hudebnik

We got back from a camping SCA event at 9:30 PM Sunday, unloaded the car but mostly just piled things in the kitchen. Monday morning I put away most of the stuff in the kitchen. Walked dogs in the park. Cleaned and oiled my use-knife. Oiled my ankle-boots. Cleaned and oiled the treenware plates we used at the event. Emptied the dishwasher. Watered plants on the porch. Started a batch of sourdough bread. Eventually shalmestere got out of bed and we both did some gardening: she weeded things while I picked the first two wild strawberries of the season, and adjusted the bird-net over the cherry tree. While I was trimming dead raspberry canes in the back yard, the next door neighbor said he had a mail-order box that had arrived for us over the weekend, he went and got it, and we had a good conversation about working at Google Maps. His wife works at an organization that needs data about the footprints and heights of individual buildings, so they might be a good client for the Maps Platform.

Had a dream about reading and writing music/software that depended on writing words in cursive, rotating them 180°, and reinterpreting them: for example, "lookup" becomes "dpngooy", more or less.

In case Thanksgiving wasn't a sufficient season-marker, we have another sign that winter is coming. First frost was Friday night, and it's forecast to get below freezing every night for at least the next week.

So I drained the rain-barrel, and drained the garden-hoses, and picked the last raspberry and the last few dozen Thai chili peppers, and denuded the basil plants of leaves (on the assumption that they'll die off in the next week anyway). Probably should have done all these things the day before first frost, rather than the day after, but that's life.

A few years ago, when we ripped out the quince trees that we had planted too close to the front of the house, we replaced them with four rose bushes of three different varieties, and put in wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana) as a ground cover. Two rose varieties are doing reasonably well, while remaining rose variety and the strawberries are trying to take over the world. Anyway, a week ago we noticed that berries were getting ripe, so we picked about half a cup: they weren't the "violent red" of the best commercial strawberries, but tasty. On Thursday we picked another pint, and yesterday I turned them into ice cream, using a simple, minimalistic recipe: macerate the strawberries in sugar (3/4 cup for a pint of berries) and a tablespoon of vodka for an hour, add heavy cream (equal by mass to the strawberries), blend, chill, then freeze in an ice cream freezer. No boiled simple-syrup, no egg-yolk custard base, no cooking at all. We tasted the results after dinner last night, and it was delicious!

Meanwhile, this happened in the back yard:

Only one ripe so far, but in past years we've gotten 1-2 cups of berries a day at the height of the season. And we still have at least a pint in the freezer from last year, so we'd better get started making things with raspberries.

Meanwhile, I picked one (1) green bean from the struggling bush-bean plants in the front yard. The Thai chili plants are blooming, two of the four holy-basil plants I transplanted from the egg-carton seed-starting incubator seem to have survived the transfer, but none of the six Thai-basil plants I transplanted at the same time survived, so shalmestere mail-ordered a couple of Thai-basil plants.

Meanwhile, the toad-lilies in the circular bed in the center of the front yard are thriving, to the extent that they've drowned out the climbing vines we had planted in the same bed; need to thin the toad-lilies and see whether anything survives of the climbing vines. shalmestere planted a few more dahlias last week. The shamrocks are doing well, the five or six colors of violets are trying to take over the world, the clover I've seeded to replace lawn-grass is doing well in some places and not in others....

Baked a loaf of bread Friday evening. It came out a bit underdone in the middle -- I think I set the timer for 45 minutes, should have been 50 or 55 -- and there's a horizontal-plane split that makes the top quarter of each slice inclined to split from the lower three quarters. Tastes pretty good, but not useful for anything resembling a sandwich. Probably ought to make another batch sooner than next weekend.

We've got almost all the held mail from our three-week trip to Spain: there's one package that the Post Office says is "held at customer request", but I went there yesterday with the tracking number and they couldn't find it. But we retrieved a box of dahlia bulbs from the next door neighbor, and a box of violet-adjacent baby plants arrived (and were planted) Friday afternoon. Gardening yesterday was postponed due to rain and wind, so we went to Trader Joe's and Home Depot instead (getting a bunch of potted plants at the latter). Today looks more promising on the weather front: we need to put in the aforementioned dahlias, and the pansies and violet-adjacents that shalmestere bought yesterday, and the Thai-chili and bush-bean plants that I bought yesterday, and I want to start some basil seeds indoors before moving them to the front lawn. And there are more bean seeds left from last year; might as well put those in too, so they produce a few weeks after the ones I bought yesterday in plant form.

