#4 An Important Book

What book made the biggest impact on your life?

My first impression of this question was...yikes, I read all the time. How in the world can I pick one book that was the most important to me? That's a near impossible task! Yet when I actually sat down to write this, it became very simple. It would have to be a book I read over and over again as a child. It would have to be the one that instilled in me the love of reading for shear pleasure and enjoyment. The one where the words just danced off the page and made me smile. The one that called to me every night...pick me up...read me aloud..listen....there is magic on the page...

Christmas morning 1961, my parents gave me a small book of poetry called Silver Pennies by Blanche Jennings Thomson. She was the head of the English Department at Benjamin Franklin High School in Rochester, New York and she edited this anthology in April, 1925. It was illustrated in black and white by Winifred Bromhall. Nothing fancy here, just a gathering of absolutely wonderful poems.

Thomson wrote in her Preface, "You must have a silver penny to get into fairyland. But silver pennies are hard to find and it isn't everyone who knows where to look for them, even if he has time: so it is for such people, the mothers and the teachers who want silver pennies for their children that this volume is prepared. It is my hope that no child will be left out of the fairyland of modern poetry for the lack of a silver penny."

It is here I discovered Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale, Hilda Conkling, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, and Edna St. Vincent Milay. I read about the moon and the stars, fairies, dancing potatoes, griffins, cats, camels, elves and Joan of Arc. Everyday things became magical and the magical became real. My imagination soared as the words took me on faraway journeys or caused me to look at things in a slightly different way. This book sat beside my bed and I read from it daily. Where is this little book now? On a shelf in my office, still close at hand.

Here is one of my favorites. Doesn't it sound just like me?

I Meant to do My Work Today

I meant to do my work today-

But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,

And a butterfly flitted across the field,

And all the leaves were calling to me.

And the wind went sighing over the land,

Tossing the grasses to and fro,

And a rainbow held out it's shining hand-

So what could I do but laugh and go?

Richard Le Gallienne

#3 My Life as a Mathematician

OK, I must confess, I have always loved math. All the way through school it came easily and I always made good grades. I actually enjoyed solving all types of problems. There was always a correct answer even if there were several different ways to find it. Just follow the numerical path and solutions appear.

Two things I remember about math class.....

Every Friday in the 4th grade we had a test that consisted of ten word problems. After the test we swapped papers, used our red pen and graded the papers as the teacher told us the answers. When our papers were returned, the teacher then called out our names in alphabetical order and we had to tell her our test grade out loud in front of the whole class. Even with a good score, this was mortifying to me.

In 10th grade I fell asleep in my favorite math teacher's class and he threw an eraser at me. I was totally embarrassed, but his class was still one of my favorites.

My love affair ended my freshman year in college with calculus. The first few weeks seemed to be a review of things I already knew and I was still easily completing my assignments. Then my professor gave us a placement test and I scored very well. I was put into the "advanced" group. After my first hour in the advanced class was over, so was my understanding of calculus. I never grasped another concept, try as I might(oh that pesky little sigma). I went to individual tutoring, I studied for hours on end, nothing helped. The only thing that made the class bearable was that the professor could roll a cigarette with one hand while he taught which was interesting to watch. And he was the head of the Canoeing and Outing Club, so we had adventures together outside of the classroom. This professor passed me with a D, which was higher than my earned average, but he knew I was trying as hard as I possibly could. The D was a genuine gift and Calculus was the last math class I ever took.

I will still tell you today that I love math. Even Calculus did not stifle the romance.

I use math daily in my job as we use data to justify all of our placement and intervention decisions. We discuss things like the bottom quartile, class averages and graphing. It comes in handy when figuring out sale prices, and I always like to find a bargain. I am in charge of artist merchandise at two music festivals a year. I have to keep track of things like CD's, DVDs, t-shirts, and bumper stickers as sales can total up to $25,000 over a three day weekend. Accuracy is important when dealing with other people's money! I also use math to take care of my own finances.

Yes understanding and using math is a daily necessity. Thank goodness I always had knowledgeable and interesting and caring math teachers. Hats off to you Mr. Hazen and Dean Puckette. Your math is still with me today.

PS-I know maybe you probably don't believe me. After all this is blog challenge #3and I never did blog challenge #2. Perhaps I can't even count! But it's like this, I have no class, so I have no class poll. Simple, but true, and a true cop out...

#1 My Life as a Reader

Already I am late in posting.....but this is in response to Melanie Holtsman's fall blog challenge.

