Rolling On One

All this time I’ve been using Finale, I’ve been going to the simple entry rest palette every time I needed to enter a rest. I finally (as opposed to Finale) found that all I have to do is hit the 0 (zero) on the numeric keypad to enter a single rest of the same duration as the current note. Do you know how much easier that is? Do you know how much time I’ve lost over the last two years moving the mouse over to the rest palette to grab a rest every time I needed one?

Arlene asked me to come over to the JCC this evening to help out with a class she was teaching for a group of special needs teenagers. The project was to make matzah covers by discharge printing on some black fabric we had bought at Walmart last weekend. We’ll sew those printed blocks onto black cloth napkins. The original idea was to discharge print the napkins, but they turned out to be colorfast. Um, if you’re a little puzzled about all that, the idea of discharge printing is that you remove color, rather than printing color onto a light background, by printing with bleach. Rather than liquid bleach, which is stronger than you want to work with, harder on your hands than you want to be involved with, and hard to tell where it is on the printing plate, you use SoftScrub cleanser with bleach. That’s not so concentrated that it will burn a hole in the fabric or your hands, shows up on your stamp or printing plate or leaf that you’re printing, and is thick enough that it stays put where you brush it on the plate.

The kids turned out to have a wide range of abilities. The prints, naturally, reflect that. I was impressed by how well prepared Arlene was. I had helped cut out the fabric, so I knew about that; but in addition, there were pieces of paper the right size to block off areas to print “matzah” after the kids had printed leaves around the outside; several pieces of paper taped to the front of the room with step-by-step directions for the project; trash bags taped to the table; and of course all the materials. She figured that since I’m moderately familiar with the process, I could be of more help than the adults who work with those kids.

Right now the prints are hanging up to dry.

They need to be washed to rinse out the Soft Scrub that we printed with, then ironed and appliqued onto the napkins.

So in between, let’s see, I never mentioned that two weekends ago we stopped at Cabela’s in Scarborough to get some fly tying supplies. For some reason I was early leaving work, we were at exit 42 earlier than usual, and it was getting close enough to fishing season (open water fishing, that is, not ice fishing, which I still am not into) that it seemed to make sense. It turned out that they were having a 30% off sale on all fly tying stuff, so I lucked out. I got some really good grade dry fly hackle, Whiting farms, a small package that’s supposed to have enough for at least 100 flies. In contrast to Frank Perdue, who breeds chickens for the best meat production, Whiting Farms selects for feathers that make the best dry flies! Roosters grown specifically for their feathers. It sounds goofy, but the feathers from one rooster will sell for over $100 (and that’s all at once. In small packages like the one I bought, I bet it could add up to $500 or more!) That’s a lot more than Perdue can get for one chicken. Of course, the market for dry fly feathers is a lot smaller than the market for oven stuffers.

Last weekend I warmed up for fly tying by putting snells on a few hooks. That means tying a short length of heavy fishing line to a hook and tying a loop in the other end, so you can clip a snap swivel onto the loop of fishline rather than trying to clip to the hook directly. It’s a start.

Sunday of last weekend was a meeting of the Maine Jewish Artists group. One guy showed several of his pieces, found object assemblages which have a lot going on and are probably more meaningful when he explains them than if you just saw them in an exhibit.

Then there was a lot of discussion, especially about what amount of outreach we wanted to do to get people from all over the state to participate — something of a problem, since everyone there was more or less from the Portland area, and some other parts of the state are pretty remote. The group would like to be welcoming and supportive of people from The County, but we don’t really want to have to have meetings far away very often!
We wanted a picture of the group, and I had my camera in the car, so I did it:

We didn’t do much on Sunday except get up, clean up the house and drain the water, and go to that meeting. After the meeting we found our way to the Audubon Gilsland Farm sanctuary, but didn’t try to walk around — it was late and the ground was snowy. We stopped in Portsmouth for supper at the big Japanese restaurant, Sake.

The reason for the MRI is that for about three years I’ve had some problems with my left hand. I thought it was carpal tunnel syndrome, which would make sense with all the keyboarding I do as a software engineer. It was really bad three years ago, and my primary care physician sent me for physical therapy at that point. I had some exercises to do to strengthen my shoulder, and it got somewhat better.

It was worse again at the end of last year. I would wake up at three or four in the morning with my arm tingling. It would stop if I leaned my head down to my right shoulder for a minute, but start again unless I turned my head just right until I fell back to sleep. Turning on my right side for five or ten minutes was OK, but longer than that would make it start tingling again. Lying on my left side was out of the question.

I started doing the exercises that I remembered from last time, and at my regular physical exam in January I asked my primary care doctor about it. He said it did sound like carpal tunnel syndrome, but that didn’t explain the arm problems. He sent me to a hand specialist, who had an X-ray taken of my neck (which, come to think of it, they had done three years ago too), sent me for an EMG (electromyogram or something like that), sent me back for physical therapy, and sent me to a spine specialist, who thinks the whole problem is in my neck. The spine specialist sent me for the MRI.

The hand doctor asked me if I was dropping things. I had dropped my keys a couple of times, but besides tingling in my hand the problems I was aware of were lack of feeling in my fingers and difficulty taking my wallet out of my pocket.  More precisely than lack of feeling, the tingling was overwhelming the feeling of what I was trying to feel. That was most obvious when I was buttoning a shirt. I couldn’t feel where the buttonholes were. With the clarinet, I couldn’t feel where the holes were that I was trying to cover with my fingertips.

