Happy Trails

We hit the trails, on horseback, one auspicious afternoon when it was not too hot, for an hour's ride in the Brown County State Park.  I vaguely remembered, or perhaps falsely remembered, having mounted once before, but it was probably before moving to the U.S.  I got myself fitted up for the occasion, donning my cowgirl hat and my "fire-engine-red" cowgirl boots, so described by our guide somewhat jealously.  We were told two basic maneuvers - right or left turn by pulling slightly on the rein accordingly, and then, off we trotted in an orderly procession, one horse's nose behind another's butt, so to speak.  I was assigned a horse named Sam; later on I learned that he tended to misbehave by snacking on the greenery along the way.  Sure enough, he would snap some branches off the scrubs once in a while and munch at his leisure.  The trails through the park were not all on smooth turf or gravel, there were some rough patches of mud, steep inclines, and down slopes.  A couple of times, Sam sidetracked us from the trails to get at some juicy bits of leaves in rather precarious conditions.  The guide hollered at me from the front to pull him back, saying with some encouragement, "You can do it, Cowgirl!"  Kirk said that Sam had "got my number" -- and could do anything he wanted with me.  When we got back, no sooner did I dismount, Sam let off a heavy jet of pee -- I barely got away in time.  

Happy Trails

Felix Holt, The Radical

The book, Felix Holt, The Radical, by George Eliot just came out as an audiobook available for free download in the Internet Archive website here or LibriVox's catalog here.  (Both sites have their eponymous free apps for convenient listening.)  George Eliot has such an extraordinary range of observation, power of description, and understanding of human aspirations and foibles that in reading her books one gets a vivid impression of the life, mostly in small towns, in 19th Century England.  I had not read Felix Holt before so it was a real pleasure to get to listen to the book for the first time.  I recorded four chapters for the book, not all in consecutive order.  If you listen to the whole book from the beginning, you can easily pick out my parts; they stick out like sore thumbs.  I hope they don't ruin your listening experience.  These are my first forays into reading for audiobooks; I hope I get better at it with practice.

p.s.: If you can, please consider giving to LibriVox.  Thank you.  

Summertime

And the livin' is easy

Unlike the previous two summers, this one has been especially mild, some hot days in the high 80s/low 90s, interposed with days, in the low 70s, of sustained rain and thunder storms.  All kinds of vegetation in our yard, never before seen, are growing rambunctiously, after having stayed dormant in the ground for the previous two years due to the severe drought we had.

The pleasant weather prompted Kirk to hang up his old hammock in the sunroom, the one he used to sleep in for an entire year when he lived at the dorm at UCSB many, many moons ago.  He bought it in Merida in the Yucatan on a trip, hitch-hiking part of the way, through Mexico, one summer when he was an undergraduate.  (This kind of road trip somehow does not seem very feasible in the present time, at least in the eyes of the older and wiser folks like us.)  

He thought to get another one like it for me so that we could sleep in plein air, as it were. After some searching on the net, he managed to find an outfit in Yucatan that sells almost exactly the same Mayan style of hammocks at an incredibly good price!  He ordered it and got it in no time.  We hung it up side by side with the old one, whose colors are slightly paler than its freshly-minted neighbor.  We've so far spent two and a half nights out there, the half being the one that I called off, rather unnecessarily according to Kirk, due to the severity of the thunder storm we had that night.  

Sleeping outdoors is a little like camping, except that the bathroom facility is close at hand.  One's sense of hearing is especially acute in the dark--kids giggling from somewhere in the neighborhood, probably also camping out, the screeching of cats fighting, the sound of driving rain and outrageous thunder, and the notes of the first bird awakening and the answering trill from another in the early dawn, barely broken. 


07.08.13 Update:

Hostas in bloom

The hostas in the bed by our front walk, which we thought to have been completely decimated by the deer in the neighborhood when we moved here three summers ago, have miraculously revived and re-populated the entire bed, despite my having planted hyacinths there in the fall after we moved in.  And in recent weeks, saturated with rain, they have even pushed out their slender, delicate, lavender-colored flowers to our great surprise and delight.  We have been jealously guarding them from any deer approaching our yard -- that is, as best as we can, for the truth is that there is no stopping the deer munching, en famille, from yard to yard in Bloomington. 