Reading is one of my favorite pastimes and I am never without a book. For as long as I can remember (and it seems that my memory starts in about third grade with chapter books), I have been a lover of books and a lover of libraries. In elementary school I liked nothing better than going to the library to pick out my next book. I read every biography at my school and I can still remember how all of the covers were just alike. From Amelia Earhart to Babe Ruth, people and their lives just fascinated me. Today however, I do not read very many biographies.

The library at summer camp had creaky old rocking chairs that were a wonderful place to sit and read. Here I devoured all of the Nancy Drew books. Then it was on to the Hardy Boys and Bobbsey Twin mystery books. Today my favorite genre is still the mystery whodunits, but I like to shake it up every once in awhile with a little romance, vampire thriller, or science fiction thrown in. Some authors I have been reading lately are Janet Evanovich, James Lee Burke, James W. Hall, John Twelve Hawkes, Carol O'Connell and Dana Stabenow.

My neighborhood library as a child was the Willowbranch library. Isn't the name just wonderful? And the best part was that the children's section was located downstairs. I can remember eagerly holding my mom's hand as we walked down in joyful anticipation of the sights and smells of all the books awaiting me. I still visit there today and check out such wonderful books as A Nest for Celeste by Henry Cole.

My summer vacation consisted of leaving Jacksonville, packing up the car, picking up my grandmother and driving 30 minutes to her beach house at Atlantic Beach. After a morning of frolicking on the beach and eating lunch, my parents insisted we take a nap. We had to get in our beds, but we were allowed to read if we did not want to sleep. I would bring piles of books from the Willowbranch Library and read such classics as Treasure Island, Old Yeller and Black Beauty. This started my love of reading in bed. A good day is one where I can spend all day in my pajamas reading a book. And likewise my second favorite place to read is on the beach. I love the sun in my face, the sound of the surf in my ears, and the challenge of keeping the book dry as I swim periodically to cool off. I also like to read as I travel and I still devour books on my summer vacations. This year I spent a month on the road and made it all the way to Maine. I finished all 3 of the Stieg Larsson Girl With the Dragon Tattoo books and The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.

I am such a voracious reader that I never buy a book. I still make use of the public library and my favorite one is our new downtown branch. I swing by there every time I leave the beach to go to Hairpeace, my favorite hair salon. I've started reserving books online and it is exciting to get an email letting me know that my request is ready. But this is as much as I involve technology in my reading. I am old school and not yet ready for books on IPads or Kindles or whatever those devices are called. I still like to feel the novels in my hand and and to experience each turn of the page. I was slow to get a cell phone, so maybe this will change as well.

Put a book in my hands, give me a few hours, this is my idea of paradise.

The Last Day of Floydfest

Today our fiend John turned 55, so we had to start the day with mimosas to accompany Herb’s breakfast. After the celebration we headed over to the parkway for the last day of Floydfest.

I spent some time with Denise and Randy as they were leaving around 5:00. I also had fun practicing my new hoola hoop skills. to. I had a few drink tickets left and I used those to drink sangria in the beer garden.

The day ended with Grace Potter and the Nocturnals on the hillside stage. She was high energy and had a rocking female base player. I could not stop dancing and I got her new cd. A perfect ending to a wonderful weekend of music.

Our friends all went home to Bristol, which left Herb and I to enjoy a night alone in the chateau:) We went to a farmers market and got corn on the cob and green beans to cook up with the steak we had left from our first night there. We ate and watched the sunset on the balcony. Ahhh vacation!

Mayhem

The record heat wave is still going on, so we took our time getting to the festival today. We enjoyed a Herb cooked breakfast of eggs and grits and biscuits and ham and bacon and fruit on the balcony. Then we just enjoyed the house and the mountain view.

When we met up with our friends, Emily had a beautiful new hair do. Tony had made friends with the sound crew, with the help of a little Tennessee moonshine. This enabled us to have the best seats in the house all day- right up on the sound board. This was perfect as Saturday was the most crowded day of the festival. We were not only comfortable, but could see over everyone’s head. It was a great place to sit and the absolutely perfect place to listen! We enjoyed the music of JJ Grey and Mofro, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Levon Helm. Amazing stuff!!!

When this show stopped at 11:00, we moved on to the meadow stage and danced until the wee hours to Carl Denson’s Tiny Universe. They had a motown sound complete with a horn section and back up singers.

Woot! Woot!