When we returned from Spain, one of the smoke/CO detectors was chirping, not to say "please replace my batteries" but to say "please replace me". So I bought two new detectors (I think the one in the attic has completely given up the ghost, not even chirping) yesterday at Home Depot, and need to install them.

The two large suitcases we took to Spain have been emptied, nested with their smaller siblings, and put away in the attic. There's still a suitcase that shalmestere took to the living history show a month ago; I'm not sure what needs to be done with that stuff. And there are a few items of clothing that I took to the same living history show; I think they're clean enough that they only need to be put away.

This afternoon we're scheduled to attend the "celebration of life" for Richard Pace, a fixture of the NYC and Amherst early-music scenes. He was a decent amateur musician, specializing in voice and dulcian/bassoon, and a prolific fund-raiser, and he had a wonderful, infectious, boyish grin than I'm sure people will bring up repeatedly at the event. Immediately after that is an album-launch concert by local early-music group Alkemie which we may or may not get to depending on our energy levels.

It would be nice to accomplish some house-cleaning and stuff-triaging today, but I don't know how likely that is. There's Too Much Stuff piled up.

And as mentioned before, the weather is nice today, so we should walk the dogs in the park.

Early last spring we planted a lot of flowers in the front lawn. Many were non-native ornamentals -- hyacinths, tulips, Frittilaria, etc. -- but we bought and planted about a hundred corms of spring beauty, which is native throughout the eastern US. None of them came up last spring, and this spring I was starting to fear that the squirrels had eaten them all, but some of them showed their faces last week.

To do this weekend:

• Buy & apply grass seed (although much of the front lawn has been planted in perennial flowers, so we'll need less grass seed than in past years) ✓


• Buy ✓ & install sink disposal (they're allegedly "easy to install", which is true of most appliances and fixtures until I run into something about our old house that doesn't match the assumptions of the person who wrote the instructions, like where does the electrical supply come from?)


• Design & acquire materials for new music-stand top ✓


• Finish taxes


• Walk dogs in the park (today, as it's supposed to be cold and rainy tomorrow) ✓


• Declutter Something


• Dust Something


• Fix Something


• Pay bills


• Administer dogs' monthly pills


• Draft set lists (for two potential concerts: one at Pennsic, and one at a living history show in three weeks!)


• Practice music for same


• Inventory & triage shawm reeds


• Text underlay for a piece of Ars Subtilior I transcribed from Chantilly last week ✓

To do:

• Plant remaining bulbs in sublawn ✓/2


• Buy stuff at farm stand in Forest Park ✓


• Clean some part of the house


• Plan Thanksgiving dinner ✓


• Use up stuff in fridge to make room for Thanksgiving


• Christmas shopping


• Play medieval music (towards Sooper Seekrit Project)


• Walk dogs in park ✓


• Make warm coat for Archie (who arrived in summer; he can wear Luna's if need be, but it's not his colors)


• Pay bills


• Fix somethin ✓


• Pick raspberries ✓


• Buy groceries ✓

Over the past few months, shalmestere has developed a desire for a Pretty Front Yard (as well as a Pretty House), and this has manifested in a bunch of mail-orders to garden supply houses, and various other gardening projects.

