Rockin guitars shared in Olympia
I had two tickets tonight to the Los Lobos acoustic concert as the Performing Arts Center in Olympia. Each year I get a pair of season tickets and then get various of my friends to come along to the shows. This time, I just couldn’t find anyone that was free. While I was really looking forward to this concert, it was seeming a lot less fun on my own, but I figured I would have a good time anyway, so I headed downtown.
I had an hour to kill before the show and had not had dinner, so I stopped in at a local coffee bar to get a bite. That extra ticket was really burning a hole in my pocket – 3rd row seats to a really hot, sold out show. And sitting in this cafe, a bunch of college students who probably couldn’t afford the relatively steep $40 price. Finishing up my dinner, I gave the ticket to the barrista and told her to choose someone to give it to – I didn’t want to choose and I wanted it to be a surprise, I figured it would be just too awkward to try to do it myself. She thought that would be fun and agreed, and I took off and headed for the theater.
For a while I watched the door, wondering who they’d given it to and hoping they had followed through. It was an interesting crowd, the arts patrons in Olympia are all white-haired and such, but you just know they were Deadheads and rocked out once upon a time :D I bumped into a few people I know professionally, which always seems to happen. I saw lots of young men with their fathers too, and more earringed guys in leather and jeans than usual. But no-one who seemed like the right person.
I headed to my seat, and there I found a young man with a guitar and backpack – one of the many young musicians in Olympia. His guitar was beautiful and obviously his prized possession. He turned out to be from a family of musicians, knew a lot about the band, and had always wanted to see them. He was homeless and had just spent the last of his money, which was not at all obvious given the well-cared-for guitar case, his clean clothes, sketchbooks (he was an artist too) and overall niceness. He had left his wallet in the cafe, and when he went back to get it, they gave him the ticket – it’s hard for me to imagine a better choice.
He was totally excited about the concert and so was I. On the stage were rows and rows of guitars of all imaginable types. The band was truly hot and talented, one of those bands that can morph from sweet Latin ballads with romantic voice, classical guitar, and tenor sax/accordian duets, to hard-driving southwestern rock, to fairly spacy Grateful Dead-inspired transitions. They spent a good part of the concert playing acoustic, but as the night went on, trended toward Latin rock, finally getting the sold-out concert hall to stand up and dance (one of my few quibbles with this venue is that they have tons of great dance bands but no way to really dance). They got all the ladies up on the stage, and the white-haired one in front was putting the teenage kids to shame :)
A great night. I really had a good time, and am thanking the inspiration that brought me good company for the concert and no doubt a totally unexpected surprise for him. Something about Olympia – where things like that seem normal. I’ve had more good times with strangers since I moved here than in the last 5 years put together :)
Inaugural impressions
Random walk through the inauguration…
From Obama’s speech, the quote that struck me the hardest: “… we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” Always what I have liked about Obama – he says what needs saying.
At the exact moment when Obama became President (12 noon), he was listening to the beautiful music of Itzhac Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Anthony McGill, and Gabriela Montero. Nothing could have been more fitting.
They had the courage to walk part of the parade route. I have to admit I was holding my breath. I am so glad they did, and that they are unafraid.
I received a beautiful embossed invitation to the inauguration, and even though I couldn’t go, I want to keep it. This, from a person who never keeps ANYTHING. I still might keep it.
I never watch TV, but even I can tell that the ads are unique – they’re about health care, green energy, the rights of workers to have a better life, grass-roots organizing, sustainable product cycles. It’s amazing that even advertising is being shaped by Obama’s vision. I remember during the election the major ad campaign for “clean coal”. My favorite ad of inauguration day is the sham ad by coal executives from Al Gore’s group, gently funny enough to be straight out of SNL (“just leave global warming to us”), ending with the tagline “There’s no such thing as clean coal.”
And all day I was thinking, “I can’t wait to see what he does tomorrow.”
