New Camera

By Laura Conrad | Published: March 11, 2010

Lately, every time I wanted a picture for the blog I didn't have my camera, and every time I took a picture with the cell phone, I ended up apologizing for it. So when Woot had a good price on an Casio Exilim camera, I bought it.

It arrived today. It's a good size for sticking in your pocket, and seems to take pretty good pictures:

[Sunny]
Sunny napping

I always use Sunny for my test subject. Then I noticed the Birthday cards, and took them too:

[cards]
Birthday cards

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District 9

By Laura Conrad | Published: March 11, 2010

I watched this movie last night because I'm going to be nominating Hugo awards and this seemed like a likely candidate for a nomination.

It's a surprisingly good science fiction movie. I found it very unpleasant to watch because of all the violence, so I only gave it two stars at netflix, but really, Hollywood doesn't "get" science fiction that well at all often. It's about first contact with aliens, who get treated like a "lesser breed" by the South African government. There's lots of blowing things up, and a creepy makup job as the main character gradually turns into an alien.

You get to nominate 5 movies, and I'm sure this should be one of them. Whether I'll vote for it when the time to vote comes is another question. I would really like there to be a movie that's as good that I actually enjoyed watching. The only other candidate I've seen so far is Star Trek, and it's certainly not as good Science Fiction, although I really enjoyed watching it.

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Report on the March 9, 2010, meeting

By Laura Conrad | Published: March 10, 2010

We played:

Schedule

In March, regular dropin meetings will be held on Tuesdays, at 7:45 PM at my place.

We now have 8 people signed up for the Walk for Hunger on May 2: Me, Norah, Barney, Aram, Anne, Bea, Dick, and Ishmael. Paul Ukleja will be playing during our breaks. Anyone is welcome in the morning for the informal solos and duets.

The April meetings will be limited to the people playing at the Walk for Hunger. Drop in meetings will resume in May.

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The Lacuna

By Laura Conrad | Published: March 6, 2010

The central character in this book is the son of a US bureaucrat and a Mexican woman. He lives in both countries growing up, and in Mexico city ends up working for Diego Rivera; his wife, Frida Kahlo; and their houseguest, Leon Trotsky. Later he becomes a best-selling novelist and is hounded by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

For some reason, the reviews I read of it are lukewarm, but since I'm both a Barbara Kingsolver fan and interested in those characters, I read it anyway. I think the reviews are what always happens when someone is famous -- it's easier to say the book is a falling-off from earlier work than to really describe how good it is, so they say it's a falling-off.

I wouldn't recommend it as the place to start if you haven't read Barbara Kingsolver before. That would be Prodigal Summer if you like novels, or Animal, Vegetable, Miracle if you prefer nonfiction and are interested in eating local, non-industrial foods. Both of these books are set in the Appalachian south where Kingsolver grew up.

But I thought it was certainly up to the standard of The Poisonwood Bible, also about a disfunctional family in an unfamiliar setting.

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Coco before Chanel

By Laura Conrad | Published: March 4, 2010

The big disappointment in this movie was that I didn't really enjoy looking at the clothes.

This defect is inherent in one of the good qualities of the movie -- it's about the period in Coco Chanel's life when she's looking at all the clothes around her and hating them and thinking she could do better.

But except for the last scene, where she's wearing a Chanel jacket and watching her models go down the runway, we don't really see any examples of her doing better -- the dress she designs for herself to replace the "feminine" one her "protector" has bought her seemed fairly pedestrian to me. The little black dress she designs to go dancing with her new lover is better, but we don't really see it very well.

Looking at the movie as either a moralist or a feminist, I think the script romanticises the demimondaine lifestyle, although I'm sure the writers would dispute that. The self-centered lord of the manor whose mistress she becomes is realistic enough at the beginning, but his conversion to supporter of her design career is completely unconvincing.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I hadn't yet seen any of the other candidates for the Best Costume Design Oscar, but I was rooting for Bright Star to win it anyway. This is part of the competition, and having seen it doesn't change that opinion any.

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Report on the March 2, 2010, meeting

By Laura Conrad | Published: March 3, 2010

We played:

Schedule

In March, regular dropin meetings will be held on Tuesdays, at 7:45 PM at my place.

We have 7 people signed up for the Walk for Hunger on May 2: Me, Norah, Barney, Aram, Anne, Bea, Ishmael. If I'm listing you wrong, either because you're on the list and didn't sign up, or because you did sign up and you're not on that list, please let me know.

The April meetings will be limited to the people playing at the Walk for Hunger. Drop in meetings will resume in May.

