59’th year – Page 18

Sunny takes a bath

I did think while I was doing this that you would enjoy
pictures, but really, it takes at least two hands to give a dog a
bath, and setting up a camera, tripod, and remote control while
you’re doing it would make it even more too much work than it
already is. So you’ll just
have to take my word for it that we both looked wet, and he looked
miserable.

Sunny and his cousin Monte both got fleas while Monte was
here. Monte’s seem to be clearing up from the Frontline flea and
tick stuff, but
Sunny’s just seemed to be getting worse, and I got a good look at
the infestation yesterday when Sunny was rolling in the grass in
the sunlight, and after that it made my skin crawl just thinking
about it.

So I decided he probably needed a flea shampoo in addition to
the monthly flea and tick stuff.

People at the dog park have spoken well about Laundramutt as a place to
give your dog a bath. They have tubs the right height and give
you aprons and assist you getting the dog into the bath. But when
I called them, they said they weren’t interested in helping bathe
a dog with a flea infestation.

I stopped at the pet store on the way to pick up the farm share
and picked up some flea shampoo. I took Sunny out in the back
yard and tied him to the fire escape and turned the hose on. The
internet instructions suggest wetting and soaping the neck first,
so that the fleas don’t just go hang out around the ears and eyes,
which you’re going to be trying not to get shampoo in, and then go
back and feast on dog blood. So we did that, and then wet the
rest of him, and soaped him, and rinsed him twice, and then I
toweled him off and took him inside and blow dried him.

He spent this whole process looking martyred, and clearly
wondering why I was torturing him, and the rest of the day feeling
miserable because he smelled wrong and his mommy didn’t love him
any more, but he seems to have mostly forgiven me today.

He’s normally a pretty clean dog, and any bad smells he picks
up seem to be temporary. I’ve dealt with skunk smells with a
sponge bath. The only time I resorted to a hose was when I first
got him. He’d spent a month in the shelter, so he had a pretty
strong disinfectant smell, so I hosed him off but didn’t bother
with shampoo. So this is the first real bath he’s had since at least 2000,
so it’s obvious that he thinks it’s not only cruel but also
unusual punishment.

But he’s nice and fluffy, and doesn’t seem to be scratching
anything like as much. He is shaking his head more than usual, so
I probably got water in his ears, or maybe a few fleas took refuge
there. But the flea population should be down to the number that
the monthly spot of stuff can handle.

Halfway through

Yesterday was my half birthday. This means two things:

In one year, I will be 59 1/2 and I will really own all the money in my
retirement accounts.
I’m half through with this experiment in blogging every day.

I know I already told you about how I felt about being one third
down, but I’ve had a couple of new thoughts since then, so I’ll
pass those on.

I think I’m writing some better. My current crusade is to use
the word “thing” less, and substitute a more specific noun.
I’m doing this in routine emails, as well as in these blog
posts.

I may be reading better, as a result of the fact that my
default is to write about anything I read that I really love
and want to tell people about. One of the more popular posts
on this 59’th
year experiment was the one I wrote about Little Dorrit
after watching the BBC adaptation and rereading the book.
Part of what made that one good was that I took notes about what I
noticed and had to look up while I was reading it. I’m
currently rereading Anna
Karenina, and I’m planning a similar post about it.

I did finally get a request from a friend to change something.
I had goofed and left his real name in some text copied from
elsewhere on the web, and my blog turned up on
the front page of a google search for his name, and he was starting a job
hunt. Of course, I immediately redacted his name. It does
prove that this blog has a higher google page rank than the
page from which I lifted the quote with his name in it.

Of the top ten most popular posts, four are about the Boston Early Music Festival. I
got a request this week from the American Recorder
Magazine to use my blog post about the recorder
masterclass with Paul Leenhouts, since the person who had
been assigned to cover it for them hadn’t come up with an
article.

I still don’t know much about who’s reading this blog, but the
numbers of readers are going up steadily, so someone must be
enjoying it, or finding what they search for in google on
it.

I still haven’t completely missed a day, although I admit that
days like last
Wednesday are cheating a bit. But I had written real
content, just in other contexts from the 59’th year blogging
every day project.

I chopped down a cherry tree

I was late with my post yesterday because I spent the morning
in Fall River. I usually go there to see my mother and sister
for dinner, but there are things you don’t feel like doing after
dinner, so I spent the night and in the morning helped with the
tree and practiced some of the music
Judy and I will be playing on September 21 at the Fall
River Arts Around the Block festival.

We didn’t really chop down the whole tree, but we ended up
cutting off a lot more of it than I would have expected. The
problem was that Comcast wouldn’t install cable television
(which they need because with the new, improved digital
broadcast TV they can’t get a lot of stations they used to get)
unless they trimmed the branches that were in the way of where
lines come into the house. It needed to be trimmed in any case,
because it was quite likely that if a storm moved the branches
violently enough, they would stop having telephone service.

