Back from our little excursion up north for the weekend! Camping was fun, and the blues festival was mobbed again! Don played great with the band, and I kept busy during the two gigs by being the CD-seller girl.. That was kind of fun and made the night go by faster!

I met some new friends and was invited to play a song or two with one band, but I declined, because I hadn’t brought a guitar. It’s a little strange playing somebody else’s guitar, especially as I don’t even know the guys. However, it was nice to be asked!

I took a bunch of photos, so if you’re interested, hop on over to my flickr page. However, I took one photo especially for my Irish blogger friend Dragonstar! We had stopped on the way home at a roadside gardening place, and I saw these garden sculptures and just had to snap a pic for you Ms DS! So here it is:

(click to see larger!)

xo

The title of this post comes from something Don heard Nat say on our discgolf course one day. Also, this post is mostly directed towards Nat and Dwight, but feel free to read on if you are not one of them.

The new off-shoot game of Putz is called PUTZ AROUND.

Each player gets their own three discs. Par = two on each round. First tee is from the porch. If you get zero discs in the basket, your next round starts from the porch again. If you get no aces but get all three discs at Par Two, you move to the next position. If you get an Ace, you skip ahead to the second position.

There are 6 positions.
Porch = #1
Garden = #2
Poplar = #3
Birch = #4
Pipe = #5
Hill = #6

The goal is to finish first. The last round is played from the porch again.
No points.

We gave it a test run last night and it was pretty fun! Moves along fast, and gives you a chance to practise your putting from different locations besides just the porch.

First game, positions go to the right.
Second game, positions move to the left, and so on.

Can’t wait to try it out with a bigger crew!

Hello, it’s the lazy bloggerette again! We’ve had a lovely stretch of hot, sunny days again, and the three cats have resorted to looking like dogs, stretched out and lethargic. Spooky seems to have settled into her “non-womanhood” nicely, though she is a bit more vocal! She’s always got something to say.

Having a roll in the catnip on July 4th.

Well, this is first time in four years that on Independence Day we did not have the usual gang up for the weekend! Everybody had other plans, and with the cost of gas these days, it makes perfect sense to skip the three hours drive up to the Hill! Don and I made the best of it anyway, with some yummy grilled meals, cold drinks and our game of “Putz” with the flying discs. We managed to invite Mom and Dad and their dearest friends, John and Mary, who had been visiting for a couple of weeks from Holland, over for cocktails on Friday evening. We tried to get them to stay at our place for a “shmorgeshborg” dinner, and they tried to get us to go with them to the local tavern for a fine meal, but we both declined (me, because I was too tired from a busy week at the market… last thing I wanted to do was go back downtown and see PEOPLE!), so, cocktails it was, and that was nice. At least it gave Dad and Mom a chance to rehash a few “Kate as a 6 year old in Holland” stories….

So, the nice hot weather couldn’t come at a better time.. after all, it’s either WINTAH or JULY up in Maine! NEXT weekend, Don and I head up north to Rockland for the blues festival, where he will be playing Friday and Saturday night at a bar, and it is always a RAWKUS affair! The best part, however, is we bring our tent and camp at the state park a few towns away. This will only be our third time camping, and it’s beginning to get easier. This year, we will bring our new portable tent gazebo for extra bug intervention, as well as a blowup air mattress for extra sleeping comfort. Because of the gig timing, there is really no need for us to bring much food, as we will just dine at the bar, and we intend to try and squeeze in a boiled Maine LOBSTAH somewhere on the trip, or perhaps on the journey home. We always try and get a boiled lobstaH at least once each summer! After all, we are in Maine.

Meanwhile, we’ve been indulging in lots of salmon, swordfish and large grilled shrimps and prawns.. Combined with a fresh tossed salad with lettuce and herbs from our little garden, and some baby red potatoes and perhaps an ear of sweet corn on the cob, and that pretty much takes the cake! (Ha ha, sorry for the pun.)

Musically, I am still in a slump.. waiting for a new muse to pop into my life.. or something! It’s a shame, but meanwhile, I’m slowly working on my tapes-to-digital project (which will probably take me the rest of my life..) Here’s an oldie from 1991, me playing back up guitar with my dearest friend, Jill, who wrote a batch of songs back in the day. The recording tops the crappyness scale in quality, but, I’m such a sucker for good time past. Here we are playing in one of my livingrooms in one of my old apartments in Cambridge, Mass.

