Turlough Carolan

I've been playing quite a few weddings lately. Back when the hammer dulcimer was my main instrument, I used to play weddings all the time. Since I've moved to the mandolin, the offers have decreased, which is fine with me. It's fun to play at the wedding of someone you know, but playing at stranger's weddings can get old fast.

There is a certain type of music that is generally considered to be "wedding" music. It's usually slow and melodic, it's usually in a major key, and it's usually instrumental. When I played the dulcimer, probably half of my repertoire fit those guidelines. Now that I'm doing weddings on the Octave Mandolin, it's a little more challenging. I don't play a lot of "wedding" music for fun on my own, so I've had to intentionally work up enough songs to pull off a wedding.

This is where Turlough Carolan comes in. Turlough Carolan was a blind Irish harpist who composed a ludicrous amount of beautiful, slow, melodic songs in major keys (and some in minor keys as well). You really can't find anyone who's music is better suited for weddings, in my opinion.

So here's a couple of Carolan tunes I've worked up for weddings. The first is "Planxty Irwin" ("In Honor of Irwin"). I was playing at my cousin Rachel's wedding last week and the day before the wedding I suddenly panicked and thought that I didn't have enough material for the prelude, so I worked up this arrangement sometime around midnight. Turns out I had more than enough for the prelude, but it doesn't hurt to have one more option.



This second piece is called "Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór" ("Little Hill, Big Hill"). I worked this one up a while ago and had a little more time to put into the arrangement. This is probably the most well known Carolan tune.

Colo(u)rs of Life

1. Ben in my dad's bright red jacket at Winnipeg Folk Fest (July 09).


2. Rose of Sharon bush in the backyard provides me with plenty of pretty pink blossoms.

3. Painted the trim in the dining room white. Brightens up house immensely.

4. Bright red tomatoes accumulating rapidly in the fridge this week.

Going North

I am starting my second and last 7-week session at UND in Grand Forks (and Winnipeg on the weekends). I leave for GF tomorrow and start my first three days of classes at the ND School for the Blind which is affiliated with UND.

Naturally, I'm a big blob of emotions, knowing that I have to leave Ben for so long... and yet very excited for what lies ahead.

Here are some pictures that I recently took.
1. My favorite snack lately.
2. & 3. Some curriculum modifications I made this year--also part of my internship project.
4. The love of my life. See you soon, Ben!

The New Bike

So I've been biking as my primary mode of transportation for close to seven years now. For the past five of these years, I've been riding a single speed bike that a friend helped me put together, mostly from used parts.

If you are a biker who uses a bike mostly for in-town commuting and just getting around, and you live in a place without too many hills, single speeds are great bikes. They're durable, efficient, and usually people don't want to steal them (though this is changing as they are suddenly becoming "cool"). They are workhorses, they're fun to ride, and they're easy on the pocketbook.

I've put over 10,000 miles on my single speed in the time I've been riding it, but this past April convinced me that it was time to have a decent bike with gears. A combination of very high winds and muddy conditions made me start to worry about what riding a single-speed in those conditions might be doing to my knees.

So I put up some cash and bought a 1998 Trek 5000 off of Ebay. I'm still keeping the single-speed for getting around town, but when I take longer rides, it will be nice to have something that can handle the Kansas winds a little better.

Here's a picture.



For those of you who like looking at pictures of bikes, there are more pictures here.

I also shaved my beard this weekend.

MASSIVE UPDATE!!!!1!1!!

It's time for a massive update. There are three things that we need to let you know about.

Update #1

Ingrid and Sonja just visited us from Winnipeg. They stayed with us for a week and we had a great time with them. We even got to walk them through their first experience with a tornado warning. The first day they were here, there was a line of thunderstorms that was pounding us pretty much all day. We did have to go down to the basement for about half an hour when a funnel cloud was sighted about a mile away from us. It did not touch down.

We also had a sushi night.As you can see, along with the sushi we had a huge bowl of delicious barbecued meat. Thanks, Ingrid.

Sonja, Ben, Andrea, Ingrid, Kate and Nick.

Update #2

Andrea and I had a little bit of time to work on the garden today before it started raining.

These will be green beans.

Lettuce and Spinach - the only things we had already planted.

Update # 3

It's a cute-off. A cute-off is not a competition, but just a situation where there are two cute things. Everyone wins a cute-off because everyone gets to see two cute things.

First we have our nephew Luke, and second is our nephew Airo.

Congratulations. You just won the cute-off.

Easter in Newton

I decided to attempt Paska. I actually had a friend teach me to make it last year, but she mostly did the work and I watched. It turned out pretty well today---but now I need to learn how to make that cottage cheese spread.

The recipe was huge, so I shared it with some others on my street.

We have some great neighbors here on 6th street. Jane is a lovely 92 year old who still gardens and has a great sense of humor. We invite each other over for tea every once in a while. She gave me her tomato cages last year. Adjacent our backyard lives an older (70s) couple who think we're hippie-farmers because we hang laundry, grow vegetables and have dandelions---but I think we've managed to convince them that we're not crazy. Then there is the lovely sweet (deaf) widow from our church, the family from church across the street who take in our mail when we're gone, and the younger couple next door with whom we share garden tools, groceries and invited us to be part of "cow-share" milk cooperative. There's a lot of sharing and give-and-take on our block. It's nice to have a little community around you like that. I always took good neighbors for granted on Helmsdale growing up. Anyway, that doesn't really have a lot to do with Easter ...or does it?

Tornadoes and Woodchucks

This weekend was Andrea's first tornado warning. A tornado warning means that a tornado has been sighted somewhere in your county. Sometimes close, sometimes quite far away. In this case, the tornado was quite far away, and it wasn't really even that stormy in Newton. I was actually walking home from the movie store when the siren went off, and the voice calmly shouted "Tornado... Warning... Take... Shelter... Immediately."

Everyone of course ran outside to see the tornado, but they were all disappointed.

This is what it looked like outside our sun room window. Except without the tornado.

I was about a half mile away from home, and I had to decide if I was going to run or not. On one hand, running would make me look like a moron. On the other hand, I knew that Andrea had never experienced a real tornado warning before and I wasn't sure if it would scare her or not. So I tried to run casually, like I just happened to be out for a jog in jeans and a flannel shirt. I believe most people were fooled.

Andrea was fine, and had already taken some blankets, a flashlight, and her visa documents to the basement. We hung out down there until they sounded the "All Clear" siren.

The next day, we awoke to see a woodchuck in our garden shed. Neither of us had ever seen a woodchuck before. This is what it looked like:

***insert woodchuck joke***