Fairy hordes, in fact.
J. M. Barrie once wrote”when a new baby laughs for the first time a new fairy is born.” I always leave out the “new” part, because I prefer to think of it as “when a baby laughs, a fairy is born.”
On the other hand, today’s bit of fun would lead to serious fairy overpopulation if that were the case, so I may have to give up that idea. But I defy you to watch this and not smile.
And I suggest we all try to get back to a place where we can enjoy simple things this much.
No, I don’t know how to pronounce it.
It seems, neither does anyone else, since she is more commonly known, like Cher and Prince, as just—Sissel. (I don’t know how to prounce that, either.)
I’m sort of out of the main information stream on the music world, so maybe you all know all about her already. But, just in case, here’s a little background:
Sissel is a Norwegian soprano. She’s internationally famous (except, it seems, to me since I just discovered her). She sings everything from pop to country to rap to classical music. She’s performed with everybody from Placido Domingo to Charles Aznavour to rapper Warren G.
Her voice is most often described as “crystalline,” and I can’t think of a better word. Her Wikipedia entry is here, her official website is here, and you can find a bunch of tracks for your listening pleasure on YouTube.
Happy Listening!
I ate the whole thing.*
Boy, am I thankful that all the holiday food is finally gone. That perpetual New Year’s Resolution I make (probably, it should be called an All Years Resolution) is impossible to even begin to honor while there are still cookies and cakes and chips and dips around. I was derailed even further this year because of a family gathering on the 5th for a long-lost cousin.
He wasn’t really lost, of course The Navy has known where he is for almost 20 years. And I’ve seen him on Facebook. It’s just that it’s been a good long time since any of us have seen him in person. He was here for a day or two, so there was a gathering out at the pond.
When we do that, everybody brings something. Then, there is always too much food and most of us end up taking part of what we brought back home. Clearly, I need to learn not to volunteer to bring cake.
The thing is, I have all kinds of will power at the grocery store (assuming, of course, that I’m not starving when I go in there). I do not, however, have any will power at all once the food is already in the house. Quite the reverse, in fact, as I somehow manage to rationalize—at this time of year, anyway—the necessity to eat it up so that the dieting can begin.
(I am aware of how ridiculous that is. It’s the point at which the sensible idea of watching what I eat comes smack up against the other sensible idea of frugality—waste not, want not—and frugality wins. Because it has hunger—or, rather, bad eating habits—on its side.
But the cake is gone now. The dip is past its expiration date. (That’s a triumph. I didn’t eat it all this time!) And the MotH** can be trusted to finish off the few chips that are left.
Let the misery begin!
* That dates me, doesn’t it? Remember the Alka-Seltzer commercial?
** MotH = Man of the House
to leaf blowing?
This is what I am wondering today. I’ve had my leaf blower for about 2 years, and I must confess that I do not seem to have grasped whatever nuances there are.
You’d think it would be easy, right?
It’s a blast of air.
Point at the leaves, and they blow away.
Well, yeah.
They do.
Blow away.
But, here’s the thing. They blow in multiple directions. So, I very carefully clear off one section of the driveway, say, and as soon as I move to the next section, I am blowing leaves back over the cleared portion. It’s…disheartening.
Now, the lawn guys I see working around the neighborhood don’t seem to have this problem. They go whooshing around, jump back in their trucks, and leave behind a nice clear driveway.
That’s not what happens for me. I blow the leaves off the rocks in the flower beds, and they land on the front porch. I blow them off the porch, and they’re back in the flower beds. I don’t think I’m getting the hang of it at all.
I’ve googled.
I don’t find any new ideas, really, except for one guy who suggested making sure your beer is covered before you start leaf blowing. That wasn’t exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.
Now, I don’t want you to think I’m buried in leaves. I have had some success. (Some? My budget for bags is BIG.)
I’ve been blowing leaves since October and expect to continue through March. First, the sweet gum leaves fall and the popcorn tree drops its foliage. Then the crepe myrtles and various other trees to which I have not been introduced (so I don’t know their names). Right about now, the cypress needles start drifting across the yard. I think the water oaks begin just when you think everything is done.
Leaf removal is a six month (at least) task. I don’t even try to get all of them up. I just try to keep the hardscape clear.
