Father and Son

Jacob is now 6 months old/young and the apple of his daddy's eye. So sweet seeing them together :o)

Advent

Today is the first day of Advent (from the Latin word adventus, meaning "coming"). It is the beginning of the liturgical year in the western Christian church and the period of expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the Nativity of Jesus; in other words, the period immediately before Christmas. In the Roman Catholic and Lutheran calendars, Advent starts on the fourth Sunday before December 25. Christians believe that the season of Advent serves a dual reminder of the original waiting that was done by the Hebrews for the birth of their Messiah as well as the waiting that Christians today endure for the second coming of Christ. Many people make use of Advent wreaths during this season, with one candle representing each of the four Sundays of Advent. Western christians use purple and rose colored candles, lighting one each week, with the rose candle lit on the 3rd Sunday of Advent. It is usually burned at the family evening meal each day. During Christmas Day, four lit white candles are used.

Advent is a journey from darkness to light, lighting the first feeble candle in the shortening, frigid days as we begin the vigil of waiting, and then sense the first glimpse of longer, lighter days with the lighting of the rose candle. What Advent is, really, is a discipline: a way of forming anticipation and channeling it toward its goal. There's a flicker of rose on the third Sunday—Gaudete!, that day's Mass begins: Rejoice!—but then it's back to the dark purple that is the mark of the season in liturgical churches. And what those somber vestments symbolize is the deeply penitential design of Advent. Nothing we can do earns us the gift of Christmas, any more than Lent earns us Easter. But a season of contrition and sacrifice prepares us to understand and feel something about just how great the gift is when at last the day itself arrives.

This, by Joseph Bottum is worth reading.

Thanksgiving

It was all we could do to get Ingy out of her jammies and into her street clothes for dinner yesterday. With a bit of coaxing, her big sis and I lured her upstairs and with only a small amount of brute force, she was transformed into a rather charming little girl as she poses with her mama's mama :o)
After dinner we played Wii bowling and Len was thrilled when he got a strike, though the 5 year old in the house managed to beat us all, twice.
As kids we used to head for the basement after dinner on holidays and play ping pong, now we can bowl in the comfort of our living room without worrying about breaking a lamp or tossing a ball through the window or wall. I often wonder what we'll be doing 10 years from now :o)

Less than a month

Only 27 more days til the shortest day of the year...we're hangin in there and getting the wood dry for a good winter solstice celebration.

I thought this was interesting as we approach Thanksgiving tomorrow.

Toilet

At last...a picture of a toilet. Okay, I know my world must be very small if all I can focus on is a toilet, but is there anything more important in one's daily life???? It must be an absolute spectacle using one of those contraptions . Now my question is, do they flush? I see what must be a water line going somewhere. More questions.

Bathroom ala Azerbaijan

Sis sends me a picture of the bathroom at her school and still I can't see what one looks like. She also sent a pix of sheep eating outside the door of her house and now I understand why people there take off their shoes and slip on house slippers before entering.

Here's her description of the bathroom and life in general...

If you go to the right there are 2 "stalls", with holes in the floor....try to hit that!! Behind the door, is another hole in the floor.. You don't linger in the bathroom. No mirrors, hot water, etc. You just do your duty and run!!

Yucky here today.....dreary, grey, misty... and I guess it's like this most of the winter. We have lots of mud/puddles, etc. In fact we had to talk about our route to school "turn right, go two blocks, turn left, etc. (no one has addresses cause they don't recieve mail) directions are very important!! So, Judy and I had fun with "go two blocks, through the potholes, over the garbage ditch, etc" Life is interesting. Showers are seldome, pooing standing is a treat, wiping your backside with one leg in the air to be able to reach, etc... funny. You just roll with it. People are clean, so I guess they can do it better than me!! Today I'll stop by the bazaar and get some carrots and make a salad....usually it's just soup with some meat and potatoes, for dinner........ then there is always LOTS of sugary things. Everyone has gold teeth. Maybe I'll come home with a "gold grill".

Today, if I do nothing else...I am going to clean my toilet til it sparkles and thank God that I live in a land where we are king of our castle and all have a "throne".

Something completely different and so sweet.

Jacob Loves Stolling

I think the smile on Jacob's face tells us all exactly what he thinks about the fancy new stroller he wheels around town in. It's one of the dandy three wheelers and I'm talkin big bouncy wheels. Heck, I wouldn't mind riding in the darn thing.

Lunch On The Boat

Ingy got to have lunch on daddy's boat yesterday. What a lucky girl.

Gustavo Dudamel

I got a kick out of the review given Gustavo Dudamel and Martin Frost, a clarinet player in Gothenburg Synphony Orchestra and the orchestra in general. I can't imagine anything more exciting that playing under his direction. This video of the young people in the Simon Bolívar Youth Orchestra in Argentina seems to agree and this was the system that produced Dudamel.

My nephew lives near Gothenburg. I wonder if he got the chance to see him direct. He will begin this fall as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Hmmm..maybe a trip to LA is in order:o)

Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra Gustavo Dudamel conductor.

