Rolling On One

Massachusetts has an initiative question in next Tuesday’s election that would let supermarkets sell wine. I’m against it.

Now, it’s true that we’re way behind the times on this issue. The current situation is that any one person can only hold two liquor licenses. A whole supermarket chain counts as one person, so only two Trader Joes’ markets in the whole state can sell wine currently, and two Shaw’s markets, and so on.

Maybe I’m wrong on this, because independent stores seem to exist in Maine, for instance, where most supermarkets sell wine, but I see it as another step in consolidation of all retail business. There aren’t small stationery stores any more, the way there were before Staples and Office Depot took over that business, and there aren’t independent drugstores any more, the way there were before Walgreens and CVS and Rite Aid took over that business, and there aren’t independent hardware stores any more, the way there were before Home Depot and Lowe’s took over that business. Independent liquor stores will have a harder time staying in business if supermarkets start selling wine. There are always some just on the edge of being profitable, or profitable enough to be worthwhile. Some will close, and the promise of more choice and more convenience for consumers will just turn into having to go to the supermarket instead of a small business; and that almost certainly means having to drive instead of being able to walk to a nearby store. So, I see a “yes” vote on question 1 here as a vote against small neighborhood stores. But maybe I didn’t make it in time to get a post in on November 3.

Pretty lame title.

I’ve been using one of those new mouthpieces when I practice trumpet the last few days, to get used to it before I take it up to Maine. I haven’t hit the D# with it yet, but I was nice and solid on the D. That’s plenty OK. I’m well on my way to memorizing my favorite of those four Goldensteyn pieces by now.

We walked out to Fortune Panda for supper. By now it’s bedtime. I did get a few more rounds of Matt’s sweater done, got to within 40 pages of the end of OOTP, and phoned my mom.

I hadn’t been on my unicycle once this whole year. There’s not a lot of empty parking lot where I work these days, and it’s really a more corporate environment in general than the last few places. I wouldn’t be comfortable riding around in the center of the campus, and there’s too much traffic there anyway. However, several weeks ago when I got to work really really late I found a candidate place to ride. It’s the top floor of the parking garage! It has very few cars, really isn’t far away, and hs reasonably flat, smooth surface.  This morning I  got the uni out of the attic, pumped up the tire (note! singular! Of course!), and threw it in the trunk. I drove on up to the top floor of the parking garage and was delighted to see that there was only one other car there. I intended to ride on my lunch hour, but by the time I had walked around the pond and had my lunch I was making too much progress on a bug I was fixing to take another long break. I thought about it during the afternoon, but it didn’t seem appropriate to disappear at that point. Finally before driving home I took the uni out of the trunk and did one lap around the top floor. It worked fine. As usual for the first time out of a year, I didn’t have any trouble getting started. I’ve never figured out why it works that way, but it always seems to. That may be my only uni ride for the year, but at least I got that one in.

Oh, that’s the parking garage on the right of rte 128 northbound just before the overpass about a mile before the Highland Avenue, Needham and Newton Highlands, exit. Next time you go by, just shake your head and say to the person next to you, “This internet community really is pretty strange. I know someone who rides a unicycle around that parking garage.”

I’m not going to try to write a novel, but maybe I can do a post every day for the month of November. That would be National Blog Posting Month, I suppose.
It’s too late to wish “Happy Halloween”, but if you’re like us you have leftover candy that there weren’t kids to take. We had only three groups of kids, Arlene estimates about 15 kids total. That wasn’t enough, even at three little candy bars each, to make much of a dent on the bag from Costco. So, as I was saying, if you’re like us you still have the candy part reminding you of Halloween, so it’s not totally too late to show you the jack-o’-lantern:

We got that pumpkin, and a small (one pie size) one, at the roadside on our way back from the MOFGA apple day in Unity, Maine. It was another of those honor system farm stands, $2 for a larger (but not really big) pumpkin, $1 for a small one. I carved it with a set of pumpkin carving tools, and a couple of kitchen knives. I consider it a great success, because I didn’t break any of the carving tools doing it.

