Scenes from our southern fair

A slow news day in Maine

Bicyclist pedals off Maine State Pier

By Portland Press Herald Staff

"Police say the man who rode his bike off the end of the Maine State Pier last night was admiring the tugboats in the harbor instead of paying attention to the end of the road."

OOPS. I don't think I've done anything quite that smack-your-forehead-worthy, and if I did, I am sure glad it did not end up in the daily newspaper.

Rest of the story (not long) is at the Press Herald site, link above

Ashokan Farewell and "Inconceivable!"

Somehow yesterday I stumbled across the Ken Burns Civil War documentary theme song, Ashokan Farewell, and the reading of the Sullivan Ballou letter. If you’ve never heard the letter from a RI soldier to his wife upon the eve of the Battle of Bull Run, read aloud (the only way to experience it), you can hear it here. And get out your hankies. Can you believe The Civil War came out 17 years ago?

So then I was thinking, ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have a CD of violin music.’ I started a list of not-necessarily-classical violin tunes with the intention of downloading to my iTunes and making a CD. I thought of tunes like the Ashokan Farewell, Vangelis' Building the Barn from Witness, and Knopfler’s A Love Idea from The Princess Bride (which turned 15 this week, can you believe it?) but surprisingly, I had a very hard time finding what I wanted online. My search terms were close but no cigar.

I’m not opposed to classical, Vivaldi and Mozart are great and I love their violin pieces. But searching for popular music yielded bluegrass fiddle or gypsy-Hungarian songs. Even Mark O’Connor didn’t yield what I was looking for, but I’m sure if I stuck with a search of his voluminous tracks I would find pieces that are similar to Ashokan Farewell.

One CD I did find was titled, “The Most Relaxing Violin Music in the Universe.” I like things that are named what they are, don’t you? I stopped the search because it was taking too much time away from other things I wanted to do. Like be productive. I guess I'll settle for stumbling across the tunes I am thinking of but don’t know yet and consider it a musical treasure hunt.

So speaking of The Princess Bride, my all-time favorite movie, I can’t believe it is 15 years old this week. Who could forget The Cliffs Of Insanity? The Pit of Despair? Inigo Montoya and his pursuit of the Six-Fingered Man? I own the DVD, and I’m bringing it to a friend’s house this weekend, a friend who has never seen it. Now, Princess Bride, or PB to us insiders, is a cult classic. That means that we say the lines out loud, like in Rocky Horror Picture Show. I hope my friend doesn’t get too annoyed when I shout “Inconceivable” and “unemployed…in Greenland!” and my fave, “He’s only mostly dead!” Me and the movie Princess Bride. It’s true love.

Ho hum yet another video of someone's kitty

pictobrowser test

thanks goes to Christie!

Now I know why I liked Lou Grant

He said, at Mary's initial interview, "I am one of the few people in my business who does not have a peptic ulcer. And that is because I have always been able to delegate ... blame."

I can't alter the due date

The gallery show I have entered is coming and tomorrow all the pieces and parts are due because the curator needs to hang them. Thirty-four artists have entered, woo-hoo! Should be a good show. The curator wants titles, prices, dates, artists' statements, dimensions, synopses. I need to finish writing an artist's statement, develop prices for the pieces and e-mail them, and here, finishing the last page in my altered book.

I had taken photos of several of altered book pages and framed them as entries. When I brought the enlarged pieces and also the book to show the curator, she asked if the book could be in the show too. So that means I have to finish it!

Tea: jasmine blossom. Fresh exacto, new scissors, cutting mat, and a Smithsonian magazine as glue pallet.

Never Forget

The day the terrorists attacked, and we lost so many people...all heroes. Where were you that day?

Photo courtesy Post Commander Larry Newth, Gray American Legion #86.

360 degree view from my deck

north, east, south, west, and down, at dawn of a Saturday


Horse pasture


Meadow Baptist Church cemetary


Bert, curious


Landlord's front porch


Flowers in pots under the deck have died

random moments so far today

I love this word I've just learned: quagma. Matter in its fifth state is known as quagma or quark-gluon plasma – no ions, protons or neutrons yet. (The five phases of matter are solid, liquid, gas, plasma and quagma).

My nephew wanted to know why you have to bow down when you say your prayers. The answer he got was: because God is Great, and makes the world wonderful for us etc etc and then he said, "could he make my waffles?"

I am bringing fruit salad to the lake today, where I've been invited to a BBQ. So I drove to the local farm stand early this morning to buy a basket of local peaches. The peaches were charmingly arranged in an oval basket in a pyramid. They were soft and had dew on them.

More kitty cuteness: relaxing against my leg after a hard day playing with string

Labor Day adventure

I've started using Freecycle again, a Yahoo! group where people post usable things they don't want and all you have to do is pick them up. The items run the gamut from empty laundry bottles to office desk. My landlord built a 10X10 deck off my bedroom and I need to fill it with stuff, on the cheap, so I checked out the group again

There was a posting for cactus planter with live cactus in it, so I jumped on that one right away. The deck is on the north side but it still gets direct sun in the late afternoon and delicate plants are going to have a hard time. Plus if I'm being honest I'm not the best at keeping plants alive. Cactus have a better shot.

The pickup was in Winterville, a town I was not familiar with. Googling it on Maps, I found it was just 15 minutes away. Yippee, I'm there! The Freecycler gave me directions and off I went into the late afternoon of a summer day.

Traveling over rural roads, passing farms and hills just blushing green after a bit of rain, I sighed and declared once again that Northeast Georgia is the best spot on earth. Then I arrived at Winterville and it just got that much cuter. Neatly trimmed clapboard homes with rambling porches and sweetly placed rocking chairs, lawns rolling down to two lane roads, and the town center that looked like it was plucked from the early 1900s and gently set down like a young girl does with her doll furniture.

All in all, a nice sojourn. And the cactus planter was perfect, too.