10-Jan-2000 Practice
I've had a tune running through my head since the middle of yesterday.
That's fine with me. It's The Happy Nigun by Gioia Feidman, one of the tunes that Glen gave out for the new session of klezmer band last Tuesday. When you have a tune or a rhyme running through your head, the only realistic way to deal with it is to own up, and sing it out loud, or in this case, play it on the trumpet until you've exorcised it. Fortunately for my co-workers, I don't have my trumpet at work. Tomorrow night I'll get to play at band rehearsal, and I'm looking forward to making a lot of noise. This is how it used to be the first year or two I was playing klezmer, but I haven't had the music going through my head the same way the last few years. It's better this way.
I'll be curious to see Glen's reaction. “Wait a second! You mean you really practiced at home? In the ten years you've been in the band I've never known that to happen!”
Let's see if I can catch up a little. New Years Eve the choir sung at Friday evening services, at what would have been a normal supper time. We did music by Salamone Rossi. The idea was to welcome the 21st century with music from the 17th. That music can start going through my head, too, with the least bit of excuse. One or two of the pieces switch from 3/4 to 4/4 and back several times before they're over. Something like that, that takes a lot of concentration to catch on to, embeds a piece in my head and makes it hard to get rid of. I think it's the extra effort of learning it that does it. OK. From synagogue we went over to Sue and Richard's for supper and watched Grosse Pointe Blank on DVD. It finished at six minutes to midnight. We watched the ball drop and saw the Boston fireworks on the local news, and that was the turn of the millennium. I think I'm sticking with that, and not buying any of this “The millennium doesn't change until 2001” stuff. It's the end of the 1900's, for sure. I'm enough of a C programmer that I believe there was a year 0, even if the historians don't count any such thing. Just because the Western world hadn't caught on to the idea of zero as a number when they worked out chronologies doesn't justify the nonexistence of the year 0. So the first millennium went from year 0 to 999, the second one from 1000 to 1999, and here we are.
New Years Day there was an open house at the big Victorian house at the end of the block. The couple who live there are retired UMass/Boston professors. The house is full of fascinating stuff and exotic plants, and the company includes all the long time residents of that end of the block. Arlene and I are almost the youngest people who get invited, and everyone talks about the history of the block, who has lived where since when, what houses have burned down in the last fifty years, and so on. There's always great potluck food, too. Not the least of it is the lime chiffon pie I baked. I brought its twin over to Sue and Richard's the night before.
On Saturday we explored the Dunback Meadow conservation area in Lexington. Someone had told us about it when we were on Plum Island a couple of months ago (yes, checking old entries, 20 Nov 99). Someone on the MassBird listserv, which we found when doing a web search to try to find the place, gave us directions to it. I had seen a sign for a conservation area on the way to the Museum of our National Heritage and wondered if that was the one; indeed it was, but the entrance is on the other side. We flushed a pheasant -- we used to hear them all the time, but they've become rather scarce in recent years -- and got a good long look at a sharp-shinned hawk. We went on the the Museum of ONH, see above, don't make me type it again, and looked at an exhibit of photographs of the Civil War and an exhibit about George Washington.
There goes that Happy Nigun through my head again. Let my concentration slip for a moment, and it's all over.
Sunday we set out for Drumlin Farm to get a few copies of the Audubon Society's lists of Massachusetts birds so we can keep good records this year. We got sidetracked and went first to Hardy Pond in Waltham. It's a pretty strange neighborhood, a place that was once summer homes and lakefront property, but has grown up into a blue collar residential area. Tiny houses are crowded next to each other with backyards going down to the pond. We saw loads of ring-necked ducks, a swan, canada geese, and hooded mergs. We got out to Drumlin Farm near their closing time, but had time to get the lists we had come for and a sack of bird food.
I baked some bread last night and this morning (mixed it up and kneaded it last night, let it rise overnight, baked it before breakfast). One loaf is 100% whole wheat. The other is a different kind of ginger bread. I mixed three slices of candied ginger, chopped up pretty small, with about a quarter cup of raisins, a quarter cup of chopped dried apricots, and a quarter cup of date pieces, and kneaded it into the dough before forming the loaf. I'm estimating that quarter cup part now; I didn't measure the fruit, just put it in. I don't think that loaf will be around long.
 |
 |
 |
|