These longer days

I have not not been blogging, I just have not been posting.  Because I have not been finishing.  Sorry about that.

Sometime in the next week I need to:

-finish the directions for the next three block swaps & get them posted.

-finish not one not two but three baby quilts for whom boy-quilts had been made & then they turned up girls, two of them do not arrive until August/September which is some pressure off but still I am going to stop paying attention when someone says "it's a !".  On the flip side the next three boys are COVERED (get it, quilts, covered?).

-use that Joann's coupon.  Not that I am a Joann's fanatic or anything but if I have to pay full price for batting I will never forgive myself.


-remember to get that info about the bee-hive for sale.  Because a person who is allergic to stinging insects needs a bee-hive.

-pick blueberries.  It is blueberry season & i missed it entirely last year.  Blueberries are (almost) the only fruit I even like & I actually love them, so I need to get out there this time.


& in the next month:

-shop for a GPS.  This one is easy actually.  I just have to say to A that I really want a GPS for my road trip later this year & I will be presented with one.  First though I need to see what features I really care about.  This is harder than you might think because I am a technological fantasist.  that is, I get my heart set on features that are not combined in a single gadgets & then I am never satisfied.

-get those I-SPY swap squares together. I really enjoyed this last time, although I was almost too late, & I am one of those quilters who can never have enough 4" novelty squares.  If you are one of those, too there are still a few spots left.  I think.

It does not look like much but, well that is in addition to all the other stuff I don't do when I should.  Anyhow, one way or another things will be better by the end of the week.  If only because deadlines will have passed & if I miss them, they're gone.  That's the way it is with watersheds.  & solstices.

What would Claude do?

It is getting pretty hard to avoid oil spill chatter down here in the Land of Flowers.  There was a shining light of levity yesterday when one of the senators from Texas apologized to the BP-Prez for the "shakedown".  Oh Texas, you are always good for giggles.  Still, I thought I would take a little time & reflect on another famous how-did-we-not-see-this-coming disaster & how maybe, just maybe, that big cheese handled it a little bit better.  I am speaking, of course, of the fire at the 1971 Montreaux Jazz Festival.  

Let me take you back.  The festival itself was founded in 1967 by three men, including Claude Nobs (more on him later) who really could not have done it without the backing of several other people.  It lasted for three days & nights & took place in Montreaux, Switzerland at the Montreaux Casino on scenic Lake Geneva.  Nobs had a back ground in catering, tourism & a love of music.  For the first year the festival almost exclusively featured jazz musicians, but it was not long before the repertoire expanded.

Jump forward to 1971.  Anyone who has ever heard the song knows Frank Zappa & the Mothers were on the stage & lets just say, something got away from them.  Specifically, a flare gun.  A stupid with a flare gun.  Maybe I am getting old, but every time I listen to my friends' complain about their kids' music choices I always ask myself: how bad can it be?  I mean, did anyone bring  a flare gun to the concert?  & just in case you are thinking we, at was an isolated, never-to-be-repeated weird fan, less than a week later Frank Zappa was attacked on stage & broke his leg.  Anyway...there is actually of a bootleg of the Monteaux performance (of course there is!) & you can listen to the fire announcement & subsequent panic.

Which brings us to Claude.  Remember Claude?  This is a post about Claude.  As the festival's general manager, Claude Nobs knew the terrain, quite literally.  He knew the building, he knew where the exits were, he knew the floorplan of the old Montreaux Casino so well that he could apparently negotiate it in the dark, in the smoke, dragging another person.  & once he got that person out he went back in for more.  Several people fleeing the arena had hidden in the casino itself & become trapped/lost/disoriented.  Guess who found them & got them out alive.

I don't know about you, but I am not sure how many more pictures I can look at with solemn people in solemn suits saying either "we never saw this coming" or "we should should have seen this coming" or "you should have seen this coming" or "I did see this coming but would you listen to me?" or whatever.  I do not mean to say that if there was negligence (through incompetence, through greed) we should just chalk it up.  I do not think determining if there was, even in a long drawn out expensive process, is bad for moral or prevents people from moving on or is punitive in itself.  I say go for it, do it, lets make this thing so ugly that no big cheese ever looks at a company jet & says "I deserve this more than laborers deserve safe conditions; I need this because my work is so important even though I have no understanding of specifics".  & maybe, just maybe, we can start thinking along the lines of the guy in charge should be the guy who knows the lay of the land because he is always there, not the guy waiting on a report.

As for what would Claude do there is not much more to it.  Funky Claude will be forever lauded for pulling kids out of fire, but he is still the general manager of the Montreaux Jazz Festival.  Sometimes he sits in on harmonica.  Mostly though it is a day to day operation, getting money together, coordinating schedules &, well, managing.

One final note:  just in case yup are having trouble with the metal sound & the gravelly lyrics, I give you this most dubious cover.

