What Are You Listening to? Wednesday

Chuck has lived a lot of places in his lifetime.

He was born in Rhode Island. Then he lived in Hartford, Connecticut. Spent most of his childhood in West Springfield, Massachusetts. And when he was a young teenager, his family moved to Cleveland.

Chuck loved Cleveland. He's still friends with buddies he met 30 years ago. Chuck only spent a couple of years there before he joined the Marines and moved to North Carolina, but the city really made an impression on him.

He even cheers for the Browns and the Indians. Even though they suck.

*cough*


This is a photo of Chuck when he was about 15 years old, 1976-ish. His sister Laura is on the left, and his friend Dave Anderson is playing the guitar on the vintage 70's couch and Chuck is clutching his "Houses of the Holy" record.



Chuck was a hot 15-year-old, wasn't he?

I would totally be arrested if I was a teacher. Good thing I never became a teacher.



I had the pleasure of meeting his friend Dave the first year I lived here in NC.

Dave "Symphony Boy" Anderson is the principal bass player in the Louisiana Philharmonic in New Orleans.



When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, his house in New Orleans was completely flooded, all his family's belongings trashed.

Dave's wife is a harpist in the orchestra, she lost 5 harps in the storm. They were both on the road at that time, Dave was playing in Kansas City. His wife had just enough time to get back to New Orleans, rescue the pets, and one harp.

They were displaced for a year. Dave found temporary work with an orchestra in Minnesota, while his wife and kids stayed in Durham, NC.

In June of 2006, they invited us to a goodbye party in Durham. They were finally returning to New Orleans, and starting over. Chuck had just gone through his last round of chemo. We didn't have a lot of money at that time, and Chuck felt guilty about going even though we live only two hours away. I convinced him to go, since he hadn't seen Dave in years, and I'd heard so much about him that I wanted to meet him.

These are some of the pictures:

Dave and his wife were nice enough to let us sleep at their house for the night in Durham, after the party. This is the harp Dave's wife saved, in the living room of that house. I was very struck by this instrument...it was HUGE in this little room. Talk about impressed!




A pic with Dave, me, and a dude that played in the North Carolina Symphony. I think his name was...Lenny? And he was from....Latvia? I think. We got to see him play in a special performance by the symphony at a park here in Jacksonville, NC. Very cool.




This pic is my favourite. I think it's very striking. With Chuck's bald chemo head and that crazy looking bass...I think that part of that bass (the neck?) was from one that Dave had that was wrecked in Katrina, and he made it over.

LOVE that bass. Cool is the word.



Dave is a very eclectic musician. Definitely classically trained. His dad was a bass trombonist in the Cleveland Orchestra.

Dave is a composer, both of classical pieces and jazz pieces.

This is video of one of the LPO performances they did. They were playing Verdi, but they snuck in some Stanley Clarke (a jazz musician) fingering as a private musician joke...Dave is the one straight down on the end...he's wearing a cap in most of the other pictures I posted, I was afraid you wouldn't recognize him ;)




Edith, I think that even you might have liked that video!

He also did an NPR interview a couple of years ago, and you can see what he sounds like. He's very down to earth. He talks about his 210 year old bass, and his experience with Hurricane Katrina. It's a long interview, so no pressure to listen. But it's neat...

http://www.jockamofeenanay.com/communitygumbo/audio/0711/cg_daveanderson_lpo_071103_64k.mp3



I just love how he marries classical with jazz. And I'm not even a huge fan of jazz! He was known for playing with the symphony, and afterwards going to the jazz clubs and playing in his tux.

And, he's one of the nicest, smiliest people I've ever met. I'm very glad we had the experience in Durham.

This last video is one of the song 'Skinny', by Alex Bevan. The video is some silly thing made up by some dude on Youtube, it's the only way I could find the song in it's original studio form. But the song is really cool. I love the lyrics, the guy in the song is totally Chuck....

"I'm a skinny little boy, from Cleveland, Ohio...come to chase your women, and drink your beer..."





It's worth a listen. Hope you enjoyed my little bio about Dave.

They Got Little Cars That Go Beep, Beep, Beep

Recently The Idiot Gardener wrote about how he was laughed at in the pub for mentioning that he had been sowing vegetable seed so late in the season.

Usually, I'm not above pointing and laughing at the silly things my friends do. Especially when we're out having a pint.

But...

I usually plant sunflowers every year. This year, I had decided not to.

Wayyyyy back, when I started this blog in January, I wrote a post called A Vegetable Garden's Lament. It chronicled the destruction of our former veggie garden. A garden that was crap, really.