There was really only one branch that needed to go away, but
the ladder we were using wasn’t high enough to reach that branch
just before it started trying to grab the phone line. So we had
to saw it off close to the trunk of the tree, and to get to
that, we had to saw a lot of other branches. To get the ladder
to where we could saw those branches, we had to saw some more
branches.

So the upshot was there was a fairly big pile of cherry
branches, some of which will make firewood for next winter.
They’re choke cherries, so the birds will be upset, but it won’t
affect the Conrad family food supply any.

And the flower bed on that side of the house will get a lot
more sun now. It’s a southern exposure, so you tend to think of
it as full sun, but of course the part that was under this tree wasn’t.

Edamame

The farm share included a sheaf of edamame two weeks ago. I’ve
served them at two gatherings, and was surprised by how many people
had never heard of them, or if they had heard of them, couldn’t
remember enough of how they were spelled to pronounce the name
anything like right. So I figured I should tell you about
them.

They’re soybeans that are picked still green. The pods of the
ones I had were fuzzy — someone in the band claimed to have had
them with smooth pods, but nobody else remembered them that way.
I’ve only ever had them already shelled until now.

One enjoyable feature of this farm share item was that they
came on the stalk — that is, the farm saved labor costs by just
cutting off the plants and putting them in the box, and I took the
beans off the plants and put them in a bowl. I did this while
chatting with a friend who was picking up some items that she
could use better than I could, so it wasn’t time-consuming.

I put a little water in the bowl, and microwaved the pods for
about 4 minutes, and then served them after band rehearsal last
Tuesday. It’s pretty good finger food if you aren’t really
hungry and just want something to nibble on, but they really
taste better with some flavoring. I put out sesame oil and soy
sauce, but nobody felt like shelling enough at once to put on a
plate and put sauce on them, so we just ate them straight out of
the pods.

There were still a lot left, and my plan was to shell them into
the salad I made for the cookout I went to yesterday. I went
through all the vegetables in my refrigerator and put at least
some of most of the ones that are edible raw into the salad
bowl. I’d had a dozen ears of corn last week, and cooked them
all and eaten all but three, so I cut the kernels off the cobs
and put that in the salad too.

By the time I’d done all that, it was time to leave for the
cookout, so I decided to take the edamame with me in the pods
and maybe people would just eat them while we waited for the
charcoal to cook the meat, or maybe someone else would want to
shell them.

Everybody had a few, but then went back to munching on potato
chips, but one person volunteered to shell them for the salad,
so we got some in there, and they were good with the dressing.

I think there are still a fair number left, but they’re at the
house where the cookout was.

If you want to try them and don’t have a farm that sells them,
some supermarkets (Trader Joe’s that I know of for sure) have
them in the frozen foods section.

How the gig went

I posted yesterday that I
had a gig in Waltham and I didn’t know much about what I was going
to play.

As is usual with gigs where you don’t know much about what’s
happening the morning of the gig, it didn’t work out to very
much playing. It wouldn’t have been worth going to Waltham for
the 5 minutes of performing time, but the rest of the performance
was entertaining, and the rehearsing with Lynn and Ishmael was really
fun. They’re both good people to play with; I play with Ishmael
all the time but usually in the context of a larger group, not all
of whom are very experienced performers, and I’ve only had a
chance to sing with Lynn a couple of times.

The original email sent to possible performers talked about
two 5 minute intermezzos and implied that there might be a fair
amount of playing time before the performance. So we rehearsed a
fair amount of stuff, and we were all prepared to fill in with
solos if something needed setup time.

When we got there, the first person we talked to said there would
be 5 minute intermezzos, but that he didn’t think he wanted before
performance music. So we arranged to get food before the
performance. (At one point there’d been a mention of food during
the rehearsal time, but that didn’t happen, and I’d gone easy on
lunch expecting an early supper, so I was hungry by 6:30.)

The second person we talked to said the intermezzos would be
3 minutes or less, but he had no problem with lots of music before
the performance. So Ishmael played fiddle tunes when he’d
finished his sandwich. I could have played too, but I’d packed my
soprano recorder when they told us there wouldn’t be
before-performance music, and I wasn’t confident enough that the
right key would come out on the G alto.

So we ended up doing Ravenscroft’s
We
be three poor Mariners for the first intermezzo, but being cut
off before we could follow it up with To
Portsmouth and He
that will an alehouse keep, which would have been a 5 minute
set, or maybe a little more.