With the exercises I’ve been doing it’s a lot better. In another week I’ll go back to the spine doctor and find out what the MRI showed.

Well, I had an MRI of my neck done at the West Suburban MRI Center, or words to that effect, in Wellesley, yesterday.

Mostly it was noisy and boring. The technician’s main concern before doing it, other than making sure there was no stray metal in my body (like pins from surgery, or artificial joints, or bits of metal in my eye) was for me to pick out what channel of satelite radio I wanted to listen to. That turns out to be fairly important. The MRI machine makes a loud buzzing noise while it’s working, which was most of twenty minutes in three- to five-minute stretches. The music is intended to distract you from that noise. Meanwhile, you’re lying there holding as still as you can and trying hard (in the case of a neck image) not to swallow more than you have to.

I can see why MRI machines and claustrophobia don’t go together. You’re in a small space there in the middle of that big magnet, and you really can’t move. I didn’t mind that part, but the surface in front of my eyes, the top of the hole through the magnet, was closer than my eyes would focus. For some reason, that was disturbing. I just closed my eyes, listened to the radio, and tried not to swallow.

Many years ago (maybe 15 — more likely over 20) I interviewed at Field Effects, a company that made rare-earth permanent magnets for MRI machines. To show me how strong the magnets were, the people there handed me a big steel crescent wrench and told me to walk a few steps toward the magnet, and to hold on tight to the wrench. As I approached the magnet, the wrench smoothly but firmly pulled on my arm until I was working harder than I have to when Dozer is pulling on his leash.

Any other origami fans out there? Find a dollar bill and visit this site to make a beautiful (thanks in good part to the work of our friends at the bureau of printing and engraving) little shirt.

I stumbled upon that site yesterday. Stumble Upon takes you to a random website recommended by some other web surfers, based on the list of things you told the stumble upon site you’re interested in.  I’m not positive that’s always a good idea. There are web sites that will install spyware or other bad stuff on your computer as soon as you open the site in Internet Explorer, and I’d hate to see anyone directed to one of those sites because I told them to try Stumble Upon. I think if you use Firefox and keep it updated and don’t install things whenever an unknown website tells you you need a new plugin to see it, you’re fairly safe. There sure are lots of interesting sites I’d never find on my own.

There’s that old joke, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice, practice, practice.” It really does seem that practicing helps. I’ve still been playing trumpet for five or ten minutes each morning, and I do keep getting a little better and better. The section of Carnival of Venice that sounded blat, blat, blat a month ago is sounding somewhat smooth these days, and the double-tongueing chromatic run is better. Tonight at Klezmer meeting I was playing the baritone at the end of rehearsal on a Chasidic medley. It was feeling as though the horn was the part of my voice outside my body, an extension of me rather than an entirely separate piece of equipment. When I was a kid taking music lessons, nobody ever told me that was what I was striving for. But if any beginning brass players spot this post, guys, that’s the idea. It feels great, sounds great, and it turns into music instead of just the right notes.

Besides going to the movies Saturday night (and going shopping in Bridgton in the late afternoon) we mostly just hung out at our place watching the birds come and go. There were lots of redpolls, still a couple of pine siskins, and excellent views of the red-bellied woodpeckers.

Redpoll and chickadee at the same feeder:

Redpoll in an apple tree:

Pine siskin. Look at that patch of yellow in the wing!

Red-bellied woodpecker and blue jay:

I turned the lower of these two lace bobbins last weekend, from a fresh-cut piece of striped maple. The wet wood turned very easily, but was fibrous and left a fuzzy surface. The upper one is new today, from a piece of seasoned birch (I think it was birch). It came out with a nice hard smooth surface. Now will I do 23 more like it to have a useful set of bobbins? It would be good practice to make a bunch of similar pieces.

The weekend of February 14 we were in New Jersey to pay a shiva call on Millie and Joel, and to go to the memorial service for my uncle Irving (actually my mother’s first cousin, not really an uncle.)

Pictures:

Arlene and her mother’s cousin Nathan:

David & Rachel’s son Jacob, just over 2 years old, and Greta’s dog Orli:

Natalie’s widower Yechiel and Joel’s sister Wendy’s daughter Hannah:

Joel and his grandson Baylor, Gena’s youngest:

********************************************

And from Irv’s memorial:


This woman came from Belgium just for the memorial service. She had been an exchange student from Ethiopia in about 1961. The family that was supposed to be her host family refused to take her, and Irv and his then wife Johnny (the mystery writer Juanita Sheridan) took her in. She wrote a short biography of Irving, of which she brought 150 copies to give out at the memorial service.

If you’ve seen Slumdog Millionaire, you know from the title that I have too. We went to the Magic Lantern in Bridgton last night to see it. There were lots of people in the audience! That’s not really a surprise at the Magic Lantern, especially considering that it was a 7 PM show. We were the only people in the audience for the 9 PM show of Coraline in Oxford a few weeks ago. That cinema probably just paid for the electricity to project the movie on our admissions. I felt that Slumdog Millionaire deserved its oscars. It was a little like Crouching Tiger in terms of giving you an image of part of the world you don’t see that often in movies or TV — or at least I don’t. It made me feel that the U.S. is finally joining the world. When you can have a hit movie that doesn’t have any American characters, and hardly even any European characters, that’s a pretty significant step.