On other fronts, I’m within 100 pages of the end of Order of the Phoenix, looking forward with some trepidation to starting The Half-Blood Prince. It’s sitting there waiting for me, just a matter of time.

And on yet other fronts, I have Matt’s sweater body, front and back knit in the round, done up to where I’ll have to join the sleeves, and one sleeve more than a quarter of the way up from the wrist. That’s more than a quarter of the distance, but almost certainly lots less than a quarter of the work, since it gets wider as it goes. Or should I just say, since it’s a sleeve being knit from the wrist up.

It was really a pretty busy Saturday.

And by the way, there are lots of pictures, but no pretty pictures, in this post. Unless you’re interested in sash cords, it may not be worth waiting for.

More or less first (but after making french toast for breakfast) I went to the post office and bank. There was a teller I hadn’t seen before, an asian woman without a name plate by her window. I said, “there’s no name plate.” She said she was new, a name plate was on the way, and her name was Ming. I said, “I knew someone named Ming in high school.” Then I remembered, “means ‘bright'”. “Right”, she said, “how do you know?” um, I said, “Wo shuo yi diar zhong wen.” She said something in Chinese that I didn’t get at all but it could have been something like “where did you learn?” so anyway I explained (in English! I had reached the limit of my Chinese with one sentence!) that we had had a class where I used to work. That might be the most Chinese I’ve used in years.
Now to the main topic, fixing a window. We’ve had a window in the living room that we haven’t been able to open for months because if you unlocked it the top sash would just fall down and not stay up. There’s a very simple explanation: the sash cords were broken.

Here I digress a moment. It’s all about having some basic skills. That’s really how I feel about knitting, not so much that it’s a hobby for me (though it is) as that it’s something it’s useful to know. Look: when you’re hungry and you have a good apple crop, it’s useful to know how to bake apple pies. When you need a warm cap or mittens or sweater (or you can foresee the need) it’s good to know how to knit. When your window doesn’t work right, it’s good to know how to fix a sash cord.

When I was in college, the intellectual kids used to talk about alienation. I was never sure what they meant, but I thought it was that they weren’t really in touch with things, a lack of connection. So sure, you can buy apple pie, you can buy a cap and mittens and sweaters, and you can hire someone to fix the sash cord. But if you pick the apples and make the pie you’re not alienated from your food the way you are if you think apple pies grow in the supermarket. If you watch someone shearing a sheep, and do enough drop spindling to know how fleece turns into yarn, and knit, you’re not alienated from your clothing.

OK, so here are some pictures of fixing sash cords.

If you live in a house more than thirty or fourty years old, you probably have double-hung windows, that is, two sash that slide up and down. You may not have looked to see, or not thought about it, but there has to be something holding the upper sash up, and something that keeps the lower sash up when you push the window open. Face it, gravity is always at work. So the answer is, there are counterweights, big ugly blobs of cast iron, one on each side of the sash, that together weigh about as much as the sash, connected to the sash with a rope that goes over a pulley. It all more or less balances. The weights are always pulling the window up, but not so much that it goes up by itself. When (not if, when) the rope breaks, the window stops going up. That’s what was happening in our living room.

It does take some tools. I had taken a crowbar up to Casco and left it there. I bought a new tool, a Stanley Wonder Bar, specifically to fill in for this little job, and I think it is wonderful. It has good nail pulling claws at each end, a sharp enough flat end to fit into the space to pry off the side of the window, and it bends in the right places to give good leverage for prying. Because the first step is to take the sides off the window, carefully, so you can take the sash out. The rope runs from the top of the sash down a channel (just big enough for the rope) along the side to where there’s a hole big enough to accomodate a knot at the end of the rope. Here I am prying off the trim on the left side of the window:

Of course you want to do that carefully so as not to damage the trim, but there are going to be nail holes to deal with. The trim on the other side and the top trim had to come off, too.