The second intermezzo was supposed to be Jenny went to
gather rushes, sung by Lynn with me and Ishmael chiming in
on the choruses to encourage the audience, and maybe doing an
instrumental verse if Lynn needed to catch her breath, followed by me and
Ishmael playing one or two Morley
Canzonets
to two voyces, but the actors popped out during the last verse
of Jenny.

Ishmael’s friend who came along and hasn’t had much experience
of this kind of thing was quite annoyed at how truncated the
performing was, but Ishmael, Lynn and I had really been
expecting it. I was surprised during rehearsal when Lynn
suggested we sing Purcell,
since he’s a good 200 years later than the play, but she denied
that she’d ever suggested we do it in performance — she says
she just said I
gave her cakes and I gave her ale is fun to sing, which it is, so we burst into song..

Wrote a program yesterday

It’s a pretty short program, and it doesn’t do as much as I
wish it did, but it will make a tedious and error-prone job a
little bit less tedious.

I’ve mentioned this before, but turning a website from html
into a content-manged site is a pain in the neck, and one of the
most painful things is getting the images and pdf files and such
into the media library, because that’s a terrible web-based
program, that only lets you do one file at a time.

So my program uses the python wordpresslib. It takes
one argument, which is the name of the file to upload. (The url,
username, and password
for the wordpress blog are hard-coded for my purposes.)

The program uploads the file and returns the URL for accessing
the raw file in the media library.

This isn’t really as good as you would hope for — what you’d
want is to supply a title and caption for the item and get the
link that shows the image in your post as a link to the page
page in the media library. You have to do all of that through
the web interface. But at least that web interface is a
reasonable program. The one for uploading gives you two
choices, one of which never works for me and the other one makes
you pick the filename via the browser even if you know it.

I’m glad I got programming energy for this even if it isn’t
much of a program. I think it’s important to use skills like
that pretty often. Of course I’ve been writing some PHP in the
course of the website redesign, but that’s closer to writing
html than it is to real programming.

Here’s the program if you want to use it:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# 09-Aug-20 lconrad; created # usage: addmedia.py filename # adds filename as a media object to the serpentpublications.org wordpress blog # import library import wordpresslib, sys if sys.argv < 2: print "usage: addmedia.py filename" filename = sys.argv[1] # note that it's the xmlrpc.php interface you need to specify wordpress = "http://serpentpublications.org/wordpress/xmlrpc.php" user = "*redacted*" password = "*redacted*" # prepare client object wp = wordpresslib.WordPressClient(wordpress, user, password) # select blog id wp.selectBlog(0) # upload image for post imageSrc = wp.newMediaObject(filename) print "Image uploaded to: %s" % imageSrc

Little House at the New Yorker

If you enjoyed the
Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder,
there’s a New
Yorker article about Wilder and her daughter,
Rose Wilder Lane.

I haven’t reread the books in a while, but here are some
thoughts that occur to me reading the article:

I hadn’t remembered that the Ingalls family were illegal
settlers in Little House on the Prairie.
Part of the article is a survey of other literature about
the books. There’s a lot of material for research here, since
the original pencil-written legal pads on which Laura drafted
the books have been preserved. It’s not clear whether we have
the typewritten versions that Rose submitted for publication,
but apparently the scholars are assuming that most of the
differences between Laura’s drafts and the published versions
are Rose’s editing. It gives one little confidence in
literary scholarship as a whole that there the scholars who
have examined this material come to drastically different
conclusions about the extent of Rose’s contribution. Some of
them apparently believe that Rose was the real author, using
Laura’s drafts as raw material, and others believe, “Wilder
demonstrated a high degree of writing competence from the
beginning, and her daughter’s contribution to the
final products, while important, was less significant than has
been asserted.” (Quoted from John Miller in his introduction
to Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder. )
Another big part of the article is the history of the Wilder
family reaction to twentieth century politics. They were
supportive of the William Jennings Bryan free silver
movement. Rose became a supporter of Eugene Debs, a
socialist, later flirted with communism, and after that
espoused what we now call libertarian principles, and in fact
may have been one of the first people to use that term. Laura was a
Democrat until the late 1920’s, but decided that the party was
committed to taking money from the farmers and giving it to
the urban poor, and was quite upset at the election of
Franklin Roosevelt. She believed (ignoring railroads, free
schools, and government-backed credit) that the Ingalls family
had accomplished what they had with no government assistence.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0064400409&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

You’ll have to read my other blogs again

I really find on Wednesday that if I fix all the problems with the music
that the Cantabile Band
played the previous night, and get it uploaded, and maybe blog
about it on the Serpent
Publications blog, I don’t really have the time or energy to
write a completely unrelated post for the 59th year
blogging experiment. So the way I did a week or so
ago, I’m just going to point you at the writing I’ve
already done. Even if you aren’t interested in the Renaissance
music, read the Chidiock_Tichborne
article.

