Northwest Notes

Emailed two people regarding some research I'm doing for a writing project; planned my client's workout; booked a car for our Chicago trip; cleaned the shower tiles; worked on a writing project; pulled two five-gallon buckets of weeds or unwanted volunteer plants; practiced guitar on the patio ("Across the Universe"); biked to the gym; bought the book club book Rebecca at Fremont Place Books on the way there; trained my client and worked out; grocery shopped a little; biked home and grilled a steak; washed the dishes.

I only work part time but I feel like I'm pretty productive. I make a to do list each week, but I only put three or four things on it per day because it is normal to do so many more things, and each of them seems important.

Tomorrow's list includes planning a workout for my 6 PM class; practice guitar; and go through all the papers stacked on my desk and deal with them so that they won't be on my desk any more.

We hadn't seen a hummingbird in our yard in several weeks. I thought maybe she was raising young. It's about the right time of year for that, I think. A few days ago I saw one in front of the house. Just now I was sitting in the back yard and saw a male perch on the gangly viburnum by the patio. He reconnoitered for a minute, then flew to the slope garden and browsed the honeywort and knautia. Then he went to a clump of coral bells and sipped on those. I had not seen a hummingbird sip from any of those three plants before! When he was on the coral bells flowers, he was as high as 12 inches above the plant's leaves and I could see them vibrating from his wings fanning them.

We're about to have our house painted. The contractor came by on his Harley and parked it next to my scooter. They looked cute together.

Julie wants to build a bamboo tepee trellis in her yard that her daughter can play under, so she came over today and we cut a bunch of bamboo for her. It was pouring rain but we couldn't think of a better time to do this, so we put our rain pants on and enjoyed it.

So now my bamboo is nice and thinned out for the year. I like to be able to see through it.

Today I got outside for 45 minutes and dug another 15 feet of the outline of the new garden.

Looking down at it from the top level of the back yard:

Similar perspective, but in this one you can better see the woodchip bed in the front (background center of the photo, with a little tree in it in front of the red car). This new garden will be gravelly soil and will meet up with that woodchip bed and continue around to the right onto the front yard.

And here's a picture of that woodchip bed and tree, with three little dwarf conifers I bought last fall on sale and planted two days ago.

I love that crapapple tree because it leafs out so early. I might get another one for the front-yard portion of the new garden.

Yesterday it finally wasn't raining, so Tom mowed the lawn and I worked on the new garden excavation. I had drawn some curving bed shapes on the grass with spray paint, but I didn't like them. Freehand curves drawn on the ground just don't look good. So yesterday I attached a string to a stake, placed the stake in various places and used spray paint to draw partial-circle curves by following the end of the string. I held the string taut so it acted like a big compass.

I was so happy with the curves I drew that I decided to start digging along them, to outline the new beds before tilling out the rest of the grass inside them. First I used the flat shovel to perforate all along the paint line; then I went back and perforated a parallel line inside it, at a distance of the shovel width. Finally I cut across it every eight inches or so and popped out a square of grass. This went surprisingly fast. Slower is beating the turf chunks to get the extra soil out and moving them to a pile--which will eventually have to be hauled away, I think.

The picture is just the beginning--the new beds will extend all the way around to the front of the house, encompassing this bit of backyard, the whole south side yard, and a big part of the south half of the front yard.

I ran out of paint so I haven't yet drawn the border of the front portion of the garden. That will require a lot longer string, to make one great big sweeping curve rather than a tight circle like in this photo.



Can't wait to get back out there tomorrow and do some more digging!