So Sorry
By Jill S.B. H. 1991

Well, I just know you’ve all been holding your breath, waiting to hear about the outcome of my beloved dryer… SHE’s BACK! And we owe it all to my better half, Don! Now, if only he had his own BLOG, because when I got home from work yesterday, he had a wonderful story about his adventures in replacing the dryer belt. However, Don remains somewhat of a mystery man, as he just doesn’t have any desire to clutter up the internet with his ramblings..

You see, he MAKES the internet, so to speak, for a living, and it is not in his character to showcase his thoughts. You’d have to speak with him in person. He receives designs from website designers in another state (well, our old ‘hood, back in Massachussetts), and then he’s the smarty pants that CODES the things.. making it all happen. These are big sites, with all kinds of fancy features, however, with all of his brilliance, there are still things he admits to NOT knowing. Like making a Flash site.

One of the many things I admire and respect so much about Don is his abilty to teach himself how to do stuff. He’s always been the “go -to” guy in all of his careers. He’s been an art director for an independent film magazine, and a video editor. Video editing back in the days that they used TAPE… pre-digital. Meaning he had to sit through hundreds of hours of raw footage, painstakingly document by hand every key point, than go back again and find those moments and splice them together. I, for one, could NEVER have the patience to do all that!

This is why he is a good side man in bands, as well. He’s never been the one to be a front man. He loves being the sideman, the back up, a team player. This is why he enjoys playing the bass now. He’s the middle man and the root between the front person (singer), the guitarist, and the drummer. The glue.

I don’t know where this came from in him… He never finished college, yet he really didn’t need to. Back in 1995, when the internet was just being born, he decided he wanted to learn how to make himself one of them new fangled concepts, a web page. So, he went to the book store and bought a book about HTML. And he read it. The whole thing. Then he made a web site.

He called it “The Cyberspaceship,” and it was brilliant. The first page loaded (and back then, do you remember how long it took for a webpage to load? AH HA HA!), and it appeared as if you were Captain Kirk sitting in your chair on The Enterprise. There was a view screen, and on the bottom of the page were little buttons that linked you to different space scenes, like space ships floating by or views of planets and stars.

This project took him months to do, and it “won” all kinds of “internet awards” (remember those silly things?) At the time, nobody really knew “what to do” with the internet, but soon enough, those greedy, money-hungry exploiting people in the world realized the potential of the internet. Don took his coding knowledge that he learned and continued studying and turned it into a career, in that back-door way that he tends to fall into things. Ironically, his brother does some similar work, too. It’s pretty cool.

These days, Don has to constantly keep up to stay in the game. When he’s not working on coding a web site, he’s researching the daily changes to the web coding world. Like last year when Windows decided to try and corner the browser world with their Vista/Internet Explorer7 thing.. arg.. what a nightmare for him. And trying to please the “suits” who have no idea about anything… trying to explain to them that the color and look on YOUR browser doesn’t look the same on a different brower or computer..

Meanwhile, I’ve lucked out, because he’s also good at fixing things. And he’s not afraid to admit when he can’t. That’s a good thing, too. So, he went on to the internet, made a few calls, ordered the new dryer belt, it arrived in two days, he looked on line to learn how to install it, and by golly, I’ve got a working dryer again!

Yeah Don! I’m a lucky girl.

Lucky
(A little ditty by my “basement” band, Krush Truck. That’s DiscMan Dwight on vocals, brother Nat on drums, DON on bass, and me on guitar…)

Friday we had the old junk car hauled away. Scooter has been sitting in the driveway since we moved here four years ago! We hope to purchase a newer second vehicle this fall.. Gulp.

Sunday morning, Nat and Craig helped us haul a nasty, stinky old refridgerator and a giant, broken upright freezer out of our basement and into Craig’s giant truck and leave them at the transfer station (dump.) Wow! I’ve been wanting those useless space hoggers out of my basement since we’ve moved here.. uh, four years ago! Man, that felt good.

(Nat and Craig… “Getting the job done.”)

Yesterday, after doing a load of laundry, I discovered that my dryer was broken.. ARG! I knew Don shouldn’t have put Nat’s sneakers in there to dry! Ah well, it was just a broken belt, and we’ve ordered a new one on line and it should be here by tomorrow. Hopefully Don will be able to replace it.. he’s confident he can, thanks to finding a very detailed description ON LINE. Who here doesn’t just LOVE the internet??

It was one year ago today that Spooky showed up on our porch, meuwing her scratchy, soft meuw, and changing all of our lives for the better.

