I think Champ is really obsessed with me. He came by my office for the second year in a row to wish me Happy Valentine’s Day!
Doesn’t he look bigger than last year? The handler who brought him in, said he’d been eating a lot of hot dogs. I dunno, I heard he’s been eating a lot of kids. 😉
I’m like many of my peers in having a “wide net” that sweeps in all manner of trivia, facts, obscure details, and what-have-you and stores it away against a time when said knowledge will randomly come in handy. If you’re reading this and you know me, you probably have a pretty wide net as well. The people I know well all tend to have this in common.
I sometimes wonder, however, if mine is atypically wide — I have a bizarre set of interests that you don’t always find in the same brain. In the last 24 hours, I’ve been able to supply the names of two of the major players in the unification of Italy in the 1800s (Garibaldi and Cavour) and I’ve found myself using “DUUUVAL” as the meeting password to an online meeting with a customer located in Jacksonville, Florida. Sports geekihood and regular geekihood don’t always coincide.
Having such a wide net can be kind of a curse. Carole, who graduated from Harvard and who competed on Jeopardy nonetheless assumes that she can ask me virtually anything and I’ll know the answer. I’m her human Wikipedia. On those (admittedly rare) occasions when I don’t know the answer, she’s dumbfounded… and just asks again, much as one would rephrase a Google search that failed to find what you were looking for the first time. It couldn’t be that I actually don’t know … it’s just a matter of rephrasing the question so my brain will cough up what she’s looking for. When I tell her that I actually don’t know the answer, she gets vexed with me. “I don’t always know the answer, Carole” I say, and she says “Once in a blue moon, sure. But you usually DO.”
No, this isn’t a humblebrag. As I said, I know a lot of people with the same blessing/curse, the curse of knowing everything. It’s just kind of weird, is all. A lot of times I have literally no idea why I know something. Just that I do.
I spend almost all my time traveling for work — until this week I’ve been on the road every week so far this year: Texas, Texas, Texas, Arkansas, Texas. It gets lonely on the road sometimes, especially when I’m one or more time zones away from home and when Carole doesn’t get home until late due to rehearsals (choir and orchestra on consecutive weeknights).
So I get a little attention-starved now and then. And so once in a while I try to do or say something via email that will get Carole’s attention. (It’s awkward to send a telegram-like email that says “I AM LONELY AND ATTENTION-STARVED STOP PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO ME STOP”, so I have to use subtler methods.)
Last week I did this:
Carole wrote me this morning and told me that I should do a screen-shot and post it here. Apparently she found it amusing enough that she looked back at it days later. So, hey, I guess I can call that “success”.
Hey, all. I’m going to be singing in concert with the Green Mountain Mahler Festival this Saturday at St Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. The Green Mountain Mahler Festival doesn’t just do Mahler works — they do various readings of orchestral and choral works by all manner of composers. Sometimes we just come together and go through a work from beginning to end, but other times we rehearse all day and then do a concert for friends and family in the evening. That’s the case here. We’re going to do two Te Deums (orchestra and chorus), one by Bruckner and one by Dvorak ; the orchestra will also do the Adagio religioso from Lobgesang by Felix Mendelssohn.
It should be fun. I’ve performed with the Mahler Festival pick-up orchestra several times, sometimes playing French horn and other times as a vocalist. I’m singing alto this time around.
The concert is at Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 8:00 PM at the Chapel of Saint Michael the Archangel at Saint Michael’s College, in Colchester, Vermont. Admission is by free will donation; the donations will go to AgeWell. For more information visit vtmahler.org.
The Green Mountain Horn Club — an all French horn ensemble founded in 1984 by Alan Parshley — holds concerts now and then when we can get people together. Recently we played in Lincoln, Vermont as part of their “Hill Country Holiday” celebration. The concert was held at the United Church of Lincoln and we had a pretty decent turnout.
The video, above, was shot by my husband Jay from the church balcony. The sound isn’t professional quality, obviously, but it’s not awful. There are a couple of breaks in the action when the camera chose of its own accord to just stop filming, but we only lost a couple of the spoken-word transitions between pieces that our conductor used to give our lips time to recover. All the music was recorded.
I hardly ever post regarding the death of a celebrity; I reason that sufficient other people will take care of the public fawning over the dear departed’s legacy. (And that, in any event, it bothers me that we seem to care more about the lives of famous people who we have no actual connection with than our actual neighbors.)
Today, I’ll make an exception.
Russell Baker, humor columnist, passed away on Monday at the age of 93. You can read the Washington Post’s write-up here.
Mr. Baker managed the nearly impossible task of being wryly funny in print, every week, for years and years. That’s not easy. I loved his dry sense of humor and his self-deprecation. I didn’t grow up reading his columns because our local newspaper, the Roanoke Times, carried Art Buchwald’s columns instead, but I discovered Baker once I ventured out into the world. His columns are worth looking up and reading.
But that’s not the main reason I’m posting here on the occasion of his death. I’m posting to honor the author of an essay so funny that it’s literally been hanging in my kitchen for decades: “Francs and Beans“. You may disagree, but I think it’s one of the funniest things ever written. And so I choose to honor its author by saying “Mr. Baker, thanks for the laughs. You made the world a better place by being in it.”
