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I had some children's songs playing on my Ipod. She sat down at the piano and started playing along with the music in the right key and getting most of the notes right. She didn't add chordal accompaniment though. She only does that when she plays those songs without the music playing. She's just five years old.
It started when she was three. She figured out how to play Fere Jacques by ear all on her own. In three weeks she had that song figured out plus Jingle Bells and Twinkle Little Star.
Honestly though she may not be a genius, but she's definetly musically gifted.
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Wow. Very cool about your daughter's musicality satate.
Today a stranger on the bus told me my baby has "Paul Newman's eyes." He was obviously drunk on mouthwash (the mintiness is a dead giveaway) , but very pleasant nevertheless.
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Waitaminnit! I thought *I* had Paul Newman's eyes. (If I only had everything else that was Paul Newman, I'da been set.)
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I've always found I can pick up a musical instrument and, with the aid of instructions, (books or personal), play it well enough to convince people I could play it well---if I applied myself. I regret never having ready access to a piano...
Not that I'm complaining...knowing how it's all done adds to my appreciation of music...
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My son-in-law's parents (did that make sense?) have started raising chickens.
He says they have them in a big cage (wire all around, about 8 feet long by 6 feet wide by 4 feet high with doors on top that they can open to reach in and get the eggs and/or the chickens). They can pick it up and move it a few feet every few weeks, and that way the chickens can fertilize a whole field (as well as get the weeds, I guess), and they are almost the same as "free range" chickens because of the frequent ground change for them.
Sounds like a great idea to me, especially if you have enough land to keep them on whichever field is fallow for the season.
[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited June 17, 2010).]
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When I was a child I drew a whale on the keys of our piano. Then I would memorize songs by whale anatomy. (Not real songs, just my random little kid songs.)
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I'm thinking he was, what, eighty when he died? Were they of any worth at that point.
Alastair Cooke donated some of his organs when he died. He was in his nineties...but, I gather, it wasn't exactly a pre-arranged "voluntary" donation...
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I'm on a car tour. Showing off the new Volvo S60 in the northeast. So if you have a desire to meet me (or bloody my nose) let me know and we care share a beverage of your favorite stimulant (beer, coffee)
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It's Mountain Dew for me, or the caffeine therein...but I don't use it as a stimulant, I just drink and take what comes.
(Laid off of it for a week-and-a-half this month...illness and indigestion, followed by a cutdown on fizzy drinks, followed by buying a case of 7-Up cans. But I'm back on it now.)
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Oh coffee Shiny shade grown beans Freshly ground, aromatic and darkly delicious Brewed at home So I can have three cups without severing my arm to pay for them
[This message has been edited by Ethereon (edited June 22, 2010).]
quote:My favorite stimulant is soy sauce. Dark with mushroom. Hmmm.
What kind of mushroom, Pyre Dynasty?
By the way, soy sauce made me think of something (so it isn't entirely random, sorry): I am amazed at what a difference ginger makes in the taste of sushi. Wow!
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I can't say I like the pickled ginger that comes with sushi, but I love wasabi mixed into the soy sauce.
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What spices do I use regularly? Hmm...pepper, of course, followed by parsley, oregano, garlic salt, minced garlic, basil, and minced onions. Maybe some of 'em aren't spices but I use 'em as such. Whatever the recipe of whatever I'm making requires.
There could be just about anything in the preprocessed stuff I get...I look at ingredients occasionally but don't keep anything in mind when shopping...
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For some reason oregano tastes like pencil lead to me, and it ruins the flavor of things for that reason.
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When my kids are babies, and still like to eat anything, I like to make them eat lemons and the like just to see their face after I've done it. Cutest thing ever. I made my daughter eat some Wasabi, and she about exploded in cuteness. I wish I had the camera ready.
Now that I think about it, this really explains why my children are so picky. ~Sheena
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The pickled ginger is to cleanse your pallet between sushi pieces so you taste each one separately without the aftertaste of the last one.
I make a multinational hot soup, with curry, red pepper, cajun, Tabasco and wasabi when I can get it (and a host of other things.) My niece once stole a sip and she regretted it deeply. She doesn't take food from me anymore, even if I offer it to her, no matter what I say. Of course I have heard horror stories of babies suffocating
Adding a little dill really pulls things together.
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One of the ingredients in my spaghetti recipe is hot Italian sausage. I don't actually eat it, and I don't know precisely what's in it---sausage is one of those things you really shouldn't watch being made---but I do know, from tasting samples that have spilled out of the casing, that it tastes like licorice to me---hot licorice. (The candy, not the plant.)
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Well you know how it goes when the board is down.
Anyways I don't exactly have a recipe for Psycho Ramen, I just open the spice cupboard and toss in anything that looks good at the time. I usually start with a base of Ramen Noddles, but I think any kind of noodle would work. I've only once ran into a spice I didn't like, for some reason Chili Powder goes wrong in a noodle soup. As for other additions, I use whatever I have on hand. bologna works well, as does turkey. (Sometimes I boil a few Hot Dogs in there and serve them in buns.) As for veggies: Peas, Carrots, Onions, Mushrooms, Lentils, green/red/yellow peppers. Once in a great while I toss a can of tomato sauce in there which turns the whole thing on it's head. My favorite spices: Cumin, Basil, Curry powder, Tony's Creole, dried red pepper, Garlic, Dill, basil, and many others that I can't think of just off the top of my head. I make sure to smell the spices before they go in and keep a sharp nose on the soup-in progress, if things turn bad I can usually save it. Once in a while I pull off a supernal soup that I'm just geeked out about for days.