Reading Out Loud

Recording in Session

Earlier this month, I made myself a cardboard sign, which says "Recording in Session", to hang up as needed on the door of my office.  (It somehow seems to remain on the door any time of the day, for days on end, as Kirk soon finds out.)  You may be wondering what it is all about; well, there is a story behind it...

I recently jointed a multi-national volunteer organization, called LibriVox, whose ambition is to record all the books in the public domain and make them available for download for free -- a lofty goal indeed!  As you may be wondering why there are people doing this, here is what they say about it on their FAQ -

Why are you doing this?  What's in it for you?
"We love reading, love books, love literature, think the public domain should be defended and enriched, we like free stuff, we like to hear people read to us, and we like reading to other people.  It's fun, it's a great community, it's a rewarding public service to the world. And "nothing" is in it for us, except the satisfaction of participating in a wonderful project."

Well, it can't be said any better.  I've been listening to their free audio-books for some time and as they always begin and end their recordings with calls to volunteering, I finally decided to give it a try and signed up.  (They are not very particular about signing people up; no qualification is required.)  For the past several weeks I've recorded six chapters, three each in two books, and spent many late-night hours reading and re-reading paragraphs in the books and heavily editing my recording.  Compared to those of the experienced readers, my reading sounds laborious and has a unmistakeable foreign accent but they don't seem to mind it once the recording meets certain guidelines.  (I'll let you know what I read once they publish the two audio-books in question.)  Several of my readers will be a great fit for doing this kind of thing; I won't name names but you all know who they are.    

Reading out loud, though everybody does it, is not as easy as it sounds; to many of my friends who are professional pedagogues, for whom the ability to get their points across effectively with voice is essential, speaking/reading out loud is perhaps as easy as second nature.  Though I've been speaking English almost exclusively for over 30 years, it still frustrates me when I can't speak well, explain myself clearly, or when I feel that I speak with a foreign accent, and I don't mean in occasional episodes of public speaking but just ordinary day-to-day conversation.  As a way to improve my English, I read out loud to myself from time to time just to keep my tongue nimble.  Therefore, to volunteer to read for LibriVox seems like a great opportunity for me to practice my English.  I hope it gets easier as I continue to work on it.                     

Hmm, you may be thinking, "This is another of her early retirement projects, like blogging and learning to play the piano; how fun!"  Well, yes, and many thanks to Kirk that I have been able to do this.  As a New York Times' article asks "What do you want to be, now that you're grown?", I feel like I've been given a second life, to do whatever I like to do, now that I've left off, albeit not entirely voluntarily, being an income-producing adult, whose life is tied to the job that pays.  I have, however, never been at a loss to have something to "do" with my time; quite the reverse, I'm concerned about not having enough time to do all the things I like and want to do. 

Make it Sing

For the last month and a half I've been laboring to coax my clunky, plodding piano keyboard and my aching, rheumatic fingers to cooperate to produce a singing-like quality for a piece of music that I have been trying to learn and commit to memory for our yearly recital.  It was the second movement of Mozart's piano sonata No. 16, K545 -- a perennial favorite for piano novices.

Three days before the recital I went with my teacher to the place, the Fellowship Hall of one of our local UU chuches, where we are to perform for our family and friends.  I was fortunate to have the opportunity to test out the piano there beforehand; it turned to be even more unresponsive in certain keys than the one I have been practicing on.  In order to make some of the notes heard, I had to put more weight on my left hand -- basically unlearn the habit I've gradually acquired during the many weeks of practice, that is, to play softly and velvety with my left hand and let the melody sing from my right.  If there was any consolation, my teacher told me that it was something that most concert pianists had to go through, that is, having to make adjustment of their playing according to the idiocyncrasy of the pianos at the venues where they are to perform. 