Well, I have not had a whole lot to say or write about lately, so…
here’s a photo a took yesterday evening of a Monarch Butterfly feeding on a blooming Japanese Iris.

(Looks cool large , too.)

The outdoors is very lush at the moment. Here’s Bonezee (he gets to go outside because he’s very good and sticks around) enjoying the flowers and butterflies and hoping to catch another field mouse.

(Larger)

We have had a few very hot and humid days, erasing nearly all memories of our cold, snowy winter. Though not completly, as I’ve already begun to stack 2 cords of green wood for next winter!

Life is a circle, or perhaps, many little and large circles overlapping with each other.

BlogBlast For Peace

I was tagged a couple of weeks ago by my lovely blogger friend in France, Barbara, to do a MEME post.. (I’m not real sure of the use of that term, but it’s “blogspeak” for stuff about ME! As if you don’t get enough of that here!) I was asked to show four things that are in my house that are very old. So, here we go: (click photos to see them bigger if you wish)

My first thing is with me all of the time. I only take it off once in a awhile when my fingers get itchy on a hot and humid summer day. It’s an old “men’s club” ring.. Not sure which club.. but it belonged to my Great Aunt Clara’s first husband (whose name I can’t remember, he died before I was born.)

When we were moving her to an assisted living facility, she told me to take whatever I wanted… I liked this big gold ring, with scull and crossbones on one side, some strange flags and other symbols that have since rubbed nearly smooth. I was about 15 years old when I slipped this on my fingers, and I’ve been wearing it ever since. I am 43 now. It’s pretty old.. She must have been in her mid-eighties when we were moving her, and so.. well, somebody do the math.. I’ll have to ask me Mums.

Next, we have “Hmmberry.” This is a handmade teddy bear that Don has been carrying around since his boyhood. He’s 50-grumpcoughcough-something and it was made with love by HIS grandmother. All I know about her was that she was a Lutheran and lived her whole life in the Lafyette, Indianna area. He’s a pretty special bear and hangs out in our living room on our bookshelf. Don has had to sew his legs and arms back on many times.

These are technically in my barn now, but I’ve been carrying them around for twenty+ years now. They are the bridles I used on my old Shetland pony, Ramakin Whiskey (Ramy for short). The leather is quite brittle and dry now.. I really should oil them, but I’m afraid it would make me a bit moony to do so. I loved my pony, he was a cutie.

(Aboard Ramy with friend Donna and her pony Sunset at my childhood home)

Some of my favorite childhood books. I loved these verses, even more than the “Whinnie The Pooh” stories. Thanks to my Mom for “turning me on” to them when “I was very young.” As you can see by the colorings, they were well loved and read.

And I couldn’t resist adding this one to my MEME post. A BUNCH of old keys. How many hands have touched these keys? Some where to old cars I’ve owned, some to old apartments I’ve lived in, and then there are a whole bunch of old skeleton keys that I must have found in my childhood home’s barn. Pretty cool, huh?

Well, thanks Barbara, I had a lot of fun doing this! I’d like to tag some people, but I don’t think I have enough friends on my blog roll to do so.. If you’d like to participate, go for it and let me know!

Have a great day.

I just moderated 57 comments, all spam! For a second I thought it would be funny to approve them all, but then no. That was one heck of a sweep, the most I’ve ever had to delete in one sitting.

When I began this blog, it was in hopes to replace a forum I was moderating for a while. I called it the “TALK” board, and for a while there, it was kicking! Friends would show up out of the blue and leave comments, much hillariousness and wackiness ensued.

But then, I kept having to delete bad posts. The spam got out of control, and I could not moderate the comments in advance, to prevent posts with photos of shiney penises and abnormally large boobies. This - I did not like to see first thing in the morning. I got so disgusted with it all, I took the board down.

Almost a year went by, and I relied on my MySpace to keep up, but it just wasn’t the same. Friends who were posting on my TALK board were not on MySpace. Or flickr. Or even Facebook (which I have an account with but rarely visit).

So Don made up this blog for me. I wanted to be able to post my thoughts (my life notes), and have anyone comment, and be able prevent spam. This feature I like very much.. I was quite surprised to have 57 spams this morning, though.

It seems to be working out ok. Though my old posting friends no longer visit, or comment. These were not friends from the blogosphere, but people I actualy knew/know in real life! The line is getting a bit blurry between the two, though, I must admit. Though I’ve never met my internet friends, so many years of internet corrospondence has gone by.. it’s strange.

This is my first thoughts of the morning over coffee. More coffee.