Ordinary Day

Any of you who have followed me on a regular basis know that my household are longstanding fans of Folklife, the big four-day music festival that happens every year at the Seattle Center over Memorial Day weekend. This year’s is imminent, and as always, Dara, Paul, and I are looking forward to spending time there.

But I noted with dismay this morning that the Seattle Times has an article up saying that unless they get more donations at the gate this year, next year’s festival is in danger of being canceled. 🙁

According to that article, Folklife usually only gets donations from about 17 percent of attendees at the gate, and they take in around $190,000. They really need to bump that number up to $350,000 in order to afford next year.

So if you’re in the area, you love Folklife and what it brings to our local culture, and you’re planning to go this weekend, please please please donate anything you can spare at the gate. They need your help. Also, if you’re not going to be able to hit the festival but you still want to help out, you can donate to them directly on their website.

Please spread the word to other area locals! And if you’re going to be at the festival, hey, look for Dara and Paul and me, and say hi if you see us!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Those of you local to the Seattle area know that Memorial Day weekend is Folklife, and solarbird and I being well, us, of course we’re hitting the festival as much as possible this weekend!

Yesterday’s adventures started off with an Irish session, apparently the first one at Folklife in four years, and which turned out to be hosted by a flute player named Ming Chen. (He was an excellent flute player, it must be noted.) I saw oodles of flute players besides him as well, and each and every one of them had more Serious Business flutes than my Norouet–which only strengthens my resolve to save up for a Serious Business flute from Casey Burns.

Ming described the session as being intended to welcome newbies who aren’t necessarily brave enough to lead a tune in session, and/or who know only a few tunes, in which category I definitely qualify. So I said HI I’M ANNA and told everybody I knew “Blarney Pilgrim” and “Morrison’s” and “Swallowtail”, and got encouraged to try to play something. So I started playing, which was all very well and good except for the part where I was aiming for “Blarney Pilgrim” and what popped out of my fingers instead was “6/8 d’André Alain”! Because um hi yeah, guess what tune’s stuck at the top of my queue of Jigs I Know In D. *^_^*;;

I went “oh shit sorry” and everybody was understanding (Ming found me later on Facebook and said ‘yeah this happens to all of us’, hee, which is reassuring), and I asked for somebody else to start “Blarney” since I was sure I’d remember it once I heard it. Which I did. “Morrison’s” was also played, which I kept up with more or less. And “Swallowtail Jig”, which I also knew. We did NOT do a couple of the other tunes I know–”Road to Lisdoonvarna” or “Banish Misfortune”. But I did more or less recognize “Butterfly Jig” from it having been played in the now-defunct Renton session. And I tried to actively listen to unfamiliar tunes as well to see if I could at least TRY to piece together any of them by ear. It was hard since everybody blazed through about eighty million tunes.

Several familiar faces were in attendance as well, Jason and Miki and Marilyn from the Renton session as well as Valerie and her husband from the current Quebec session I was going to. Saying hi to all of them was definitely satisfying!

And speaking of my Quebec session crowd, there was later on the great satisfaction of seeing La Famille Leger perform, immediately followed by a group called Podorythmie–which contains no fewer than four of the session crowd. Between both performances there were four, count ‘em, four different stepdancers (Dejah with her family, and the three others with the Podorythmie group), and Podorythmie brought along a crankie as well since Sue Truman and Dejah both are really big into those. (If you don’t know what a crankie is, click over to The Crankie Factory, where Sue Truman will tell you all about this old art form!)

Today, Dara and I actually opted to go down for the evening on the grounds that our aforementioned session pal Miki has joined Piper Stock Hill (Facebook link–they don’t have an off-Facebook or off-Myspace website), Seattle’s only band dedicated to the music of Newfoundland. It pleases me DEEPLY that we have such a band, and so Dara and I kinda had to make a point to stop and see them.

Plus, we’d never been down to Folklife during the evening and we wanted to see what it was like. Survey says: a bit more relaxed and groovy, with a thinner crowd. Dara and I scoped out the various craft tents to kill time, at which point we came across a booth FULL OF FLUTES AND WHISTLES. I immediately had to stop, because I’d been highly curious about whether I could play a better whistle, well, better, than the cheap toy one I have now. This particular flute maker had flutes and whistles made out of carbon fiber, in fact, and ZOMG they were pretty.

