Peeking into the rock

I quickly found a map which I ought to have taken a photo of for later reference. It was a big sign and had everything marked out on it except for a "You are here." So I had to study it and my surroundings for a while to figure out where I was on the map and where the other things were (the bus station I had come from and the castle, mainly). I guess most Czech towns have a Kosmonaut street if they did any expanding back in the Soviet days? But in Strakonice, there's a lot of "Dudacky" (bagpipe) naming action too. Of course, being Czechia, or probably just being Central Europe, there is a Bagpipe beer as well.

(why am I putting in these annoying links to the pictures instead of embedding them politely in the text? Because I don't have convenient access to my graphics editor so as to make the pictures a nice polite size and I don't want to bloat your browser)

( a long dissertation that only touches on the smallest piece of the festival )

Successful mission: go out on my own, find bankomat, get money, buy maple syrup for Frank and Hana at the DM Drogerie. A drogerie is a store that sells shampoo, body oil, shower gel, suntan lotion, very small packages of tampons, deodorant, inexpensive and hygeinic cosmetics, baby food, and a wall of "natural foods." Drugs are bought at the Lekarna, which was closed. I wanted to get glucosamine because my fingernails started crumbling again, and a non-drolwsy antihistamine because I lost my bet with the universe so I'm allergic to the guinea pigs. Oh well, I thought it migfht happen, because my rat allergy extended to mice already. It's not nearly as bad with the guinea pigs as the rats. If it had been pet rats I would have walked in the door and been hit by a wave of toxicity. With the pigs oit tookm a half-hour of cuddling before the reaction set in.

Also had my first two typical linguistic interactions. Did I mention that even though I drag my dictionary and declension book with me everywhere I basically have given up on actually learfning Czech? I just get along and it's all fine.

First liguistic interaction type was in the Drogerie. I explaimned that I don't speak Czech, I speak English, and the young woman switches right over with a solicitous air. Czechs know they have a difficult language and they are often very gentle with foreigners.

The other typical interaction was on my way back. I was taking pictures of a plant that I think is related to gooseberries and currants or maybe to heather. It has those pitcher shaped little flowers and the berries are a plausible shape. A Czech woman of about my age came up and told me a lo about the plant, happily acknowledging and then ignoring my apology for not speaking Czech. She used the word for currants, rybiz, but she alspo stepped on two berries while saying something pointed, so I think she was telling me that they l.ook like currants but they aren;t edible. Finally she asked me if I was Russian.

As I say, this is two of the more typlical linguistic interactions I get in Prague. I am not complaining. Nobody has ever endangered or even inconvenced me by refusing to believe I don't understand them, and I think it's hilarious that so many people here think I am Russian (or Portuguese).

I am having lethal connectivity issues that we don't understand. I think it's a compatibility issue, but I can't be more specific. What happens is that most of the time my computer is unable to use the wireless network here, and for several hours today it couldn't even see it. We tried hooking the computer up to the modem with a wire, but apparently the computer doesn't have the capability of using a wired connection? For anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of hours, though, I can get online just fine. I usually forget what task I set out to do with that when it happens, though.

It doesn't matter too much, though. I can use Frank's computer when I need to send things in.

I finished reading the galleys for Outside suspiciously quickly and now I am sure I did it wrong. I only found one typographical error and one continuity error that was totally my fault and easy to fix. But I'm just going to give it a cross-eyed glance again on Tuesday and send it back and hope for the best.

And I'm also making slow but steady progress on the all-new Conduit (written from scratch with a different presentation and predicted to be novella length).

I did take some pictures today but I'll probably upload them the day after tomorrow. I'm going to Strakonice for the day tomorrow to listen to bagpipes. I will keep trying to get Hana to go with me but I think she is not as enamored of bagpipes as I am. Frank is flying to the UK to get registered for work at temporary doctor agencies, and to pick up a car they have bought there. Things are starting to move fast on that front after sitting still for way too long.

Instrumental music is usually good for writing to because I don't get distracted by the words.  So I put on a Wicked Tinkers CD.

How in the <i>hell</i> do you get bent notes with a bagpipe?  I am not imagining this.  I am not interpreting grace notes as bent notes, these are definitely bent notes.  On highland pipes, it says here.  No electronic manipulation that I know if.

The heretical bastard Aaron Shaw has a bass tappan (drum) accompaniment to his  very scary, very creepy piobrochead ("A Flame of Wrath," commemmorating the composer. Donald Mor, burning all the people of a village in their homes to avenge the death of his brother, Squinting Patrick).  It just makes it creepier and scarier.  

If you're a sucker for bagpipe pictures, go here. I uploaded five pictures from the Winter concert.

