Author: girl

music I thought I’d forgotten

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One of my gifts this year was Mental Jewelry on CD. The band, Live, is one of my favorite bands, largely on the strength of this first album. I have a weakness for debut albums, believing they represent an artist’s hopes and dreams that they’ve been tweaking and polishing for years up until the point of recording. Plus, they frequently remain the best of a band’s discography, unless the artist dramatically changes their sound.

At any rate, Live is one of my favorite bands, and Mental Jewelry is one of my all-time favorite albums, and up until now I have only had the album dubbed on tape. It’s true that I have two copies, each given to me by the two people I was closest to that year. Which is perhaps a clue as to my affinity for the album: it reflects my ethics and sensibilities regarding living in the world in many ways. I suppose that’s why the two people who knew me best in 1992 passed it along. To some degree, selections from their first album have an energy similar to that of other recordings from that year: EMF, Jesus Jones, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. Which is fine by me, I am of my age and I liked all of them as well. Just not as much as I still like Live.

I started hankering to have a copy of Mental Jewelry on CD after seeing them at Meadowbrook this past summer. I happened to be in LaSalle, and to see an ad for the concert on TV. As it happened, I could have picked up a voucher at any gas station in the Detroit area and gone for five bucks, but I didn’t; I bought a single ticket and showed up early to pick it up at the box office. The guy in the seat next to me had done the same thing—he’d also driven nearly 4 hours to come to the show, and had never seen them in concert before. This made the fourth time I’d seen them, and it was definitely the biggest venue. Well, the Palace was comparable, but they were the opener.

I am a bad fan. Despite having loved the music for 15 years now, I knew very little about them, and still couldn’t really tell you who’s who in the band. I’ve always known they were my age, I remembered that much from having interviewed them after the show at my college my first year. But I only recently learned they were from Pennsylvania, and I couldn’t tell you any kind of trivia about them. I do know that they’ve been together as a band since junior high, and that may explain some of the fondness I have for them. That aspect reminds me of people I know who’ve been playing together just about that long, and have succeeded in leaving the garage sound behind. I have to say, knowing a lot of people who played music in garages growing up pretty much ruined me for garage bands in my adult life.

But, back to Live. I got the CD as a gift, I listened to it on our car trip across the Midwest, and I thought to myself ‘I must have listened to this tape A Lot, because I know every word of every song and I would have sworn I couldn’t even tell you what was on this album with any degree of reliability.’ I still couldn’t tell you the names of half of the songs, but the brain cells that contain the actual music have not been reallocated after all.

So now, this week, I’ve been listening to the CD on my wee shuffle. I’m sure I’ll get sick of it again at some point. So far, though, all it’s really done is give me a strong craving to hear the version of ‘I Walk the Line’ that they performed at the concert last summer. Which in turn is giving me a strong craving to see the film again; one of the rare instances when I thoroughly enjoyment Reese’s acting, in addition to being impressed with both of their voices. Even the interjections of my friends to the tune of ‘he wasn’t that good-looking, was he? I don’t remember him looking like Joaquin Phoenix, did he? Can we find a picture online?’ didn’t take away my appreciation.

But June Carter Cash is a topic for another day.

music I thought I’d forgotten

1st cookie date — chocolate chip peanut butter cookies

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My main holiday gift to my partner this year was a cookbook, Great Cookies. It is, as the title leads one to believe, a cookbook entirely consisting of cookie recipes, over 300 of them. The author does include in the ‘cookie’ moniker some types of bars (i.e. Florentines), balls (i.e. peanut butter ones), and culturally specific confections (i.e. Palmiers) that others might call sweets or pastries. I’m just sayin’.

While I’m sure we could have happily just read cookie recipes all year long, the gift also included a weekly date to make cookies together. He will get to pick the recipe each week (because it’s his gift) and I will make sure we have the ingredients and show him how to, for example, beat egg whites and things like that. I imagine we’ll max out my technical expertise somewhere in, let’s say, April, at which point we’ll either make simpler recipes or learn together.

I hope that all of this will be facilitated by the new electric hand mixer and non-slip counter pad I recently acquired, with my birthday gift certificate from his mother. I’ve never owned an electric mixer before, much to the surprise and consternation of our friend who got tagged to mix the buttercream frosting for our holiday cookies last month. I witnessed many puzzled looks of pain and concentration on his face as he creamed the butter with a wooden spoon and then resorted to the potato masher (an implement only purchased this past year as well; I used to just use a fork) to meet his electric mixer frosting standards. In the end, the frosting was great, completely uniform in texture and color, which nudged me—along with our collective sore shoulders—to look into an electric mixer.

In the end, I’m glad I did, because Great Cookies presumes you have one and doesn’t use instructions like ‘cream’ but instead ‘mix on medium speed for 2 minutes.’ Am I alone in believing that you don’t need an electric mixer to bake, just a strong arm? I didn’t realize that they had become so much the norm.

At any rate, tonight was our first cookie date, making it also the first time we used the mixer. We made chocolate chip peanut butter cookies (p. 36). The recipe was more labor intensive than the ones we’re used to (my pfeffernusse recipe with a gazillion ingredients comes closest), but we followed the instructions and used the food processor for the sugars and the mixer for the butter. I had a little trouble with keeping the mixer steady while creaming the butter, but I expect it will get easier as I get more used to handling it. Later steps went more smoothly, and our shoulders certainly aren’t as sore as they might have been in the past with all this mixing.

