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My adventures...
Firemen just came walking through my building. Apparently that annoying beeping I was hearing off in the distance was a smoke detector in another one of the condo units in this building. I'd think that if one went off they all would. Should I have had something telling me 'danger, danger' in my part of the building?
I felt a little self-conscious about the 2000+ Victrola and Edison records spread all across the kitchen floor, and the fact that I was still in my pyjamas at 7:30, but at the same time I'm sure they've seen everything in the course of their work. As to the provenance of the old recordings (and I'm not saying 'vinyl' because he assures me they're mostly Condensite and shellac) I'm sure Eor will want to post about this score/chore in great detail, so I'll leave it at ... we spent all day, yesterday, retrieving them from someone's barn an hour's drive away, and mice have been using their paper covers for housing material for generations. One wonders if they are now musically gifted mice. It was an adventure. When we first arrived at this lovely homestead from the 1700s (practically a thorp, with about a dozen buildings) and looked over the few boxes they had set out in the yard I played Spock to his Kirk and tried to give all the logical reasons he shouldn't do this. Did you ever notice Spock never wins these debates? Eor later characterized music which is being neglected as having the same pull on him that a stray cat would have on me - it needs to be taken care of, and he doesn't trust that someone else will do it. But as we were loading the van (with many, many more disks than we'd originally thought, because the boxes were just a small sampling) he said I'd forgotten one factor as I was giving my dissuading arguments: That this sort of thing, finding a dusty treasure trove in an old barn, is often the initial event in a ghost story. I said that not being logical it hadn't occurred to me, but now that he mentioned it I didn't want to think about it, and he laughed at me and said I had too much imagination to be Spock.
And now I've said much more than I'd intended. He's very excited, and has been throwing himself into learning all about how to clean these up and get them recorded into digital media, so hasn't had time to write about the whole thing, yet. I've teased him a little about being on a manic swing, because he always says he's bipolar, and he said maybe that really was the case because he's feeling pretty good with these steroids he's on for the poison ivy(or whatever).
Anyhow, that whole adventure happened the morning after I got home at half past midnight from my Cousin P's party which unexpectedly went mobile. We started at my cousin's house with the intended feast of bread (I brought my own) and really good beef/barley soup (I completely forgot barley is something I shouldn't eat), and then my cousins P and D and their friend D decided to go out for dancing and karaoke. I thought it was quite amusing and adorable that one of the women who was there (T) had a 15(ish?) year old daughter who insisted Mom had to go out dancing.
"Karaoke with Asian people, that would be so much fun!"
"It's not Asian people," Mom pointed out, "It's The Asia. There's never any Asian people at The Asia."
And then Daughter wanted to straighten Mom's hair.
"No, you're not straightening my hair. You can put some makeup on me, okay?"
"But I've wanted to straighten your hair for so long, and how can you not let me on this wonderful night of singing?" Yup, she had Mom wrapped around her little finger, and hair straightening happened. (Later she even texted Mom while we were out and told her how beautiful she had looked on her way out. Going to get everything she wants? I'll bet. :))
I didn't remember at all where The Asia was, so I took my car and was following another of my cousin's friends over hill and dale in the dark through the wooded farmland and small towns of the New Hampshire / Maine border and going "Where the hell am I!?" all the way there. We went through two towns and each time I thought "oh, we must be almost there..." and then we'd leave the town again. Then we had to swerve to avoid guys pushing rolling chairs along the side of the road (at 9:30 in the evening!) and suddenly we were there - apparently they were stealing chairs from The Asia. :)
When we were kids it was a restaurant which was known for being a melange of Chinese/Polynesian Americanized 'cuisine,' and the cheesy 70's Chinese decor is still there, which makes an interesting enough backdrop for the horrible dance music mixed very badly by a DJ who seems to delight in screwing up the dancers just as they start to find the rhythm. "Let's equalize the room and make EVERYONE look foolish" seems to be his motto. There was one guy there who could actually dance salsa, and the DJ even managed to screw him up. My cousins seem to adore him, but it's kind of their local place, I guess.
