Rolling On One

The JCC Klezmer Band played a concert last night at the elderly housing building next to the JCC. Between the band and the Temple Emanuel choir, I’ve done at least four concerts there. It’s a good audience. Last night there were three women sitting near the front who seemed to know all the words to “Abi Gezunt”, a Molly Picon song from probably the ’30s for which I did the Yiddish vocals. I also introduced that song. The title means something like “so long as you’re healthy” (that’s the same gezunt as in “gesundtheit!”) There was a song on the American Roots PBS radio program several weeks ago by a jazz vocalist, probably also from the ’30s or ’40s, about her experiences in the recording industry. Every verse had a refrain something like “bagels, schmagels, abi gezunt!”. So I guess “abi gezunt” was a pretty well known phrase.

The audience was enthusiastic, sang along on “Abi Gezunt”, “Midnight in Moscow”, and “Tumbalalaika”. I was complimented on my Yiddish singing by a woman from Poland who’s a native speaker of Yiddish and was trying to talk to me in Yiddish, which didn’t really work out. I could be a rock star if I wanted my fan base all to be octogenarians.

Charley helped me get my MacBook Pro set up with boot camp so it really dual boots into Windows XP or Mac OS 10.4. It’s working very stably with the virtual network from work on the windows side. That was the real reason for getting the Intel Mac in the first place, to have a machine from which I could connect to work, so I could work from home either in Newton or Casco. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but it seems to be working properly now. When I was trying to run the virtual private network connection from Newton under the Parallels virtual machine, the connection was dropping after a few minutes or even after just a couple of mouse clicks.

We drove to Bridgton after supper (and after planning supper for early enough so we could get there) for a presentation on animal tracks at the Lakes Environmental Association. It greatly exceeded our expectations.

When our kids were little, we went to several Canadian national parks and made an effort to go on ranger walks and go to the evening programs. We learned a lot about nature that way. More recently, we’ve been feeling that that kind of program was often rehashing things we already knew, that by now the presentation was below our level. The one tonight was not the least bit below our level. It’s not that you had to know as much as we did to benefit from it, but that David Brown covered material from the basics to lots of detail, so people with lots of levels of knowledge could all learn something.

He started by saying that he’s done these programs for several years, and he likes to focus on different things different times so it doesn’t get repetitive. This time he was talking about beaver ponds and what you might see around them, from beavers themselves to coyotes that might be hanging around hoping to catch an unwary beaver to otters and minks that need the water habitat and on to an excellent video that included closeups of several hard-to-see birds that live in the wetlands.

The speaker not only explained how to recognize different tracks, but showed how he read the stories of what had happened — places where at least three coyotes had been walking single file, leaving what looked like one set of tracks, and then had gone separate ways, and a place where several coyotes had gathered to socialize and howl at the moon, places where otters scratch their bellies on the ground, and other things you wouldn’t have been able to tell anything was going on unless someone pointed out what to look for.

Also from two weekends ago, Charley walked down to the lake with Emma so she could try out the kids snowshoes we had bought from Craig’s List. I took a picture as they came back to the house. Hey, he’s wearing the sweater I made last year. Maybe he likes it.

Two weekends ago, up in Maine, Charley made some chowder for supper. He requested that I make some bread to go with it. We found a recipe for gluten-free cornbread (from the Land-O-Lakes website. With sour cream) for Nicole. Arlene asked, “Do you have the right thing to bake it in? Do you just use a square baking pan?”

I said, “You can use a square baking pan, or muffin tins, or even a mini-bundt cake pan.” We had bought one of the latter at deep discount from Marden’s shortly after we got the house, when I wasn’t sure I had muffin tins at all, but hadn’t used it.

So here’s a picture of the fanciest cornbread I’ve ever made:

If you track down that recipe, I recommend it highly, even with oil instead of butter, and off-brand sour cream.

Sue, the newish violinist in the klezmer band, told everyone that there was going to be a presentation about current klezmer music at her synagogue this Saturday evening — that is, today. We didn’t go to Maine this weekend, and a quick trip to Brookline seemed in order.

The presentation was immediately following a havdalah service. That’s the ceremony at the end of the sabbath, marking the division between it and the normal work week. Traditionally, you can find out when it’s time to end the sabbath by looking at the sky. If you can see three stars, it’s time to make havdalah. We just went by the clock tonight.

There were about twenty or thirty people gathered around a big round table in the community hall of Temple Beth Zion in Brookline, including a young woman with a guitar who isTBZ’s intern rabbi and Dan, who used to play violin with the JCC klezmer band. They led us in singing, first, a relaxed chant of words from the coming week’s Torah reading and a psalm, “They shall build a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell in their midst / We will bless the name of the Lord, now and forever” (in Hebrew of course) and second, blessings over wine, the spicebox that gets passed around for everyone to smell, the light of the fire, and the division between the sabbath and the rest of the week. Arlene thought the tune for the blessings was familiar, but wasn’t sure until she listened to her Israeli dance CD later.

The klezmer presentation was by Ari Davidow of the KlezmerShack website. He had brought a laptop with lots of music on it, but no speakers. The music was good, and a good overview of new stuff and new bands in klezmer, but the volume was sorely lacking. Most of it was pretty hard to hear, and you couldn’t blame the size of the room or how far away you were sitting or the crowd noise, because we were pretty close and there wasn’t much of a crowd. Or maybe it was as big a crowd as Davidow expected; here’s a permalink to his post about the event. I probably should order a couple of the CDs he played selections from.