I loved this short novel. It's mainly about a father and son and each's relationship with his own father. At times the plot stopped and the descriptive impressions rambled like Faulker, but eventually it would come together again. What I loved the most was the descriptions of rural natural scenes, such as Howard mesmerizing himself with the flowers in a meadow in front of an abandoned house, the trees growing out over the dirt roads with their crest of tall grass down their middles, and to top it all off this vision quest he undertakes as a youth by sitting chin-deep in a creek all day and all night:

"Howard eventually comes to the outlet at Tagg Pond. The day is unusually warm. He stoops to examine how the water has arranged silt and leaves around the stones in the pools beyond the first reaches of the outlet. The silt and water combine in an element that is half earth and half liquid. The appearance is that of a solid streambed. Howard takes off his father's boots and the three pairs of socks he is wearing and rolls up the legs of his pants. When he steps into the water, the mud yields, a phantom floor that gives way to the true ground with little more resistance than the water flowing over it.... The clouds of silt unfurl and the current carries them away.... After a time, small brook trout return to where he stands near the high grass and the bushes of the bank. Clusters of frog eggs float past him, some close enough to see the embryos inside. Howard traces the riverbed with his feet and finds a flat stone broad enough to sit on. He finds another stone to place in his lap, so that the water will not lift him. He sinks down into the silt and sits on the flat stone. The silt is so deep where the stone is that only his head rises above the water and only his neck rises above the silt. ...

"It is now the middle of the afternoon and Howard decides to sit this way through the entire night, until the sun rises the next morning. By the time the shadows begin to lengthen and creep across the water, the stream has healed itself back around him and he imagines that he will now be able to see the animals and the light and the water the way they are when he is not present, and that that might tell him something about his father."

It's been raining steadily most of the morning, but the squirrels and birds seem oblivious to it. A squirrel is running around burying stuff in the sloping flower bed, rooting strenuously and then patting down the mud with his little hands. A junco parked in the birdbath, splashing and then just sitting there as if soaking up the sheer joy of 50 degrees and raining. A pair of house finches came along and sat on the birdbath waiting for him to exit. I couldn't get the camera in time to capture the three of them up there.

Lots more juncos are foraging all over the yard, on the patio and in the gardens, along with  young robins who look grown up but have high peeping voices when they open their beaks. They keep picking at random things as if to test for edibility. There's a second and possibly a third pair of house finches up in the giant laburnum with a pair of song sparrows, and there's a wren on the patio. It keeps on raining. I wonder if the birds even are aware of it.

Can you spot the robin in this photo?

I'm planning a large new garden that will wrap around the south side of the house onto both the front and back. I'll have a wide packed-gravel path, gravelly dirt, and dwarf conifers--at least those are the plants I think I want. First I have to remove lots of sod and a small overgrown south-side flowerbed. I started yesterday by hand-digging the sod two feet out from a front (west side) planting bed that I'm preserving. I also moved a bunch of yard-potato rocks I'd scattered around at a lame attempt at cute edging years ago. And dug out about nine thousand invasive bluebells. So, that all took about three hours.

Today, after a workout at the gym, I got carried away with more shoveling. I used the flat shovel to edge a flowerbed in the other side of the front yard. I had killed and smothered the grass in the bed, but of course it has been growing in from the sides. Nancy told me about an edging method involving a V-shaped trench all the way around, exposing the edge of the turf and separating it from the soil of the flowerbed. So that's what I did today. It was labor intensive but it looks better and should last awhile--I hope.

What I'm really looking forward to is warmer weather so I can kill the big swaths of lawn that will become the new garden and path. After that I'll rototill, rake, excavate the path, and get the materials. Somewhere along the line the house needs to be painted too. Hard to believe it's been five years.

Here's a "before" photo of where the new garden will go. I was standing on the top level of the backyard, looking west toward the front, along the south side of the house. It will be a couple of big semicircles with the path, drain beds for the rainbarrels, and planting areas. There will be a lot less grass in this picture when this is done.

You can see where we've already worn a path. The bed to the left of the barrel will be dug out and absorbed into the new garden and the path will go right through it.

We bought two cupcakes yesterday from each of four local bakeries. 

 

The contenders were--below, clockwise from lower left:

Bella Dolce on Madison and MLK (the largest cupcakes; we bought a chocolate with purple frosting and a red velvet)

Cupcake Royale in Madrona (carrot cake and chocolate with salted-caramel frosting).