A gang of appliances
Yes, they’re ganging up on me. In the last week, five of my appliances got together and decided to revolt. First the washing machine, then the toilet stopped working (fortunately, not my only toilet). Consoling myself with Netflix, the DVD player stopped, just refused, to give me any quarter. Thankfully, my multimedia laptop was up to the job – a small victory. In retaliation, I put my washing machine up on Freecycle, because the problem with it seemed pretty serious. Maybe there would be a handy-person out there who would want to fix it… Heading to bed, I found that my bathroom sink had decided to chip – just all at once – the enamel chipping off, leaving unsightly black spots. Even the sink was in on it!
Having what seemed like a serious reply to my washing machine ad, I decided to show them all what would happen if they didn’t behave. Over came a very nice handyman and his friend with a truck, and off they went with the washing machine. Peering back behind it, into the mysterious spaces where you never want to look if you can help it, I found that the dryer, too, was rebellious. The exhaust hose was all disconnected! Which might explain why there was far more lint than there should have been in that space.
Sigh… I hasten to point out at this point, that this is not my fault. This is not my house. Or rather it is, but these are not my appliances, but those I inherited when I bought the house. Perhaps that explains why they don’t like me, though the DVD player should know better. It could be that they overheard me talking about replacing the electric stove with a gas one, and tried to teach me a lesson. Well, we’ll show them who’s boss around here… sorta.
The internet was my next stop. I knew exactly what washing machine I wanted – the exact same one I had in my old house. Ordered that from Sears, check. Did some research on DVD players – this one has been the weak link for a while, since I bought a new HDTV to watch movies on, but the DVD player was just an inexpensive normal one that doesn’t do HD. Blu-Ray, here I come. Ordered from Amazon.com, check.
Now for the trip to the hardware store to do the stuff I have to do myself… moan. A little bit more internet research to find out stuff that probably every guy on earth knows, like how to disconnect a recalcitrant rusty washer hose that the installers insist you get off before they come, and how to replace a toilet lever, and what parts I need to replace the dryer duct. Having my little list of stuff together, off I go to Ace Hardware.
It’s been kind of a lot, fitting this into an already extremely busy week. I get there, and suddenly am exhausted. I stand in the store like a deer in the headlights, searching the cleaning aisle for WD40, having no idea where it would be :D (It cleans rust off right? It should be in the cleaning aisle…) I must have looked lost and confused, a typical female entering the handyman lair for the first time. Still, I don’t protest when a very nice young store clerk leads me around to find everything. I peer at the toilet handles for a while, not remembering AT ALL whether the lever is on the front or the side, details, details. I choose, hoping it will be right (it was). I even buy a tool (gasp) for getting the hose off the spigot once the rust is removed. Home with my purchases, I kind of arrange them around the house where they go, saving the actual use of them for later, when I get the next burst of adventurousness :D
Still, I get tired of not being able to use my toilet, so that one gets tackled first. This turns out to be ridiculously easy, and I am heartened. Put the lever through the little hole and attach the chain, no problem! Flush. Yay~! Or so I thought… until I go to bed. Which is when I notice that the toilet is flushing itself every half hour or so, waking me up. But of course, I’m half asleep and have no idea how to fix this, so I keep going back to sleep. In that mysterious middle-of-the-night way, some information must have filtered up from the unused mechanical part of my brain, which informed me at 2:30 in the morning that this might be a very easy fix, simply a matter of moving the chain further up the lever (like if it was pulled a little too tight and a tiny bit of water was getting in there). Up I get and move the chain, and go back to bed. Some time later I realize the water is still running, rushing really, and I can’t leave it like that. Up I get again, figuring maybe I’ll just disconnect it so I can sleep :D But now I realize I’ve put it too far up the lever, and it’s not closing at all. There’s one place in the middle that looks like it will work, and it does, and finally, blissful sleep. Apparently the toilet, at least, has forgiven me.
