Rock Polishing

Last blog of the year and my 2010 New Year Resolution is satisified!

In grade school I had a good friend in my grade named Rayla.  My younger brother Eric was the same age as her younger brother, and they were pretty good friends too.  Rayla and her brother got a rock polisher for Christmas one year, and Eric and I were both intrigued and envious.  Despite repeated requests, Santa never did bring us a rock polisher.
Flash forward 30 years or so, and my brother Eric was assigned my daughter F in the annual Christmas name drawing. Of course he knew just what to get her! A rock polisher!
He got a nice big one and sent it to F. He ordered all the grit also, and that came too.  So after she unwrapped the rock polisher we scurried around and found all the rocks we'd collected over the years and put them in the rock polisher. The tumbler is supposed to be 5/8th full when you start.  With all the rocks we had it wasn't even a quarter full!  So we have been collecting rocks on our various excursions over the years and putting them in the tumbler and finally we had enough to run the tumbler this Dec.  F by this time is a junior in college!

 So we went through all the steps listed in the grit package. The first grit was supposed to run for a week. I opened up the tumbler and got a shock!  It looked like liquid cement.

Had our rocks tumbled themselves into oblivion!
But no, underneath it all I found our rocks.  Rinsed them all off and put them back in the tumbler with the next grit size.  The tumbler now was less than half full of rocks!  Another week and we were able to add the pre-polish.

The rocks looked so shiny after rinsing.  I didn't dry them off at this point, so I really don't know how shiny they really were.

We were very excited to add the polish, but I have my doubts about this step in retrospect. The rocks just aren't very shiny. I think the polish got in the fine cracks on some of the rocks.  I have to read up more about this step of the process. At the end the tumbler was only about a quarter full of rocks.  I wish we could remember where all the rocks came from.  Some of them have definite memories associated with them, but others are a mystery.

Dec 24

What am I doing in the days leading up to Christmas?

• Writing, writing, writing. 
• Made two batches of peanut butter bon bons.  The first disappeared so fast (ok I have only myself to blame), that I made another batch, which I hid to make sure they last through Christmas. 
• Raking leaves.  All leaves off the walnuts, but the elm and mulberry still have leaves.
• Christmas shopping- still need to wrap presents.  But shipped the ones that needed to go elsewhere and put cards in the mail. I was disappointed because the box of cards I bought shortchanged me by 4 cards.  So I stopped writing cards when I used them all up even though I hadn't gotten all the way through my list. Maybe can finish up after Christmas.
• Biking- but weather has kept us from biking every day, is more like every other day this past week. The picture is the view yesterday, Mt Tam visible on the right.
• Intensive practice for choral society which ended Dec 19.
•  Am terribly behind in my business accounts- won't that be fun to catch up on!
• OK how do I make these dots go away?

Choral singing is So Demanding! and Rain! in the forecast

Having the usual pre-concert jitters.  We have some really nice music this semester that I really enjoyed learning, namely Haydn's Te Deum and Mozart's Solemn Vespers.  But now it's concert time. Ugh! Squeezed up on the risers again where it's really hard to hear the rest of the section and you can't even hear yourself.  Last night I stood next to some different people and had some different folks behind me.  It's really hard to sing correctly when the people behind you are singing wrong! It totally throws me off.  Plus the person next to me on one side was too slow- nice voice though. Plus there are actually some errors in our music that not everybody has corrected. Plus, you really have to be "on" the entire time, you can't let your mind wander for a second from your part.  On top of that, worrying about maintaining a nice tone, good intonation, blending, and singing impossible Latin syllables at a high rate of speed.  No wonder I'm stressed out!
We are singing with the orchestra, so we have their conductor. It can be really hard to hear them through the choir, and, they aren't perfect about following the conductor either.  We had two practices with the orchestra.  I would have liked another, as I don't feel we are really ready.
Last night the conductor seemed to be in a really jovial mood. No matter how much we screwed up he just kept smiling.  It was a little unnerving, but maybe that's the only way he can cope.
In other big news, nothing!!! but rain in the forecast for days. Let's hope the rain is showery enough that we can still squeeze in our daily bike ride.  I'm addicted to that daily shot of endorphins!

Year of the Bug

Almost to the end of the year.  This is no time to get behind on my blogging!
Had a great day in the field Sunday- my normal blog day.  It was overcast and foggy from here all the way to SF and up Hwy 92 to Skyline, where it really got foggy.  Eventually, as I had been counting on, we broke out of the fog into a beautiful crystal clear blue sky and sunshine.  Our spirits rose perceptibly, everyone got all bouncy and bubbly.  It's been a long time since we worked in the field on a Sunday.  But traffic was nonexistent coming and going, and aside from the day being so darn short it worked out really well.  Plus our experiment turned out really well.

This has been the year of the bug.  First the spotted wing drosophila ruining our cherries, blackberries, and raspberries- that actually started in 2009- then an amazing infestation of stink bugs, which rendered our tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillos inedible.  Lastly, our elm had the worst infestation of elm leaf beetles I can remember in a long, long time.  As a result, there are many elm leaf beetles looking for a place to spend the winter and they seem to think the living room of my house is a possibility.  So within 15 minutes of vacuuming there are again elm leaf beetles creeping across the floor. I took this picture of the elm this morning, and you can see it still has plenty of leaves left on it.  What you can't see is that many of them are still green, so our leaf pickup job is going to continue for a while.
We had one cold snap of frosty mornings, and since then the weather has been mild.  Lows only in the mid 40's.  Lots of rain.  I noticed a cluster of earth stars in the bed outside the kitchen door.

Be careful what you wish for

How's this for a nice gray picture?  It's been mostly gloomy this week and it rained all day today.  Had our first day off biking since Nov 17. Made a nice batch of split pea soup for dinner.  Did some Christmas shopping, at Costco and online. 

Friday we went in to Sac State to see F in scenes from the opera Pelleas at Melisande.  The students did a great job, but thankfully the performance only lasted an hour.  The chairs were uncomfortable and the scenes they did were all recitative (maybe the whole opera is that way) and the piano accompaniment (played by a fantastic pianist) was doing something difference from what the singers were doing. Afterwards went to Letherby's for ice cream, and F and her friends also must have skipped dinner because they all ordered food as well. Oh! My! Goodness! Letherby's was a new experience for me! Talk about ridiculous and excessive amounts of ice cream!  I still have some of my milk shake in the freezer.