Rolling On One

Through last week the preschool at the JCC was holding a silent auction. The items were on display in the lobby, where I walked to get to the locker room and pool area when I went swimming. One item was billed as a picnic – barbecue feast. It included a classy-looking picnic basket, packed with stuff, a backpack of some sort, folding tables, and a kid’s table and chair set. The picnic basket appealed to me. It looked about right for putting in a canoe and packing off to a deserted island for an elegant picnic. The bidding was up to $110, and I put myself down with a $120 bid. It looked as though the package was worth well over that, so I didn’t expect to be the high bidder. But, oops! Monday there was a phone message from the preschool saying that I had won the item, and should come in to pay and pick it up at my earliest convenience.

It was convenient on Tuesday morning. I found my way to what looked like the office of the preschool, over on the first floor of the old section of the JCC. That part of the building is a bit of a maze, left over from when it was the working boys’ school (the property was called “the novitiate” when we first moved to Newton, before the place turned into the JCC). The office is separated from the hallway by a real brick wall with an arched window. It feels like being in a restaurant in a renovated below-street-level townhouse in Boston. Of course, my memory may be inexact, but it makes a better story this way. Back in the lobby, there seemed to be no items of the auction left except the package I had just bought. It took me three trips to get it all to my car.

We finally unpacked it all and looked it over last night.

The kid’s table and chair set has an outdoor table with umbrella and two chairs, with “Finding Nemo” pictures over the umbrella, chair backs (I think) and tablecloth (I think. We didn’t unpack it all. Mine! Mine!) I liked the turtle parade in the South Australian Current, (was it?) maybe best of everything in that film. Between Gena’s boys, David & Rachel’s kids, and Emma, there should be kids to use it from time to time.

The two folding wooden tables, about the size of TV trays, are very substantial and will be useful next to a grill for holding ingredients etc.

The backpack turns out to be a special picnic backpack from Brookstone, with an insulated compartment for the food and an insulated sleeve on the side for carrying a bottle of wine, with a set of dishes and utensils (that we didn’t look at) and cloth napkins besides. By itself it would be plenty to carry a classy picnic for two.

The picnic basket that caught my eye in the first place is from Williams-Sonoma. It has a drawer at the bottom big enough to hold two bottles of wine. The main compartment has four melmac plates, two wine glasses (It looks as though it’s designed to hold four. That’s a slight puzzle)  and utensils for four, and plenty of room for food. That alone would be a good value for what I paid for the whole package.

And then there’s stuff that was packed in. Two barbecue potholders (and I need at least one to replace one that had a close encounter with a lawnmower), four dishtowels, a set of grilling tools, a digital thermometer fork to see if the food is done, planks for cooking planked fish, a grilling cookbook, three kinds of barbecue sauce, salmon rub, and for dessert, a s’mores kit — graham crackers, marshmallows, and two hershey bars. Holy smokes! I just have to say to everyone else, silly you, not outbidding me!

Last Saturday night, when we were in New Jersey for the baby naming – simchat bat thing on Sunday, we went with Millie and Joel to a concert at the synagogue in Succasunna, where they teach in the religious school. The performer was Rick Recht, who would like you to think of him as a rock star in the Jewish music league. Arlene and I are the wrong demographic. She looked around the audience and thought we were the oldest people there. Millie said no, that some people she knew from the congregation were older. But after those people left, we probably were. There was a video going in front most of the time, lots of waving of arms and pumping of fists, and a fair bit of singing along by the audience (helped by the words printed in the program.) We thought that Rick would be a wonderful synagogue youth group song leader, but we felt fine leaving without buying any of his CDs.

— or maybe I should just say Simchat Bat, rejoicing for a daughter. Arlene’s brother Ira’s stepson Scott and his wife Stacey (is there an E in that? maybe not) had a baby back in the fall who had severe medical problems as soon as she was born. After weeks or months in the hospital, touch and go for weeks, she seems to be well now. (kinehora — knock on wood). There was a big, anything involving Scott’s father is bound to be big, party in Milburn NJ this past weekend.

There was a very lovely ceremony in the synagogue sanctuary first, with everyone in the immediate family — and since Scott’s and Stacey’s parents are both divorced, there are four sets of grandparents all of whom participated — reading wishes for the baby and offering their blessings, and a woman cantor who chanted beautifully. Then there was a reception with bagels and lox and catering staff cooking omelets to order, more food than at some weddings you’ve been to.