I’m not terrible at it, but I’m wondering if there’s a way to be better.
I’d just like to be able to aim with slightly more…specificity. Is that too much to ask?
to Swiffer WetJet owners.
Maybe you don’t have a Swiffer WetJet and have no intention of ever getting one. That’s okay. Talk amongst yourselves.
Those of us who do have them find them very easy to use and quite convenient for quick clean-up. They are also inordinately expensive in terms of their renewables—i.e., the stuff you have to keep buying.
The expense is bad enough. But I also get annoyed by a marketing tactic that creates demand by proprietary “technology” rather than quality of the product. It’s bad enough when software doesn’t work with older operating systems, or your music and video collections stop being playable when you buy a new machine, but when we’re talking about cleaning products, it really annoys me.
So, I am very pleased to bring you this Tuesday Tip on how you can refill your Swiffer bottle yourself. Just one caveat—in finding this tip, I did read of some people who had trouble with it. It’s possible that Swiffer has changed the design and newer bottles won’t work this way. However, you’re not out anything if you give it a try. Nothing to lose. Oh—and a safety warning. You’ll be dealing with boiling water. Be careful. Use common sense. Don’t burn yourself or anyone else.
Here’s what you do.
Once the bottle of cleaning solution is empty, get a small saucepan.
Fill it with a couple of inches of water. Just enough to cover the white cap of the bottle and a little bit of the blue part—when you hold it upside down.
Get the water boiling. You can turn the burner off now.
Hold the bottle upside down in the hot water. (I wasn’t sure if it would melt if it touched the bottom of the pan, so I made sure there was enough water to hold it off the bottom.)
The instructions I read said 10 seconds was long enough. I found it didn’t work until I’d held the bottle in the water for about 3 minutes.
Using a dish towel or something to protect your hand from the hot water, take the bottle out of the water, and twist off the top. This will take some force, but if you’ve heated it enough, it will not be too hard. I’m not that strong, and I managed it.
That’s it. The top will twist on and off now without heating. If you want to make it easier, you can use nail clippers or wire cutters to cut off the little white teeth around the inside of the cap.
Now you can fill it with a homemade cleaning solution or any commercial solution of your choice.
If your Swiffer is still under warranty, you may not want to do this. I suppose it would void the warranty. Once you’re done with the warranty period, however, save yourself some money.
I hear you can also make your own re-usable cleaning pads. I’m going to try that next.
Who can fathom a bird brain?
It’s been a couple of days of bird bemusedness.
First, there was an injured bluebird, being succored out at the farm.
And the begging duck, unfortunately trained by one of my cousins to like Cheerios, with the result that he (or she) was constantly underfoot at another cousin’s homecoming party. Which is hilarious—partly because ducks are inherently hilarious but also because I’m more used to dogs and cats weaving around my ankles than I am to ducks. (As I said to yet another cousin, “‘Stop chasing the duck’ isn’t a sentence I heard very often in New York.) So, funny, yes, but I don’t really imagine that dropped potato chips are good for ducks. On the other hand, hanging around the humans may keep it out of the way of predators, so who knows?
Meanwhile, we seem to be a stop on the migration path of the Turkey Vultures. Nothing like seeing five or six of them ominously circling overhead and then looking up to find another dozen hulking in the trees above you. Even if you didn’t know they were scavengers, I think you’d find those big dark forms, hunched over and peering down at you, to be something less than a good omen.
However, their dour presence is offset by the Canadian Geese standing on their heads in the pond. Three or four of them with their little butts in the air just make me laugh–especially with a small white heron standing there staring at them.
We had a baby hawk sitting on our mailbox for a time last week.
Then, there are the coots. I’ve been wondering where they’ve gone. And, yesterday, a group of four or five coots came back—in the rain—to huddle next to the sea wall. I don’t know why they don’t swim under the dock. The huddling seems to indicate they aren’t that fond of the rain, but they don’t take the obvious shelter. So, I don’t know. Who can fathom the mind of a bird?
But it’s a miracle, in the face of humanity’s ever increasing encroachment on their habitats, to have all these flighty friends around, still, to astonish and perplex me.
before I talk.
