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Recapping the Summer
Missed Readercon in early July to help some friends get a truck and pack it for a big move, and was very sad to see them go, but they made it safely and successfully cross-country and much relief was had by all.
In later July, went to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival and enjoyed some fantastic music. We'd intended to camp, but by the time we got up there the road to the campground had been closed (intermittent torrential downpours, too muddy to drive), so we ended up sleeping in the car with the tent and our gear piled up at the front, and amazingly enough everything fit, including us, and it was fairly comfortable. But with the windows closed we missed all the wee-hours commotion: a van had caught fire in the camping area up on the hill, which had to be evacuated. Nobody was hurt, thank goodness, and a lot of people pitched in to make sure the evacuees had space and blankets to sleep in. The festival itself was fantastic, as always, but I experienced it in a way I never have before, with a sort of reinventing-the-wheel sense of wonder and outrage and camaraderie: folk music as political protest. I was a young child in the 1960s and I went to a liberal-progressive grammar school in Greenwich Village; peace signs and peace songs and protest songs and poems and art were the default milieu, their concepts something I took for granted. My appreciation of folk and New Folk (singer-songwriter) music as an adult has been mainly aesthetic and emotional. At this festival, the anger and heartache and scathing satire had a raw immediacy I've never felt from this music at any concert or event. Suddenly I was listening to people singing about the things I've been raging at, am raging at now. Suddenly this folk festival, which I've been going to on and off for many years, took on a whole new dimension. But it was really only going back to its roots. It left me with the weirdest mix of gratification and upliftedness and we-are-doomed-to-repeat horror; familiarity and estrangement in a kind of infinite loop. In the intro to one of her new songs, Cheryl Wheeler said something along the lines of "I was so angry. And I wondered if I was overreacting, and I asked some friends, 'Is it just me, or is it really this bad?' And they said, 'It's really this bad.'"
In still later July, had a very nice birthday, then a most decadent and enjoyable several-combined-birthdays dinner with family at Peter Luger's in Brooklyn. The next day, did a gig out in Suffolk County, playing as the Orchid and Onions trio for an offseason St. Patrick's houseparty thrown by dancers (who did some excellent sets! suburban decks as the new ceili parlours? "round the house and mind the citronella candles!"). We are still in leisurely pursuit of another Orchid; if we had a fiddler, really, we'd be dead brilliant, but we played quite well and I was pleased with the event.
In early August, went to the Appalachian Mountain Club's Echo Lake campground for a week of hiking, canoeing, kayaking, swimming, nature walks, reading, and napping. Good food, great people, great facilities--right down to the wonderful library building, well equipped with desks and lamps (and a cozy fireplace), which I made quite a bit of use of since I'd brought work with me. Tried Ping-Pong for the first time in twenty years, and can still play! Tried horseshoes and abysmally sucked. Went on an outing, led by the camp naturalist, to the Mount Desert Island Biology Laboratory, a terrifically impressive place I had no idea existed in all the years I've been going Down East. Slept well on my bunk in the canvas-over-wood-platform tent, managed to wake up naturally before seven every morning so that I got a big kick out of the bugling of "Reveille" instead of bitterly resenting it. *g* One evening we had an impromptu session out on one of the decks by the lake--accordion, fiddle, guitar, and pennywhistles. Another evening was Trivial Pursuit in the mess hall. Friday night was talent night, and there was real talent and the evening was a blast; later on, after hanging out for a while in the rec hall and then sitting by the fire in the darkened library, we stretched out on the swimming dock and stargazed. (It was beautiful, but we got skunked as far as Perseids go.) The lake can support two nesting pairs of loons but this season has mysteriously had three; every night, and sometimes at other times of day, we'd hear their various calls going out across the lake and echoing off the cliff wall across from the camp, and with the exception of wolf and coyote howls, there may be no more hauntingly beautiful sound on this planet. The camp is really an extraordinary place; run for the past two decades or so by the same couple, it's become a home away from home for many of the guests, who make lifelong friends there and come back for the same week year after year. I was impressed by pretty much everyone I met, including all the kids, and had a lot of fun with them. The camp gives the same sense of retreat as the Maine schooner we usually go on; the minute you come down the tightly tree-girt driveway you feel that you've gotten completely away from the world. But it's less literally true than it is on the schooner; the town of Southwest Harbor is a five-minute drive away, and we did nip out a couple of times, one time to hit the Internet cafe and another time to get a piece of the world's most mountainous blueberry pie.
This past weekend, while I was finishing up a brain-breaker of a copyedit, we rearranged the living room to confound the cats. (It didn't actually confound them; they're quite adaptable about their environment, and they love the new configuration.) In the process, I unshelved all the books in the "books I worked on" bookcase; years ago I stopped collecting published copies of things I've copyedited, but as I piled armful upon armful of volumes off to the side, I was pretty impressed by the quantity and variety. If we hadn't been so keen to just get the bloody furniture moved, I'd have laid them all out on the floor and taken a picture of them. Maybe I'll still be able to do that; one side of the room is now, as planned, freed up for my piano, which I'm hoping to get moved here from its long-term foster home in Manhattan sometime next month, and I haven't moved the books down to the office yet.
