The Elephant's Child

Tuning the Big Austin.

When your husband is up inside the innards of a 1928 Austin universal wind chest, which is a large, walk-in, air-locked, pressurized box of reinforced boards that provides the wind to all the pipes mounted on its top, and your husband is 6'-3" tall, the one thing you definitely don't want to hear is,

"I crawled in here forward; I don't know if I can turn around."

Good thing he took a cell phone in there with him.  He needed it to tell me, seated at the console, when to turn the organ on and off.  When you turn that organ off, there are intermittent soft sighs as the air seeps back out of the very extensive wind system of the organ after the blower stops. It sounds for all the world like moaning ghosts, especially in a large, quiet, empty sanctuary after nightfall.

We were tuning until nearly nine o'clock.  That organ is large enough that you could easily spend two or three full days tuning if you were to tune absolutely everything on it. It's a four-manual organ, with pedal, great, swell, choir, and solo divisions.  The solo division is in a chamber one story up above the balcony, at the opposite end of the church from the console and main organ chambers, which are, standard Presbyterian/ Methodist style, front and center behind the altar.  We used cell phones to assist with the tuning of the solo division, since there is no way someone sitting at the console can hear the poor soul up in the solo yelling "Next!" when it's time to hold the next key.

I spent close to twelve hours sitting on the organ bench, my feet dangling because I'm too short to rest them on the pedal board. (We're nice technicians, and do not adjust the bench unless absolutely necessary. Even then we put it back the way it was when we came.) Mad Musician spent the same amount of time contorting himself into the smallest and strangest of spaces, reaching carefully across ranks of pipes with his tuning knife, being careful not to "butt-tune" any mixtures.

A mixture rank has from two to five pipes that play together when you play one note on the keyboard.  They're tons of "fun" to tune, since you have to block off all but one the pipes with pipe-cleaners, and tune each one to blend with the others. Mixtures are what give sparkle and shimmer to some organ registrations.  For the mixture on the swell Mad Musician had me turn on the stop we were tuning the mixture to (the reference stop) then turn the reference stop off to tune the individual pipes of the mixture to the others.  

"Butt-tuning the mixture" means to bump the delicate little ranks of mixture pipes with your behinder while you're bending over to reach across to tune something else entirely.  Not a cool trick, and a good example of why ordinary lay people should not go poking around inside an organ chamber.

I'm just in awe of Mad Musician's ears. (Well, I like his behinder too, but hey, I'm married to him.)  After many hours helping him tune, I can finally hear when two pipes are out of tune with each other, but it takes me a few seconds of listening and concentrating.  He can hear it right away. 

Fortunately, Mad Musician was able to repair what he needed to repair inside the Austin wind chest and extricate himself. I did not have to go in after him.

For a man who claims he's no good at dancing, he sure seems to be able to move around wonderfully in the tight and delicate of spaces of a pipe organ chamber.

Back Home Again

It's good to be home.

It will be good to back to more-normal blogging schedule, too. 

Notes from the Road

On a berm up above a gravel farm driveway, a single yellow metal lawn chair, facing into the sunset.

A Ford dealership in a heavily Catholic rural area: Paternoster Ford

Sparkle Kitty playing drums on the car seat to the Synchronicity album by the Police after consuming an entire vanilla shake.

I just now realized that The Police wrote an awful lot of creepy stalker sort of songs.

Incongruously, a Korean fast food joint in  small central Wisconsin city.

A minivan full of cute Orthodox Jewish college guys, at an Arbys.  Can't say that I've ever heard Hebrew spoken at a north-Midwestern fast food spot before.  Minnestota plates, NY Yankees baseball gear on some of them.

Missing Firefox's convienences. Convienceses! (bah!)  Like spell check. (If you correct me in the comments, I'll ban your IP.  Pbbbllltt!)

A beautiful, gloriously-built English-American sounding organ in a church that doesn't have clue what a gem resides in their balcony. Absolute crying shame.  Tuning the tuba, though (not a real tuba, but reed pipe stop mounted horizonatally on top of the organ case) just about made my ears bleed.  It's beautiful, but it's really, really, really, really l o u d.

Another church: The Lutheran Hymnal, c. 1941 in the pews and Creative Worship for the Lutheran Parish in the bulletin.

A Methodist church that had a sermon preached in the past year entitled, "Oceans: Para-sailing in Anonymity."

Um, yeah.

Writing is Brutal.

When you're writing at age thirteen or seventeen or even twenty-one, everything you write is glowing and pure. Everything that comes off your pen or keyboard seems brilliant, both to you and to your teacher.