An Aside

So here is what I have learned about blogging on vacation:

This is the first time I have taken my Mac on a road trip. I worried every time we stopped to hike and had to leave it in the car.

There are still many hotels that do not have wifi.

The hotels that do have wifi are in the big cities. We tend to stay up late and enjoy the night life, So where is the time to blog?

You miss the lovely scenery when you try to blog in the car and then post later.

You forget what happens day to day if you put off blogging for a few days. (At least at my age that's true.)

You really forget what happens when you are back at work and still plan to blog about your vacation. How hard could that be, just do one day in the afternoon and finish out the trip. Yea right!

Even if you tell all your friends that you will blog about your vacation, it is still not enough peer pressure to make you blog daily.

I figured that travel, as one of my most favorite things to do, would be easy to post about everyday. Not necessarily-though I think it's a time issue rather than a topic issue. Herb can pack all kinds of activities into each day!

I am hopeless and so now months have passed and I am not blogging at all. It's hard to start fresh and blog with the lost vacation days hanging over my head.

How to break the cycle? Hmmm.....

Take on the fall blogging challenge only to fall short again? Or maybe just do short blogs on the challenge to dive back in again?

It's a thought....albeit a scary one. I'm not quite ready to commit today. But 10 is not a big number. I think I can do it!

Magic

Floydfest is right off of the Blue Ridge Parkway and the setting is beautiful. This year however, they were having record high temperatures and during the day it was 98 degrees. YOW! Thank goodness our two friends Denise and Randy were vending this year. We spent quite a lot of time in their tent cooling off. They are from West Virginia and we only see them twice a year at our festivals, so it was nice to visit with them. She made my long patchwork music skirt that was perfect for the Chets Creek theme last year. So of course I had to get a hot chili pepper skirt for the cultivating theme this year.

There is a whole Healing Art section at Floydfest, and it was here I started my day with a 45 minute massage. Ahhhh-it was the best! Then it was on to the Blue Ridge and Beyond Dance Tent for a hoola hoop lesson with Spiral and Rich from California. They have taken the hoop to a whole new artistic dancing level-it is beautiful to behold. While we were hooping there was a 15 minute torrential downpour that cooled things off for a few minutes. I stayed dry and continued my lesson.

Then it was time to concentrate on the music. I got to hear The Jason Spooner Trio, Adrienne Young, Deer Tick, Konono No.1, and Railroad Earth-one of my favorites. I went down front and danced all evening to these guys :) We also got to see Miss Kitty’s Society for Wayward Cosmonauts, a group of demented ballerinas and aerial performers.

The Dreaming Creek Main Stage ends every night at 11:00. So after Railroad Earth we wandered backstage and sat in hammock swings and enjoyed free wine and a much needed rest. Then it was on to the Blue Ridge and Beyond Dance Tent to rock out to the Pimps of Joytime.

What a fun magical and fun filled festival day!

Music

Four years ago, Herb and I came up to Floydfest. When we explored the little town of Floyd, VA, we discovered a fabulous clothing store called Winter Sun. The clothes are hand painted and the designs are bright and colorful-so me. I was looking forward to buying another dress there this year.

The store was just as I remembered it, but the dress selection was very limited:( I tried on the few they had, but none of them were the right fit. So I bought several shirts and jackets instead. They also had a booth up at Floydfest and I hung out there with Susan, one of my new Virginia friends.

We ate lunch at the Blue Ridge Restaurant and had a delicious southern meal of chicken pan pie. Then it was on up to the festival that started at 4:00.

Our first stop was the Beer Gardens and the Pink Floyd Stage. Here they serve all kinds of local draft beer and wine and besides backstage, this is the only place you can consume alcohol. The very first band we saw on stage was Galen Kipar, featuring Jacksonville’s own fiddle player Lindsey Pruett. What a great surprise!! The rest of the evening included Big Daddy Love, Cornmeal, Galactic, and Eric Krasno & Chapter 2. Lots of dancing was involved and the music was great!

Next Stop...Floydfest

Floydfest here we come! And thank goodness...Herb is feeling better!

At mile marker 173, right off the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia is a wonderful four day event of music, magic and mayhem. As you can imagine, the setting is exquisite and the music includes jazz, rock, bluegrass and everything in between. There are also aerial acrobats, fire dancers, puppeteers, jugglers and artistic hoola hoopers.

We are staying in a chalet with a mountain view with five other friends. No camping for us this year. Steaks on the grill for dinner on the balcony overlooking the Smokey Mountains when we arrive. It is breathtaking!