In later July, went to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival and enjoyed some fantastic music. We'd intended to camp, but by the time we got up there the road to the campground had been closed (intermittent torrential downpours, too muddy to drive), so we ended up sleeping in the car with the tent and our gear piled up at the front, and amazingly enough everything fit, including us, and it was fairly comfortable. But with the windows closed we missed all the wee-hours commotion: a van had caught fire in the camping area up on the hill, which had to be evacuated. Nobody was hurt, thank goodness, and a lot of people pitched in to make sure the evacuees had space and blankets to sleep in. The festival itself was fantastic, as always, but I experienced it in a way I never have before, with a sort of reinventing-the-wheel sense of wonder and outrage and camaraderie: folk music as political protest. I was a young child in the 1960s and I went to a liberal-progressive grammar school in Greenwich Village; peace signs and peace songs and protest songs and poems and art were the default milieu, their concepts something I took for granted. My appreciation of folk and New Folk (singer-songwriter) music as an adult has been mainly aesthetic and emotional. At this festival, the anger and heartache and scathing satire had a raw immediacy I've never felt from this music at any concert or event. Suddenly I was listening to people singing about the things I've been raging at, am raging at now. Suddenly this folk festival, which I've been going to on and off for many years, took on a whole new dimension. But it was really only going back to its roots. It left me with the weirdest mix of gratification and upliftedness and we-are-doomed-to-repeat horror; familiarity and estrangement in a kind of infinite loop. In the intro to one of her new songs, Cheryl Wheeler said something along the lines of "I was so angry. And I wondered if I was overreacting, and I asked some friends, 'Is it just me, or is it really this bad?' And they said, 'It's really this bad.'"
In still later July, had a very nice birthday, then a most decadent and enjoyable several-combined-birthdays dinner with family at Peter Luger's in Brooklyn. The next day, did a gig out in Suffolk County, playing as the Orchid and Onions trio for an offseason St. Patrick's houseparty thrown by dancers (who did some excellent sets! suburban decks as the new ceili parlours? "round the house and mind the citronella candles!"). We are still in leisurely pursuit of another Orchid; if we had a fiddler, really, we'd be dead brilliant, but we played quite well and I was pleased with the event.
In early August, went to the Appalachian Mountain Club's Echo Lake campground for a week of hiking, canoeing, kayaking, swimming, nature walks, reading, and napping. Good food, great people, great facilities--right down to the wonderful library building, well equipped with desks and lamps (and a cozy fireplace), which I made quite a bit of use of since I'd brought work with me. Tried Ping-Pong for the first time in twenty years, and can still play! Tried horseshoes and abysmally sucked. Went on an outing, led by the camp naturalist, to the Mount Desert Island Biology Laboratory, a terrifically impressive place I had no idea existed in all the years I've been going Down East. Slept well on my bunk in the canvas-over-wood-platform tent, managed to wake up naturally before seven every morning so that I got a big kick out of the bugling of "Reveille" instead of bitterly resenting it. *g* One evening we had an impromptu session out on one of the decks by the lake--accordion, fiddle, guitar, and pennywhistles. Another evening was Trivial Pursuit in the mess hall. Friday night was talent night, and there was real talent and the evening was a blast; later on, after hanging out for a while in the rec hall and then sitting by the fire in the darkened library, we stretched out on the swimming dock and stargazed. (It was beautiful, but we got skunked as far as Perseids go.) The lake can support two nesting pairs of loons but this season has mysteriously had three; every night, and sometimes at other times of day, we'd hear their various calls going out across the lake and echoing off the cliff wall across from the camp, and with the exception of wolf and coyote howls, there may be no more hauntingly beautiful sound on this planet. The camp is really an extraordinary place; run for the past two decades or so by the same couple, it's become a home away from home for many of the guests, who make lifelong friends there and come back for the same week year after year. I was impressed by pretty much everyone I met, including all the kids, and had a lot of fun with them. The camp gives the same sense of retreat as the Maine schooner we usually go on; the minute you come down the tightly tree-girt driveway you feel that you've gotten completely away from the world. But it's less literally true than it is on the schooner; the town of Southwest Harbor is a five-minute drive away, and we did nip out a couple of times, one time to hit the Internet cafe and another time to get a piece of the world's most mountainous blueberry pie.
This past weekend, while I was finishing up a brain-breaker of a copyedit, we rearranged the living room to confound the cats. (It didn't actually confound them; they're quite adaptable about their environment, and they love the new configuration.) In the process, I unshelved all the books in the "books I worked on" bookcase; years ago I stopped collecting published copies of things I've copyedited, but as I piled armful upon armful of volumes off to the side, I was pretty impressed by the quantity and variety. If we hadn't been so keen to just get the bloody furniture moved, I'd have laid them all out on the floor and taken a picture of them. Maybe I'll still be able to do that; one side of the room is now, as planned, freed up for my piano, which I'm hoping to get moved here from its long-term foster home in Manhattan sometime next month, and I haven't moved the books down to the office yet.
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(I do like the slightly startled expression little dog has when she's checking out the aftermath of furniture moving.)
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Welcome home! ^_^
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Welcome home. You need a vacation from your vacation, yet? *evil grin*
And kitties are all about change. (LOL's and runs away)
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I did kinda need a vacation from the summer, but I spent a whole day sacked out on the sofa catching up on nine weeks of "EastEnders," which was sublime and reinvigorating. :)
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Eastenders is good stuff. And spending time sacked out is never to be overrated! *vbg*
Good stuff.