Today, I figure I had better hurry up and tackle the washer and dryer before the Sears guy comes on Sunday. Spray WD40 on the hose connection, check. That will get dealt with tomorrow. Now, the dryer. Hmm…. just how do you attach these things anyway? Little plastic strips are supposed to hold the hose to the duct, but it’s obvious after only a bit of testing that this will result in exactly the same outcome I had before. Fortunately, I also bought, TA-DA! duct tape, lol. I always thought that was kind of a cheesy way to attach things, but hey, it works. I’m not going to have another chance to get back there easily, so I HOPE it really works.
Time to go get my new DVD player out of the box. That, at least, was designed to work with my model of TV, and this I feel more comfortable with. I even bought the right cable to connect it with. So I’m sure that will go well. Right? The washing machine is on Sears… not touching that and glad they’re doing it. Maybe things will start to feel like they’re back to normal around here soon. I hope.
25 Things About Me
Joanna Powell Colbert tagged me!
Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are to write a blog with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you. If you don’t tag 25 people, no worries! It’s all for fun.
25 Things About Me
1. I played concert oboe daily through the end of graduate school, in band, orchestra, and musicals – as well as clarinet, saxophone, and recorder. Never could play the flute, even though it has the same fingering as the oboe – can’t get the hang of the mouthpiece! I hope to play wooden recorder in a medieval or renaissance music group when I retire.
2. I never could fit into high school. My crowd was an older group of hard-core stoners already out of school, and at the same time, I got straight A’s. Only two of us went to University, and we stayed good friends for 20 years.
3. My dorm at Caltech was a throwback to the 60s – free love and the Grateful Dead. Mixed with relativity, three-dimensional calculus, synthetic chemistry, and spectroscopy. O.o A quarter-hit of acid with your physics exam, anyone?
4. Somehow I survived all that and became a relatively normal person :D … but with a keen appreciation and enjoyment of the stranger things in life. I haven’t touched a drug since I graduated, and don’t care to. Except coffee :)
5. My early research days were doing spectroscopic research on the colors of gemstones and on Martian mineralogy. I can honestly say I am one of the few people in the world that has had a piece of Mars on my desk.
6. I was put on the environmental path by the extreme pollution of Boston at that time, which I had not previously encountered growing up in Seattle. Not to mention that the Martian space program was tanking both here and in the USSR and so there wasn’t much future in continuing research in that field. As it turned out, my chemistry and geology background were useful, and I moved to UCLA to finish out my doctorate.
7. I got involved in one of the first cleanup programs in US (and the world) to formally deal with contamination in rivers, harbors, and bays. This led to a job at the Washington State Department of Ecology, to teaching numerous training programs around the country, and finally enabled my consulting business.
8. I love working for myself. I’m not sure I could ever go back to a traditional employer. Because I work at home, having just the right home environment is very important to me – it’s not just a place I come home to at night.
9. I’m so happy for the internet – it has made my current career possible and provides all kinds of opportunities for earning extra income should the need ever arise. It makes me feel confident that I will never have to go back to traditional work or “retire” if I need to keep working. When I wrote my dissertation, I had to borrow one of the few portable computers in the department!! As an undergrad, PCs (as opposed to large centralized mainframes) were making their first appearances on campus.
10. My first real job was processing fish tickets (payroll) for fishermen in Seattle returning from Alaska, for Whitney-Fidalgo Seafoods. Each ticket showed how much of which fish were caught and where. This turns out to be pretty typical of Seattle – almost every family still had some tie to Alaska.
11. When I was growing up, my Mom did astrology, numerology, and past life regression and was very active in the New Age community. Like any kid, this eventually led to me having a kind of backlash toward New Age philosophy. I still can’t handle most of the “trappings” of New Age (crystals, angels, etc.) and find many of the beliefs hard to accept (as with most religions), though I have come to look for the value in all religions and philosophies and have become firmly agnostic.
