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So I took Emma to the Monterey Scottish Games so she could see what a bagpipe competition is like. It's nothing like I would have thought. No audience: just the judge. You walk around in this little square area that's marked off with streamers, and you play your piece, while the judge reads your music and listens to you, and makes notes on your playing. Later on you find out what you got. Emma thought it would be asier than doing it for an audience, which surprised me because I think she's used to doing audience work.
The Grade IV pipers were about all in the same ballpark with Emma, so that was reassuring. Some of Jay's students were there, and we were looking out for them, but the only one we were sure of was Paul who did a very creditable ground and first variation of "Too Long in This Condition." Emma was pleased -- she knows the whole thing.
So there were all these SCA types walking around with full regalia and little daggers in their socks. Really. Emma would kind of like one of them, but when we looked at them they were pretty fancy and expensive and the littlest ones didn't seem to have functional blades (she'd be using it to trim her reeds and stuff, not to pick fights). We looked at sporrans too: the nice ones cost three hundred and more. There were sporrans made from whole badgers, and one of the musicians in the group Wicked Tinkers had one made of a bear paw, apparently. That seems ghoulish to me. The ones Emma liked were made like very fine shoes -- naturally she also liked the nicest ghillie brogues, but we didn't even see any of those for sale, so we didn't have to get sticker shock on them. We spent money anyways. She got a tartan sash, some small silver jewelry, and I got a CD of Wicked Tinkers and a pipe band compilation -- most of the piping CDs didn't even list the tunes by name! All they said was "strathspey, reel, march" or "Selection." Selection? What does that mean?
And there were stage mommies with their little Highland Fling dancing girls. It's funny watching the rigid, stereotyped recitals these have become, when you know that the dance was at one time a drunken revelry danced with great abandon and much shouting. Notice I don't say "the right way" or "really" or "authentic" anywhere in there. This thing we saw was real too, but different. And it's just -- just odd.
I've been thinking about meconnaissance since I read the article in Anthropology Today about the kamikaze pilots. The Monterey Games was just chockablock with it. ALl these different people talking about the same thing and meaning entirely different things by it. No thing that was there seemed to have the same meaning for more than three people at the same time. I'm surprised they can even get this thing going. WHy don't they bog down in a miasma of misunderstanding? For that matter, how can any group function, when there are so many different ways to understand each thing?
Other things in today's subject: we walked over to watch the Mime Troupe and for Emma to help dismantle the works afterwards. On the way home I discovered that Logos was having a sale on used cookbooks . . . so I bought seven. I don't usually do this. But the one I wanted, Elizabeth David's A Book of Middle Eastern Food, which I used to own but it fell apart into usuable little atoms,was not there. I found a less satisfactory book of hers which I got and two Paula Wofert books I didn't get. It's probably unreasonable but Wolfert's books annoy me. They're pretentious and largely unusable -- she uses too many rare ingredients and unreproduceable methods, and insists that the reader will never know what the dish is supposed to taste like anyway because they didn't get to eat it the way she did, in some place that she can't even tell us where it is. I mean! That's not a cookbook, it's a put-down. Anyway, there were a bunch of those little spiral-bound Time-Life "cooking of - - -" dealies for a dollar each and I got them. They're nice little books. And I think I got a Spanish cookbook and a Mediterranean vegetable book. Well. I do eat Mediterranean vegetables kind of a lot.
Maybe I am a Mediterranean vegetable.
I have to apply for a job tomorrow morning. There's a pretty decent chance I can get it. I don't want to jinx it, but it would be being a literacy coach for k-2 grades at a nice little school . . . on the other side of Watsonville. I better carpool for self-preservation again, if I can.
And I have to clear out this room -- which is the second-nastiest room in the house -- because we're geting a trio of lateral files tomorrow to build a new desk with. I stained and defted a 29" by 96" piece of fine oak plywood this morning, to be our new desk top.
Then this will be just about the best room in the house.
Oh, and I wrote a little over a thousand words today (and I don't feel bad about it being less than my peak, considering all the work I did in other areas of life -- I also racked the wine, which is weird: one batch is orange colored! -- but it seems like it will taste pretty good after I have sufficiently clarified and aged it). A funny thing happened: I came to a natural place to break the chapter, just a little shorter than they have been, and the work I had thought would happen, didn't: instead of the whole invasion by the other watchers happening, I got to this cliffhanger with the watchers just showing up and my guy's instinct kicking in and telling him to be afraid of them.
I'm pretty happy with the chapter -- unexpected things happened in it. My guy tries to manipulate the bad guys into a falling-out, but it doesn't work. Some maneuvering around breakfast and stuff.