So here’s the report on last
night’s meeting, and the description
of the pieces I uploaded this morning.

Crime in the Broadway Building Condominium

I got home last night after band rehearsal and the sidewalk in front of my house was crawling with
policemen.

The yappy little dog that my next door neighbor was taking care
of for his parents was yapping his head off, and one of the
officers asked me if I knew whose dog it was, because someone
had complained that it was barking and they were worried that it
was dehydrated. I told them, and
gave them his phone number. At this point I saw that they had
opened the door, so I was a little confused that there was still
a problem with the dog. The neighbor, arrived as I was
going into my unit.

I walked my dog, and when I got back there were still lots of
policemen around, and my neighbor was sitting on the steps looking glum
and explaining to a woman about where the dog’s pills were. I
kept thinking that this was an awful lot of police attention for
a crabby neighbor complaining about a barking dog.

When I got up this morning to walk my dog, there was a police
officer standing in front of the building, and she was still
there when I returned from the dog walk. I asked her what was
happening and she said that she couldn’t tell me, but they were
watching the building today, and we’d be very safe for the day.
When I looked out during the morning, there were frequently lots of
police officers and other onlookers.

Here’s what the online police blotter has to say about the
incident:

On 8/17/09 at 9:15 PM, 31-year-old *redacted* of *redacted* was arrested for Possession of Class D w/ Intent to Distribute & Violation of the School Zone. Police were dispatched to the residence to investigate a noise complaint and found a large amount of marijuana plants being cultivated on the third floor of the residence.

I still think the next time the police complain about not
having enough resources I will be thinking about all the
officers spending all this time on this particular case. I
support legalizing marijuana, and if it is going to be illegal,
and people are going to smoke it anyway,
I’d rather they grew it in their apartments for their friends
(which I would assume is what my neighbor has been doing)
than that they pay lots of money to organized crime for it.

In any case, if you live somewhere where there are crabby
neighbors, you clearly should be careful about what you do
that’s illegal. I don’t know for sure that a good lawyer
couldn’t get this thrown out of court for search with a lack of
probable cause, but even if that happens, it will still be a lot
of trouble for a little bit of marijuana. (Yes, the blotter
says it’s a lot of marijuana, but it’s an 1100 square foot
apartment, with the usual amount of furniture, clothing, kitchen
equipment, … so there’s a
limit to how many plants there could be.)

What I did on the Pub Crawl

I decided that if you were interested in what I wrote
yesterday, you’d want to know what it was like, so here are some
remarks and some pictures.

We started at the Cambridge
brewing company, which is an American brewpub with a lot of
interesting beers brewed on site. Like most eating places that
used to be factories, it can be pretty loud when it gets full, but
that wasn’t a problem yesterday at lunch time. I had their
imitation Berliner Weisse, straight, although I concluded as I
have the other times I’ve tried it straight that I like it better
with the woodruff syrup. I also had the Mediterranean platter.
I’d been there for lunch on Thursday, so people asked for my
recommendations, and many of them ordered the Hefeweizen, which
I’ve been buying in growlers and drinking at home all summer, and
a Russian Imperial Stout which was a guest beef from the Stone
Brewery in San Diego.

[CBC]

Then we moved to the Elephant and Castle downtown, where
everyone ordered either Fullers London Porter or Fullers London
Pride. They have similar hop profiles; I was glad I had the
porter because I liked the extra taste of the roasted malts.

[Elephant and Castle]

The next stop was Jacob Wirth’s, which is
known for its selection of German beers and food. But they’ve
recently started having a cask ale on tap, and I believe in
encouraging that, so that’s what I ordered. It was something from
Dogfish Head. It’s a nice setting for drinking, with lots of wood
and old posters and signs. I’d planned to have the cherry
strudel, but I wasn’t hungry yet.

[Jacob Wirth]

After that I got tired of taking pictures, although the next
place, The Other Side, is an interesting space that
could have made a good picture. We were upstairs under the
seemingly improvised
vaulted skylight. I had a red beer with a French name, and a
piece of cherry pie.

Everyone else had the same reaction I did to the idea of
Cornwall’s, and nobody was drinking their beers very fast by now
and most people wanted some food, so we decided to skip the
Cornwall’s stop and go straight to The Publicke
House in Brookline. I had something from the Scillie
Brewery in Belgium. When it was time to move on, a few of us
decided we’d be better off having food where we were than at the
next stop, so I had something called The Publicke House Platter,
with bread and cheese and salad and cold cuts, and a Framboise to
go with it.

The food and beer were all good. Of the 10 or 11 people who came, most of them were people I
wanted to talk to. So I enjoyed myself, but it was too bad that
it’s a dwindling institution. We used to get a couple of dozen
people, including people from out of town who liked the idea of
drinking with people who already knew their way around Boston.