“You were immense.”
So there was a big snowstorm overnight, with 18″ or more of snow falling here in Richmond, VT.
Okay, it wasn’t really a “snowpocalypse” in the sense of power going out and roads being impassable … mainly because it just never got windy. A quick check of the Green Mountain Power outage map just now showed everything A-ok.
To get real frustration, you need wind blowing drifts right back over roads that just got plowed, and wind bringing snow-laden branches down on power lines. What makes this latest storm stand out is that it’s below zero Fahrenheit, and anyone who lives in a snowy part of the continent knows that you don’t typically get big snow when it’s that cold. I suppose it must have been warmer higher up in the atmosphere.
It was cold enough out that we skipped the Women’s March in Montpelier on Saturday morning even though a friend of Carole’s was one of the scheduled speakers and we’d wanted to go hear and support her. Neither of us felt brave enough to go stand for a couple of hours in zero degree Fahrenheit weather and have to rely on porta-potties if and when the urge arose. I have visions of being frozen into one of those things, and I want nothing to do with that.
The approach of this storm scared people enough that businesses were posting “we’re closed until Monday” notices on Facebook on Friday night. Ditto for churches — we knew as of Friday afternoon that there wouldn’t be services today. That’s actually kind of rare. Mostly Vermonters just keep on going until the power goes out. But five degrees below zero AND snow falling at a rate of an inch or two an hour for twelve straight hours is enough to deserve at least a bit of notice.
We went around last night and double-checked all the windows and pulled down all the blinds. It was damn cold out and we wanted the warm to stay on the inside.
I went out yesterday afternoon before the snow really got going and raked the accumulated ten inches or so of existing snow off the roof of our new gazebo, then did a second pass today. Truth is, I have no idea how strong our new gazebo’s roof is, but I don’t want to find out the hard way that two feet of accumulated snow is beyond its design load.
Looks like it’s time to break down and go buy a proper snow rake with a long extensible handle.
As of 3 pm or so, the snow’s basically stopped and the main roads are all plowed and passable. The supermarket in Waterbury was open, though most small businesses were closed. We drove up to the Bolton Valley ski area, a couple of miles from our house, and the lifts were open and the parking lots were full. Good snow means good business! Unfortunately, they’d also had a water line breakage and at least one of their restaurants was closed. I’m sure they’ll cope.
Long story short, our house is now in full Santa’s-Workshop mode. Cue the yetis, it’s time for a party.
I travel a lot for work. I have a smartphone. It has a camera. I’m often pretty bored.
The end result of all that is that I take and upload a lot of photos from my travels to the Google Maps photo repository. Google then uses them in location listings.
No one has to upload their vacation snaps and other photos to Google Maps. But once you choose to, Google tends to assume you want to keep on doing so and will send your phone suggestions to upload your most recent shots. As I said, I’m often pretty bored, so I’ve uploaded a lot of photos. I’m a Google Maps “Local Guide” Level 10 user, as a result.
And because I’ve uploaded so many photos and because I’m a Level 10 user, my photos often wind up being the cover photo of many locations on Google Maps (if the business or location owner hasn’t uploaded their own, that is). And that means that occasionally a shot I took in a moment of frivolity winds up being the public face of a theoretically reputable business or tourist attraction or whatever.
The most egregious example of this is the entry for the Friendly’s restaurant in Williston, VT. Take a look. That photo at the top of some ranch dressing with rainbow sprinkles on top? That’s one of mine. I don’t know why, out of the dozens of photos I’ve taken at that Friendly’s that one wound up being the profile photo. But it did. And it’s been viewed (as of just now) 210,434 times.
And that’s not even my most popular photo. My top two are:
It’s a strange world we live in, my friends.
There are people in this country who do not own a large stuffed Wienermobile.
I am not one of those people.
(For what it’s worth, I’ve had this thing for years and years. Bought it off eBay. It came with strings attached to hang it from the ceiling of a store or business, but mostly I’ve just left it on the top bunk of the bunk bed we pointlessly use as a spare sofa down in the living room. I saw a post on Fark.com today about the wonderful life Wienermobile drivers experience and decided to post a photo of my own little Wienermobile in the comments.)
There are few experiences in life that provide the same je ne sais quoi as hearing one of your cats slowly and methodically working up to a full-bore upchuck on the carpet twenty feet behind you while you’re taking part in a work-related conference call.
You know how it goes. At first there’s a soft gulping sound or two, the sort of thing that you could easily attribute to any number of ordinary causes. But then the sounds get louder and more urgent… whulp whulp whulp whulp. And then the climax: a nice loud gagging noise followed by small wet lumps of something hitting the carpet from four to six inches above floor level.
Ick.
And the whole time you’re sitting there on the conference call, cheerfully interacting with your co-workers and customers, thinking “oh, jeez, this sounds like it’s going to be a big one” and trying to remember where you left the roll of paper towels and the scrub brush and the spray bottle.
The denoument, of course, is the cat in question showing up a few minutes later, all perky and full of lively enthusiasm, wearing a look that says “Hi there! What’s for lunch?”