We were planning a new one! We were thinking big!

Sadly, I had delusions of grandeur. Much like a schizophrenic. Maybe next time I'll wear a foil hat...




The above vision did not come to fruition (I hate the word fruition, why would I use it?)

I thought, what's the point of planting sunflowers this year? The former garden had all grown over into lawn (and I use that term loosely, our lawn is just a tightly grown clusterfuck of weeds). I would have to get out the shovel and break ground once again to make even the smallest of gardens.

April passed. May passed. June...

SUNFLOWERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They sprang to mind, and they haunted my dreams.

"Whhhyy didn't yoooou plaaant meeeee?"



I woke up in a cold sweat. Had I missed my window for planting?

I raced down to the garden center. Found a packet of seeds. Looked at the planting times for my area of the United States.

"March-June"

Yes! I wasn't too late!

I spent all afternoon digging a small sunflower garden in the second week of June. In the HOTTEST part of the summer. Like an idiot. Or should I say, like an Idiot?

They bloomed last week!


Aren't they....!


Short?





I mean *cough* I MEANT them to be this way! You've heard of Russian Mammoth sunflowers? These are....um....Canadian Pygmy sunflowers!!

Yeah.

Ok, fine. You got me. I admit it. I planted my Mammoths way to late and I got these stubby little excuses for sunflowers.

But aren't they kind of pretty if I photograph them the right way?



That's better.

They kind of make me think of that song "Short People" by Randy Newman, which is what the post title is from...



Short sunflowers ain't got no reason to live....


...but I like 'em.

Blog Feature Friday ~ Greenhorn In The Garden

So.


Hurricane Earl.


*crickets*


Hurricane Earl = LAME.

Yesterday I went down to Emerald Isle beach to check out the surfers, I mean the waves, at about 11:30am. They weren't destructive or anything, but they were kinda kickin'.


More surfers were sitting on their boards watching the waves than were actually surfing. This one kept striding back and forth with his board, trying to look studly.



The seagull in the foreground of this shot was PISSED OFF with me for some reason. I thought he was gonna peck my eyes out. He was squawking like I owed him money.

I tried really hard to make my eyes not look like old, stinky shrimp...I think I succeeded.



I was fooling with the settings on my camera and got this silly shot...(but I kind of like it anyway...)



Earl was really a disappointment. Barely got any rain or wind. At least we didn't board up our windows or anything. Chuck and I went and ate lunch at The Bogue House and we saw that some people in Carteret County were doing just that.

Cape Hatteras got quite a bit of weather though. One of our local news reporters got pounded by a wave on air...hilarious.

This is my attempt at making Earl look more scary and less lame.



Didn't work.

You know what's NOT lame???

My buddy Turling's gardening blog Greenhorn In The Garden!

Great sense of humour. Always has a project going. He's a proud family man and a football hooligan.

The post that really sucked me into his blog was "We Are Gardeners. We Are Not Savages."

And then I loved the guy! Ssh, don't tell Chuck!



As a person who likes to mix her passion about gardening with her other interests, how could I not like the one about gardening and baseball? And you get to see a picture of the author!

Lately, Turling's been leaving more and more time in between posts. Most would assume he was caught up in the everyday adventure of real life, like this guy.



Not me. I think he's a lazy bastard!

Turling, you must pay attention to your family less, and regale us with your gardening forays more often! Your children will forgive you once they're old enough to realize what a star you are in the blogosphere.

Go read Turling's blog. The last post was one of the most creative I've seen in a long time.

What Are You Listening To? Wednesday

Fell in love with this The Kinks' "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" when I first heard it.

This is a shortened live 1973 version of the 1966 song.



"Let's really have a laugh. No one's here for art.' Hehe. Ray Davies is a cheeky monkey. I love that guy.

The lyrics paint such a vivid picture of a flamboyant slave to clothing trends...fitting that it's song by a bunch of lads wearing things like purple velvet coats or a blue shirt with red pants. Ah, the 70's...



Fun Fact: Singer Ray Davies was shot in the leg in New Orleans in 2004 whilst chasing down a dude that had snatched his companion's purse. Just found that out, and I thought I'd share.

Oh, and he has a daughter with Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders. Another fun fact.

I've played guitar mediocrely since I was 14, and this is one of my favourite songs to butcher.

It's impossible to be frowning whilst singing out loud to this song. Had a bad day? I did.

Belt it out!

'Oh yes he is!...Oh yes HE IS!'

I feel better already :)

Starry Night

I'm a hurricane tracker!!



