masters of communication


This sketch from A Bit of Fry and Laurie amuses me. Quite a lot. (Thanks to The Skwib for offering up these tasty nibbles, which are neither plain, nor prawn flavored.)

If you enjoyed that, you might also enjoy sketches by The Two Ronnies. I confess I’d never heard of them until reading the comments for the Fry & Laurie sketch on YouTube. (Which is usually a dangerous endeavor, as 99% of the comments on YouTube are written by 12-year-olds.) However, on this occasion I learned that the sketch above was likely influenced by this other sketch comedy pair. You can see a bit of their skillful timing below in “Crossed Lines.”


And one more from the Two Ronnies. This last one is chock full of fun with phonetic ambiguity. (You scream, I scream, we all scream for phonetic ambiguity.)

(This post actually relates to several of my candidates for categories of things I like, but I won’t count this post as one of my 40 since I don’t have time to say more. But can you guess what some of the things I like are?)

shades of gray

The world is a complicated place. Many people find life easier to see good and bad as clearcut cases of black and white. I’m much more likely to see both sides of the issues, to see good in the bad, bad mixed in with the good. To see that both sides of a conflict can be both right and wrong. All of this has nothing to do with my affinity for shades of gray.

When I was a little girl, I loved bright colors. I liked to be surrounded by color. The more colors, the better. I even went through a rainbow phase. I still love color, love to find it in artwork and nature, but I’m less inclined to wear a lot of colors. Bright colors make me feel a bit too on display. Most often, I like to wear black and gray. Especially dark gray. Charcoal gray. Most of all, I love items that combine black and charcoal gray. Or black with varying shades of gray.

My affinity for gray and black clothing items sometimes borders on compulsion. I find myself wanting to buy any shirt I can find with black and gray stripes. I own, at this time, at least 3 shirts and 4 sweaters with variations of gray and black stripes. I have 2 winter scarves with black and gray stripes (but they have different widths of stripes! They are different!) and another scarf that is a plaid of grays and black. Okay, I have more than 3 scarves with grays and black. I’m not sure how many. (It’s fewer than 30. Really. Maybe only 6.)

There was the longest time that I was hunting for just the right charcoal gray and black scarf. I learned to knit at one point in part so that I could construct that perfect scarf. (But then I found 2 scarves that were close enough.) I’m sure that at some point, I will acquire more black and gray striped scarves, maybe one that is more gray and black than black and gray. (Have you ever watched Despicable Me? I coveted Gru’s scarf.) Sometimes I will buy items that are gray with white stripes, or gray with other color stripes. But these items always feel somehow lacking. They do not have the magic for me of charcoal gray and black.

Here I am wearing Theo, who is wrapped up in one of my black and gray sweaters.

This was a picture from yesterday with my current black & gray sweater favorite.

One thing I realized, while digging through my photos looking for me in my various gray and black clothing items, is that I have many very unflattering photos of myself in those gray and black clothing items. Those you don’t get to see. But I did find this cute picture of me that John took when we visited London in early 2005. Notice the charcoal gray jacket and black and charcoal gray hat. At that time, my quest for a black and charcoal gray scarf was as yet unfulfilled (though that was the trip when I found the gray plaid scarf). My scarf in that photo appears to be only gray.

(This is my first installment of a project to write 40 posts about things that I like.)

daunting

I’m working myself up for something for something that scares me. (And no, it’s not turning 40.) What’s funny is that in telling a friend about it over the phone, somehow I managed to give the impression that I was trying to tell her that I was pregnant. (I’m not.) Though I suppose it is a kind of nesting. Or maybe anti-nesting. We’re going to have…a yard sale.

We have now been in this house over 12 years. We had a lot of stuff when we moved in. Then we bought a lot of stuff. Then we acquired a lot of stuff, antiques and small heirlooms, from both of our families. And we had a wedding, for which people gave us stuff. And we had 2 children, who also led to the acquisition of stuff. All of these things add up to way too many things. While we’ve given away much of our baby gear and baby clothes, and donated many other miscellaneous items, the rate of things leaving the house has not managed to keep pace with the rate of things coming in. The time has come for something drastic.

Our town has an annual “progressive” yard sale. Sadly, this does not refer to the politics of the town, but only to the concurrent timing of the yard sales and group listings. This morning I dropped of the registration form to get our house listed in the flyer. The deed is done. People are going to show up at our house a week from tomorrow, and hopefully they will leave with stuff.

I’ve never orchestrated a yard sale. We had a few moving sales when I was growing up, but I was never in charge. I’m a little overwhelmed.

Hold me.

I should probably post something…

…seeing as I just said yesterday that I’d be posting every day this month. And today is the second of the month. So here are a bunch of photos I took on Monday, during the drive back from my in-laws’.

Bridge.

Reflected bridge.

Pretty prison.

Truck with intriguing big tubes.

They look like they will be part of a building, somehow.

Something about these stacked round things made me think of Vienna sausages packed in a can. Except really big. And green. (Which would be really, really gross for Vienna sausages.) (Especially given that they are pretty gross on their own.)

