Rolling On One

Anne and Matt have been talking about a fire pit for quite a while. Last weekend we did some serious planning. Matt and I went to the Naples Aubuchon Hardware store and came back with 720 pounds (9 80-pound bags) of ready-mix concrete. Matt dug a circular trench for the foundation (the middle wants to have plain dirt under it for drainage) and mixed and poured the concrete. He and I went to a stone yard on Sunday; it was closed, but we wandered around and saw that there’s a big variety of stone available to build with.

Not all those trees are going to be left by the time we’re done with the project.

Not this past weekend but the weekend before, Sept. 6 it must have been, Arlene and I went on a guided nature walk at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker village. That’s the last Shaker community left that’s a going concern. There are four Shakers right now, two elderly women, one middle-aged man (one other man was part of the community two years ago, but has gone out into the world since) and one younger woman who joined recently.

One of the eight people on the walk was a reporter for a local newspaper, one of the papers that you can pick up free at the supermarket, the Gray-New Gloucester Independent. Naturally we wanted to read the article, but we hadn’t expected that our picture would be in the paper:

That’s my leather hat from Fort Hall and my Rome T-shirt on the right, Arlene’s hat and red parka on the left, and the tour guide’s hand pointing to the map.

This turned out to be a nature walk where most of the participants had something to contribute. We pointed out a couple of birds. The reporter, Don Perkins, knew a lot about trees and about the history of the area. The guide was very good on wildflowers and details of the history of the Shaker property and talked about her trip to the monarch butterfly overwintering area in Mexico and her experiences working for the North American Bluebird Society. Another woman was a wildlife biologist with a sharp eye out for frogs and toads, and another man spotted all the blackberries and huckleberries  within range.

Our guide, Carol Beyna, had brought a sample of poison ivy safely ensconced between two sheets of clear contact paper. Although I thought I was good at identifying it, I learned a couple of fine points from her.

Notice that the petiole (stem) of the middle leaflet is longer than that of the two side leaflets. The two side leaflets are not symmetrical about their central vein. There’s a sort of purplish dot where the three petioles meet. If you get close enough to see that, I hope you’ve been careful where you were walking!

OK, right now I have running through my head a song we did in klezmer last night. I’ll follow the strategy Mark Train advocated in “Punch, Brothers, Punch” and try to get rid of the problem by talking it through. Since I don’t have an MP3 of it to post, there’s no real danger of your catching it (as opposed the Twain story. Sorry for the popup in that link).

It’s not strictly speaking a klezmer song, rather an Israeli dance song written by Naomi Shemer, “Od Lo Ahavti Dai”. If you have to have something running through your head, at least being by Shemer is a good thing. She’s most famous for “Yerushalayim shel Zahav”, “Jerusalem of Gold”, which came out just before the ’67 six day war which reunited Jerusalem and immediately thereafter became the anthem of the times in Israel. It’s a good song, a really good song, but without the fortuitous timing it probably wouldn’t be nearly as well known as it is. She wrote a zillion other songs, of which we did several in Koleinu a few years ago.

Anyway, I know this tune from folk dancing, but I hadn’t known the words before last night. We played it over and over, as we usually do when first learning a piece. It happens to be written in a very comfortable range for me to play on trumpet, so I could concentrate first on transposing and getting the right notes, which was pretty easy since I knew what it was supposed to sound like, and then on enjoying getting good tone and phrasing.

There were English words on the page, but Shemer’s are so much more to the point that I couldn’t be bothered with them. In Hebrew she says something like,

With these hands I have not yet built a town. I haven’t yet found water in the middle of the desert. (… I forget the next line …)
I haven’t yet loved the sun and wind on my face enough. I haven’t yet said enough. And if not, if not now, when?

It turns out I didn’t really understand the Hebrew. The first stanza sounds reasonable, like a young person saying he wasn’t ready to settle down yet, because he wanted to do some iconic idealistic Israeli pioneer things, like building a town in the desert. But judging from what he wants to do, each stanza he’s 20 years older! The next-to-last verse has him not being ready to settle down because he hasn’t built his dream house, nor written his memoirs! That wasn’t “I haven’t yet said enough”, but the woman he’s refused to commit to saying, “I haven’t yet said, ‘ENOUGH!’, and if I don’t now, when will I?”

OK, by the end of last week I finished the back of my Aran sweater. I started the ribbing of the front on Saturday night. Some problem, I forget if it was a counting error while increasing for the start of the pattern or what, on Sunday morning got me disgusted and I ripped the whole front out and started over. By the end of last weekend I was done with a couple of pattern repeats (oh, sorry, checking a previous post, 1 1/2 pattern repeats. So much the more done during the work week!). By now, I’m halfway through the fifth pattern repeat on the front. The back has twelve pattern repeats before binding off the bottom of the armscyes and I think nine more between there and the shoulders. So with some luck I could be halfway up to the bottom of the arms on the front by the end of this weekend. Or by the end of today if I keep going.

I just downloaded the newish (new this week but not brand brand new) browser from Google. The WordPress “write a post” page looks the way it does on Safari, not on Firefox. That’s mostly to say that a toolbar that lets you put in links and edit the post in HTML (among other things, but those are the things I use it for the most) isn’t shown in Chrome. I’m not surprised, because the Chrome web site says they used the same rendering program as Safari, but I’m a little disappointed. KTHXBYE I’ll plan on using Firefox for my blogging (now I expect to hear people saying, “Hmph, not that you ever post anyway.”)