Everyone put in karaoke requests, and I felt I should really follow suit, even though I wasn't drinking and don't know any popular songs. And don't sing very often, which my cousins do: at this place, in various choruses all their lives, and as bit parts in the backgrounds of plays. At least, I figured, everyone else was drinking, so they might not notice how horrible I would be. I found a song I thought I pretty much knew, even though I know a different version - "Everyday," by Buddy Holly. I know the Beat Soup version. Which has a much longer intro, apparently, because I had no idea the song had even started until the little lyrics thing was through half of the first line. The DJ stuck me up there first, maybe because I'd put in my request last, I don't know... or maybe so that I wouldn't hear my Cousin D. sing and get intimidated, because he's heard her and knows she's good. Or at least she certainly has "White Rabbit" wired, as she proved. And, completely unfairly, they project the lyrics so everyone in the room can read them! It's not like everyone has to know if you screw up, or even purposely change the words. Anyhow, I had told him beforehand that if he wanted to screw with it and mix in some reggae he was welcome to do so, and I think that's what he did for the second half of the song, which made me feel a lot more comfortable and let me kick in a bit more. Cousin P. said I did well after I'd figured out the different version, but I think she was just helping me not feel like so much of an idiot. :)
And then I left, before 11pm, because it was going to be such a long drive back. Cousin P gave me very detailed and careful instructions as to how to get to Portsmouth and jump on 95 to get back home, but apparently I can't follow instructions. I immediately screwed up, ending up wandering through the boonies again all by myself, looking for route numbers. And it took a long time to find them. I knew I was headed the wrong direction at first, by where the moon was, but oddly when I found a route number, finally, it was leading me back into places I'd known as a kid, and very shortly everything started looking familiar. I'd gone out of my way, but looped right back around to P's house and through the town that was our ancestral home as though I had the nose of a homing pigeon.
After I was solid on where I was going I pulled into the only gas station in the middle of the familiar little town and washed my windshield because I was having trouble with reflection, and some truck pulled in after me, right up to the pumps, as though they thought I must know where I was going and the place might still be open even though it looked quite closed. I felt as though I had led them astray. And then I saw two other cars doing the wandering-slowly-stopping-randomly-in-the-road-and-turning-around behavior, so I began to feel as though it was Night of the Lost People and I wasn't at all unusual.
I was fine driving, but as soon as I walked in the door I wanted to fall asleep right on the kitchen counter.
I felt a little self-conscious about the 2000+ Victrola and Edison records spread all across the kitchen floor, and the fact that I was still in my pyjamas at 7:30, but at the same time I'm sure they've seen everything in the course of their work. As to the provenance of the old recordings (and I'm not saying 'vinyl' because he assures me they're mostly Condensite and shellac) I'm sure Eor will want to post about this score/chore in great detail, so I'll leave it at ... we spent all day, yesterday, retrieving them from someone's barn an hour's drive away, and mice have been using their paper covers for housing material for generations. One wonders if they are now musically gifted mice. It was an adventure. When we first arrived at this lovely homestead from the 1700s (practically a thorp, with about a dozen buildings) and looked over the few boxes they had set out in the yard I played Spock to his Kirk and tried to give all the logical reasons he shouldn't do this. Did you ever notice Spock never wins these debates? Eor later characterized music which is being neglected as having the same pull on him that a stray cat would have on me - it needs to be taken care of, and he doesn't trust that someone else will do it. But as we were loading the van (with many, many more disks than we'd originally thought, because the boxes were just a small sampling) he said I'd forgotten one factor as I was giving my dissuading arguments: That this sort of thing, finding a dusty treasure trove in an old barn, is often the initial event in a ghost story. I said that not being logical it hadn't occurred to me, but now that he mentioned it I didn't want to think about it, and he laughed at me and said I had too much imagination to be Spock.
And now I've said much more than I'd intended. He's very excited, and has been throwing himself into learning all about how to clean these up and get them recorded into digital media, so hasn't had time to write about the whole thing, yet. I've teased him a little about being on a manic swing, because he always says he's bipolar, and he said maybe that really was the case because he's feeling pretty good with these steroids he's on for the poison ivy(or whatever).