We walked a block down to Washington Square (Brookline, not NYC) and found a sushi place, Super Fusion or some such. The food was good, but it didn’t impress me as deserving of a Zagat rating that was proudly displayed. There are alternative places to eat in the immediate vicinity, so I doubt we’ll ever go back.
On the other hand! Across Washington Street was a patisserie/cafe, Athans Bakery. Arlene got a dish of gelato and I got a piece of lemon cake. The baked goods were elegant and beautiful, with a big selection, there were plenty of places to sit, and we decided that we had found the right place to have dessert. It would be worth the trip from Newton just for dessert some day.

Up in Bridgton last weekend it was Mushers’ Bowl. That’s like superbowl, but it’s about dogsled racing and it’s a smaller scale event. By about a factor of 1000.

We were disappointed that the dogsled racing was cancelled last year because of lack of snow. This year it was postponed from the original date to last weekend, and there was just about enough snow by then.

Besides dogsled racing, there was an event called skijoring. It’s racing on cross-country skis with a dog pulling you, sort of a cross between cross-country ski racing and dogsled racing. On the uphill parts, I guess the human part of the team does a lot of the work. On the flat and downhill, the dog is probably running faster than you could ski. My favorite picture from the event is this one of a skijoring competitor. I was panning the camera about right to get a nice blurred background. You can just about see the dog’s legs way off on the right.

There were competitors from far away. I overheard someone pointing out a truck that had come from Alaska. Clearly it wasn’t just for this one race; this must be part of the whole dogsled racing circuit.

The races were run the way olympic skiing events are, that is, with entrants starting at intervals, each timed separately. It takes a little organization to get a dog team set to go — you have to get all the dogs on the correct side of their harnesses, and keep them from getting tangled up before they start.

The starter gives a 30 second warning, then announces 20 and 10 seconds, then counts 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go!

Did you know that the musher stands on the rear runners of the sled? The body of the sled is basically for gear, not for riding on.

How did I get so close to the action? It wasn’t hard. Here’s how big the crowd was:

There were several separate races, for the pros and amateurs, skijoring, and kids one-dog dogsled races. The main races were over a course a couple of miles long. The kids race was perhaps 200 yards, but included a hill that was challenging for some of the dogs.

… and as we were watching, every so often a truck of pulpwood would go by. They were paying attention to the crowd, but you didn’t want to slip with this a few feet behind you.

The reason my spinning wheel didn’t work seemed to be that the wheel supports weren’t tight, so the wheel wobbles all over the place when you apply real force with the treadle. Then the belt pops off.

I had heard of some material that’s supposed to make wood swell so joints fit tight. The main application is to fix wobbly chairs. On my way to work on Friday I stopped at National Lumber to look for the stuff. After not finding it myself, I asked someone who worked there, “Do you have some material called something like Chair-Loc that’s supposed to fix loose joints in furniture?” He said, “Yes, that’s exactly what it’s called,” and found me a little bottle – two ounces for $4.65 or thereabouts. “Does it work?” I asked. “Yes, at least I think so. I’ve seen it around for 40 years,” he said. Late that night I took the loose supports out of the wheel, applied some Chair-Loc to the inside and outside of the joints, put it back together, and let it sit. By morning the whole thing felt much more solid. When I tried using the wheel, it didn’t wobble all over the place any more, and I was able to spin on it without the belt coming off. So there’s my unsolicited testimonial to Chair-Loc.

I took my new (newly acquired, that is) spinning wheel to Cambridge for a lesson at Mind’s Eye Yarns on Thursday night. The wheel seemed OK when I was practicing treadling it, but the drive belt kept jumping off the wheel as soon as Lucy tried spinning on it. She switched me to one of her wheels for the duration of the lesson. But before that, she took mine apart enough for me to see how to change the bobbin, how the bobbin should spin, and generally give me some confidence in my analysis of how it all worked.

I was surprised at how easily I was able to produce a yarn without its breaking all the time. My mother had a wheel when I was a kid, and I of course tried to use it once in a while, but I was never able to keep a yarn going for any length at all. This time it just seemed to work.

It’s going to be a while before I can produce yarn with any uniformity of thickness or twist. Mostly it’s very overtwisted, and it varies tremendously in thickness. Lucy says that as a beginning spinner you have to learn to love the lump, because your yarn is going to come out lumpy. So I’ll try to do that.

By the end of the spinning group, which meant about half an hour of spinning in the lesson and close to two hours in the group, I had a full bobbin.  Pretty soon I’ll have to learn to ply, and then I’ll have to do something with my yarn. Maybe a very lumpy hat?

I went to my dentist on Tuesday, knowing that there was decay in one of my upper left teeth and hoping that it was just a cavity that he could fix quickly. It wasn’t. After the dentist did some drilling, he said, “There’s some bleeding. I have to see if it’s from the gum or from the nerve.” It was from the nerve, which means the decay is too deep for just a filling. The best case would have been a root canal. It turns out that there’s not enough tooth left above the bone to put a crown on, so it would need gum and bone surgery to expose more tooth. And there’s not all that much of that tooth left anyway, so it might not last. The alternative is an implant, which wouldn’t be much more expensive (I hope!) than the root canal, crown lengthening surgery, and crown. So I’m going to have that tooth extracted and get an implant. Meanwhile there’s a temporary filling in that tooth. The dentist said that it can go two ways: be fine, or turn into a toothache. So far it’s been OK.