no simple highway

Maybe I should do this more often. Anyway. Went to NEFFA and it was OK. (Points to anyone who gets that reference.) Was surprised by how few people I knew compared to previous years. But the dancing was fun and the music was too. Brought the geetar and they didn't throw me out, so that's something. As I expected, trying to play by ear in the hallway jam sessions was completely hopeless. I tried to cue off another guitarist and couldn't figure out the chords he was playing, then realized he was probably in DADGAD tuning (which is very common in Celtic music, as opposed to the standard EADGBE tuning I was in) and wasn't going to be any help. Goal for next year: learn to play by ear. There were several scheduled jam sessions of various sorts, however, some of which provided sheet music with chords, and at those I made a decent accounting of myself, might even have contributed to the overall musicality here and there. The one focused on traditional French and Breton tunes was really interesting, though the chord changes were a little fast for my novice skills. But, I was sitting next to four pipers and a hurdy-gurdy player, so I could have been playing The Star Spangled Banner backwards in 7/8 time and nobody would have noticed.

Backing up a little: I've been working from home for the past year, and among other things that enabled me to finally start taking guitar lessons instead of trying to learn on my own, which wasn't getting anywhere. That company collapsed in late March, and I'm starting a new job next week, but it won't be working from home so finding time to take lessons and practice is going to become more of a challenge. (And then there's also the challenge of how we're going to get Benjamin home from school on days Anne is working, but that might become a different post.)

Took the commuter rail there and back on Saturday, since gosling was going to need the car. On the way home, I got to the Mansfield station somewhat early, and was watching the train's headlight coming from waaaaaay down the long straightaway... then realized it wasn't stopping... then realized it was an Acela just before it went ripping by at a hundred and fifty, two feet from me, nearly knocking me over with its wake.

Contra dancing has definitely evolved since I first got into it. Old-fashioned asymmetrical contra dances where the "1" couples (facing "down" the set, away from the caller) do most of the dancing are basically unheard-of now, and figures that are strongly asymmetrical, such as Contra Corners, are now routinely called in alternate directions on each round. And of course dancing the opposite role is now completely normative, even if most dances at NEFFA are still called as "Ladies/Gents" as opposed to, say, "Ravens/Larks". And, the figure I learned as G*psy has been renamed to Right Shoulder Round for obvious reasons.

NEFFA continues to impress me with how multigenerational it is. There were tons of teenagers and young adults, and I watched a kid who couldn't have been over 5 completely ripping it up on his fiddle.

About 10 years ago I told gosling I was going to make her a jewelry box. Note that I did not say *when* I was going to make it.
Purpleheart with some figured maple and cherry.
( pretty pictures )

So back in September, which is when one needs to do these things, I made reservations for a 3-day stay at Smugglers' Notch for me and the kidlets for the tail end of February vacation. Signed Squiggle up for their all-day ski school camp program, because trying to ski with both kids in the afternoon (Ben having a morning lesson) wasn't going to work, since Ben was going to want to ski on trails commensurate with his ability level, which is definitely no longer the bunny slope. That program required kids to be potty trained, which I blithely assumed he would be by then.

Around New Year's, at gosling's suggestion, I switched Squiggle to their childcare-with-skiing program, because he still wasn't using the potty with any consistency. He's technically too old for it (it's for 0-3), but they were fine with making an exception.

One of the perhaps surprising effects of the rather snowy winter we've had is that I had not managed to go skiing at all until this weekend. January tends to be horribly busy between New Year's, Ben's birthday and Arisia, and after Arisia, either we had something else planned or it was horribly cold and/or blizzarding. I planned one day to take Squiggle to Nashoba to introduce him to skiing, but he insisted he didn't want to.

I'd been concerned about the forecast for the weekend, because Friday (our first ski day) was supposed to be pretty cold. I'd gotten Ben a face mask that he said he liked when he tried it on briefly at home, but when we headed out Friday morning, it kept falling off his face and he said he hated how it felt (the problem he'd had with the mask he'd had before; kid has some sensory issues), so I put it in my pocket and hoped he wouldn't be too miserable in ski school.

Smuggs has kind of a split personality; the resort aspect of it is very family-oriented, with lots of kid-focused services and activities and excellent child care and ski school. All of that is at the Morse Mountain part of the place; from there you can ski over to the main ski area which is this old-fashioned kind of place where the base lodge and lifts haven't been updated since the place was built sometime in the 60s. I'd been there once before, when I was 5, and there was a surprising amount that I remembered. The main area has some wide cruisers and a lot of really steep and difficult trails and glades. Having not been skiing in a year and not biked in a month, I took it kind of easy, but didn't have a whole lot of fun. It was brutally, horribly cold and windy on the upper mountain; even with glove liners my hands were freezing. I think it might have been the coldest temperatures I've ever skied in. And with their old, slow lifts, I only got in three runs before I had to go fetch Ben from ski school (at resorts with modern high-speed lifts I can do more like 10 runs).