The cookies themselves are tasty, and they look nice and even, with uniform consistency. We were both expecting a cookie that was more ‘peanut butter cookie with chocolate chips’ and we got ‘chocolate chip cookie with peanut flavor.’ Given that, we probably won’t make this cookie again; it’s a lot of steps for a chocolate chip cookie. And, while it tastes nice, I put it in the ‘I’d eat it if I wanted a cookie, but I wouldn’t get in any fistfights over it’ category.

overall ratings:
ease of preparation: 3.5
match to expectations: 2.5
‘the cookie itself’: 3

1st cookie date — chocolate chip peanut butter cookies

The Salt Roads, by Nalo Hopkinson

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The first book I’ve finished this year is Nalo Hopkinson‘s The Salt Roads. It was labeled (in some descriptions) as fantasy, but I would describe it more as historical and/or speculative fiction.

A friend whom I admire greatly is a fan of Hopkinson’s, which is what led me to pick up this book. In the end, I appreciated it, but I can’t say that I loved it. The book is structured around three distinct narratives, in three distinct time periods and locations, connected by the ‘fantasy’ aspect, the voice of a goddess. I certainly didn’t dislike it, however I didn’t find any of the three main narratives compelling. I did become more engaged toward the end of the novel, when the linking narrative of the goddess builds to a tension point. In the end, though, the book simply ends, with very little to indicate why these people or these portions of life narrative were made to constitute the story. This element is why I would classify this book more as historical fiction: the selection of the characters seems to have been made along lines of historical interest, and the characters themselves never come fully alive in their own right. So, it is interesting in the abstract to read of Baudelaire’s mistress, a slave midwife in the prelude to the Haitian uprisings, and the myth of an Egyptian saint in the 4th century, but I struggled to move beyond an historical interest in their futures.

Nalo Hopkinson is compared to Edwidge Danticat, who writes historical fiction of Haiti as well, and to Toni Morrison. Personally, I greatly prefer Danticat’s historical fiction set in Haiti; I find it much more alive, and Krik? Krak! is one of my favorite short story collections. In fact, I can credit that book with opening me up to the possibility of enjoying short story collections in general.

I’ll certainly read more of Hopkinson, though; perhaps one of her earlier books will grab me more. This particular one I’d give a 7/10.

The Salt Roads, by Nalo Hopkinson

catching up with the local pond

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I didn’t know when we bought this house that I would be getting a local pond as part of the package, and I count myself very lucky.

The pond is about a mile from our house, with a paved path encircling it that is about 2/10 of a mile around (it’s a small pond). I’m not sure if it was human-built at one point, or if it was natural. It collects storm water from the main road nearby, and it has a run-off ditch itself, that flows into the nearby creek, which allows it to maintain a constant depth. There is a small island at one end of the pond, where the Mallards nest and the resident Great Blue Heron resides. There aren’t any swallow nesting boxes, a common sight in other ponds like this one, but there are a couple of stakes with netting clustered around them that the turtles use as sunning spots.

Today, a flock of Canada Geese was hanging out, with a lone white goose among them. It could have been a Snow Goose, although we couldn’t see any black on its rear (and from what I could tell, its legs looked slightly more yellow than pink). If not a Snow Goose, it was likely a local domesticated escapee, possibly a Ross’s Goose; it was plenty windy enough last night to have blown over a small goose hutch.

We also saw a single turtle sunning itself on the grass at the edge of the pond. I didn’t have my turtle book with me, but I did bring my little binoculars and was therefore able to see the red patch on the side of its head quite clearly, marking it as a Red-eared Slider (I discovered after looking it up at home in my field guide). It’s a non-indigenous, invasive species locally, but I still enjoyed catching sight of it.

I’m thinking that I should start a turtle lifelist as well, since this is the third new type of turtle I’ve seen at the pond. The first, Mud Turtles, are common, I’d just never seen them before. The second was a Snapping Turtle, which was an exciting find. It took me a while to register that the rock behind the turtle was in fact the shell, and the ‘turtle’ I’d been seeing was only its head.

I hope to get my digital camera repaired soon, so that I can take photos on my visits to the pond. One of these days I’ll stay until dusk, and hopefully catch a flock of geese taking off.

catching up with the local pond

setting intentions for 2007

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Welcome, new year!

I have quite a few big intentions for 2007. They mostly involve creating daily habits: daily walking, daily zazen, daily yoga, daily vitamins, daily reading, daily writing. I could add ‘daily drinking coffee’ and ‘daily watching the birds out my back window,’ but those are habits I already have pretty well established. I could also add: weekly cooking, weekly art-making, weekly yard-beautifying. To sum up: it is my intention in 2007 to create the life I want to be living.

I’m proud of myself for fending off another offer to return to teach in the spring (my beloved little honors class). I don’t know what kind of employment, if any, I’ll seek out this year, but this spring will mark the first time I’ve not taught college for two semesters in a row in 9 years. That seems like an important achievement for me.

One thing is certain, though. I’m definitely looking forward to getting this year on the road and seeing what 2007 has in store for me.

setting intentions for 2007