12. I do, though, have a love of tarot cards. I think it was the images that originally drew me. I have long loved card systems of all kinds, as well as games, and philosophy, and tarot is all three. The structure and cycles represented by the archetypal images in the deck are fascinating. Forget fortune-telling – there are serious insights to be had. If you doubt it, ask, and I’ll tell you more about it.
13. It was probably inevitable, given the above, that I would become a Magic card collector at some point in the game’s early history. At that time I had a lot of disposable income, and began trading the cards on eBay. I bought out whole stores and repackaged and resold the cards, and assembled a near-mint collection of all the sets from the very beginning, along with many extremely rare promotional cards. I kept those sets and unique cards when I had sold off everything else. Later, when I became single, they were worth so much that they paid for half of the down-payment for my new house… bought by a Microsoft collector.
14. I married a college boyfriend and we had a good marriage for a long time – 17 years. In the end, communication, work, and other problems resulted in a parting of the ways, amicable. I am proud of the fact that we managed our dissolution without lawyers and without hard feelings.
15. I now do, among other things, mediations of divorces and child custody issues – and I know just how bad it could be! I also facilitate large interagency workgroups, generally in the environmental field. You’d be amazed how many environmentally beneficial projects are held up because agencies don’t agree or can’t get organized.
16. Most of my career, I worked on cleaning up contaminated sites, and developing programs to do so, including developing the numeric cleanup standards that determine what are safe levels of chemicals in the environment for fish, wildlife, and people eating fish. I’m transitioning out of this now, into more people-oriented work described above.
17. I do expert legal consulting on the effects of wood waste in the marine environment, among other weird specialized topics. One of my cases finally went to trial (most of them settle) two years ago. Let’s just say the timber industry is not fond of me.
18. One of my stranger income streams is reverse-outsourced from India – I freelance for an editorial firm there that edits scientific research articles for journal publication, written by scientists whose first language is not English. Most of my papers are by Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, or Japanese authors who are required to publish in English. Can you imagine if you had to publish in Korean? Topics include medicine, genetics, biology, chemistry, crop research, geology, industrial science, and occasionally social research. So far, I’m finding the genetics ones the hardest – though I’m definitely updating my knowledge in some of these fields!
19. I’ve gotten very interested in sustainable food issues – taking it a step beyond recycling, buying organic, etc. I am working on buying more locally and growing my own vegetables, among other things.
20. I recently moved to a smaller house in Olympia, which is just the right size for me, is in a forested neighborhood, with neighbors that are all women~! (at least the adults). This is so good for me. I love Olympia and all the things to do here.
21. I have a cat named Sophie who’s a bit anti-social, though not with me. If you spend a lot of time here, she’ll love you too. She has a good memory, but is just careful who she gets involved with :D
22. I’ve always loved games, in every format – board games, card games, word games, puzzles, computer games. Yes, I even get lost in the world of MMORPs at times – mainly because it provides a way for me to spend real time with my brother and sister-in-law, two of my favorite people, who live in CA. I have a local board gaming group I hang out with in Tacoma, where I can really let my inner geek out :)
23. Cooking is another passion – though I am frustrated at the moment because the electric stove in my new house does not cook well. It’s never the same as gas to start with, and I am beginning to suspect it is also about 25 degrees under its stated heat. Nothing comes out right. I can’t wait to replace it with a gas one – but that requires running gas to the kitchen and is a project high on my list for the new year.
24. Late last summer I finally got to try out kayaking – there are many marinas in Olympia that rent kayaks, including one very near me. I loved it! I will be back on the water as soon as the weather allows, and hope to find someone to go with.
25. Last but not least… I’ve got two weeks at a condo in Puerto Vallarta each year, right in mid-town on the beach, high in the air with rafts of pelicans and frigatebirds sailing by. Puerto Vallarta has the best sunsets in the world, and the sound of the waves is so soothing that it puts me instantly to sleep. I was convinced to get it not least because i always come home so rested, even if I go and work on the balcony. Someday I hope to live in Latin America and am exploring my options year by year. :)
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