Now they consider "Oldies" to be songs from when I was in college, and even later. I mean, really!)

I worked some pretty early hours back then, too. Sometimes I needed a little extra inspiration to get going in the morning. This song was the best. It starts out sort of mellow, sort of like a folk song crossed with lite jazz. Each verse swings a little more than the one before, building up to The Big Finish (tm). Even if I was still half asleep when the song started, by the end I was singing into my hairbrush microphone, working out my choreography, and tossing in some jazz hands for good measure.

This video doesn't give you any of that, but it is the recorded version I know best. Anyway, I don't really want to see it performed. I have my own vision of what it SHOULD look like.



Look out, old Macky is BACK!

Non-habit-forming

So I made it through October and posted almost every day. Blogging is a habit now, right?

Ah, no. As frequently happens when I participate in month-long challenges, by the end of the month, I am OVER whatever the activity was. That's why I quit doing NaNoWriMo. It makes me hate writing.

I did finally get my gingerbread last week. We had one blustery day, and I baked. Perhaps I should have waited. It's raining now, and possibly turning to snow tomorrow. I have cookie supplies on hand, just in case I feel the need to bake again.

In honor of my DTAUC friends on the NaNo forums, I am crocheting a doily. I'm also still working on re-spinning the black wool that I got in my spinning class a few years ago. The singles are done, and I am plying it. What I'm really eager for is the post-spinning wash. This was raw fleece, and even though I had washed it, it was still fairly greasy. I probably need to soak it more aggressively, which sounds like an oxymoron. I think it needs a longer soak in hotter water to nudge more of the lanolin out.

I haven't quite adjusted to the time change yet. If you are like me, maybe this song will give you a pick-me-up when you need it.

And the winner is...

I don't know. Nothing has jumped out as The Thing I Must Do In November, and I'm okay with that. I do need to work on last year's sweater, though, and the other one that is completely knitted, and just needs to be seamed up.

Tomorrow is supposed to be sandal-warm here, but confidence is high that Wednesday might be gingerbread day.

Today's video clip: Ray Price and Willie Nelson. I stood in line once get Willie's autograph, back in his tax trouble days. Not only did I get the autograph, he got up from the table and posed for a picture with me, and then walked over and shook my dad's hand. That's the thing that left the biggest impression with me, that he made an extra effort to be nice to my dad.

As usual

Staying up too late, trying to post before midnight.

October is not quite over, but I think I can declare NaBloWriMo a success. I've only missed posting one day, and that was an accident. Now, as with NaNoWriMo, I won't claim that you got high quality every day, but you got something. I like to think that even when I just posted a video, it may have revealed a little bit about me.

As November approaches, there are more "do something crazy this month" options. There's NaKniSweMo, where you knit a sweater in a month. I tried that last year, and still have a half-finished sweater that I haven't touched in eleven months. Maybe I should knit the OTHER half of the sweater next month.

Or there is NaNoJouMo, where you work on an art journal every day. That one appeals because 1) there are daily prompts, and 2) you can use words and pictures, in any proportion you see fit.

Then there is the 30-Day Creativity Project, which just wants you to do something creative every day. Even fewer rules! I'm liking it already.

Here's what I WISH I could do. But, patience, grasshopper.

What a crock

At the grocery store a couple of days ago, we found packages of fresh vegetables for making beef stew. I thought it was brilliant, because it irks me to have to buy, say, a bunch of celery when I only need a couple of stalks.

So today, I decided to make beef stew in the crock pot. I worked today, and wasn't able to start cooking until afternoon. Setting the crockpot on high should have given it plenty of time to cook, but after three and a half hours, the vegetables were still very crunchy. We ended up turning the crockpot to low and going out for Mexican food. By the time we got back home, it was simmering nicely.  We'll have to stew for Sunday dinner.  It will probably be better the second day, anyway.

I'm wondering now, though, if that crock pot going wimpy, since low seemed to cook hotter than high. It's probably about 15 years old.

Yesterday, I installed an old copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking on the desktop.  I'm trying it out tonight as I write this post. Talking to the computer is not as natural as I thought it was going to be. Even with simple text, I have to stop fairly frequently to make corrections or look up commands. I also don't seem to have a good sense of what the words look like when I'm not actually writing them. That may be something to get used to in time.

After yesterday's melancholy song, today's selection is plumb full up with the confidence of young love. This is the aria from La fille du regiment that earned Pavarotti the nickname "King of the High Cs". Here is is performed by Juan Diego Florez, and he pops out those nine, count 'em, nine Cs like there is nothing to it.

Wating for gingerbread

It's almost November, and I'm still waiting for gingerbread weather.

Gingerbread weather is the first really blustery day of mid-fall. It chilly enough that you need a proper jacket, and maybe even a scarf. It's probably cloudy, maybe even drizzly, and the wind cuts right through you. When I was a kid, the first occurrence of such weather was my mom's excuse to make gingerbread. Even after I was grown and long gone from home, she and I would still report to each other when it was gingerbread weather.

I keep thinking it will be any day now, but so far, no. It's getting cooler, but otherwise rather sunny and pleasant. I'm ready for it, though.

This should be the point where I give you my mother's recipe for gingerbread, so here it is.


Betty Crocker Gingerbread Cake and Cookie Mix

Yep, mom was a dandy cook, but her gingerbread cake came straight from a box. What's more, she always topped it with fake whipped cream. At first it was Dream Whip. (Mixing the Dream Whip was my task in the gingerbread experience.) Then, when Cool Whip hit the market, she switched to that.

