enjoy every sandwich

I really miss Warren Zevon.

And David Letterman. He is such a gracious host.  

My kids got me an app for my phone called Soundhound. I kept asking what song I was hearing and they said there's an app for that and they hooked me up. Who knew?

When I hear something I like and want to know who it is, soundhound tells me and lets me mark favorites so I can find them later, like today.

Today. So cold and windy and harsh a day, but sunny, and I've found the spot on the couch where a cat would sit, and I start going through my soundhound favorites lists.

Dawes. Have you heard of them? I love them. This is the song I heard and had to find:

It is really a great song, especially the bit at the end with the kids. The perfect accompaniment to an afternoon alone, a wistful mood, a patch of sun and a glass of wine.

But then, the next song that autoplays on youtube is this one...

Zevon, Letterman and Dawes. Desperado Under the Eaves -  my favorite Warren song. 

I believe synergy is the word. Or Serendipity.

My afternoon is perfect now. Except I need a kleenex. :)

Enjoy every sandwich, and song, my friends. 

Thanks, youtube. And Warren. And Dave. And Dawes.

xo

NPR Music Tiny Desk Concerts

I have been transported by some wonderful and diverse artists on NPR's Look Back at 2015 Tiny Desk Concerts . The second song on this clip by Anna and Elizabeth, Lella Todd Crankie made me cry. I didn't know what a crankie was until today. Their music made me remember the wonderful mountain music from the movie Songcatcher.  Enjoy.



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Iron And Wine: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert:

It's cold, snowy and windy today. Pretty gloomy. Except for this in my day. Thanks, NPR.

Time Sinks

I wrote the post below and forgot about it, lonely on my cobwebby book blog draft pile. I forgot what I wrote, all of it. I've read some of my book reviews that I remember nothing about writing either, let alone reading the book I babbled on about. Should I worry? I do, and I hope I can forget about worrying soon as easily as I forget the words I write. I'm trying to look on these little amnesiac discoveries as an adventure, not evidence of slippage, just overload. There's just too much to discover, like this post.

Thankfully, almost two years later, the links still work. I'm listening to the concert as I finish and post this now, because why not? I like to share. I'm going to post it to facebook too, because why not? The concert is so good I just restarted it.  The songs at the five and thirty minute marks I could listen to on repeat.

Dave Pell is still costing me hours of delightful reading and too many open tabs, and my relationship with Chardonnay is still going strong.

Here's to time sinks rescued from the draft pile.


March 2014

This is a verbose post. If you want to cut to the chase, just listen to this NPR Laura Marling concert while you go about your day, evening, whatever. Or just sit and listen to it, and soak it in, because it is a really great concert by an artist I bet few to none of us have heard of until now, Thank You Very Much, NPR.

Eighty lovely minutes of new music and my brain loved it. Reminiscent of Joni Mitchell meets Shawn Colvin, but unique and fresh and evocative. Just lovely.

So, the blah blah back story, or why this post is titled Time Sinks.

I get an amazing email newsletter called Next Draft by David Pell, in which he shares a dozen or more of the most fascinating, interesting, newsworthy, funny, striking or ironic things he finds on the internet. His list is one or two sentences describing each news bit, plus an embedded link, and following up on all the links can cost me hours. Happy, interesting hours. I'm always thrilled to have read something before he links it, because it makes me feel like the winner to already know something before he writes about the topic. Dave Pell is why I have so many tabs open on my computer. One of the reasons.

The prize winner time suck was today's email, with the link to NPR's Bob Boilen's list of his favorite concerts of 2013. Bob went to 662 concerts last year, which I struggle to fathom. I'll not attend that many live music performances in my lifetime, even though live music performances are among my very favorite things about being human and alive. So, he listed his favorite 116 in his Best Concerts of 2013 article. The top ten are featured, with links.Who doesn't love a best-of list? I had to know what made them so good, so I started clicking, with very complicated results. In short, I hated his top 4, no offense to the artists, and wondered what the hell I was missing.