A few weeks ago we had professionals in to cut down the quince trees. They'd been there eleven years and produced maybe two decent crops, the rest being eaten by either moth larvae or squirrels, and they're not particularly attractive trees except for the one week a year that they're in bloom. And we had planted them too close to the house. And while we were having those out, we took the opportunity to take out the yew trees between our house and one next door neighbor's. A few minutes after the tree-cutting crew left, another guy from the same company showed up to grind out the stumps, and the grinding machine seems to have badly cracked the concrete of our front walk. The boss at the company came and looked at the situation, and was adamant that his machine couldn't possibly have cracked the concrete (they run it over sidewalks and driveways all the time), unless perhaps if the process of grinding out the stumps had moved roots that ran under the sidewalk, which was probably very old and poor-quality concrete that was about to crack anyway. I pointed out that the worst cracks are at the point farthest from where they were grinding, but right next to some tire tracks that are obviously where the machine rolled onto the walk. I also pointed out that the walk wasn't cracked when the first crew finished, and it was cracked half an hour later when the second guy finished (as I pointed out to him at the time); there's really no possible argument that it wasn't cracked by the root-grinding machine during that half hour. He still doesn't want to admit responsibility, but says as a favor to me he'll have his concrete people re-pour the whole front walk (the cracked square and three others) at cost. What that actually means, I'm not sure.

Anyway, where the yew trees had been, there's a bed about 3'x12' of bare dirt (with the occasional chunk of yew root). We put in two lilacs, and shalmestere started a campaign of digging up unwanted-looking violets around the neighborhood (where they're often treated as weeds) and transplanting them into the bed around the lilacs. And she mail-ordered some yellow violets, which arrived over the weekend; we put them in Tuesday evening.

Where the quince trees had been, we put three rose bushes: two "midnight blue" (actually a sort of dark cochineal red) and a "peachy creeper" (peach-colored flowers, with an allegedly creeping, ground-cover-y habit). She's looking at some other varieties of roses, probably some kind of near-wild-type climbing rose.

Two years ago we put a semi-dwarf Montmorency cherry tree on the sublawn: last summer it produced leaves, and this summer it produced a bunch of flowers and 22 (or was it 29?) cherries. This evening we dug up some turf in a circle around it, lined the edge of the circle with rocks (which had come up in the other excavations), and planted a circle of irises just inside the circle of rocks. Not sure what will cover the rest of the now-bare circle; perhaps wild strawberries? There's a batch of toad-lilies on order that are supposed to go in there somewhere, once they arrive (probably in the spring).

There are also crocuses and dwarf day-lilies on order, probably going along the sides of the walks.

My aunt's funeral is this afternoon, in North Carolina. We had been planning to drive down there to be present in person (driving and camping to avoid excess interaction with other humans along the way), so we scheduled vacation days for Thursday and Friday (so as to take a leisurely drive down and have time to see relatives other than at the funeral) and Monday (so as to take a less-leisurely-but-not-frantic drive home). Then my mother chickened out on account of COVID, so we did the same, and will attend the funeral by Zoom. We unscheduled Thursday's vacation day, but kept Friday and Monday.

So on Friday we drove to the Storm King Art Center, an outdoor modern-sculpture park in the Hudson Valley. It's 500 acres of rolling hills, with pieces of sculpture scattered around everywhere, ranging from pieces the size of a human to towers a hundred feet tall and landscapings hundreds of yards long. 500 acres is rather a lot, really: we got to maybe a third of the sculpture installations before physical exhaustion (shalmestere is extremely sensitive to heat and humidity) sent us home. But it was quite pleasant spending the day surrounded by lovely scenery, with no particular deadlines or goals, seeing the green and feeling the breeze.

Yesterday I had wanted to return to the Hudson Valley for a hike in the mountains with the dogs, such as Anthony's Nose or Storm King. And the weather looked promising for such an endeavor, but there was also a hurricane heading our way, and we didn't want to be caught in it if it arrived a little earlier than predicted.

So we stayed home and did ordinary weekend things like laundry, lawn-mowing, and gardening. I put in a row of bricks along the edge of our front walk, and another along the edge of the walk between our house and the left-hand next-door neighbor, to define the edges more clearly and keep the grass from growing over the walks. And we (mostly shalmestere) cut a bunch of branches off the quince trees in front of the house: we're leaning towards having them removed altogether after this year's crop, if there is a "this year's crop" -- in recent years the squirrels have taken many of the fruit, and the rest have been full of moth-larva poop and not useful for cooking.

The hurricane started making its presence known around 7 PM, when I walked the dogs in a light drizzle. Then went to the grocery store, and by the time I got out the light drizzle had become a downpour. Just at the moment it's not raining, so I'd better walk the dogs before it starts again.