If you guessed that headline is a quote from somebody named Smith, you are right! Because…it’s Smith Sunday!
Today, we would like to bring to your notice Margaret Chase Smith.
While we’re all being enthusiastic (or outraged, as the case may be) over Hillary Clinton’s past, and possible future, run for the Presidency—and some of us who are a bit older remember the excitement over Geraldine Ferraro’s nomination to the Vice Presidency—it’s worth remembering that Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman placed in nomination for the Presidency at a major party’s convention.
Ms. Smith served her country as a Congresswoman and a Senator and, until Senator Barbara Mikulski, was the longest serving woman in the Senate. What may be even more impressive is that she held an all-time voting record in the Senate until 1981. 2,941 consecutive roll call votes.
When you consider that, these days, legislators don’t seem to even show up to work, let alone vote, I think that’s pretty good. (Hey! Maybe we should pay them by the vote and see if that gets any more work out of them?)
She was also a moderate Republican and was not afraid to break ranks with her party when she disagreed with them.
Now, admittedly, she was only a Smith by marriage, but with a record like that—we’ll take her!
According to children.
This has been bouncing around the internet for a while, so it’s entirely possible you may have seen it. I always like to revisit it, however, and it is an entirely perfect candidate for Silly Saturdays.
I think the following are among my favorites—because they seem to be true as well as funny:
He [Saint Paul] preached holy acrimony,
Queen Elizabeth was the Virgin Queen. As a queen she was a success.
Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet.
and
Soon the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility.
But there is a lot more inventive history there, so click on that link and enjoy!
Artist
Today’s Friday Find.
Joe Fenton is a London-based artist who works in graphite, ink and acrylics. His drawings are amazing. The content is a little macabre for my taste—Hieronymus Bosch is mentioned in his bio as an influence, and you can see why—but I am blown away by the clean lines and elaborate layouts of the drawings.
I don’t know what the proper art vocabulary would be to describe these works but “clarity” and “specificity” and “highly detailed” are the words that come to mind.
Since I’ve been giving myself drawing lessons—with mixed success—I am even more impressed by this particular style. A more freewheeling realism, such as that for which I have been striving, strikes me as being more forgiving than this. If your hand slips a bit when contouring a face, you can always fudge the shading. It doesn’t look like that’s really possible in Mr. Fenton’s work.
The symmetry blows me away, too, in many of them. I mean, it’s hard enough, I would think, to create one side of these ornamental drawings so cleanly. To balance it out on the other side seems like daring the art gods to make your hand shake.
So, I don’t know how he does it—but wow!
Color me—monochromatically—impressed.
Acromantulas
Well, not really. But I know exactly how Ronald Weasley felt when he and Harry Potter tracked Aragog to his lair (web?).
I took the Christmas lights down today.
The ones around the garage—they were relatively easy.
The dock…that’s another story.
It’s not that it was hard to remove them. A little tricky maybe where they went around the corner and over the lamp, but I managed. A combination of a broom handle and acrobatic skill. Nothing spectacular.
It’s just that there are a few more spiders than usual out on the dock just now. Maybe it’s been too warm? I don’t know. But eeek!
I was okay with the necessity to evade the spider webs as I got the lights down off their hooks.
I was okay with the spider that rapelled past me as I handed the string of lights around the piling.
It’s just the rather large arachnid that was crawling across the front of my sweatshirt as I was coiling the lights that finished me off.
But…you know…let’s look on the bright side. I’m thankful I saw it before I wore it inside. I’m thankful it was on my shirt and not my head or my hand. I’m thankful that the heebie-jeebies were not so debilitating that I was unable to finish the job.
But…eeek!
I’m also hoping that by the time you read this post, I will be thankful that I did not have spider nightmares all last night. (I’m not feeling too confident about that because just writing this makes me feel like things are crawling on me, but hope is good. It never hurts to have hope.)
What I’d like to know, though, is just what is it the lizards think they are doing? I realize that the grasshoppers may be too large for them. But the spiders?
The natural balance around here seems off.
The spiders need to eat the other bugs, and then the lizards need to eat the spiders. It seems a perfectly straightforward food chain to me, but I don’t think the lizards are doing their part.