Ira took a picture of Arlene and me through one of the centerpieces (the autofocus camera may have been concentrating more on the foliage than on us) —

— Arlene’s Aunt Lee, who lives in Buffalo and doesn’t get to New Jersey even as often as we do, visited with Nathan (who I guess is Arlene’s first cousin once removed, but only 9 years older than Arlene) —

— Gena and her three boys

— Lee with Scott and his father —

— and then we went to Ira’s house, where Gena’s youngest was building with blocks

— well, I took a lot of pictures in the hope of getting one good one, but got two good ones —

— and Joel played cards with the two older boys.

Arlene and I went to New Jersey for a baby naming last weekend. On the way, just past the TZ, we took a short detour to visit my uncle Irving. He’s really my mother’s first cousin, so my cousin once removed. You can probably find a web page about his ninetieth birthday party (over four years ago!) somewhere on this domain, if you look from the top — oh, maybe here.

Evelyn —

and Irv —

— look just about the same as always. There weren’t as many political posters up in the living/dining room as I remembered, but maybe I was thinking of the cellar. There are lots of pictures of major leftist heros, from Mother Jones and Eugene Debs through Che and Fidel to I don’t know who, hanging on the wall of the carport. Irv moved his car so we could see them all.

Evelyn showed us her iPhoto collection of pictures of the paintings she had had in a one-woman show a couple of months ago. We chatted about various relatives, had lunch, and watched all the birds — quantities of mourning doves, chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, and a couple of fox sparrows — outside their dining room window. They have a string of about five big bird feeders, the kind with a hopper between two sheets of glass or plexiglas that take two pounds of seed each, with a tray below each that holds whatever spills from the top ones, all on a big squirrel-proofed pole. Irv says they go through several hundred pounds of bird food every winter.

Halfway through the klezmer band rehearsal on Tuesday someone opened the door of the room and looked in somewhat hesitantly. I didn’t recognize him at first, but then it dawned on me — it was Jim D’Amicco, who had played clarinet with us years and years ago. He’s excellent, maybe the best clarinetist we ever had except for our original teacher Glenn Dickson. The band will be much much better overall with him than it’s been. I’ll probably be playing baritone horn more and trumpet less than in recent years, but maybe just playing more harmony parts on trumpet.

In case anyone thinks this is sometimes a knitblog, here’s a progress picture of my sweater. I’ve bound off one front shoulder edge and the front neckline, and the other shoulder edge is either ready to bind off or one row from it. I knit it in the round up to the armscyes and knit the front and back in parallel until I bound off the first stitches of the front neckline, so there’s not much to do on the back — maybe seven or nine cm. I’m thinking metric because I’m working from a Norwegian pattern — I’ve said that before, but so long ago that it’s no surprise if you’ve forgotten. Metric is good because the work gets to bigger numbers faster (it’s like metric speed limits — you can go 100 or sometimes 110 in Canada, because it’s kph not mph). Anyway, whatever, here’s the progress picture!

There was a big snowstorm predicted for Friday, continuing into Saturday for Maine. We decided not to drive up on Friday, and were settling into a Saturday in Newton. Anne and Matt had planned to take Monday off and make a three-day weekend of it. They phoned (several times) and when they got to Casco reported that the roads were OK and the weather wasn’t bad. We decided that if we left by early afternoon we could get there in daylight, before the melting snow iced over again, and that with them staying Monday we could leave later on Sunday than we usually do and wouldn’t have to turn off the water and spend lots of the afternoon cleaning. So the more impulsive heads prevailed and we ended up in Maine on Saturday evening after all. Anne and Matt had brought their new dog, Dozer. I neglected to bring my camera, so the only pictures today are from Matt.
We went for a good walk on snowshoes on Sunday morning. I was working on the lathe baseplate in the afternoon while the other three and Dozer went for a walk down the road along the lake. Matt came back, somewhat out of breath, and said, “Want to see a pileated? Start the car and go down to the other end of the association road!” I didn’t expect the bird to be there when I got there, but it was amazingly cooperative. We watched while it did more woodworking than I had been doing with power tools — well, more pound for pound, anyway.

Um, if you don’t know, this is a real treat for birders. These birds are normally shy. They’re so big, the size of a crow, and so distinctive with white patches on their wings (when they’re flying), that you know you’ve seen one if you get a brief glimpse of one at a distance. Normally that’s all the look you do get of one, and if it happens once in three or five years in eastern Massachusetts you consider yourself lucky. This one kept chopping away at that hole in the tree and let us watch how it worked, picking up the big chips of wood and tossing them over its shoulder on the back stroke.

