Spent most of yesterday afternoon at Grandma’s, knitting. She’s managed to break her new roll-up piano (or it has a faulty chip or circuitry; I suspect one of the latter). It works OK for a few minutes, then starts to make horrible screechy noises and cuts from one octave to the next on the same […]
Poor Grandma. After the last fall she had that got her a big skin tear, I wanted to take her walker away but didn’t say anything. About the time that was healed, she fell again–again with the walker–and got another cut. Friday, when I was over there, she was still insisting on using the damned […]
The other day I threw out that nonpoisonous slug bait that degrades to phosphorus, preparatory to planting things that slugs would like. Yesterday, I found the big banana slug (pictured below) in one of the raised beds, dryish and sorta curling up, though still alive. I didn’t expect him to get into one of the […]
All right, Ryan, here you are. A picture of Grandma playing with her new roll-up flexible piano.
Only three octaves (I think I’ve said that several times), but it’s pretty cute. She can’t see the music if it’s behind the keyboard, so she keeps it in her lap. I’m going to scan some of her […]
So I’m planning to drive down to Camano Island yesterday a.m. to meet Mary and Bill to do some pen-swapping so I can write a few more Stylophiles stories. We manage to meet without difficulty at the Stanwood off-ramp, though I try mightily to mess up the rendezvous, and I follow them out past the […]
Several years ago, I had to take pics of the annual Skagit County tulip fest for work. It was quite beautiful—Skagit is one of the world’s largest producers of tulip and daffodil bulbs—but once you’ve seen fields full of tulips, well, they all sorta look the same. Headed down today just for the change of […]
I was out this a.m. planting sweet peas. I’ve never planted them before, but the $$$ clematis I planted last year all died, so I reckoned it wasn’t much loss if I tried sweet peas for climbing up the Ugly Retaining Wall ™. We’ll see how they go.
Looking around, I discovered a goodly number of […]
Here they are, finally–photos of the knitting bag that seems to have been in progress forever, but has only been about… four or five months? Hah! That’s pretty close to forever!
The two smaller shots are of the front and back (the back shows the open pocket, which contains a couple of patterns and […]
When I wrote my Raging Grannies group’s song “Bomb Iran” last year, to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann,” I didn’t realize it was going to be prophetic.
So Iran has “nuclear capabilities,” eh? Never mind that it has very few of the thingies you need to enrich enough uranium to be useful, […]
The Amazing Roll-up Piano arrived and I took it over to Grandma today. It’s about two feet long with a power/control panel about six inches wide on the right side and contains three full octaves–plenty for ordinary people who aren’t gonna play Mozart or Bach.
First, she was astonished that it was flexible. I shoved junk […]
Without any conscious decision, I seem to be watching Univision (Spanish TV) with some regularity these days. I think it was initially utter exasperation with the crap that’s on English TV (except for some Canadian shows) coupled with the need to have some kind of noise on so I can knit without going nuts, and […]
Mom used to play piano. She loved it. She was reasonably good, but the pleasure she got from it far outweighed any unhappiness she might have had about her technique or abilities. She was pretty sad when arthritis caused her to give it up, and give her piano to her next-door neighbor.
Not long ago, a […]
A while back I thought it’d be a good idea to learn to knit backwards, so when I was doing large amounts of stockinette stitch, I could knit in both directions and lessen the chances of carpal tunnel and other RSIs. A good idea, right? Especially for somebody whose working days are spent slaving over […]
Ira Glass had a wonderful piece on his “This American Life” show on NPR yesterday. He was exploring the meaning of “neighbor,” and what it means to be one, good or bad. With three stories from very different people, only one of which might be considered “normal” in my present world, it provoked some really […]
I’ve not read you-know-what (for the uninitiated, saying the title of “Macbeth” is supposed to call down hail and disaster) for many years, so imagine my surprise to be dreaming about being in a production of it, and knowing all the dialogue. Yes, I was dreaming in iambic pentameter, and as far as memory serves, […]