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Tuesday, August 22, 2006

light and water

Drove home heading into a freaky summer storm today -- saw it looming ahead of me as I chased it eastward, great sheets of rain darkening the sky to the north, the occasional bolt of lightning. While I was still on dry road, I saw there was a faint rainbow bridging the road ahead of me -- the red most visible, the blues and purples fading into the storm clouds.

Then I drove through where the storm had just been -- the road was wet, trees dripping. Finally, I was into the rain itself, but somehow the clouds were still ahead of me, and the sun was beating down on me just as sure as the rain. Steam was rising from the asphalt and the cars that passed heading in the other direction were kicking up spray -- and the spray and steam behind each car supported its own rainbow. No joke -- four cars went by me heading westward, trailing rainbows in their wake. Magnificent.

Saturday, August 19, 2006

The knife in my heart...

From the living room, my four-year-old shouts the score -- I'm in the computer room 'cause I can't stand to watch the game. "I know! I don't want to hear about it!" Why'd I teach him how to find all that info on the top of the TV screen?!
Gaaah!

Monday, August 14, 2006

Give us room to dance

When the weather started getting nice this spring, I took to taking hour-long walks at lunchtime. And I stopped getting up at 5:15 to hit the treadmill at the gym. So I pretty much haven't been doing much running at all this summer. Tonight, I took C. to swimming lessons, and decided I'd hop upstairs to run while she swam (there's a bank of treadmills overlooking the pool, so I can check out lessons and get my own exercise at the same time). I didn't know how it would go -- whether I'd conk out after 15 minutes, or what.

J threw some stuff on an mp3 player as I was getting ready to run out the door. "How fast do you want to go?" Uh -- pretty slow, actually. What's just above walking? "OK I'll throw a 148 bpm mix and a coupla 150 bpm mixes on."

I started with the 148 mix. A 4-minute taiko drum segment to start it off. It really hit the spot. Just the thing to run to while feeling big and slow -- the drums start rolling and all of a sudden you feel like you could knock trees over. Reminded me of a song C. and I used to sing along to by Ruth MacKenzie off her Kalevala album. Remembering that song prompted a nice trip over to the Northside website -- I really have to replace the Bukkene Bruse cd that was in my car's cd player when it got swiped....

We'll have to throw some nordic neo-folk stuff onto some of our running mixes and see how they work. Half of the stuff is in weird time signatures -- 5 or 7 beats per measure, or odd bars of a different time signature thrown into something that's straight 4/4. We'd probably be tripping all over the place...

Saturday, August 12, 2006

Hops


Now I just have to grow some barley and wheat...

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

D.I.Y. alert

I have GOT to try this...

The August issue of Sew News has instructions on how to make your own dress form. you start by donning a garbage bag (no, really!), then some strategically applied duct tape defines your form a bit, then you get some paper packing tape and draft some poor assistant to tape you up like this...

















They make a point of saying to tape your upper abdomen area last, so that you don't have any trouble breathing. Oh, and wear old clothes, because the next step is to cut the whole apparatus up the back and pry it off yrself.

Tape the pieces together, fill the arm and neckholes in with cardboard (the bottom, too) and cover it with muslin. They give instructions for making a pvc pipe stand for it too. The editor suggests getting a bunch of willing friends together and taping each other up. Sounds like a good excuse for a party!

Oh, and they also give instructions for making a detachable arm that can be pinned on to test sleeve fit...




















This is seriously the coolest thing I've seen in the past month. Even tops Alton Brown's homemade pop tart recipe!