In between the two sash is a long thin piece of wood that just fits into the sides of the window frame. It’s not nailed in, because you have to be able to get it out for this job. The trim and the sash hold it in. It’s called the parting bead (that’s your vocabulary word for today). It’s in the dotted lines:

(Yuck! See what I mean, not pretty pictures?)

It comes in a couple of different sizes, but basically if you walk up to the desk at your local lumber yard and ask for a six foot length of parting bead they’ll know what you mean. They might ask if you want 3/8 or 7/16 inch thick stock, but you’ll be close. But measure the old stuff carefully so you’re prepared. With any luck you can get the old parting bead out without harming it, so that’s just an aside. You may be able to see from the picture that the top sash is keeping the parting bead from coming out. I had to take it out at the top and wiggle a little. Then I took it to the cellar and scraped and sanded off a few layers of gloppy paint.
With the trim and parting bead out of the way, the sashes are free. Basically all you have to do is thread the sash cord (ATTENTION! Use nylon sash cord. You can buy cotton sash cord, but it’s going to break sooner. It costs less, but it’s not worth it unless you’re in an apartment that you’re SURE you’re going to leave within five years) through the pulley. Tie a figure eight knot, that’s bulkier than an overhand knot and won’t pull out of the side of the sash, at the sash end of the cord. But wait, don’t do that you’ve figured out how long the rope has to be. I’ll talk more about that below.
There’s a cut out in the side of the window that’s hiding the space where the weights run. I’ve marked it with a dotted line in this picture. There’s going to be a screw at the top and bottom of the cut out to hold it in place. It could be, if the sash cord has never been replaced before, that the wood isn’t cut all the way through, and you’ll have to be a little forceful to break out the cutout.

Reach into the space in the side, now that it’s open —

— how about that, there’s one sash cord, the one that’s not broken, holding up a weight, and the broken one still tied to its weight but flopping around. — and haul out the other weight. Be prepared to get your hands covered with dust and rust along about now. OK, study where the end of the rope goes on the sash and how high everything is, and cut a generous length of sash cord. Tie the figure eight knot in the end that’s going on the sash side and thread the rope over the pulley.

You have to get the rope the right length. There’s a fair bit of leeway, but it it’s too short the sash won’t go all the way down (the weight will come up to the pulley before the sash gets all the way down) and if it’s too long the weight will bottom out before the sash gets to the top, and the sash won’t stay all the way up. Cut plenty of cord, and be prepared to have to adjust the length after you hoped it was all set. Tie the weight to the end of the cord, put it back in the cavity, check that both weights run freely on their pulleys without being tangled with each other, do it all on both sides, put the knots in the ends of the ropes in place on the sides of the sash (be sure the sash is facing the right way! I put the window lock facing out on the first try, darn it), and put it all together. Put the parting bead back, nail the trim back on, and it’s done.

If there are still nails in the trim, you can get it back just exactly where it was. If not, put it on snugly but not too tight. If it’s too loose the windows will rattle when it’s windy. If it’s too tight, of course the windows will stick. Running a wax candle all over the channels the sash is sliding on, and along both sides of the parting bead, is a good idea.

The bottom line is, it’s not really hard, but there are a few subtleties about the process. It took me a couple of hours — maybe only an hour and a half, but not just a couple of minutes.

Well! With that out of the way, and it’s been on the to-do list for months, I went to Boston to Rayburn Music to look for a trumpet mouthpiece. I have a trumpet in Maine that Matt bought at a flea market and gave me. I fixed the water key (spit valve), which didn’t have a tight cover when he gave it to me, so the instrument didn’t really play at all, but I never liked the mouthpiece much. Old mouthpieces without a really smooth surface are a little uncomfortable, and I’ve never been able to get my full range on that trumpet. I think it’s likely that its mouthpiece is better for volume than high range. I figured if I got a mouthpiece more like the one on my good trumpet I’ll be able to practice in Maine. Rayburn has a basket of used mouthpieces that you can rummage through, if you don’t insist on a particular size, or if you want to come back until you find the size you want. I was pretty sure I’d be happy with something they had. I got two for $10 each.