It seems that way to your teachers because even moderately average writing ability is so far ahead of the average slob in high school.  It doesn't take much to sound brilliant when your classmates can't write a complete sentence.  Your writing glows in your own eyes because it's fun and easy, and you can write acres of pages about whatever you want while neatly skirting the big giant white elephant, the behemoth that will wake you in the middle of the night at age thirty-five or forty and make you itch and squirm with its need-to-be-toldness.  At twenty-one, even if you're well-read by that time, you don't have a lifetime of extensive reading under your belt, in your head, sitting on your shoulders telling you, "You're boring! Nobody's going to read that! Wooden! Fake! Full of cliches! Bah!"

When I hear a young person tell me that writing is easy for them, I think, "Ah, they've not learned to edit yet."  Ruthlessly butchering your baby, over and over again, is the only way you get better at writing, whether it's poetry or prose.  But being able to do that means you know too much about the craft of writing, and the editor part of your brain starts constantly hectoring while you put words on the page.  It becomes hard to simply get the mileage of track laid down so that you've got the huge bulk of material you need for later re-writing.  

Writing is brutal.

How I Do Laundry.

You've been warned: This is a Girl Post.  It's also opinionated.

I've faced some incredulity from friends because I only do laundry once a week.  I tried the "little bit each day" method and I nearly drove myself bonkers.  There was no escape! There was always laundry! Hanging over my head like a fifteen-page term paper made of white skivvies and stinky socks!

I don't love housework for its own sake, but I despise with an irritation that is completely irrational being behind on it.  So, I resolved to smoosh all my laundry into one day or die trying. The first thing I did was make sure that all three of us had socks, undies and undershirts to last an entire week, plus several extra.  I made sure that family members who like colored underthings had a range of colors, which could be dispersed among the various sorted piles.  This took some of the load (Thank you! Thank you! I'll be here all week.) off the whites, and spread the volume equally among the different colors.  When laundry day comes, the various piles are all about the same size. Usually.

All whites go together.  I buy plain, sturdy dress shirts for Mad Musician; they get washed on hot with the other white underthings. They last many years, even with the rough treatment. (Land's End rocks.) My other loads are darks (red and black), all the mid-range colors, and "heavy items" such as jeans and towels.  Four loads total.  I often put polyester-blend men's shirts in with my white loads since they won't bleed.  You can also put a few blues in with your whites if you need to. 

Many weeks, my darks pile isn't big enough for a load.  I do not do small loads, if I can help it.  I generally only wash when the load is a full load, so I'll be wearing more reds and black this week if I didn't wash darks last week.  Yes, I do sometimes pick what I'll wear based on my laundry needs.  You can put more in your washer than you think you can.  Most washers - regular-sized ones - are built for 8-10 pounds of laundry.  As long as everything's evenly spaced and the clothes are moving around once the agitator starts, you're good to go.

I also had Mad Musician make sure the buzzer was working on both the washer and the dryer.  When it buzzes, take care of it.  NOW.  When I had TV, I did my laundry on the day that had the best evening TV. Nowadays, I make sure my mp3 player is loaded for folding.  Oftentimes, I "run" the laundry over the course of Sunday afternoon, while I'm sewing or doing other stuff, leaving all the folding for Monday.  I may stink at cooking, but it's great to start off the week with the laundry under control.

Here are some other laundry-saving tips I do, which you may or may not find extreme: 

I don't wash Sparkle's sheets every week, and I don't wash the grownups' sheets every week during the winter months, although I do often switch out the pillowcases. If the grownups are scuzzy, we shower before bed.  I put the kiddo to bed with clean feet.  That helps, too. Clean people = cleaner sheets.

We do not use a fresh towel for each person for each shower. (Do you? Stop that.)  Put up enough towel racks either in the bathroom or in each child's room so each person's towel dries completely after each shower.  Voila! No skanky towels!

Here's the real shocker.  Stop washing clean clothes.  Were you home all day in the A/C? Those shorts are probably wearable tomorrow. The shirt may be fine as well.  You do wear deodorant, don't you?  You did an hour of gardening in your old jeans? Hang them up and wear them on Saturday when you paint.  A Sunday skirt worn over a slip isn't hamper-tossable unless you spilled coffee on it or your kid smeared a jelly donut on it.  Wear your winter sweaters and tops over a tee shirt and you'll save yourself a world of work.  