I don't know if I'll get any writing done tomorrow, but if I do, I'll be starting with the invasion of the other watchers, and continuing with my guy's escape, and ending up with my guy's flight on the road. In order for it to be the right size for the rhythm of the chapters, that last bit will have to be a whole incident. Will he end up in the East Bay? Maybe.
The Grade IV pipers were about all in the same ballpark with Emma, so that was reassuring. Some of Jay's students were there, and we were looking out for them, but the only one we were sure of was Paul who did a very creditable ground and first variation of "Too Long in This Condition." Emma was pleased -- she knows the whole thing.
So there were all these SCA types walking around with full regalia and little daggers in their socks. Really. Emma would kind of like one of them, but when we looked at them they were pretty fancy and expensive and the littlest ones didn't seem to have functional blades (she'd be using it to trim her reeds and stuff, not to pick fights). We looked at sporrans too: the nice ones cost three hundred and more. There were sporrans made from whole badgers, and one of the musicians in the group Wicked Tinkers had one made of a bear paw, apparently. That seems ghoulish to me. The ones Emma liked were made like very fine shoes -- naturally she also liked the nicest ghillie brogues, but we didn't even see any of those for sale, so we didn't have to get sticker shock on them. We spent money anyways. She got a tartan sash, some small silver jewelry, and I got a CD of Wicked Tinkers and a pipe band compilation -- most of the piping CDs didn't even list the tunes by name! All they said was "strathspey, reel, march" or "Selection." Selection? What does that mean?
And there were stage mommies with their little Highland Fling dancing girls. It's funny watching the rigid, stereotyped recitals these have become, when you know that the dance was at one time a drunken revelry danced with great abandon and much shouting. Notice I don't say "the right way" or "really" or "authentic" anywhere in there. This thing we saw was real too, but different. And it's just -- just odd.
I've been thinking about meconnaissance since I read the article in Anthropology Today about the kamikaze pilots. The Monterey Games was just chockablock with it. ALl these different people talking about the same thing and meaning entirely different things by it. No thing that was there seemed to have the same meaning for more than three people at the same time. I'm surprised they can even get this thing going. WHy don't they bog down in a miasma of misunderstanding? For that matter, how can any group function, when there are so many different ways to understand each thing?
Other things in today's subject: we walked over to watch the Mime Troupe and for Emma to help dismantle the works afterwards. On the way home I discovered that Logos was having a sale on used cookbooks . . . so I bought seven. I don't usually do this. But the one I wanted, Elizabeth David's A Book of Middle Eastern Food, which I used to own but it fell apart into usuable little atoms,was not there. I found a less satisfactory book of hers which I got and two Paula Wofert books I didn't get. It's probably unreasonable but Wolfert's books annoy me. They're pretentious and largely unusable -- she uses too many rare ingredients and unreproduceable methods, and insists that the reader will never know what the dish is supposed to taste like anyway because they didn't get to eat it the way she did, in some place that she can't even tell us where it is. I mean! That's not a cookbook, it's a put-down. Anyway, there were a bunch of those little spiral-bound Time-Life "cooking of - - -" dealies for a dollar each and I got them. They're nice little books. And I think I got a Spanish cookbook and a Mediterranean vegetable book. Well. I do eat Mediterranean vegetables kind of a lot.
Maybe I am a Mediterranean vegetable.
I have to apply for a job tomorrow morning. There's a pretty decent chance I can get it. I don't want to jinx it, but it would be being a literacy coach for k-2 grades at a nice little school . . . on the other side of Watsonville. I better carpool for self-preservation again, if I can.
And I have to clear out this room -- which is the second-nastiest room in the house -- because we're geting a trio of lateral files tomorrow to build a new desk with. I stained and defted a 29" by 96" piece of fine oak plywood this morning, to be our new desk top.
Then this will be just about the best room in the house.
Oh, and I wrote a little over a thousand words today (and I don't feel bad about it being less than my peak, considering all the work I did in other areas of life -- I also racked the wine, which is weird: one batch is orange colored! -- but it seems like it will taste pretty good after I have sufficiently clarified and aged it). A funny thing happened: I came to a natural place to break the chapter, just a little shorter than they have been, and the work I had thought would happen, didn't: instead of the whole invasion by the other watchers happening, I got to this cliffhanger with the watchers just showing up and my guy's instinct kicking in and telling him to be afraid of them.
I'm pretty happy with the chapter -- unexpected things happened in it. My guy tries to manipulate the bad guys into a falling-out, but it doesn't work. Some maneuvering around breakfast and stuff.
I don't know if I'll get any writing done tomorrow, but if I do, I'll be starting with the invasion of the other watchers, and continuing with my guy's escape, and ending up with my guy's flight on the road. In order for it to be the right size for the rhythm of the chapters, that last bit will have to be a whole incident. Will he end up in the East Bay? Maybe.