I was quite impressed by the D whistle they had, and did in fact note that I was able to play it significantly more cleanly than the toy one I’ve got. And I might well have walked off with that whistle as a purchase if I hadn’t then picked up their A flute. Which immediately informed me HI I WANT TO BE YOUR NEW SECONDARY SESSION INSTRUMENT SO YOU CAN PLAY THINGS IN A.

So I went “OKAY!” and promptly bought it. Internets, meet my new flute, shown next to my piccolo for scale!

I Do Not In Fact Have Enough Flutes Yet

After that, Dara and I wandered around some more and wound up finding another bouzouki player–which necessitated stopping to say hi, because HOLY CRAP SOMEBODY ELSE IN SEATTLE WHO KNOWS WHAT A BOUZOUKI IS. And, like we do because we’re US, we wound up improv-busking a bit of Great Big Sea. I destroyed not one but TWO different thin picks banging on Ti-Jéan, reminding myself to my chagrin that when playing ANYTHING by Great Big Sea, um, yeah, I need the medium picks. I think we can declare this guitar well and throughly broken in now, anyway. And that set us up with the perfect frame of mind to go see Piper Stock Hill have their act!

Last but not least, there was Piper Stock Hill! We’d seen them perform at Folklife before, but this time they had Miki! And this time we stopped to say hi to their leader singer after, so that a) I could buy their CD, and b) I could identify myself and Dara as raving Great Big Sea fangirls. We had a lovely conversation with said lead singer and his wife, and his wife particularly charmed me when she was trying to remember Alan Doyle’s name and couldn’t, so she did a hair flip instead. Because OH MY YES, that’s a gesture universally understood by ALL raving Great Big Sea fans. ;D

So all in all, a great time at Folklife so far! We’re going back down tomorrow for the French-Canadian jam/session that the Legers will be hosting. Maybe we’ll see some of you there!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Just to pay appropriate note to the various and sundry other things that have been going on in my life:

Jam Reports. There have not been Jam Reports for the last couple of Jams, and I apologize in advance, but there will probably not be. I just haven't been focused enough to get proper Jam Reports written. However, it is worth noting that there is much promise with GBS' "Chemical Worker's Song" with the current set of voices. cflute in particular has some very impressive harmonies coming together for that, and kendaer is feeling some potential for rumbling out the lead on this on days when mamishka isn't available.

On a related note, solarbird and I went to go visit stealthcello this past Friday night, which was made entirely of Win. She and her family have a lovely home full of lovely large Maine Coon cats as well as six two-week-old kittens, with whom we visited as well and ZOMG TINY KITTENS. Dara shared some of the music she's been working on, and Betsy answered with some of hers, and me, I was impressed by Betsy's shiny new black carbon-body guitar.

One giggleworthy moment of the evening: Dara hitting a chord on the mandolin and announcing that that sounded like "ass minor". Betsy's daughter lost it laughing, and Betsy herself pondered the question of what precisely "ass" sounds like. Dara's response, entirely inevitably: "Here, pull my finger!"

I will also not be doing review posts for the most recent BSG and Doctor, again because short on general levels of cope. I will however say that the most recent BSG was quite solid. We actually haven't watched the most recent Doctor yet, but will hopefully be getting that in soon.

Current book on the queue: desperance's Bridge of Dreams, which I have scarcely begun, but already I am impressed by the liquid rhythm of the prose.

And because I could, I went and got RAM upgrades for both my MacBook and Dara's. Now Winnowill and Kiliandra both are at 2 GB, though I have observed that I'm still taxing the CPU a bit if I try to do too many things at once. Less so than before, granted, but the problem hasn't entirely gone away.

Working on listening to s00j's Sirens, to be followed up by vixyish and tfabris's Thirteen. I have however also squeezed in Capercaillie's shiny brand new album Roses and Tears, as well as Nickel Creek's first album, since I've been meaning to listen to them for ages. This marks the first official time I have ever purchased an album calling itself country. However, listening to it, I find it definitely upholds the Alexander James Adams Principle of Celtic and Country Music, to wit: same music, different whiskey. ;)

Dara and I are planning our assault on Folklife this weekend and we are for once actually looking at doing three of the four days. We definitely want to hit the Celtic Band Scramble on Saturday, but there are things that interest us quite a bit on Sunday and Monday as well. I'm thinkin', a great big (not to be confused with Great Big) glorious burst of Folklife just before surgery should be a good way to get ready.

