Electric Mbira

Flickr 

UPDATE: 

And then I saw these guys – two conga players, a maracas player, and two guys playing ELECTRIC mbiras (they were wearing battery powered amps. An empty sound gourd can just be seen in front, decorated with cowrie shells, being used as a tip bowl. The musicians were wearing animal skins and singing – I’m not sure the crowd realized how radical their electrified sound was compared to the trad sound of the other group that was in the Alki courtyard performing area behind me.

 

Ginny
I can has iPhone?

Via: Flickr
Title: Electric Mbira
By: GinnyRED57
Originally uploaded: 23 May ’09, 2.07pm CDT PST

 

Our ride is finally here

Flickr

Looks like we arrive about two ours late.

UPDATE: Sure, we paid for Economy Plus, and we had more legroom, but I need more buttroom and hipbone room these days. At least the flight was smooth, in spite of the air traffic control audio that warned the pilots about wind shear at 1300 feet. During the flight, David slept and I watched “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” which turned out to be not brainless, rather sweet, and quite funny.

Ginny
I can has iPhone?

Via: Flickr
Title: Our ride is finally here
By: GinnyRED57
Originally uploaded: 22 May ’09, 9.26pm CDT PST

Earthrise: Christmas Eve

Flickr

40 years ago, Apollo 8 orbited the Moon on Christmas Eve.

Christmas Eve at St Nicholas – 430PM family service, 9PM Lessons, Carols, and Eucharist.

 

I have to be in Elk Grove by 8pm for rehearsal before the 9pm service at St Nicholas, but don’t get off work until 5pm. It’ll make for a LONG, cold, snowy night, but it’ll be wonderful if we can pull it off, as we’ve worked on some of this music for months. The highlight for me is probably John Rutter’s “What Sweeter Music,” but we’re also doing some old, rarely heard Christmas hymns from the 1940 Hymnal and some modern arrangements of traditional carols like “People Look East.” I’m off the hook for the family service at 430pm – partly because I’m working, but none of the choir are required to be there as it’s very much a “DIY” music kind of service. We’ve got enough on our plate with all the extra “Lessons and Carols” music in addition to the regular service music and hymns.  I tend to think we’re doing too much… it’s a lot to ask people to sit through on a cold, wintry, stormy night.

 

Particularly appropriate this year: “In The Bleak Midwinter.” I love singing the alto line on that: “frosty wind made moan.” Oh, yeah, I’ll be moaning about the frosty wind as I drive home sometime around 1030pm… 

Via: Flickr Title: Earthrise: Christmas Eve By: GinnyRED57
Originally uploaded: 24 Dec ’08, 10.04am CST PST

Full program follows after the jump…

 

Continue reading

Test Cattern

Flickr

This is a test of the Non-urgency Moblogization System. No cats have
been mobilized, there is no cause for alarm.

Ginny
I can has iPhone?

Via: Flickr Title: Test Cattern By: GinnyRED57
Originally uploaded: 26 Nov ’08, 8.44pm CST PST

UPDATE: Posting moblogged photos via Flickr works, WordPress is no longer stripping the HTML brackets!

My husband David will post a more technical explanation, but basically he set up the blog on a virtual server, and installed an older version of Linux running in VMWare on that server.

It’s complicated. Let’s just say I can now post to the blog from one of several third-party applications, and I’m going to test them all. They’re all useful, and handy for various reasons.

Floor Project From Hell V: The Stain in the Hall

Stained Quarter Round

David installed the white-painted shoe molding earlier this afternoon, and even got through the angsty moments trying to get the floor brackets for the closet doors re-installed. Now all that remains is the quarter-round. We’d had a bad time with the oak trim that came with the floor product (actually, it was quite expensive) as it was such dense, hard wood that no matter how we pre-drilled and pounded and used an electric nailer, we couldn’t get the nails to go in all the way. So we regrouped, bought plain pine and it’s now all cut and mitred to fit the room precisely, and as of right now it’s in the front hall with the first coat of stain on it. I’ll give it another hour and then put a second coat on it. It’ll dry overnight, then tomorrow night a coat of urethane (which we already have on hand) and Tuesday we should be installing it.

Once over the wittering we had to do over the floor bracket, David got his DIY mojo working and the baseboards are very neatly installed. He likes the power nailer, which certainly made the job a lot faster and easier. Soon I’ll be getting some bookshelves for the room, and will probably set up my laptop up there along with the lounge chair and reading lamp.

Obama Magnet Stickerized

Flickr

Finally had a chance to place my Obama ’08 magnet on my car… but instead of attaching it to the outside, where it could get ripped off, I stuck it to the inside of my rear window (on the left, naturally) with wide cellophane tape. I’ve had it for a couple of days – my husband David made a donation a while back and we’ve been waiting impatiently – but I was motivated to mount it after reading this.


Title: Obama Sticker
By: GinnyRED57

UPDATE: GAH!! replaced the missing angle brackets. I’m really, really OVER the PHP bug that prevents me from posting to WordPress via API from Flickr, iPHone, and Scribefire. DAMMIT!

But my stickermagnet sure are purty.
Originally uploaded: 12 Oct ’08, 4.11pm CDT PST
Ginny
I can has iPhone?

Polly Wolly Doodle Dog All Day

Made it to Steve’s house to watch Stargate: Continuum and now have a Labradoodle at my feet. Polly is a lively girl but at the moment she’s being all good and calm.