A thorough birching

I have been bogged down on the Betulaceae for quite a while now.  Not like the Anacardiaceae but still, there is a lot of birch out there.  As a result of all that birch out there, there is a lot of birch in the herbarium wood collection.

Birch trees are the first trees about which I have a specific childhood memory.  There were a few paper birches in the yard of my family's home & the temptation to peel those white strips all the way around could be overwhelming.  I remember brushing the palm of my hand over the frayed edges that had naturally peeled away hoping & hoping not to roll them away just a little bit further.  I remember being told that to do so, all the way around would kill the tree & I wanted so badly to do it anyway.

As it happens paper birches are indeed on the decline; deer & paper manufacturers do not share my conflict of spirit.  This tree was once considered an almost aggressive weed tree (I am quite sure we had them because the white trunks were at least something to look at when all the leaves were gone).  Where you chopped down one birch, three more would grow.  Unless you paved over the entire grove or  drained the adjacent wetland.  As I recall, the birches in our yard preferred lower land & wet feet.

Later in life,  I learned of that other famous birch, John Birch.  For no good reason I seem to get the man confused with another man, John Stuart Mill, which is just, well bizarre.  They are both named John....& so are a gazillion other people past& present that I am able to keep separate from either of them.  This confusion is why I am always Always ALWAYS caught off guard when the John Birch Society does something well, fairly typical for themselves. Most recently it was they have groused about the lack of documentation (their word) that "Clean, safe water is a right for all Americans"  while also biotching because full-on access to guns is  indeed a right of all Americans & they have the documentation.  If only the framers of the Constitution had thought to say "oh by the way, water that is not poisoned, that's good too".  It might help you understand how confused I make myself if I provide John Stuart Mill's most famous quote:  Although it is not true all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.

Which finally brings us to today's word: birching.  Once upon a time it meant a sound whipping, often with a birch whip, hence the "birch" in "birching".  You don't hear that one much any more.  Birching in schools (I am guessing I first encountered this word somewhere along the way with Laura Ingalls Wilder) has gone out of fashion...& I do mean fashion.  Whether it will come back or not I cannot say.   Having been on the receiving end of a particular teacher's targeted malice I would hope not, but having seen first hand what passes for self-discipline (& how one unregulated frosh can incite the whole class) I wonder if there are other options.  So there you are, three old words to use in new (old) ways.

Lessons at bat

It has been more than 100 years since he first appeared in print, but Casey is still striking out. I realize it is possible (maybe even probable) that some one might not know who Casey is.  Casey is an imaginary baseball player on an imaginary team. The home team (our team!) is behind by two runs & has two outs.  There will be no more innings & there are two batters ahead of him, neither of them worth much.  But each of them player gives his meager all to get the Mighty Casey, the ringer, to bat.  Everyone relaxed, sure it was in the bag.

It seems there have been a lot of ringers in my world lately.  Politically, the Tea Party thought they had (& probably still have) the Republican nomination for the opening Senate seat in the bag.  Florida-Offshore oil drilling was an as-good-as-done deal less than two months ago. 

Back to our epic poem:  Casey makes his leisurely way to the plate.  The first pitch sings right by him.  The crowd goes crazy.  They are quite quite sure Casey was robbed.

As for me, here in real time, I somehow missed Rush Limbaugh's claim that eco-terrorists maybe were behind the oil spill.  I did not miss the far right leaning Florida legislature, either embracing this new Tea Party ideology or the old Let's Get Re-elected ideology, forwarding ever more bizarre legislation to the governor's desk.

Meanwhile in Mudville, Casey conceded that first pitch was just not his style.  The second pitch also, somehow failed to meet his criteria.  It did not fail to meet the umpire's:  strike two.

As for the rest of the poem:  Casey finally decides to get down to the real business of a batter, swings & strikes out.  Conservative Florida Democrats are coming out in droves for the newly independent, formerly Republican, current Governor/potential future Senator.  In the interest of courting those to the left, the center & even just a modicum to the right, much of the weirdness landing on Crist's desk is stalling  there.   As for the off-shore drilling, the former party poster boy is nixing that, too.

//You can watch the familiar version here or a better one here.  Happy Anniversary Casey!

Welcome to hurricane season

Atlantic hurricane season begins today & I am delighted to report it has been raining plenty already.  For days.  Every afternoon or so, a gully washer clears away the dust & grime & more things bloom after each deluge.  Among those blooming things, one of my favorites, the rain lilies.

I grow Zephyranthes despite the fact they are poisonous to poultry, despite the reality they. like day lilies, rarely offer a flower that lasts two days.  The rest of the year, they are at best small clumps of narrow leaves that barely fill a border.

In years of drought, though, they are the first proof that there was enough rain, that there will be more rain, that another rainy season is at hand.

They seemed an appropriate way to open Hurricane Season- they are also called zephyr lilies.