I'm a huge fan of music, and I think my taste is eclectic and well-rounded, or so I thought, and one of my life's little indulgences are the tiny deskside concert series over at NPR. I've watched maybe a dozen online and I am convinced those NPR music people have the best job in the world.

Bob's best-of list had me expecting some really awesome musical experiences. But I was wrong. Maybe I'm getting old, or maybe my musical palate is underdeveloped. Bob's top four are a mix of world music and electronica and jazz, and I thought hell, these suck, no structure, they don't go anywhere, they don't move me, and I kept fast forwarding, hoping for it to get better, and then wondered what I'm missing. Sure, there is talent, but nothing that I like or can connect with.

But. Then I thought maybe it's not the music, it's me. I'm pretty sure after batting twenty percent with a trained music professional that I do not have the musical palate or chops to appreciate his top picks. Or maybe I'm just too old for some of this.

Case in point, wine. I'm sipping a nice chardonnay, and 10 years ago, I hated wine. Yuk. Then I discovered white zinfandel, which my wine loving friends would not touch. It's starter wine, basically. My palate learned to enjoy wine of some sort though, and it was good. My next step was to the reisling family, my first white, equally sweet, but easy on my palate too.

Fast forward a year or so and they are too sweet for me, especially with a nice meal. So, hello pino grigio, my new friend. I still couldn't enjoy a chardonnay, it was too intense, oaky and funky for me. But after a while I tried a sip of pinot gris and the next thing you know I'm trying Argentinian torrentes, and then chardonnay starts to taste pretty good too. Suddenly I'm a white wine girl, starting to get picky about which ones too, because they start to taste different to me. Who knew? I thought all wine tasted like crap before I learned to love them.  I even learned to like reds, though they didn't like me back and set my heart and hot flashes into crazy land. Looking over a wine list at a nice restaurant for me now is an adventure, and I enjoy learning all the nuances and finding what other grapes, regions and vintages I enjoy.

The same thing happened to me with art, in a smaller way. I used to hate modern art until I started studying art, and once I figured out the meaning behind the medium, I began to appreciate previously incomprehensible forms, and I'm suddenly a modern art fan too.

Or poetry. I used to need more structure and blatant meaning in my prose when I was younger, but I have stretched my imagination and understanding enough to not only get, but be moved by so many types of written and spoken word. My taste has evolved. Not too far, mind you, as I'm a home learned rural trashy girl at heart, and I'm not classically educated or even that well read - I just like to read is all. But I'm always looking to fill in the gaps and learn how to read and understand more complex works. It makes me happy.

But my point is, finally, that the thought occurred to me that maybe I'm not as musically well rounded as I thought, and maybe I just haven't evolved my musical palate enough to appreciate what the NPR guy was grooving on. Maybe if I try, if I study music a little more, these sounds that seem incoherent and cacophonous now might begin to coalesce into something that sounds like music to me, into songs I might enjoy. Maybe.

Or not. When it comes to music, there is so much out there worth listening to, in the genres I like best, like folk, rock, bluegrass, country, alternative, old favorites or standards or classics to discover. I'm not sure I can squeeze learning to like or enjoy the stuff the NPR guy loves into my listening wish list.

What about you, anyone who has managed to read all this. Is learning to like modern music like learning to like wine? I'm not optimistic.

But, at least I found something worth listening to on the NPR music guru's list: Laura Marling. She was number seven on the list. Her I like, and that's something. A happy discovery - worth the effort to find and to share with anyone who has the time to listen.



I hope I find this post all over again in a few more years, and that the links still work.

:)

A Few too many Words About Flint MI

I read Stephen Rodrick's Rolling Stone piece about the water quality disaster in Flint and I am angry. First, that this could happen at all, in this day, in this country, on such a huge scale is horrifying. Second, that indisputable scientific facts from college professors, laboratories, and pediatricians, as well as desperate pleas from parents of sick children were systematically discredited and ignored by politicians. Third, that the comments section at the end of the article immediately digressed into inane, angry rants between our ridiculous political parties. Stupid humans are missing the point. Please read the article and then skip the comments unless you want to feel like puking.