Until Steve gets her riled up for “outies,” that is.
p>a href=”http://www.blogula-rasa.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/p-640-480-6c4e0c9d-970b-4392-9c71-edc249ceb748.jpeg”>img src=”http://www.blogula-rasa.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/p-640-480-6c4e0c9d-970b-4392-9c71-edc249ceb748.jpeg” alt=”” width=”225″ height=”300″ class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-364″ />/a>/p>

Dis mai brane on kafeen

Flickr

Breaktime! This is my work mug, bought from a little pottery shop near
Starved Rock State Park IL – I think in a town called Dixon. Cute
place, making a good recovery from a tornado a few years ago.

Mai brane needz dis in teh mourningz

Ginny
I can has iPhone?

Via: Flickr Title: Dis mai brane on kafeen By: GinnyRED57
Originally uploaded: 5 Aug ’08, 10.38am CDT PST

Breaktime! This is my work mug, bought from a little pottery shop near
Starved Rock State Park IL – I think in a town called Dixon. Cute
place, making a good recovery from a tornado a few years ago.

Mai brane needz dis in teh mourningz

Ginny
I can has iPhone?

Ready for use

Flickr

Here’s the story: The two pieces of slate, and the large rounded glacial pebbles set in crushed limestone around it, are the salvaged pieces of the altar at Holy Innocents Hoffman Estates, my former Episcopal mission parish. When we closed the church at the end of December, 2006, there were a few people who mourned the loss as if a family member died. Many of them left after trying to remain with the rest of us; they just couldn’t continue in the new place.

One of the things that was discussed in the run-up to the closure and merger with St Nicholas was a crazy-ass idea: the St Nick’s people offered to help us dismantle the altar and move it to Elk Grove, where it would become an outdoor altar for summer use. This was receive politely by some and enthusiastically by others, but privately a lot of us thought “nice sentiment, but not possible.”

Well, butter mai butt and call me a biskit, they got ‘er done last week, a little more than a year and a half later. A few months back, the old altar was carefully demolished at the old building, as the new owners had agreed to letting us take it down. They’re not a liturgical church and did not need it (and it was in the sightlines between the congregation and the ministers).  A crew of volunteers went over and took the altar apart. Most of the men who originally put it up have died, but a few older ladies remembered the story on how it came to be. The men had gone up to Kettle Moraine State Park in Wisconsin to liberate some glacial rubble from a quarry area, and the slate for the altar top was duly ordered with a nice set of Maltese crosses at the corners and in the center. A relic of the Blessed James De Koven was set in the top – this explains uch about our Anglo-Catholic tradition at Holy Innocents. But when the then bishop of Chicago was to come for a visit in the early Sixties, he told the mission that the top of the altar was much too low – it needed to be raised a matter of inches to be “correct.” Well, so they went and bought another piece of slate, which was quickly marked with crosses (they appear to be done with a stonecutting saw, very utilitarian). The family of Florence Keller donated the cost of this second piece of slate, and it was installed on top of the first one. Here’s how it looked after the closing liturgy, when we cleared out the worship space immediately after church on the Feast of the Holy Innocents. And here’s how it looked ‘undressed for Advent‘ the year we started the “grocery bags for the hungry” pantry ministry.

When the altar was dismantled, it was found that the stones were mortared in place around a simple wood-and-chickenwire frame, which came apart pretty easily. The two pieces of slate were separated for the first time in forty years, having been held together with little more than gravity and caulk.

The whole affair was trucked over by the volunteers to St Nick’s, where the pieces spent the winter on wood pallets under canvas. Then a few months ago, a committee started working on what to do with it all.

Originally, the old altar was to be restored as it had originally been. The workmen decided that the old top would form the supports for the new altar, and they cut it in half and angled the halves in order to give as much support as possible to the newer top – the plan was to rebuild the “cage” around them and put the rubble boulders back, covering the old top back forever.  But then after church a few weeks ago, we were all “volunteered” to move the boulders to around the edge of the newly laid concrete slab, and this was the first time for us to see the slate altar “in situ.”

We admired the Maltese cross carvings (one of them had to be sliced in half). Manny, one of our priests, is Maltese, and he took a lot of ribbing. Several of us started talking as we lugged boulders… “what if we did something else with the boulders instead of replicating the old altar?”

We decided, just a random group of sweating folks, that we liked the modernity of the exposed “old” and “new” slate and the way the legs were angled, with the Maltese crosses toward the street, appealed to us. We didn’t mind the machine marks on the back, either. They just showed that it was an altar that had been used – it was a working altar for decades, and a little wear and tear is inevitable. So after some discussion, and moving the boulders again, the Bishop’s Committee ratified the informal “what-iffery” of the boulder-haulerrs, and came up with a nice solution (approved by the ultimate authority, the “stone guy” that Tim had found who was willing to do the work at cost, with free labor).  So now it remains only to be used. We’d better do this quick! Summer is almost over. But we think that seating won’t be a problem, as everyone has at least one camp chair or folding tailgater chair at home. I just hope it doesn’t happen while I’m away on vacation, although it probably will.

It’s funny how things work themselves out. Father Steve, our vicar, had been so anxious to preserve the past, but the people who were interested in doing something new were the former Holy Innocents people – in fact, pretty much ALL of the former HI people that have become integrated with the rest of St Nicks. He was so worried about causing hurt, but we were all very quick to come to the same conclusion – we’re happy to see the old made new, for the greater good of our own church community. Now we have to figure out how to rededicate the altar, and ourselves.

A harvest blessing, perhaps?

Ginny
I can has iPhone?

Via: Flickr Title: Ready for use By: GinnyRED57
Originally uploaded: 31 Jul ’08, 7.00pm CDT PST

Ginny
I can has iPhone?