Not officially, I don't have my own little farty plane that flies into the eye of the storm (which would be AWESOME), but I'm very interested in the weather.

It's true! I'm really nerdy about it. My mum thought I was a little weirdo, because most kids watched the Flintstones while they were eating their breakfast, getting ready for school.

I lay on the couch watching the Weather Channel till the last possible second I had to get dressed and walk the 5 minutes to school.



When you look at the Atlantic map on the National Hurricane Center Website, it's very artsy and swirly. Like the brushstrokes of a Van Gogh painting.





Chuck thinks I'm tempting fate and a hurricane will crash down on us and wipe us out by even looking at that website. When I give him a tropical storm update, he looks like he has the urge to go put on hip-waders.

Chuck's been through a few crazy hurricanes. I sometimes wonder why he bothered to stay in Coastal NC if he's so freaked out by them.

When Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, I had just come back to Canada from visiting Chuck. My grandpa was dying of lung cancer, so my brother Kurt and I trekked up to Northern Saskatchewan from Edmonton to hold vigil with my mum and the rest of my extended family.

I remember sitting in my grandma's living room, my grandpa there in a hospital-type bed...watching all the horrific events unfolding on the news because all we could do was wait and watch TV. It was like a movie, but it was real. Surreal. I don't mean at all to make light of the damage hurricanes can do, I'm just very interested in how they work.

In Edmonton, the worst things we had to worry about weather-wise were tornadoes and blizzards.

Tornadoes didn't happen very often in the city. The worst one on record was July 31, 1987...I didn't have to even look that date up because it was so infamous in Edmonton history. I was six, being the flower-girl in my uncle's out of town wedding at the time. My dad and my two older brothers were home though, and watched the whole thing from the outskirts of Edmonton. Luckily it didn't harm them.

Snowstorms were par for the course, they were bad every year. You kind of just got used to digging yourself out of your driveway so that you could get to work.

Did you know that a hurricane is unlikely to affect land west of Bermuda if it forms east of 35 degrees longitude?? No?? Well, there you are, you just learned something.

Danielle passed us by, but we may or may not get affected by the edges of Hurricane Earl. Wind? Rain? Nothing? Tomorrow we'll get a better picture of where it'll hit exactly.

Weather is fascinating. And meterologists on the news are always the weirdest people on the program. Perfect fit for me!!



*sigh* ...Just a bookseller with a dream. A crazy weather dream.

Don't You Mind People Grinnin' In Your Face

A few days ago I was in the drugstore, buying saline solution and insoles for my shoes.

I'm a contact lens wearer, and I like my feet to be comfy and odor-free. As any reasonable person would be.

I had just had some lunch, and I was enjoying my morning off before yet another grueling night at work.

I walked up to the counter to pay for my items, and there was an older man up there ringing up purchases. I was wearing a shirt that said 'Old Navy' on it, and he mumbled some comment about it. I couldn't really understand what he was saying, but I supposed he was trying to be friendly, so I nodded and smiled as he rung up my purchase.

He then intelligably said, 'You must be a Marine wife.'

Understandable mistake, almost every woman in this town is a Marine wife or Marine daughter. I smiled and told him no, my husband was not a Marine. Even though I had no idea what that had to do with my t-shirt.

He said with a voice full of pity, 'Oh, that's too bad.'

WTF is that supposed to mean, right?

Since you don't live in this area, I'll tell you exactly what it means. The old man looked at me, and saw a relatively young woman and assumed I was married to a relatively young man.

When I said my husband wasn't a Marine, he assumed my husband was a relatively young man that should stop being a pussy and join the service to fight for his country. I know that he was inferring this because I'd had a similar conversation before with another retired Marine.

In that conversation (which started in the same way), I had to explain that my husband is 48 and has already voluntarily done his time in the Marines, oh, in the late 70's to early 80's. That he's now too old to even be drafted. Not to mention he only has a-lung-and-a-stump. That always gets me a bulging eye stare and another question as to how old I am.

I feel like I shouldn't have to explain this every time!

Instant day ruiner. I'll be minding my own business, going about my day. And someone will say something stupid that just makes me want to bitch slap them.



Should stupid things that people say ruin my day? Probably not. I let this one go, and let the old man think what he thinks. Because I just get tired of explaining. At least it gives me something to talk about at the dinner table, and on this blog.



Stupidity doesn't just extend to other people. I've been guilty of saying something that I didn't think about first. Usually it's just some innuendo in the wrong company.