Other local news: the big wave season has started and several insane surfers are walking around with special pagers waiting to be taken by helicopter to the water off the coast kind of to the north of here -- "Mavericks." It's an international surfing competition that takes place in 3 or maybe 4 places -- Mavericks, some place in Hawaii, a place in Baja California, and maybe one in Australia? Some of the world's best surfers are tapped to compete for a big prize each year, and part of the deal is riding the biggest waves of the year.

Less local observation: if you're ever involved with a capital case in California -- that is, if you're ever accused of murder -- cry a lot. The reason the jury in the Scott Peterson case decided to kill him before the trial was even over was because "he showed no emotion." Just remember that, okay? (Of course Scott Peterson is scum of the earth, a sociopath, a piece of work, but that's not why he's been sentenced to a life in prison waiting to be killed -- hardly any of the death row guys actually get executed -- it's because he didn't cry at the trial)

Oh, and yesterday? Yesterday I was professional. I mailed a story to Polyphony 5 -- "Dog in the City," which therefore is not going on the website like I thought it was six months ago.

I'm planning on being very professional, at least intermittently.

The Santa Cruz Band Review is over! My feet hurt, my throat hurts, and I'm tired. But happy. We got those bands on the street and they played their dear little hearts out.

I noticed before how many of the bands in "our circuit" (in Northern/Central California) have "Scottish Style" bands (drum major wears a kilt and a sash and a great big shaggy hat and marks time with a great tall staff thing with an orb at the top. But today I noticed that a lot more of them, bands which have their drum majors in pants, have their color guard in plaid. We're just a plaidy old circuit.

All the bands looked good. Maybe two were actually late -- a few minutes late. One didn't show. Which meant that fifty-two bands marched through town from the high school to the Boardwalk. The Boardwalk is why they all come, of course. The Seaside Company gives tickets to the participating bands, and that means that the Boardwalk has three hours of hundreds of teenagers from all over the state swarming all over -- past the free rides, there's the arcade with all the games, the food (if you can call it that), the salt-water taffy store, the souvenir stores -- they make a bundle, on a weekend which is well past the summer rush. And they cultivate loyal customers.

Now I'm having lunch -- two golden beets, microwave-roasted, with mayonaise (my guilty pleasure), and eggs with that Japanese rice sprinkle stuff which is largely seaweed and sesame seeds.

two weeks after I started it. And to think I started out writing a chapter a day.

This weekend has been sort of busy, however. Friday and Saturday were mostly given over to the Pleasanton Games. The Caledonian Club has been putting on these games, according to their material, for 139 years -- does that mean since 1865? It was all very large and disorienting and strange. Emma's event was on Friday, before the games actually began. The disappointing thing was that the Grade 1 (professional) piobaireachd competition was at the same time, so the Grade IV competitors, who are students really, couldn't listen to the top guys do their thing. Emma's grandparents came and listened and then took us to lunch at a strange and interesting restaurant called Blue Agave Club, which was technically good food but weird -- tequila in all the sauces and sauces on the burritos. We got Emma's score sheet which had no score or placement numbers on it and comments like "generally very nicely played" and then something in cantareachd (the syllable jargon pipers use to express the music when they're talking about it) and then something utterly illegible. One of Jay's other students placed and had to go back on Sunday to compete again. Emma was just as glad to only go back on Saturday, with the assignment of listening to Canadian pipe bands (the unofficial theme of the games was Canada; we also listened to a kilt-rock band called Kinship from BC). We listened to some bands, though I don't know if any of them were Canadian. We also ran into a passel of folks from town, including members of the SC high school pipe corps, which meant that Emma spent the time we were watching the Grade I band competition critiquing the mallet work with our former tenor drummer who is coaching our current drummers, and I spent that same time with Sarah's father, sharing in his delighted discovery of the bass drummers' strategies in these bands. He's learning bass drum with Jay's band, where Sarah also plays.

We settled another controversy, in that we found a not-too-exorbitant sporran (crotch purse thing) which Emma liked almost as much as the little rabbit one, which also fit the description of the kind that Jay wants her to have if she's in his band next year. Simple, tassles, Celtic knotwork on the flap -- but smooth leather. Emma says she has to go to at least enough more of these games to get the little sgian dubh dagger thing, the ghillie brogue shoe things, the wide belt, and I forget what else, one at a time.

Um. She's going to compete next in our own backyard, at the Loch Lomond Games .

Also my son came home, unarrested and unbeaten. He mostly demonstrated with the labor guys, since he was tagging along with his friend's union (graduate students).

And other than that -- I have reorganized yet more large chunks of kitchen, producing two bags of garbage -- mostly old shelf paper -- and a bag of stuff for the charities. I am stripping paint. I am stirring wine.

And now I'm getting on with it.

I have also a pinched goddamned nerve in my shoulder, causing nerve compresion in my left hand. No, it's not carpal tunnel -- that causes compression on the nerve that feeds the thumb side. This is mid palm and the pinky side.

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.