Two apple pies (Cortland apples picked this afternoon)

Six half-pints plus one Bonne Maman jar, about another half-pint but I guess it’s a quarter litre, hot pepper jelly from three red chili peppers Sue gave us, three long green hot peppers from Hannafords, two small sweet green peppers from the North Pine Hill farm stand, and one large red sweet pepper from Hannafords. The last batch of hot pepper jelly I made had a problem with the sugar crystallizing out, so it ended up like rock candy with jelly in between the rocks. We’ll see…

Two pints watermelon rind pickles.

One birch tree, about six inches diameter at the base, cut down with the chainsaw. The chainsaw started up easily in the driveway, but gave me a lot of grief starting out in the woods. But it did work, and the tree fell pretty much exactly where I was trying to put it. I cut it into logs and carried most of them to the backyard. Some of it should work as turning stock, and Arlene is thinking of what she can do with the bark.

A path to all the walnut trees cleaned up with a set of hedge shears. They worked great for cutting down baby raspberry canes, goldenrod, etc., that had come up in the path.

Ribbing plus one and a half pattern repeats done on the front of my Aran sweater. The back is finished, in just under three hanks of yarn out of the ten I bought. If the front doesn’t take more than another three, two each should be ample for the sleeves and I’ll be OK.

If Barack hadn’t been running, and Bill hadn’t been in the picture, Michelle could have beaten Hillary one-on-one.

The Atlantic flyway seems to have a traffic jam right at our apple trees. Our yard was full of warblers this morning. We’re not positive what most of them were, but we got good looks at a black-throated blue, redstart, black-throated greens, and probable Nashville, Canada, and yellow warblers. The tree just outside the kitchen window was hopping with warblers, and so was the crabapple.

Arlene and I just had our 40th wedding anniversary. We invited a lot of relatives and close friends up to Casco for the event. We didn’t have people staying over in our house (except for Anne, Matt, Charley, and Aunt Lee) but there were about 40 people here on Saturday.

We rented a ten-passenger pontoon boat from the marina down at the end of the lake. Joel took his kids and grandkids out on it as soon as we had it back to our association dock. The motor wouldn’t keep going for me when I took over the helm from him, and the group of people I wanted to take out had to give up and wait for the engine to not be flooded. By the time we waited for that we were seeing lightning over the lake so we decided not to go out. The heavens opened and it poured for a while (and everyone crowded into the house). The boat was due back at the marina at 6, and at 5:15 I decided it was raining lightly enough to go out. Four guests came along, and we took a short ride up the lake before turning around and going on back. Here’s me driving the pontoon boat, which is more like a floating patio than it’s like a motorboat.

Katherine and Tim (those are the parents of Salima, the recipient of that baby sweater I was making over the winter) had arranged a cake for the party. It was supposed to serve 40, but there’s lots left two days after the party (and that’s after feeding many of those people on Sunday, too). It’s from The Icing On The Cake in Newton. Arlene designed it, with a luna moth, her banjo, my trumpet, and other things we’re interested in. We were amazed at how well the cake decorating held the detail of her design.

As we were cutting the cake, I looked up and realized that besides the people in the living room, we had a balcony audience up in the loft. Here’s the view from up there as Arlene and I noticed them.

I set out for a walk around Cutler Pond today hoping to see one of those northern water snakes that were around regularly last summer. I had only seen one so far this whole year.

Along the near side of the pond, on the dike between the pond and the marsh along the river, a guy was fishing at the big open spot that’s the obvious place for fishing. I looked in the bucket near him to see what he had been catching. Besides a couple of sunnies, there was a good-sized, and I mean twelve or fourteen inches, largemouth bass. Well! I didn’t know there were bass that size in that pond. I asked him what he was using for bait, and he showed me his can of earthworms, and then went on to tell me how smart fish were. If one of them gets off the hook on the road there it will flop towards the pond, not the other way. Then he showed me how he baits his hook and covers all of it with the worm, because if even just the point is showing the fish will have nothing to do with it. Then he went on to talk about catching the worms, at night when they’re above the ground (that’s why they’re called night crawlers, after all) and how you have to move fast and grab them at the end next to their burrow, not try for the far end or they’ll get into the ground before you know it. I’ve done a little fishing myself, but that big bass in his bucket gave him a lot of credibility, and I figured I could probably learn something by listening. Along about this time I noticed line paying out of the reel of his fishing rod, and said, “Something’s taking your line — you’d better get the rod and see what’s happening.” He had a fish on. And, holy smokes, not just any fish, when it was close enough to see, but a big largemouth. I mean, close to 20 inches. The biggest largemouth I’ve ever seen in Massachusetts, for sure.

After I helped the guy untangle his stringer so he could tie the fish down to discourage it from jumping out of the bucket, and took a couple of pictures of it with my iPhone, a man and woman who were walking towards us thirty yards down the path started talking very animatedly. “It’s huge!” she said. “This fish?” I asked. “No, the snake we just saw.” I got more specifics and ran over to check. Sure enough, it was one of those water snakes I was hoping to see. I went back to the fisherman, thanked him again for everything he had told me, and went back along my way. When I got to the snake, I saw a garter snake next to it. At first I thought the water snake had caught it for lunch, but no, it was just hanging out, with its head up, looking around. It didn’t take kindly to my being there and slithered away before I could get a group portrait, but I did get a picture of the water snake.

Further on, at the end of the side path leading to the river, was another water snake, smaller and with clearer red and yellow marks. What a bonanza! Three snakes and a fishing lesson on one walk!

(check back for pictures later. I left the cable for the iPhone up in Maine. I’ve ordered another one from Apple, but it’s not going to be here for several more days.)