Regulatory water quality analysis was my business for decades. Drinking water, industrial discharge, landfills, hazardous and radioactive waste clean-up, analytical methods, data quality control: these are things I know. In my lab days, I read and implemented regulatory codes and quality procedures and wrote many of our Standard Operating Procedures for sampling, preparation and analysis for trace metals. After 18 years away from all that to raise my babies, I still know the EPA test methods and the emission and absorption wavelengths for lead analysis, and I can probably still operate the atomic absorption and emission spectrophotometers to do the analysis. I started my career as a sampling technician, and talked to many a concerned mother as I took drinking water samples from their kitchen sinks. I cared very deeply about what I did in my job, and I have been steadily concerned since I retired with the weakening of the EPA,  and the lack of funds to ensure that we maintain all the ground we painstakingly made up since the 1970s. Humans can be so incredibly stupid and short sighted.

I'd been unable to focus on the news out of Flint when the story broke, and when I did, last week, finally pay attention, the first thing I read was the raw data analysis reports for lead in the homes sampled not by a regulatory agency but by Dr. Marc Edwards, a water-treatment expert who teaches at Virginia Tech and has received a MacArthur genius grant. Dr. Edwards and his students were so alarmed by what they were seeing and hearing that they undertook a massive study at their own expense to find out why children were getting sick in Flint. There is actually a crowd funded site to reimburse the university for the analytical costs, because they are staggering and I know why in excruciating detail that maybe only another lab rat like me will understand...

GoFundMe Flint Water Study

Summary of Flint Water testing results

Raw Data tables for Lead in Flint Water     This is the one that made me cry.

I read the reports, and I looked at the lead results. I refreshed my memory for the action level for lead in drinking water, and saw that many of the Flint homes recorded over 1000 times the action level, at hazardous waste levels, not drinking water levels, for not one, but for many homes. The data made my stomach lurch and I burst into tears. I'd never seen anything like this data. I cried for the children and the families who were paying to be poisoned. I cried for the stupidity of the politicians in the city of Flint, and the State of Michigan, for the failure of the EPA, and the media, and I cried for the goodness of those who doggedly and expensively chased down the source of the problem.

Here's the Rolling Stone Article:    Who Poisoned Flint?

After I read the article, I was even more furious at the incompetence, belligerence and neglect of the elected officials, who tried to discredit concerned citizens and scientists at every turn. They are all really sorry now, of course, and many have resigned, after the President declared an emergency and sent in troops with bottled water. The truth came out, only about a year too late.

I couldn't care less about Republicans vs. Democrats or Liberal vs. Conservatives right now, and those who default to that tired old argument are as much a part of the problem as the local, state and federal governments and agencies who failed to protect children from the brain damage that the toxic lead levels will cause. "The long-term effects of elevated blood lead levels in children may include slow development, reduced IQ scores, learning disabilities, hearing loss, reduced height and hyperactivity." Chelation of the blood is the only treatment for elevated lead levels, by the way. And boiling water for bacteria only concentrates the lead further. This is what a very vulnerable, socially and economically disadvantaged city can add to the list of woes for their children, who already attend underfunded run down, toxic schools.

I'm just sick. I'm mad as hell, and don't have a clue what to do about it, but share what I know and hope for better from our elected officials.

I write this from a state without a functioning budget since July, at a political impasse resulting in only emergency funds being released, where the fallout from unpaid vendors like myself, and unsupported public institutions from medical to educational is staggering. I can't wait to see where the economic collapse of 2008 and more stupid human tricks take us next, because it seemingly will not end, just reverberate in unexpected and awful ways for decades to come. I predict there will be many more Flints in our future, especially as we continue to trash our precious groundwater reserves with fracking. 

Is it any wonder I have so many worries for my children? For all our children?

America, you are breaking my heart into little pieces.

Sorry. And now, a happy picture in apology for this unhappy post...... I'll try to lighten up next time.

Tucker kisses make everything better.

PS I forgot to mention that the symbol for lead is Pb, from the Greek word Plumbum, which is the root of our word plumber and plumbing, hence the extraneous b in the words. That b always bugged me until I learned my chemical symbols. 

Flint's Pb problem is very much a plumbing problem.