(One of my favorite combinations is Curry powder, Tony's Creole, dried red pepper, Garlic, Dill, basil and a chopped onion. It's incredibly acidic so you'll want to brush your teeth right after.)
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We just had a nice little earthquake here, preliminary reading is 5.9, but it was centered out in the desert. It's just now 5:00 pm and so there was no wait to turn on the news and get the numbers. Ever since Northridge, news stations have a seismograph/seismocam in studio.
They were taliking about it as if it were pretty shaky and fairly big. And yes, the number is big. But I think I'm closer to it than they are and it felt just like a long wiggle and roll type. From experience, I knew it was fairly big and distant. It was nice to see I was right.
We seem to be getting some quakes clustered again. We had some significant ones all around Northridge, for a few years and then it got quiet for a long time. Yes, I know they're always happening. I'm talking about the ones that are easily felt. But the last couple of years have seen a re-emergence of relatively minor shakers - in SoCal. Though one relatively minor one 4.? hit a fault line that runs very close to my home. Now that was a shaker.
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I live in Nevada, but have felt a few earthquakes here. Mostly arround 4-5. Anyway, I think there have been more earthquakes in recent years then before.
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I suppose it was too hopeful that this thread had died and gone to Thread Heaven.
Been through some moderate earthquakes when I was a kid up north, but nothing down here in Florida. Hurricanes, well, I've been through a lot of them---but you get warnings and time to prepare, at least in this day and age. The Big One in LA will be much more scary than even, say, Hurricane Katrina.
(My late uncle went through the Big One in Oakland / San Fran, y'know, the one that stopped the World Series. I heard (through my parents, who talked with him) that he had just driven his car onto the road and thought he had four flat tires. The rest, as they say, is history.)
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I'm not saying there won't be a 'big one' here someday, but I've been hearing, 'the big one is going to hit in the next thirty years,' for thirty seven years now. I was two when the Sylmar quake hit, and I don't remember it. There was another very big one a couple of years later that I do remember. And I've been through every one since then. I just think its silly to think we can narrow a geological force that functions on a million year scale down to thirty years. It's scientists pre-crying wolf so that if it happens they can say, 'I told you so'.
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As I recall, it's "on the order of" thirty years. That would mean it wouldn't be expected in under three years...but everybody'd be surprised if it didn't happen within three hundred years. (Guess what book I plagiarized this explanation from?)
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I always thought a 30 year earthquake was like a 30 year flood, each year there is a 1 in 30 chance of there being an earthquake. But if I think about it earthquakes are very different things.
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Sometimes the waffles make fun of me. So I have to punish them by drowning them in slightly maple syrup, then I cut them into tiny pieces. Then I get rid of the evidence the easy way. Hmmmmmmm.
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Right now I've been up twenty-two-and-a-half hours, with intermittent nodding-off throughout the time. Don't be alarmed; it happens to me almost every Monday.
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I am required to punish the oatmeal cookies on an almost daily basis, because they refuse to stay in their packaging. I'd much rather discipline the brownies, but they don't visit very often. Luckily they're a mischievous crowd, when they do stop in!
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Yes that includes chocolate. I'm not a big chocolate fan. I mostly like chocolate when it is wrapped around nougat or caramel or something. Reese's peanut butter cups are the best.
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Just that it begins my weekend and I have dinner (kind of) with my parents at five PM, which, with this and that, keeps me up until seven---unless I nod off. Which means my day starts at eight PM the previous night and goes on almost twenty-four hours---again, unless I nod off.
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Just before I left work at the P. O. plant this morning, word went round that one of our associated offices was on fire. But curse the luck! it hasn't yet been on the news...
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I often have dreams of my machines exploding. Then I have to beat up all the terrorists with my stick, if I survived the initial explosion of course.
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I once had a dream I was married to Will Farrel and Adam Sandler at the same time, and Adam Sandler divorced me because I lied about being Jewish, but Will Farrel loved me anyway.
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How 'bout the dream where you wind up in a filthy bathroom with a filthy and overflowing toilet?
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Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one who dreams movies, you know where at the end credits roll.
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Last night I dreamed I was watching someone make fun of a prominent politician of the 1970s and thinking that it was bad form to tell that joke as the politician had just died...thing is, in this real-life world, said politician is still very much alive. Wishful thinking?
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5 days without a post here. I better get musing....
Last weekend I paid a visit to my good friend and fellow hatracker Todd Rathke (Tiergan). Bright guy. Has a good head on his shoulders. A promising writer. We talked like old friends spending another day together. I am envious of his career nitche set in the quiet countryside of New Hampshire. Hope I can pay him another visit in the near future.
Todd makes the third hatracker I met and 4th writer friend. Scott Dantzer (BentTree) and Donavan Darius (Dark Warrior) were the other two. My job grants me the rare opportunity to be able to see the faces to the odd names on hatrack. I can't wait to meet more.
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