Are you grossed out?  Too bad. I've got the last laugh, because I'm doing less laundry than you!  Some of you are saying, "But you've only got three people in your family!"  To which I answer: I grew up with three siblings in a family of six, in West Africa, where it's HOT, and it's DIRTY. My mother did not do fifteen loads of laundry per week. Neither should you.

Try it.  See if you can get your number of loads down.  Report back.

Functional Equivalents.

It wasn't a turkey, but it was shaped like one.  It was even stuffed like one.  Mom served roast with it, too, since the non-turkey was only a fraction of the size of a real turkey.

It was a chicken. We called it turkey, though, with much laughter and joking.

We had buns or rolls, depending on how many were conscientiously objecting to the use of the term "buns" at the dinner table. Within the missions group were people from several many different regions of the United States.  We had pail versus bucket debates, PEEcan versus pay-CAHN debates,  dinner versus supper debates, and of course, rolls versus buns debates. 

I'm sure we had that frozen chocolate cheese pie for desert. It was some sort of cream cheese-based pie that cemented forever my obsession with cream cheese. It had walnuts on the top, from the hoard in the freezer.  You don't find bagged walnuts too often in West Africa, even in the grocery stores that cater to ex-pats.  Whenever Mom saw something like that, no matter what time of year, she bought it and stashed it in the freezer for the holidays. 

The next year, there was a turkey.  Oh, was there turkey.  Turkey, turkey, turkey.  The local veterinarian, Dr. Akume,  had taken on a turkey-raising project to supply poor homesick ex-pats with their beloved turkeys.  He provided very good customer service. So good, in fact, that when Aunt Norma ordered her turkey and forgot to specify what size she'd like, Dr. Akume gave her his best and biggest.

A twenty-five pounder, for four people, two of them children. Pretty sure she paid by the pound, too. 

I seem to remember my mom's cranberry and apple jello relish on and off through the years, although where she found cranberries, I don't know.

Sometimes there was pie.  Pumpkins do grow in parts of Africa, despite their image as a continental autumnal fruit.  Normally, though, African pumpkin or squash is cooked down in palm oil or corn oil with Maggie cube and hot pepper and served over rice, where it looks like stringy calf poo on a bed of snow.

Of course, it doesn't look as bad as eggplant, which is cooked down in palm oil or corn oil with Maggie cube and hot pepper and served over rice, where it looks like stringy barf on a bed of snow.

Never was a fan of the eggplant.  I can choke down the pumpkin; I eventually got used to it.  Nowadays, I'd eat it with glee, just for nostalgia's sake, disgusting color and texture notwithstanding.  I can most definitely eat palm butter, in which the pulp from the nuts of the palm tree is cooked down in palm oil or corn oil with Maggie cube and hot pepper and served over rice, where it looks like stringy gore on a bed of snow. Palm butter stains everything that rich, iron-ore red, the same red as the dirt of Monrovia. Dangerously messy stuff, but it's really good for you.  I don't think there's a food on earth with as much nutrition packed into it, except perhaps potato greens, the every day staple of my Liberian childhood.

Twenty years into my American life, I find myself attempting functional equivalents the other way round.  Several years ago, my brother and mom discovered an Asian vegetable called gai lan (Chinese broccoli) that, when chopped up, cooked down in palm oil or corn oil with Maggie cube and hot pepper and served over rice, tastes functionally equivalent to potato greens, which is actually amaranth leaves chopped up, cooked down in palm oil or corn oil with Maggie cube and hot pepper and served over rice, where it looks simply delicious. 

I haven't tried making West African pumpkin soup, although maybe I will this year.  After all, pumpkin is cheap in November. In my cabinet is a small bit of West African pepper, purchased in bulk by my youngest brother and doled out to the rest of the family in little screw-top jars.  I've got a personal stash of palm oil and palm butter, purchased for me by my African-trotting sister-in-law and hand-carried from an African grocery store in Dallas Fort Worth up here to middle America; maybe I'll even try making palm butter.  I'll serve it with a bottle of 409 and a roll of paper towels at each plate.   

Turkey is really cheap this time of year, too. Maybe I'll put turkey in the palm butter.

Stole Preview

This is a trial assembly, with the final fabrics and trim, of the white festival stole that I'm making for church.  I realized just now, with a terrible start, that Sunday is Christ the King Sunday, and the liturgical color for that festival is white.  That means that I don't have until Thanksgiving to finish this, as I thought.  I have to finish it by about six o'clock Saturday evening, when our pastor will be preparing for the Saturday evening service.