Anyhow, that whole adventure happened the morning after I got home at half past midnight from my Cousin P's party which unexpectedly went mobile. We started at my cousin's house with the intended feast of bread (I brought my own) and really good beef/barley soup (I completely forgot barley is something I shouldn't eat), and then my cousins P and D and their friend D decided to go out for dancing and karaoke. I thought it was quite amusing and adorable that one of the women who was there (T) had a 15(ish?) year old daughter who insisted Mom had to go out dancing.
"Karaoke with Asian people, that would be so much fun!"
"It's not Asian people," Mom pointed out, "It's The Asia. There's never any Asian people at The Asia."
And then Daughter wanted to straighten Mom's hair.
"No, you're not straightening my hair. You can put some makeup on me, okay?"
"But I've wanted to straighten your hair for so long, and how can you not let me on this wonderful night of singing?" Yup, she had Mom wrapped around her little finger, and hair straightening happened. (Later she even texted Mom while we were out and told her how beautiful she had looked on her way out. Going to get everything she wants? I'll bet. :))
I didn't remember at all where The Asia was, so I took my car and was following another of my cousin's friends over hill and dale in the dark through the wooded farmland and small towns of the New Hampshire / Maine border and going "Where the hell am I!?" all the way there. We went through two towns and each time I thought "oh, we must be almost there..." and then we'd leave the town again. Then we had to swerve to avoid guys pushing rolling chairs along the side of the road (at 9:30 in the evening!) and suddenly we were there - apparently they were stealing chairs from The Asia. :)
When we were kids it was a restaurant which was known for being a melange of Chinese/Polynesian Americanized 'cuisine,' and the cheesy 70's Chinese decor is still there, which makes an interesting enough backdrop for the horrible dance music mixed very badly by a DJ who seems to delight in screwing up the dancers just as they start to find the rhythm. "Let's equalize the room and make EVERYONE look foolish" seems to be his motto. There was one guy there who could actually dance salsa, and the DJ even managed to screw him up. My cousins seem to adore him, but it's kind of their local place, I guess.
Everyone put in karaoke requests, and I felt I should really follow suit, even though I wasn't drinking and don't know any popular songs. And don't sing very often, which my cousins do: at this place, in various choruses all their lives, and as bit parts in the backgrounds of plays. At least, I figured, everyone else was drinking, so they might not notice how horrible I would be. I found a song I thought I pretty much knew, even though I know a different version - "Everyday," by Buddy Holly. I know the Beat Soup version. Which has a much longer intro, apparently, because I had no idea the song had even started until the little lyrics thing was through half of the first line. The DJ stuck me up there first, maybe because I'd put in my request last, I don't know... or maybe so that I wouldn't hear my Cousin D. sing and get intimidated, because he's heard her and knows she's good. Or at least she certainly has "White Rabbit" wired, as she proved. And, completely unfairly, they project the lyrics so everyone in the room can read them! It's not like everyone has to know if you screw up, or even purposely change the words. Anyhow, I had told him beforehand that if he wanted to screw with it and mix in some reggae he was welcome to do so, and I think that's what he did for the second half of the song, which made me feel a lot more comfortable and let me kick in a bit more. Cousin P. said I did well after I'd figured out the different version, but I think she was just helping me not feel like so much of an idiot. :)
And then I left, before 11pm, because it was going to be such a long drive back. Cousin P gave me very detailed and careful instructions as to how to get to Portsmouth and jump on 95 to get back home, but apparently I can't follow instructions. I immediately screwed up, ending up wandering through the boonies again all by myself, looking for route numbers. And it took a long time to find them. I knew I was headed the wrong direction at first, by where the moon was, but oddly when I found a route number, finally, it was leading me back into places I'd known as a kid, and very shortly everything started looking familiar. I'd gone out of my way, but looped right back around to P's house and through the town that was our ancestral home as though I had the nose of a homing pigeon.
After I was solid on where I was going I pulled into the only gas station in the middle of the familiar little town and washed my windshield because I was having trouble with reflection, and some truck pulled in after me, right up to the pumps, as though they thought I must know where I was going and the place might still be open even though it looked quite closed. I felt as though I had led them astray. And then I saw two other cars doing the wandering-slowly-stopping-randomly-in-the-road-and-turning-around behavior, so I began to feel as though it was Night of the Lost People and I wasn't at all unusual.
I was fine driving, but as soon as I walked in the door I wanted to fall asleep right on the kitchen counter.