We didn’t see the next animal. Anne and Matt saw it on Saturday before we got there, and then on Monday when we were no longer there. They said they probably wouldn’t have spotted it themselves, but Dozer noticed it. We think it’s a mink.

I’m way behind. Here are a couple of pictures from almost two weeks ago —

Firstly, what’s growing in our woods is mostly beech trees. I didn’t see a lot of beech nuts in the fall, but I’ve been conscious of them recently. Here’s the husk of one. The nuts themselves are very small, not much larger than a kernel of corn, chestnut brown, teardrop shaped. The red squirrels are very fond of them.

Secondly, I unwound the yarn I spun from the wheel. Here it is on the niddy noddy —

and now in a skein. I figure it’s about 250 yards. Of course, that’s singles. With the batch I spun the night I had my lesson with Lucy, about 400 yards. All way, way overtwisted.

We did a puzzle the weekend of the 10th, an old Springbok of butterflies.

Anne and Matt had found a birds nest out in the woods the weekend before. They stuck it in the steel shelving above my workbench. It’s pretty small, maybe big enough to hold one hen’s egg with no room to spare. I suspect it belonged to a warbler or verio.

I did get to start to make some solids of revolution last weekend — that is, to try out the lathe. I have a lot to learn about it, but one thing is that I convinced myself that it was put together backwards. The drive center, — OK let me back up.

With a wood lathe you either have the wood held in a chuck, like the chuck of a power drill, to spin it, in which case it’s supported at one end, or maybe mounted on a faceplate that turns it, just supported at one end, or else held between two pointy things, one of which is sitting still (a dead center), or maybe spinning on ball bearings (a live center) and the other of which has a couple of prongs besides the point in the center and is connected to the motor to spin the work. That’s what I mean by the drive center, and the wood is held between centers. The prongs are not symmetrical, but come up straight along the axis of the center on one side so they will push straight in the direction that the wood is going to turn, and tapered from the other side so they come to points. That would be a lot clearer if I had taken a picture of them, but I didn’t.

Anyway, my lathe was set up with the drive center on the right, with the wood turning towards me on top (the wood ALWAYS turns towards you on top so the wood pushes the gouges down against the tool rest) but the drive center is designed to turn in the other direction. The wood kept stopping and coming loose from the drive center, and I had to keep tightening the other end, and I’m convinced it’s because I should have the drive center on the left. That means mounting the motor the other way, and really, putting the whole thing on a new piece of plywood.

Meanwhile, though, I did get one piece of beech (formerly firewood) roughed into mostly a cylinder, and another piece (formerly a stick carried out of the woods) partly cylindrical.

But, it’s going to be a while longer before I’m cranking out spindles.

Somehow I neglected to mention that last Thursday night I bought a lathe. It had been listed on Craig’s List. Arlene spotted it the previous weekend from Maine and called it to my attention. It was in Watertown, just one town away from Newton, and was listed at only $60. I finally got around to calling on Thursday, left a message around 8:45, and got a call back an hour later. I said I thought it might be too late to come over, but the seller said they would be up late and weren’t home anyway, that I could probably get there about as soon as they did.

It was in East Watertown, not far from where we had lived thirty years ago. It took me a while to get my act together and get over there. It turned out to be even less far from where we had lived than I thought; it was on a street that we used to walk down often on our way to shopping at all the Armenian bakeries and grocery stores in East Watertown.

I rang the doorbell and the guy who answered said, “You look familiar.” His last name had been on the answering machine message and I wondered at that time if it was Matt’s friend of the same name, so I said, “Friend of Matt Pickett, in fact, his father-in-law.” The seller had been at Anne’s wedding!

The lathe is really a mini-lathe, with a maximum capacity of about a four inch diameter turning. That’s enough to get started and see if I like woodturning enough to do it. If so, I can get a bigger lathe later. If not, it only cost me $45 to find out, not a couple of hundred dollars. My father had a lathe when I was a kid, but I only used it a couple of times. Right now I can see using one to make lots of fiber-handling gizmos, noestepindes, spindles, niddy-noddies, but I think my first big project with it may be a swift. I made a bare minimum swift years ago. It’s pretty ugly and doesn’t really handle a two-yard-per-turn skein. Being able to turn a decent hub for a swift will be a good start. I ordered a set of turning tools, probably pretty low quality, from eBay yesterday. This is another “stay tuned”, or in this case, “stay turned”, situation.