Whoops!  But I think it will be ok.  Everything is cut out correctly, thankfully.  After assembling this sample, I think I know how I'm going to get that fancy double corded trim in there without killing myself in the process.  My super-awesome 1966 Singer has come through for me once again.  What a pain;  I had no idea that the double cord would be trickier than a single cord.  I bought the double because the color matched perfectly, and it looked rich and classy.  I'll think more carefully next time.

Materials used:  Mid-weight, non-fusible interfacing, pre-shrunk just in case. "Ivory" (actually more of a winter white) silk dupioni, from a bridal collection. The color and sheen matches our white paraments quite beautifully, even though they are ecclesiastical brocade and this is obviously not. To match the altar paraments exactly would have cost us $154 per yard.  The gold and cream brocade is a rayon blend spotted as a one-time feature in the special occasions fabrics (I've never seen it since, so I'm glad I grabbed a full yard and a half).  The final stole will have the large brocade motif carefully centered, unlike the Gaspard short stole hanging in the sacristy (she says with disdain), and not upside down.

What?  You didn't spot that the motif was upside down?   Well, I did.  This is church work, people, not government contract work.  The devil *cough* beauty is in the details. 

See?  Either I'm perfectly suited for this kind of sewing or I'm certifiably insane.  It's ok.  The insanity is for a good reason. 

To Succeed, Delay Literacy.

Over here there's a nice long list of all sorts of famous and successful people who were schooled nontraditionally, having been taught at home, self-taught, or both.

It's quite an impressive list. Several of them did not learn to read until their late childhood or early teens.** Most, for various reasons, had difficulty with the traditional school setting and a parent or parents who agreed that "toughing it out" wasn't the way to go.  If you include contemporary success stories, men like Bill Gates, for example, you'll find an astonishing array of people who flunked or dropped out of college, or never attended college in the first place.

What dangerous lists!  After all, if all these people (and it's a pretty disparate group, from actors to millionaires to Jane Austen) were able to not only "turn out okay" but actually succeed in sometimes astonishing ways, one could be led to start doubting the preeminence of the traditional school in our society.

People could start to question the effectiveness of the money spent on public education. People might decide to educate their own children, or even more radically, let their children educate themselves!

Society might collapse.

Or maybe, just maybe, the ranks of non-traditionally schooled children and young adults will continue to produce our world's best out-of-the box-creative inventors, deep-thinkers, philosophers (secular and religious), ground-breaking artists and statesmen, and paradigm-busting writers, just as it has for time immemorial.

**To use the sharp-as-a-tack reasoning skills of the American news media, this obviously proves that the only way to get ahead in life is to delay entry into formal schooling until as late as conceivably possible. I agree.

It's Coming. Doom!

It's coming, sooner than you'd think, and about three weeks before you're ready for it.  Driving, wailing, syrupy stick-sweet waves of creeping earworm torture, poking into your brain while you're trying to fight the crowds for the one special thing that will make your husband's Grandma Edsella hate you slightly less.

It's Christmas music, playing incessantly on the radio and in the stores, day and night and day.   It will start no later than Black Friday, that crazy day of shopping the day after Thanksgiving, and continue until midnight on December 24th, immediately after which all the music will return to normal, in mid-song if necessary.  Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum. A new born King to see, pa rum pum never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down...

Mad Musician hates the Little Drummer Boy, the poor man.  I don't mind it so much, although it's not one of my favorites, certainly.  I can't stand Feliz Navidad.  It should be banned by the Geneva Convention.  Rocking Around The Christmas Tree drives me batty. 

Please. Stop the rocking.  Get a hotel room already.

In fact, I can't think of one single commonly-played Christmas song that I really like.

Maybe White Christmas.  But even that is schmaltzy and annoying when heard in isolation, by itself, without a soft couch, a warm blanket, a husband, an ottoman (not an automan or auduban), and an adult beverage to go with it.

What Christmas song makes you want to break a certain locked glass cabinet in the back of the Walmart and shoot out the store's speakers?

Selective Piety.

I've noticed that, among the modest-dressing, non-Amish folk in this area, that the husbands are completely indistinguishable from the secular men.  They've got their beepers, baseball caps, jeans, and Carhartts, just like everyone else around here.

Not so the wives.  They're in long skirts, dark tights, practical shoes, long sleeves, and lace hair covers. 

They stick out. 

They draw attention to themselves.  

They look different.  Not a little bit different, but an awful lot different.

I thought at least part of the idea of modest dress was to prevent other men from looking at your wife.  This degree of modest dress does exactly the opposite.

At least the Amish are a bit more consistent; the Amish men also wear clothing that sets them apart as being outside of the popular secular culture.