Or the one time I said the *cough*c-word*cough* too loudly in conversation with Chuck and another guy at a party. There just happened to be a lull in the loud background noise. All the women in the room turned to glare at me with angry-laser-eyes (by c-word I don't mean 'cancer' or 'courgettes'...or 'cough' for that matter).

Hey, the only people I hung out with before that were fresh-off-the-boat, Gaelic Football playing Irish guys. They ubiquitously used the c-word as 'hello,' 'goodbye,' and 'I love you, man'. I became immune.



Why don't we as humans just shut up before we put our collective feet in our collective mouths? My friend Bub has written a couple of blog posts about that very topic, most recently this one.

This last Christmas season, I was very busy helping customers check out. The next person in line had their back turned, talking to his girlfriend/wife. They had their infant child with them in a stroller. I caught a snippet of their conversation with the people behind them, in which they were discussing the age of their new baby.

'Sir? I can help you now, ' I said.

He turned around, and I saw that he was a she. I think it was an understandable mistake. This person was stout, wearing man's clothes, man's rings, a very short haircut and had a passibly mannish voice. All of which didn't quite cover up the fact that she was a woman. Of course I didn't think, and just started talking.

'Oh, I'm so sorry!' said I.

'Oh, no, don't worry about it! I'm completely not offended,' said she.

What I said next should have been this:

'Oh, ok, I'm glad. Did you find everything you were looking for today?'

Instead of that, I just kept on saying stupid shit. I think my feet taste pretty damn good. Pour some ketchup over those bitches.

I replied,'You know, my husband has long hair, and people will sometimes mistake him for a woman if they're not looking too closely and call him ma'am. He hates that!' *laughing a little too loudly and wildly*

She was really very nice, and said again not to worry about it. Her girlfriend/wife was looking at me like I was an idiot.

And I felt like one, because then I thought...what if she's not just a lesbian, but really trying to live as a man? I felt terrible that I didn't just mistake her as a man! That's a long, tough process to go through. I don't want to set anyone back or hurt anyone's feelings!!

Yes, this is the way my brain works.

Because I've had my feelings hurt a few times by well-meaning people. The worst is when people feel the need to congratulate me on the upcoming birth of my baby.

What's that, Dear Readers? You didn't know I was pregnant?



Exactly. This actually happens to me frequently, more frequently than I'd like. I know I'm a bit chunky, but I don't feel like I look pregnant fat!

Usually it will be a man that makes this mistake, and I try to be understanding and not take it to heart. The last time this happened, it was a woman.

When I told her I wasn't pregnant, she said 'Oh, well don't worry. I love to eat too!'

I wanted to cry and hit her at the same time.

Kyna's Public Service Announcement For The Year #2:

Unless you have your head between a woman's legs in the delivery room, getting ready to catch a kid...scissors in one hand, celebratory cigar in the other... DO NOT congratulate a woman on her pregnancy before she mentions it herself. It might get you a knuckle sandwich. And after she's done hitting you, she'll go eat a sandwich. A big one. Because you've just ruined her self-esteem. And you should feel really bad about it.

What Are You Listening To? Wednesday

The Carolina Chocolate Drops are one of my new favourite bands.



I came across this CD when it was an in-store play earlier this year. It has the reputation of being one of the most hated CD's we've ever had playing at Barnes & Noble (the most hated being the 'Mamma Mia' soundtrack). I would actually have my co-workers calling me up and asking me to change it ASAP.

I, on the other hand, LOVE it. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea. I won't be offended if you tell me you hate it, by all means do. I bet 90% of you will.

But listen to the woman sing! She has a beautiful, powerful voice...she can sing her ASS off. Like, her ass actually falls off, gets on a stool next to her, picks up a banjo, and starts playing.

'Hit 'Em Up Style' really caught my attention. The lyrics are awesome. Look at that chick go on the violin!



If you don't like bluegrass, I don't think you'll like 'Cornbread and Butterbeans' at all. But I'm going to include it anyway just in case you do.



Notice how they switch instruments. The three musicians play about 4 or five instruments each. They call come from very musical backgrounds. The beat-boxing dude's mother was an opera singer and a cellist, and his sister plays the piano.

This video is a six minute mini-documentary about how the three young black musicians all met and came to play this kind of music together. Cool to hear where their influences came from, what their backgrounds are like. They're very interesting people.



I'm passionate about this versatile band. This partcular CD has bluegrass, celtic, folk, jazz, and blues tunes on it. I've hand-sold a lot of them at the store.

They're playing in Durham in Septemeber, at Duke University. I'd really love to attend, and I'm hoping Chuck and I will make a last minute decision and just go. Depends on work. Damn work. ;)