As usual, I was the last person on, being the only adult in the group of elementary school children.  While waiting for my turn, I worked myself up with mounting stage fright and cold sweat; I walked up to the piano with something like the resignation of a prisoner walking up to the guillotine.  It was over in a flash though and I pretty much got through the piece relying on auto pilot.  I counted 7+ mistakes on the whole but it was not completely disastrous considering that my fingers were trembling the whole time. 

Here is a YouTube video of Yuja Wang, the amazing flying fingers from China, playing the entire sonata when she was in elementary school.  More about her, here.

Take it to the Max

i-Mac(ed)

Finally, I took the plunge and converted from PC to Mac. (Some of my readers will probably mutter "It's about time!")  People liken the spiritual divide between devotees of the PC and Mac to Protestantism and Catholicism; to me it was more like a spiritual conversion from Christianity to Zen Buddhism. 

What put me over the edge was that the Windows operating system on my laptop, for some inscrutable reason, kept succumbing to the dreadful BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.  (Count yourself lucky if you've never experienced it.)  I put up with this daily torment, plus many other software nightmares, for as long as I could, since last July, until my Dell laptop finally quit for good.

What kept me from making the switch sooner was concern over the compatibility between the Mac and the various Autodesk programs which I'm wedded to for architectural design.  But given that Autodesk has begun to accommodate Mac users and make some of their programs compatible with the Mac OS, and given the availability now of software such as Parallels Desktop, which allows one to work in Windows programs without having to reboot, we were finally convinced that it would be safe for me to switch.  Kirk made the switch when he moved to IU two and a half years ago and has never looked back.

After having gotten over the initial difficulty of transferring the data from my old hard drive to the new iOS environment and installing various software programs for the Mac, I've begun to get the hang of the different terminology and different ways of navigating.  What I like best about this super machine is that the Mac operating system is integrated with the Mac's own impeccable and seemingly indestructible hardware and all its peripherals, unlike the Windows setup where its operating system lives in hardware made by others and which tends to go out of sync with operating system updates or simply fall apart in a few years' time.

I've yet to find out how Autodesk programs work on the Mac; I hope the transition will be seamless.

Tronies

There is probably no face more universally recognizable, with the exception perhaps of Mona Lisa's, than that of the "Girl with a Pearl Earring," by Vermeer.  On our recent trip to San Francisco, that anonymous face with the blue and gold turban seemed to peep out at us on every street corner -- one gets a fleeting glimpse of her on passing buses and trolley cars, on banners and posters at every tourist destination. The painting is currently being exhibited at the De Young Museum.  It has drawn an unprecedented number of visitors to the museum and its likeness has been slapped onto every conceivable type of merchandise the marketing department of the museum could think of. 

One of the interesting things we learned at the exhibition is the distinction between tronies and portraits. Tronies, an old Dutch word for "faces", in art world parlance refers to Dutch paintings from the 17th Century, usually in the portrait format of heads or busts, which are studies of facial expressions (character studies) of unidentified sitters -- to use a condensed version of the definition culled from Wikipedia and other sources.
     
What exactly is so fascinating about this painting, or more specifically, about the young woman's face?  Unlike the forward-facing Mona Lisa, with her placid expression and half smile, Vermeer's model seems to be casting a backward glance at us questioningly through the veil of time.  The 1999 novel of the same title and the 2003 film based on it starring Scarlett Johansson seems to me to rob her of the many other possible readings of the face that a viewer can conjure up when standing face to face with it.

But what interests me most about the painting, is not figuring out what the facial expression--her imploring gaze and parted lips, as some might describe them--of the girl is trying to say, but the painter's ability to make palpable the sense of an arrested motion, perhaps of the girl's slow pacing movement being halted by a summons from behind, conveyed by the just-so turn of the shoulder and the tilt of the head.  

At any rate this is a painting which any budding artist would want to copy, even I.  Below is a picture of my girl with a pearl earring in the intermediate stage of its becoming, next to the original.  I chose to show this here because it seems still to possess the potential of becoming a good copy, while my finished product was completely hard and sterile, incapable of producing any mystery or poetry.        

A face that speaks
a thousand words

My attempt at copy