And when I came back to get Ben, it turned out that he had been completely awful in ski school. I was pretty surprised, because he's almost always done excellently in ski school but it was clear that the cold made him utterly unable to cope. They were very nice about it, but weren't willing to have him in the group lessons again and recommended I sign him up for their adaptive program, where he gets his own coach and they ski independently or with the group depending how he's doing. I was really pleased that they had this, and made the arrangements over lunch, to the tune of another $200 of course. Ben wasn't going out again for love or money, so after a longer-than-expected lunch I left him in our unit with the iPad and his books and went skiing again. Only managed one more run before I had to come back and get Squiggle from childcare.

He, of course, had a fine time, and the staff told me he'd been drawing pictures and giving them to the other kids. Also did a little skiing, as it turned out, on their tiny little slope in the play yard that's maybe 20 feet long with 2 feet of vertical, with its very own conveyor-belt lift. (They had assured me that they only took the kids out skiing if they wanted to, and if he didn't ski they'd refund the difference between the with-skiing program and the no-skiing program.)

I'd brought pizza makings but no sheet pan, and of course the condo didn't have one. Called guest services and they sent one over, which it turned out didn't fit in the tiny little oven. Managed to put it on the top rack with the oven door only stuck open a little.

Went to the Fun Zone after dinner, which has bouncy castles and inflatable slides and all that stuff (see abover re: family-oriented). Had a fine time, though Squiggle was being a bit of a handful, for about 15 minutes. Then he threw up. Not a lot, but obviously he couldn't stay there, and getting both kids out of there when they'd just gotten there and were having a great time was... not easy. And they were both completely obnoxious for the rest of the evening. Didn't help that I hadn't brought enough for them to do because I'd been assuming they'd spend most of the evenings at the Fun Zone.

Saturday morning it was almost as cold and a good bit windier, and Squiggle still wasn't feeling well. Decided to cut our losses and go home. They very kindly cancelled the last day of our package, and we packed up and headed out.

I'd love to go back to Smuggs again, but not with the kids until they're skiing at my level or the place gets faster lifts. And next year we're going to figure out a different arrangement, either Squiggle stays home or gosling comes with us, because soloing both kids on a jaunt like this was really stressful.

Once again, doing this meme to make other people's entries look interesting by comparison.

Somerville, MA
Boston, MA
Lewiston, ME
Carrabassett Valley, ME

(well, and very nearly East Bumblesnort, VT, but we managed to get home that night.)

As of last night I'm a great-uncle (well, step-great-uncle by marriage). Only slightly freaked about that.

I don't suppose anyone here has a car ski rack (the kind that clamps onto a factory roof rack) kicking around that they'd like to either lend me or let go for cheap.

This week is my last week at NIKSUN (née Sandstorm). Two weeks from today I start at Endeca in Kendall Square, which just got eaten by Oracle. I'll be getting some stuff done around the house that week, getting some all-too-rare time with gosling, and hopefully doing some skiing.

Yay!

A link from cos: Why did Japan surrender?. It's a review of research by historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, claiming that the primary factor in the Japanese surrender that ended World War II was the Soviet entry into the war against Japan, and not the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as is commonly believed.

I did a term paper in college on the necessity of the atomic bombing (coming down pretty firmly in the revisionist camp that claims it was unnecessary), so this is familiar ground despite my having not looked at it in two decades. One thing that the article doesn't cover, and nor does an article of Hasegawa's that I looked up, is the effect of the bomb on the Soviet decision to enter the war against Japan. They were definitely planning to do so, if for no better reason than to have a share in the spoils of Japan's inevitable defeat, and indeed the conclusion I drew was that this was at least as major a factor in the decision to drop the bomb as was the desire to avoid an invasion of the home islands. I also concluded that the bombings prompted Stalin to declare war and invade Manchuria as rapidly as possible, so as to get at least a place at the table, and that the Nagasaki bombing was at least in part prompted by the Soviet declaration, to help effect a surrender as rapidly as possible before the Soviets got too far. So you have a complicated interplay here in the motivations and actions of three governments. Hasegawa reads Russian fluently as well as Japanese and English, so I'm sure he's studied this in far more detail.

Now, this was a college term paper built entirely on secondary sources, nothing to be confused with actual historical scholarship, and I freely admit that I came into it with some degree of bias. Though maybe I should have been biased in the other direction, as my father would have been in the front lines of the invasion of the Japanese home islands. His viewpoint on this is much less equivocal than mine. :-)

We have a bunch of old worn-out jeans taking up space in our house. If you do crafty things with denim, or would like to, sing out.

Perhaps the least significant result of the successful independence referendum in South Sudan is that it caused me to think "Huh, that's going to make Yakko's World even more out of date".

For an ostensibly educational song, the original Yakko's World was remarkably inaccurate, though nonetheless entertaining. There's a fan-written update, Yakko's New World, which is significantly more complete, but even that is more than a decade old. Being the public-spirited citizen of the world that I am (and, more to the point, an unregenerate geography geek), I decided to work on this problem. (No, I actually don't have excessive time on my hands; note that the preliminary results of the South Sudan independence referendum were announced back at the end of January.)
( my excuse for a creative process )( the result; think Tom Lehrer's The Elements, only with countries )