Martin Fröst clarinet.
Ravel, La Valse Anders Hillborg, Clarinet Concerto (Peacock Tales) (UK premiere)Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique
Huntley Dent
August 14, 2008
Wunderkindfest. Unless you are a stubborn opinionator, performances can confuse you at times. I was flummoxed last night at the Proms by Gustavo Dudamel and his Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, in a concert I was expecting to enjoy, though not to the utmost. The Berlioz Symphonie fantastique wore out its welcome many years ago, and only a brilliant performance can redeem it for me. That Dudamel did not deliver. Sparkling as he is in the bright media limelight, the skyrocketing young Venezuelan has to have the goods, too. In this case, his reading was flat, disjointed, and plodding, with a drawn-out Scene aux champs that lasted long enough for Madame Defarge to knit a quilt. The guillotine movement that followed was coarse and blatty, which is how the whole reading went, either in slow mo with exaggerated emphases or sped up recklessly. Dudamel’s inability to sustain tension in soft passages, one of the most blatant failings in a bad conductor, shocked me.
Good conductors can inspire indifferent orchestras to shine (listen to what Leonard Bernstein did with the Danish Radio SO in a stunning Nielsen Third Symphony on Sony from the early Sixties), but I’ve rarely heard a professional ensemble as ragged and dispirited as the Gothenburg band. On the podium Dudamel isn’t as spontaneously choreographic as Bernstein – he stands erect and unbending in the didactic German fashion most of the time – but his face and hands are animated and encouraging. The orchestra responded to his coaxing like thick pea soup. In addition, the first-chair players in the wind and brass sections simply aren’t very good their playing stiff and emotionless. In the opening work, Ravel’s La valse, there are several interpretive approaches one can follow. The mood can be slinky, satirical, diabolic, or suave. The parody of Viennese waltzes can be sharp-tongued or good-natured. The execution can be bravura or relaxed. This La valse was none of the above. The score unfolded like a computer printout, despite some nice phrasing from Dudamel. When the time came for the tidal-wave climax, where waltz decorum collapses into harsh chaos, the orchestra couldn’t deliver a real fortissimo. Much of the evening, in fact, the musicians dawdled around mezzo forte, refusing to risk very soft or very loud playing except when Dudamel absolutely demanded it.
To cap off a strange evening, the finale bravos from the Prommers were deafening, as a beaming Dudamel walked through the orchestra, embracing some musicians and lifting every soloist, however bad they had been, to a personal ovation. The spectacle seemed absurdist in the extreme – would you reward a sea lion for dropping the ball off its nose? We also got two encores, the first a maudlin slow melody that I didn’t recognize despite its Elgarian contours, the second a familiar South American carioca tune that I can’t name, either. The brass players took off their jackets and horsed around in the second encore, a gesture in the direction of Dudamel’s famously gyrating youth orchestra, the Simon Bolivar, but what is charming from a bunch of super-talented kids wowing sedate audiences isn’t so charming from tired middle-aged Swedes earning a long evening’s pay.
The middle of the concert was occupied by a new work, a clarinet concerto subtitled “Peacock Tales” by Anders Hillborg, a composer unknown to me. It was a spectacularly trashy piece, featuring a skilful soloist, Martin Frost, who was required to wail and riff for over half an hour to no purpose. But in addition, he pranced around Pan-like wearing a tri-corn mask like a character at the Carnival of Venice while the lighting system tinged the orchestra blue or red, depending on the music’s shifting moods. Well, there was only one mood, actually, a kind of semi-frenetic minimalism cooked up with splashy chords. The composer hit upon one neat trick, however: the clarinettist played a low ostinato rhythm at the bottom of the scale while interjecting squeaky high notes, the overall effect sounding like two clarinets instead of one. Once you enjoyed this impressive gimmick, hearing it repeated thirty or forty times didn’t increase its delight.
So now what? I’ve fallen off the Dudamel bandwagon with at thud. I know his recordings and the best is a fresh, highly energized Mahler Fifth with the Simon BolIvars in great form; next comes a suave Bartok Concerto for Orchestra with the L.A. Philharmonic, one of his specialities. DG, who scored a publicity coup by signing such a wunderkind to the label, shot Dudamel out of the gate with a pairing of the Beethoven Fifth and Seventh, obviously trying to equal the splash made by the young Carlos Kleiber with the same two works in the early Seventies. But Dudamel’s versions are mostly sluggish and uninspired. His ideas about Beethoven, such as they are, don’t convince me. Now he’s on to the music directorship in L.A., which like the Proms will give him a hero’s welcome even if he plays the complete score to Mamma Mia! In foxtrot rhythm. The rest of us will sit back with arms folded and wait for some stiffer tests.

Pillow Sham Purse

It's amazing what one can do with a pillow sham. I love anything blue and white and when I found this quilted pillow sham at the fabric store, I had to have it and knew exactly what I was going to do with it.

This Martha Stewart collection would make a cool purse or jacket or whatever the imagination could come up with.

Andy Williams

I found this video of Andy Williams and the Osmond brothers plus Marie and just had to share. The sweetest part is when Marie dances with Andy. He is so loving. I kinda miss those days when music was kinder and gentler.