In memory of my mother, I also have a box of gingerbread mix in my pantry. I draw the line at the Cool Whip, though.

Now, I just need the right day.

I don't have a cheery video today. Late October is the time to share this beautiful, wistful song, performed here by the fabulous Rosemary Clooney.

When is a biscuit not a biscuit?

A couple of days ago, faithful reader Bernie blogged about biscuits, and illustrated the post with a lovely picture... of canned biscuits.

It's clear that B is not from the American South. Canned biscuits, also known as tube biscuits or those damn storebought biscuits are considered by many to be a Yankee-sponsored attack on Southern gentlefolk.

Which is not to say I've never had them. My dad was always happy to cook his baby daughter a cholesterol-stuffed array of pigmeats for breakfast, but he drew the line at scratch biscuits, so I've had my share of ersatz biscuits. Cooked 'em, too, but if I need biscuits, I usually use Bisquick, which I consider to be slightly less of a travesty. Plus, you can make Impossible Pies with it. Who could be against that? (And Bernie--Bisquick pot pies. I'm just saying.)

In the south, canned biscuits are often called "whomp" or "whop" biscuits. This term is a legacy of the late comedian Jerry Clower, who lamented the sad sound of biscuit tubes being whomped on a counter to pop them open, and the contents being foisted off onto families as biscuits.

I couldn't find a clip of Jerry talking about biscuits, but I did find an audio clip about Tater Ledbetter and his moped. I remember listening to it with my parents, and them giggling themselves silly. Enjoy!

How-DEEE!

I'm just so proud to be here!

In my distraction yesterday, I failed to note that it was the 99th birthday of the late Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon.She's been gone for 15 years now, but you remember Cousin Minnie Pearl, don't you?





What the heck, let's watch another! I like this one because she has a different costume, and different body language to go with it. Her country bumpkin simplicity often disguised the fact that she was a smart woman and a skillful performer.




The phrase, "They don't make 'em like that anymore," is sometimes overused, but in this case, I think it is the absolute truth.

Can't blog. Reading.

I stopped by Target this afternoon to pick up a few things. While there, I saw Shatner Rules by, who else, William Shatner. I glanced at a few pages, and thought it seemed more readable than his recent memoir, Up Till Now.

So I bought it, and I'm reading it, and I'm loving it. If I didn't have to go to work tomorrow, I would stay up way too late reading it. At this point, I have only stayed up slightly too late, and I need to stick to that.

Penultimate day of summer

Today was a lovely summer day. I know this because they have finally turned the heat on at work, last week when it was chilly, and it was a tad bit stifling in the office today. The leaves have mostly turned, but they haven't all fallen yet. When I crossed the river this afternoon, the trees on the banks were all covered with golden leaves. Tomorrow is also supposed to be warm. And then Wednesday, not so much.

I love autumn and spring for the anticipation they bring. One day you can be wearing shorts and sandals, while unpacking your turtlenecks and mittens. It's sort of like leading a double life.

Today's musical selection: I have no earthly idea what made me think of this. I think I may have seen something about Nairobi on Yahoo News. Anyway, even at my advanced age, I am too young to have seen The Ernie Kovacs Show when it was on the air. I did sing this song in high school choir, and years later, discovered Ernie on public television. I give you The Nairobi Trio, with Solfeggio.

More shops, no drops

Our weekend festival of shopping continued today, but we went separate directions. T really didn't want to wait while I shopped for clothes, and I did not especially need to go to Bass Pro. I would not rule out the possibility of me taking a spin through Amazon before bedtime, either.

Today's happy video has embedding turned off, so instead there is just a link:
Singing In The Rain

Gene Kelly is my imaginary boyfriend, just so you know.

My friend Sand asked me today, "What's the deal with the videos?" The first one, "Enjoy Yourself, It's Later Than You Think", is one I can sort of play on the ukulele. It isn't heard much anymore, but its message is still timely. I thought I would do my bit to resurrect it.

I don't remember why I picked "Get Happy", but c'mon - get happy! What's not to like? Judy was already entering her period of unreliability when she made "Summer Stock", but she sure kicked it in this number.

We have Sirius/XM in the car, and I listen to the Broadway station when I am driving. They played Irene Ryan's version of "Just No Time At All", which I assume is also underappreciated, since I can't find it on the internet. When you watched the clip, did you sing along when instructed? I hope you did. It's a bouncy chorus that is fun to sing.

And so on.

I love a good torch song as much as anyone [who knows what a torch song is nowadays], but a happy song has an amazing ability to lift me up. Maybe one of them will lift you up, too.

Anyway, isn't it a bit more entertaining than hearing that I bought a sweater today?

Shop 'til you drop

T and I had accumulated a long list of things that we needed around the house, so today we shopped. He has been want to replace the kitchen floor, so we got some new tiles. I wanted something to tidy up The Studio, and got a wet/dry Swiffer. Winter's coming, and I needed socks. He needed something from Scheels. I needed something from Ulta. It went like this all afternoon.

The only thing we could not find was a piece of heavy canvas. The camper tent needs patched in a couple of spots, and we thought canvas and fabric glue would do the trick. Have you ever been to Joanne's on Saturday afternoon? It's a madhouse, and as far as we could tell, every employee was either at the cutting counter or the cash register, both of which had long lines. Want to ask someone a question without waiting fifteen minutes? Not a chance. We're going to continue considering our options. Mail order? Nylon instead of canvas? Duct tape?

Since it is Saturday, here's a special Saturday song from my favorite group ever.