North Hill Bakery on 15th in Capitol Hill (chocolate with pink and chocolate with white), and

Madison Park Bakery (a mild gingerbread cake with white frosting and a vanilla with pink)

 

We ate the cupcakes over a two-day period, cutting each one in half. We voted for categories: Most Beautiful; Best Cake; Best Frosting; and Best Overall Cupcake.

 

The Winners:

Most Beautiful: Purple-Frosted Chocolate from Bella Dolce, tied with Pink with Pink Flower from North Hill

Best Cake: Bella Dolce; their two cakes tied each other.

Best Frosting: North Hill's Pink with Pink Flower.

And Best Overall Cupcake: Bella Dolce Purple-Frosted Chocolate. It stood out in our minds until the end, even though we ate it at our first sitting. Their Red Velvet was a close runner-up, so Bella is the huge winner! Hooray! It's also the closest one to our house!

Guitar practice is sometimes fun and rewarding, sometimes slow and ultimately rewarding, and sometimes frustrating. Recent research into musical and other types of mastery has shown that many, many hours of practice is the secret to mastery--not innate talent. And practice isn't necessarily fun.

Without a certain amount of reward coming often enough, practicing isn't worthwhile for hobbyists like me. This is what caused me to restart and give up the guitar over and over again between age 18 and about three years ago, with three years being the length of time I'd spend on it before dropping it yet again. So, these days, I've tried to figure out what rewards I require and what I can do to get there. Random practicing and strumming casually through songs I already know won't work, as I learned a long time ago.

I take a class that meets every two weeks. It's inspiring, fun, and social, but doesn't demand persistence on learning any one thing and doesn't hold us very accountable from one session to the next. I have to find these incentives elsewhere. So, through the guitar teacher, I met two other women students, and I meet with each of them about once a week to practice whatever songs we decide on. I'm not satisfied with our level of commitment because we move on too quickly to new songs. I'm always thinking about how to change this, and trying to dance away from the knowledge that we should start playing at open mikes if we really want to grow.

The thing that made me seek out these two guitar partners was seeing Alison Krauss and Robert Plant in concert last October 1. They were so electrifying, in spite of mostly tranquil song stylings, that I got obsessed with learning to sing harmony. I have a fair ear and voice, not great, but again the main thing is going to be PRACTICE, so I've decided to quit wondering if I'm "talented enough" to let anyone hear me singing. I'll just practice!! My two partners feel the same way, so we bump and weave our way through melody lines, declaring it not a crime to wander on and off key. Off-key singing and mistaken melody never killed anyone.

I've also slowly developed a guitar practice session agenda for myself. I naturally and compulsively document stuff, so in my Word-file songbook (where I paste song lyrics and fill in the chords as I figure them out), my first page is "Stuff to practice every day." Going through it all takes about 90 minutes of guitar time. This is what I have on the practice list now:

Warm up:
The root shape
"Running on Faith" (slow arpeggios)
Babe I'm Gonna Leave You intro (more varied arpeggios)
Triplet rhythm strums

Technique:
"I'm On Fire" palm-mute arpeggios; or non-ringing barre arpeggios on 3 and 4 strings; or "House of the Rising Sun"
"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" including whole (originally piano) intro
"Over the Hills and Far Away" entire intro

Artistic:
Everything Is Free (soloing on break) or other soloing over music
or
Harmony singing (at the moment, for the chorus of "Leaving on a Jet Plane")
or
Songwriting

Lead playing and harmony singing are tons harder than learning to strum and sing casually. When I practice those, I take breaks. It's key to have the chord changes memorized like the back of my hand in order to do either. That's a great excuse to listen to great songs over and over again. If I can learn to find good lead notes over chord changes, and learn to sing harmony a bit more easily and confidently, I think that's what will finally make me feel like a musician after 30 years of on and off guitar playing. Playing publicly is going to have to figure into that somewhere too. Yikes.