I wished I could have spent more time in that store. Besides the mouthpieces, they had two instruments that I’d love to have, not enough to buy, but enough to drool over. One, a double-belled euphonium. I played one of them one summer in Tuskegee. They’re really an anachronism, a left-over relic of the nineteenth century. With one valve you can switch from a wide conical bore instrument like a baritone horn to a narrow cylindrical bore like a trombone, changing the timbre of the instrument. You hardly ever see them. At $2800, you’re not likely to see one in this house in the foreseeable future. The other instrument was an ophicleide. That’s substantially older and less common that the double-belled euphonium, I think. It’s a brass instrument pitched about like a baritone, but with keys like a saxophone. If the store had been less busy I would have asked if I could try it. I have to imagine its price was way above that of the euphonium; I didn’t even ask.

I had to move on and get home because we were going to Providence in the evening to give a stamping workshop at An Evening of Jewish Renaissance at the Providence Jewish Community Center. The Providence Bureau of Jewish Education has been big fans of Zum Gali Gali Rubber Stamps for years. They got the JCC to invite us to participate in this event. I ran the booth selling stamps while Arlene was giving the workshop. She only had two participants. It was a miserable windy rainy day (the weather was worse in the afternoon, pouring for a few minutes when I was walking from the parked car into Rayburn’s, not so bad really by the time we packed up to go to Providence, and windy but dry by the time we were coming home) and attendance at the whole event was lower than expected.

So, that’s what we can do in one day when we’re not in Maine!

Not Trader Joe’s Joe-Joe cookies, nor former Celtics player JoJo White. This is really a propos of nothing, except for looking at my high school yearbook.
When my sisters went to 4-H camp back in the late ’50s their favorite counselor was a girl from Fitchburg named Joanne Johanneson, aka JoJo. I met JoJo when I went to a week-long 4-H program out at UMass Amherst in the summer of ’59. I must have liked her pretty well, too, because I carried a photo of her in my wallet for years after – but remember this was the ’50s and I was a naive high-school about-to-be-junior at the time. You might guess from her name that JoJo was of Scandinavian descent, and she had long blonde hair to match.

After I moved to California at the end of that summer, one of my high school classmates was Johnetta Johnson. I think I had a picture of her in my wallet, too, at least that’s my story and I’ll stick to it. When I looked at my high school yearbook recently, her picture jumped out at me. She had maybe the biggest, brightest eyes you’ve ever seen, especially in contrast with her dark dark skin. I don’t think she was ever called JoJo, but I thought of her that way.

I sang a solo in a show we put on at the 4-H convention. Joanne wrote “What a voice!” when she autographed my program book. Johnetta was in the high school glee club; she and a couple of her friends used to talk to me at glee club concerts. She signed my yearbook “I’ve enjoyed seeing you around campus. Love and luck –“. Did I say naive? I don’t think it ever occurred to me to ask girls out anywhere other than school dances, and there weren’t many of those.

Well, if anyone reading this knows either of those JoJos, at oposite poles of human pigmentation, tell her I remember her.

Toby had worked as a dental hygienist when they lived in Israel. In my second year of graduate school I used to go out with a girl who was studying that at Forsyth in Boston — it’s either part of Northeastern University or next door to it. Jane had an apartment off Beacon Street in Brookline, a couple of blocks from Coolidge Corner, with her sisters Lauren and Ellen. I can never hear the Beatles’ song “Lovely Rita Meter Maid” without thinking of her, nor vice-versa:

Got the bill and Rita paid it
Took her home I nearly made it
Sitting on the sofa with a sister or two

Only Barry (leader & accordion), Sarah (violin), Jeffery (flute), Toby (piano) and I were at klezmer class last night.