They turned out to be tanks, and not sausages at all.

balancing acts

I have a work deadline tonight, so shouldn’t be blogging this evening. However, I have a few minutes left of my train ride home, so thought I would share this picture I took a few days ago. I also had this wacky idea of trying to post every day this month. And this being the first of the month, it seemed a good place to start with that goal. I’m not sure how all this will fit together, as I have a busy month planned ahead…

forty somethings

In less than two weeks, I’ll no longer be a thirty-something. In anticipation of this transition, I’ve decided to give myself a present. Not a thing, because as I’ve said many times before, I have way too much stuff. What I’ve decided to do for myself instead is to do so some blogging. Because, though you can’t tell by the frequency of my posts (only 2 the whole month of March, and 4 in April!), I still really enjoy blogging. What’s more, I still really like my blog. What I have in mind is to put together 40 posts about things that I like: things I like to do, things I like to eat, things I like to see, and categories of things that I like to categorize.

There won’t be any particular order, nor will there be any strict time limit. I just want to write some of the posts that have been rattling around in my head since I started this blog over 4 years ago, and write about some things that make me happy. (And if I don’t get up to 40 by the time I hit my 41st birthday, then I’ll just shoot for 41 things.)


I wanted to put some sort of photo in this post, but spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out which. Here are some pomegranate seeds on the palm of my hand. I took this photo a couple of years ago.

fiddleheads

Having taken up violin lessons again this spring, it seems only fitting that I should give fiddlehead ferns a try. Here are some photos from dinner this weekend (and from Phoebe’s and my fiddles).


Raw fiddleheads.


Boiled fiddleheads. (Apparently one needs to boil them for 15 minutes, or steam them for 10 minutes, prior to eating. I’m not sure whether this is for health and safety, or for palatability. I just went along with it.)


Sauteed fiddleheads, post-boiling. (Verdict: they were pretty good. I’m not sure I was bonkers for them, but they were indeed tasty.)


These fiddleheads were not eaten for dinner.


I hadn’t really spent much time admiring the shape of my violin before.


The shape of the scroll is quite expressive. And indeed very much like the expressiveness of emerging fern fronds. (See Sue’s very expressive fronds, which she neither ate nor played, to the best of my knowledge.)

case reopened

A few months ago, I felt a strange and sudden urge to pull out my violin and show it to Phoebe and Theo.The case had been closed for many weeks. And when I say “many,” I mean a number greater than 52. I vaguely recall having had the violin case open at some point in early 2009. Or maybe I’m remembering a lunchbox. Something was open then.

But that evening a few months ago, I indeed opened up my violin case. I pulled out the violin, and the strings were totally loose. It may shock you to know that I barely know how to tune my violin. My teacher always did it, at the beginning of each lesson. I managed to tune it once, when it got so badly out of tune that I couldn’t practice, and I did a decent job. But this time the strings were so loose they might as well have been just lying on top of the violin. I decided to give it a whirl, anyhow. John pulled out his iPhone with a tuner app, and I started to turn the pegs and the little fine-tuny-screwy-things (that is the technical term), and I was feeling quite pleased with myself…until the E string snapped.

So much for that demo.

But I got to thinking, and the next day or so, I called my violin teacher. For the first time since Theo was born. I asked her about strings, and while I was at it, about starting lessons. For me, and for Phoebe, too. My teacher said she’d work on finding space in her schedule. Eventually, she found a time when she could put our two half hour lessons back-to-back.

Tonight, Phoebe and I started violin lessons together.

I can’t say it was all a joyful, magical experience. Phoebe was tired. She’d had a full day at daycare with no nap, then we’d rushed off to a 45-minute karate class, before rushing home for a rushed dinner, and rushing back out the door. Plus I think she found the process of starting the violin to be pretty anticlimactic. We got her set up with a violin of the right size (quarter-sized). Then it was about learning to hold the violin with her chin, and how to properly hold the bow. That was about it. By the time we got to my part of the lesson, which ended up being only the last 15 minutes of our hour, she was pretty much done for. She collapsed on the floor next to me, periodically rallying herself enough to tug on my arm while I attempted to play. In spite of this, I enjoyed myself. I remembered more than I was expecting. (Not that we tried any of the more advanced things I’d worked on when last I’d had lessons, over 2 years ago. We worked on stuff that was probably from my first or second year of lessons.)

Next week, we go back.

I feel like this post needs some sort of snappy ending, but I’m too tired to think of an ending, and I need to make Phoebe’s lunch and get to bed. So I’ll post a completely unrelated photo to distract you.


Hey, look. Tires. ‘Cause I’m tired. Ha, ha, ha.

more with the bellows

(I had more fun playing with the bellows the day after I took those dandelion photos. The top photo shows the bellows with a lens, but not attached to a camera. The bottom photo was taken without the bellows. (For that matter, the top photo was taken without the bellows, too, seeing as the bellows is in the photo. But you probably figured that part out…))