A Sick Herb

Herb was sick before we left Jacksonville Beach and did not fully recover before we started on our journey. After dinner with Tip he had a relapse. He is feeling terrible. We are headed to Emery, Virginia to hook up with our friends Tony and Emily and then on to a weekend of music at Floydfest. No time to be sick.

Herb slept for a whole day. I drove to Emery while he slept in the car. It was a lovely drive. When we arrived, he went straight to bed. Hopefully he will feel better soon.

The Brokedown Palace

We went into the city of Knoxville to visit our friend Tip. He is my hang gliding artist friend that makes the beautiful Leafy T-shirts I wear all the time. It was our farewell visit to his house, “The Brokedown Palace” as he has to move out in October. They are building a Costco on the property. While I was there I saw rabbits, hummingbirds and cardinals in the yard. It is a big, lovely, secret gem in the midst of a busy thoroughfare in town. I can't believe it will soon disappear :(

“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

Rest time

The next few days were spent just chilling out and enjoying the lake. I started reading “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” in a hammock by the water. Love those lazy days of summer! Ahhhh...

The Lake House

Mike has several acres on the lake. It is a beautiful piece of property complete with an old barn. I can just see music happening there. He is planning on renovating his house, adding a back porch and a large open kitchen as well as a two decker boat dock complete with a slide!. It will be fun to watch all the improvements happen over the years.

On Saturday we had an unexpected surprise. James McMurtry played at the Smokey Mountain Harley Davidson Shed in Maryville, which is only 20 minutes from where we are staying. We had a delicious dinner at Sullivan’s Restaurant and then our friend Tip met us for a rock and roll extravaganza. Party on!

Believe it our not, I actually saw people I knew at The Shed. Matthew and Susan were two excellent volunteers for me at the merch tent at Magfest.

PS I wanted to add the mountains and the barn at the top and then concert pictures at the bottom. It didn't quite work that way. I also wanted to label the folks and let you know that was Mike and Tip with Herb and me. I'll keep practicing.

Vacation Day 2

We arrive at the lake house at 2:00am and promptly fall asleep. I am awakened mid morning to the smell of coffee, bacon and waffles. YUM! I have just lost quite a bit of weight and the challenge for this vacation is to enjoy myself yet keep off the weight. Not

an easy task with “car food snacks”, new restaurants to sample and lovely meals cooked by friends. But one I am certainly up for as I do not want all my hard work to inch its way back on. I had to purchase new clothes for the trip and putting them on each morning will keep me mindful of my goal. So I enjoy half a waffle and then some exercise. Yes, I can do this.

Our day was spent out on the lake tubing and swimming. Too much fun!

Summer Vacation-The Beginning

It’s officially summer, my favorite time of the year. I am on vacation and the days are lazy, filled with sleeping late mornings, book readings on the beach, boogie boarding in the ocean and mid day movies. It’s also a time for traveling, seeing and discovering new places as well as visiting old friends. For the last four years I have traveled with my gorgeous boyfriend Herb all over the US.

This summer the first plan was to leave in June and drive all the way to California to visit my school chum that just purchased a vineyard and has recently produced his first two bottles of wine. It also included a 5th of July family cookout with musician friends in Marin County. The perfect adventure for me, right? However my school pal and his family are spending the summer with a family in Costa Rica in a Spanish language immersion program, so the west coast is out.

Plan B is now to travel up the east coast, hopefully all the way to Maine and Canada. Our departure time grew later and later as Herb had to deal with rental house woes. One needed a new roof and one needed new tenants and a complete overhaul. That took several weeks, but finally all the work was completed and we could start preparing for our trip.

Departure date is now set for Friday, July 16. First we are heading to Mike’s lake house outside of Knoxville, Tennessee for some jet skiing, boating and fishing. The next stop is a weekend of live music at Floydfest, a beautiful place right off the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia. That is followed by a visit with Herb’s uncle in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

That is all of the planning we have done so far.

Now traveling with Herb is a delight except for one small teeny tiny thing...he is not always cognizant of the time. He starts out saying we will leave around 7:00 or 8:00am, yet we are still asleep at that time. Then the van needs to be washed, he needs to pack, as well as take care of business and payroll as it is a Friday. We are leaving Petey, his rat terrier, with friends and they need to come get doggie directions. And to be perfectly honest, I forgot something as well.

The hours fly by, yet we manage to finish all the chores, pack the van,deliver payroll, eat lunch and finally hit the road. It is 3:00pm.