After playing our standard opening warm-up medley, we listened to a CD of four tunes which we started playing this session. They’re from a book/CD set Fleytmuzik that Toby got at klezcamp. After we picked out jaws up off the floor we set about playing them, at somewhere between half and two-thirds the tempo that they were on the recording. These are the tunes I entered into Finale to get B-flat charts of, and I’ve been practicing them a little. Not enough to play the faster ones comfortably, even at the reduced tempo we did.

Toby told us about her husband’s summer. He had gone to Israel, to a town next to the Lebanese border where they had lived many years ago, to do voulunteer work during the war. Most of the younger, healthier, more prosperous people had left town for the duration, leaving those too old, sick, and poor to flee. Toby’s husband was bringing food and supplies to the people who had stayed behind, sometimes delivering it while the Hezbollah rockets were flying past.  He just told her, “Don’t worry, I’ll be careful.”

Late last winter or early in the spring we bought a bunch of plain black T-shirts on sale at a place in Bridgton. The intention was to try something people were doing at the Nature Printing Society meeting last summer, dye release printing fish with soft scrub. The idea is to use the soft scrub instead of ink. The bleach in it bleaches the fabric where you printed, so you get a light colored print on dark.

We finally tried printing, but with leaves rather than fish. You don’t really want to follow these directions very closely, because our results were less than spectacular. I think it depends a lot on the dye in the T-shirts in the first place. Ours didn’t bleach very much the way we did it. Maybe we need more soft scrub, maybe we need to wait longer before rinsing (but when is it so long that the bleach eats away the fabric?), or maybe we need different T-shirts.

We put some newspaper and a piece of heavyweight plastic on the table to protect it. We spread out the T-shirt, with a plastic bag inside to keep the bleach off the back. Arlene composed her design, laying out the leaves she was going to print.

We squirted some soft scrub into a plastic foam meat tray and painted it on the back (more textured side, but we still didn’t get much texture to print. Maybe using a brayer here would have kept the bleach on the veins and made more texture show?) of a leaf with a soft foam brush. The stuff says it can irritate skin, so we figured we might as well protect our hands.

She put the leaf, soft-scrub side down, where she wanted the image, put some newsprint on top, and rolled it with a small soft brayer.

And here are the first four leaves printed:

Arlene wanted to do some walking. I didn’t want to just walk around our loop, so I suggested going over to Poland and looking for ducks at Range Pond State Park. We first stopped at the little park in Webb’s Mills, where Matt and I had seen some ducks in the spring when we went mountain biking. There weren’t any, but it looked like a nice place to put a canoe or rowboat in the water if you wanted some very low-key boating — maybe an ideal place to take a kid for some introductory paddling, where you wouldn’t ever be far from shore and wouldn’t have to worry about power boats.

We didn’t see an entrance to Range Ponds (though we did see another boat landing place to file in our memory) so we went on to Poland Spring Preservation Park. Near the entrance were several pear trees with lots of windfalls on the ground. We didn’t think anyone really cared about the fruit or it wouldn’t have been lying there, so we each picked up a handful. Total, one dozen sound, slightly underripe pears of unknown variety. There were several cars in the parking lot by the start of the walking trails. We went all the way down the Montague trail, the one we had walked in the spring, and didn’t see any birds to speak of. At the bottom of the trail, by the lake, we looked for a long time to figure out what had made a big splash in the water, without success.  Then farther away, way across the pond, we noticed a crowd of people sitting on the beach. A cheer went up, and people emerged from the water. Was it some sort of charity pledge cold water swim event? We don’t know.

Arlene’s family had a pear tree in the backyard when she was a kid. Her mother used to cook and can the pears. That was the goal with the ones we had picked up. Sure enough, we peeled, cored, and sliced them, added a cup and a half of sugar to the dozen pears, added two cinnamon sticks, cooked for a while, and ended up with four pint jars of pears.