And, it has occurred to me that as I am about to be lying flat on my ass for two weeks, I can finally read Deathly Hallows.

And have another Movie Suckoff. Because there will be another Movie Suckoff, oh my yes.

Last but most definitely not least: tomorrow night, JONES. Meeting casirafics and mamishka for the midnight show at the Cinerama, and there will be much fangirling. What can I say. There are only a few people in the world that can really get me to fangirl, but Harrison Ford is one of them.

And, just because I haven't done this in ages, here's an exercise update as well. I am now on my way back to Hobbiton!

Miles since April 5th: 107.6
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2863.8
Miles out of Minas Tirith: 26.8
Miles to Hobbiton: 1598.2

ETA 10:42pm: Oh yes, I forgot to mention: my Ubuntu VM problem has been solved thanks to help from blargh. The issue seemed to be that VMWare was confused by my machine's having both a CD-ROM and DVD drive, and when I changed the VM settings to tell it not to auto-detect a drive, it started behaving. So now I have a functional Ubuntu VM to use as a test platform at work. Go me! And thanks, Traest. :)

Note to Self: Okay, next year? Don't wait until Monday to go to Folklife. I missed all the Celtic music! And particularly the Celtic Band Scramble! Sulk.

That said, solarbird, spazzkat, and I did have a very pleasant time hitting Folklife today. Dara went down first to take care of doing a shift gathering signatures; Paul and I caught up with her around one-ish, and found cow as well shortly after we arrived. We acquired tasty food, then went and watched Seattle Kaze Daiko bang on their taiko drums for a little while.

This did not go as well as I had hoped. A good chunk of the crowd was standing since the ground had been rained on (though it wasn't as wet as it looked at first glance), so we had trouble seeing the performers. And I actually had to sneak out during part of the performance (during which brief break I saw pauldf in passing), and when I came back the crowd had shifted--enough that I finally just scootched off to the side over by the nearby building and just listened to the drumming. Which was cool and all, but half the fun of taiko drumming is to actually watch the performers swinging the sticks around.

cow parted company with us during that show since he'd been there a while and was running out of steam, so afterwards, we went and got tasty dessert (I got Shishkaberries and Dara got strawberry shortcake) and then wandered around through all the craft booths looking for a wallet for Dara. We found some she liked in the very first place we checked, but wandered around various other parts of the fair as well just to see whether there would be any that she liked better. I pulled us into the Musical Instruments section of the fair as per usual, and although I was bummed to see that Romy Benton was not present, Trading Musician did have a booth. Paul amused himself looking at a Les Paul ukelele, and I wound up buying a little box full of brand new picks since I really needed some new ones. And then we wandered more, and got more Shishkaberries (this time Paul and Dara got tasty chocolate-dipped fruit as well, and I got a second round because OHMIGOD so tasty), and then we finally decided to wander home since there weren't any acts scheduled that we were feeling powerfully moved to go look at.

But all in all it was pretty much made of Fun. We had a nice walk back to the bus stop and stopped at Borders briefly to see if two books I'm looking for were there yet (to wit, no), and debated amongst ourselves the virtues of various forms of fruit dipped in chocolate and who might have been the first person to think of dipping strawberries in chocolate to begin with. We suspect it was somebody French, since dipping stuff in cheese seems more the speed of the Swiss. ;) Regardless, this requires research. Tasty, tasty research!

Now we are home, and Paul is barbecuing on the grill. On Memorial Day. In the suburbs. This is perhaps the most domestic evening the Murkworks has ever had!

Sunday miles: 2.1
Monday miles: 5.7
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1072.55
Miles out of Rivendell: 614.55
Miles out of Lothlórien: 152.55
Miles to Rauros Falls: 236.45

solarbird and I went to Folklife today, as we do every year, after determining that there was a whole bunch of stuff all over the schedule that we wanted to see. Today, though, we opted to take it light and easy and just do the random-wandering-around thing, since tomorrow and Monday's schedules have the participatory stuff we want to do. ( Read more... )