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Report on the February 23, 2010, meeting

By Laura Conrad | Published: March 2, 2010

We played:

Schedule

In March, regular dropin meetings will be held on Tuesdays, at 7:45 PM at my place.

Remember that this is the last day to sign up to play for the Walk for Hunger on May 2. We have 6 people signed up, which will be a good bunch, but we could still use a couple more, especially if you sing bass and/or play a bass instrument.

We don't start exclusive rehearsals for the Walk for Hunger until April, so even if you aren't playing, you're welcome to come in March. We will be trying things out for the Walk, but people are also welcome to request favorites even if they have nothing to do with the Walk program.

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I did it!

By Laura Conrad | Published: February 25, 2010

Today is my 59th birthday, and I really did a blog post every day since my 58th birthday a year ago. You can read them all at the fifty ninth year tag.

I count 3 days that I really cheated. 2 of them I was sick in bed. I posted "I'm sick in bed so I'm not going to post today," posts not so much because I couldn't have stayed out of bed long enough to do a post, but because even the low-grade fever I was running seemed to be affecting my concentration enough to make it hard to frame sentences and paragraphs.

The other was a newbie mistake. I started a post that took longer than I had, and instead of figuring out how to split it into two, I just posted that you'd get it later or tomorrow, and it was tomorrow.

There have been a couple that were embarassing, and a lot more that were "What can I write about that will be easy?" and were mostly other people's work. You'll get fewer of those now that I'm not going to make myself post every day whether I want to or not.

But I do find that I like blogging, and will probably want to continue. I don't think I've turned into a great reviewer, but I feel less lonely now that when I read a book or see a movie I like I can post about it and several dozen (at least) people read it. And I find my posts about recipes I've enjoyed cooking are useful to me when I'm thinking about doing a similar thing again. The same is true of some of my posts about how I cope with the technology of my new toys.

Some of what I wanted to accomplish was to improve my writing skills. I don't think what I write when I take a lot of time to polish and rewrite it is a lot better than it was a year or even 10 years ago, but I have learned a lot about how to prune an idea so that I can do a comprehensible piece of writing about it in half an hour.

I heard a writer interviewed on the radio who had gotten started because his AA sponsor wanted him to write about his life for an hour a day. After a few months of doing that, he realized that if he could write a couple of pages a day, he could have a novel in 6 months. I don't think this is true for me -- even if I've written a book's worth of pages about, say, Bonnie's death and what I did and how I felt, it's still quite a lot of work between that and a real book.

Although I have some good posts on the spindle, I will probably take a couple of days off before posting again, so have a good weekend. I won't be forcing myself to post when I have lots of other things that have to get done that day, so posts on Tuesday and even Wednesday may get fairly rare, because that's when I do the work of running the band and publishing the music for it. But this is definitely au revoir, not adieu.

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Snow Dog at the Dog Park

By Laura Conrad | Published: February 24, 2010

[Snow Dog]
Snow Dog

We had a good snow sculpture snow last week, and someone made this dog at the dog park.

I've been researching cell phones with better cameras, and cameras that fit better in a pocket, and haven't found anything for less than $80, which seems frivolous. But I might get annoyed enough at the great pictures I'm missing that I'll just get myself a birthday present.

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Beer for the dying

By Laura Conrad | Published: February 23, 2010

At the beginning of Victoria's memorial service, George, her husband, gave a welcome speech. The first memory he told us about was of the last few weeks or months of her life, when every morning she would wake up and they would share a beer. Even on her last day, he wet her lips with some beer, and he thought he could see a smile.

This reminded me of the story my uncle told after my Grandmother's funeral. He had visited her the weekend before she died. He'd asked her if there was anything he could get her or do for her to make her more comfortable, and she asked him to bring her a beer. I didn't think of her as a beer-drinker at all -- she drank wine with dinner, and sometimes a brandy before bed. But apparently one of the things that shuts down when you're dying is your ability to swallow, and beer was what she believed would go down the easiest.

This makes me sad that I didn't work harder to bring Bonnie (who was a beer drinker) beer when she was dying. I just assumed that it would conflict with all the other drugs she was taking, and be a problem for all the tubes. At the period when I was spending a lot of my visiting time giving her sponges to wet her mouth with, I did bring some coffee, and it turned out to be a mistake -- the diuretic effect of even less than an ounce of decaf coffee was too much for the tubes she was on.

This is only two anecdotes, but until recently I didn't really hear that many anecdotes about the care of the dying, so the fact that there are two suggests that there might be lots more. So maybe the institutions and people who deal with the dying all the time should try to figure out how they could provide the benefits of beer to all their patients.

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