Jam Report #67: 1/20/08

[annathepiper]

And, even though it's a week late, a short Jam Report to cover last weekend's Jam.

The main highlight of this Jam was cflute and technoshaman bringing their friend tibicina along, since she'd come up from California to attend Conflikt. She made the fourth flute player in the room, which was kind of neat--but as with previous iterations of this particular jamming group, I kept to the guitar and left the fluting to Dara and Callie and Rebecca. I had no brain for much else besides holding my guitar for occasional strumming and smiling sleepily at what the others were doing.

Though it must be said that as soon as I found out that Rebecca was also a Great Big Sea fan, I perked right up for a bit. It's amazing and funny how fast the "ZOMG you not only know who GBS are but actually like them too?!" reaction will zap some life into me, even when I'm drooping from several weeks of radiation therapy. ;) We milked that for quite a bit of pleasant chatting before we finally got down to the business of playing stuff.

And since I was pretty much useless for driving the song selection, we had a lot of playing around with Dara's pieces this time. With three, count 'em, three flute players on hand, we learned that "Mononoke Neko" works surprisingly well as a round. There was interesting geeking about who actually ought to be playing what instrument, especially since Callie's were more tunable than Dara's are.

We played with "Cherry Tree Station" as well, which gave Dara the chance to try to explain to Callie and Rebecca what she envisioned for a multi-part rendering of this song. That was very fun to listen to even if I didn't have anything to contribute, between Dara doing the familiar bits on her instrument, Callie doing deeper and more sustained things on her big flute to symbolize the rhythms of the trains, and Rebecca dropping in interesting little improved bits to symbolize the more incidental noises of the station.

I did get hauled back into playing a bit again though since, with another GBS fan in attendance, we kinda had to do some GBS. So we did both "Trois Navires de Ble" (which seems to have settled into A at least when sung by me) and "Lukey" (which we did in G, but which I really also need to be doing in A).

I think it was shortly after that that we called it Pie, and I must say that the raspberry lemonade pie I picked up from the Thriftway was super-tasty.

Next jam: one week from tomorrow, which will be Sunday the 3rd. If all goes well I should have more brain back by then!

Comments

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Oh, my, raspberry lemonade pie / that would taste like summertime sky
I have to make some, I wonder why /
{but since this is really a clerihue} /
further speculations on the recipe would be excessively sly

[annathepiper]

Hee!

It was extremely tasty pie. Sort of a meringue, I guess, only with raspberries as well as lemon. That particular store is proving very much a tasty source of pie.

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

I hadn't tried their baked-goods department yet; did, however, realise that their produce section was way better than the QFC in Brier (which is expensive and rather limited in its selections). Oh, and the coffee selection at Thriftway is way better too -- the Vashon Island coffee beans are particularly marvellous. Hmm, must be time to ramble southward, as the coffee supply is running short.

On meringue pies, I am informed by reliable spouses that my lemon-strawberry pie (with the cut strawberries placed so as to interlock and form an engineered structural stiffener to the pie) is well-regarded. Was your raspberry pie containing actual berries, or was it more a puree?

[annathepiper]

It was more of a puree thing, with bits of whipped cream on top to decorate. Very tasty.

Mm, lemon-strawberry sounds good too!

I am not a coffee drinker, but it would not surprise me in the least to hear tell that Thriftway's selection is good. Dara and I tend to go there to shop instead of the nearer Albertsons at Lake Forest Park just because the selection in general is just so much better.

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Well, it all goes round into circles, since it was Dara who spoke highly of the Thriftway up Ballinger hill in the midst of a discussion about state highway numbers (I get 522 and 527 mixed up), and although I can get around Brambleville and Lake Forest Park okay, I don't yet know all the street names and so gave them my own: Ballinger Way became the Diagonal Slope, and Lake City Way is the First Right Counter Level. Cedar Way is the Sump Road because it runs down a big balka. Yeah, it's wierd but it works, mnemonically. I rather like Dara's "Cat Whisker Road" though I don't have a really clear head-map of its orientation, yet. (And I've been weekending in Bramble-burb for what, 8 years now? Yeah, slow learner...)

Where is the Albertson's in LFP, anyway? I have some general-use coupons that they sent me in apology for screwing up, and I should probably burn them off next weekend before they time out. Don't shop Albertson's much any more because in the other branches I've visited they set their freezer temperature too high and the frozen stuff often isn't. I don't much care for oxymoronic ice-cream.... //^_^\\

'Kay, back to the cesium mines, have to finish a map this evening. It's a pay-cheque, y'know.

[annathepiper]

The Albertsons is the shop in the Lake Forest Park Town Centre, at the corner of Bothell Way and Ballinger Way. It's on the front side of the shopping center, the part that's closer to the corner, and it's on the wing that's closest to the Starbucks.

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the geography lesson for one hundred dollars!

I'll have a look at the Albertsons on Friday, which is the usual shopping-day; I suppose that in terms of travel time it's not that much harder to get to than the Ballinger Thriftway, but the extra turns and winding roads just make it seem further away. Have just gotten so weary of the stagflational combination of bad selection and bad prices at QFC in Mountlake Terrace, and the endless chaos of the Fred Meyer over in Lynwood (whose only real attraction is that it is nearby to the Lynwood Goodwill store, which is one of the nicer ones altho' not as entertaining as the Saint Vinnie's which I am growing to like owing to the seredipitous nature of its stock).

Snowed some more here. Offer of snow still stands altho' my influence with the Weather Gods must be declining, since They have stopped issuing blue-sky days upon my request. [Sigh.]

Oh, one more piece of fun goodness: most shops'll issue you a shopping card without attached credit or cheque-cashing details. Nothing in the form specifies that you must give a real name, so I tend to make up glorious figments like Euphonia Slugfield or the like, giving her address as 53rd floor, Space Needle, Seattle 98105 (or even better name/address pairs than that, upon mood) -- the chief benefit of course is avoiding paying tourist prices for one's goods. QFC are particularly awful about that two-price system: it's one of their main irritant features.

The point of that observation is that with the chain-conglomeration of grocery stores, once you've figured out who owns what, you can carry the One Card to Rule Them All (or two or three in a given market) instead of a whole wallet-full. I like to use my Shaw's card from Vermont at QFC; it adds to the fun. Also, sometimes an "out-market" card will trigger higher discount levels, which lends amusement all around.

I suppose I should document this more properly -- after all, what's the point in accepting being gouged for groceries, where the price inflation has been most severe in the past few years? Were it not for the arcane Customs regs about bringing food down, I suspect I could run a nifty little cross-border arbitrage trade just on foodstuffs, since Sea Atoll prices seem to be so stinkingly high these days.

[annathepiper]

Re: geography, you're welcome!

I think that snow you keep offering has made it into the mountains down here, the Cascades are getting hammered! o.O Not so much down in our area though.

And re: grocery cards, heh, our favorite local trick is to use Microsoft's main call in number for the discount phone number in the lines at various stores. I don't even carry a card except for a QFC one I got at one point!

sorry - that anonymous post was mine

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

LJ went and unsubbed me again mid-session; sorry bout that!

Garlic bread happening, NOW.

Re: sorry - that anonymous post was mine

[annathepiper]

No worries, I knew it was you. ^_^ And mm, garlic bread!