Garlic and Dimo

Garlic juice works great as a glue! I'm not really surprised since there have been times when cooking when my hands feel sticky from slicing garlic. Interestingly, I think slicing makes for stickier hands than chopping- but I haven't done any controlled experiments on that.

The dimo (or Di mo) was a small flattened tube- not surprising since it's the inner layer of bamboo. I wasn't sure if I was to leave it tubular or make it flat so I opted to cut open the tube and attach one layer only. It went on fairly smoothly but with a portion of the edge folded over because it stuck prematurely to the garlic juice. Initially the membrane- or reed, I've read it called- vibrated a lot. I tightened it by moistening it and smoothing it out a little more, making the creases and crinkles run perpendicular to the flute. The rough vibration smoothed out and my tone was more smooth.

It seems to take a lot of support to play- It could be, in part, that I'm terribly out of shape, but I had only a small range in which I felt comfortable and had good tone. Small, meaning 6 notes. I had to start in the middle of those six notes and play either up or down; it was much more challenging to start higher or lower and move through the small range. I needed to be very conscious of my breath, making certain I breathed with sufficient support, way down in my diaphragm. My tone had to remain very simple and open and even then I would occasionally just lose all sound. I couldn't figure out why, and though I hate to blame the instrument and not my technique, I couldn't help but wonder if the dimo was improperly sealed.

I also wonder if I should remove the tassel at the end of the instrument? It is looped through the last two "vent" holes but wasn't extremely easy to take off since it was a bit snug.

Dizi Dimo

I've been wanting to get back into shape as a flute player for some time now- a couple of years, actually. I've been stymied by carpal tunnel bilaterally, as well as dealing with the constant needs, requests, demands and desires of three children so the flute always manages to be at the bottom of my priorities. I went so far as to schedule 10 minutes of practice into my Chorebuster schedule, but alas, even that allows it to fall by the wayside.

I hereby resolve to do a much better job prioritizing pleasures in my life!

There- you heard it here first.

Today I stopped by a neighbor's garage sale and found an unused Chinese Bamboo Flute, about which I knew nothing, except that it was long and would have a lovely deep, rich tone. There was an "extra" hole in the flute, between the mouthpiece and the finger holes. The seller and I discussed the hole and what might possibly cover it- she played flute when she was younger but never learned to play Chinese flute and didn't understand the extra hole any more than I did. For reasons I don't understand I had to buy the flute- and planned to look it up on Youtube as soon as I could.

When my 7 year old son got home from a work day at school he discovered the flute right away and we learned the name is "dizi", it's in the key of C (I think- that's what's written on it, along with a lot of Chinese characters) and it needs a "dimo" (bamboo paper membrane, with perpendicular creases and wrinkles) to cover the extra hole. The dimo is crucial for proper tone creating the harmonics and richness that make the sound of the instrument unique. It's playable with substitues but with a very different sound, like with this very nice rendition of Suteki Da Ne, played with a piece of tape in lieu of the dimo. Contrast the more Western tone with this incredible tone of a Chinese performer. When I heard her play I realised I have enjoyed listening to the dizi for years, but didn't understand exactly how a Chinese flute differs from a Western one.

We discovered a small envelope in the case with some dimo and apparently I can use garlic juice as glue- even though one online store refers to "toxic" garlic juice! I guess that's a risk I have to take, but I'll make sure I use the organic stuff from the organic farm down the road, just to decrease that scary toxicity! Now to find a teacher, or music....

All that good juice on the vines- and what about the apples?

For the past few years I've been harvesting and processing our grapes into juice with my handy Saftborn juicer. I don't even remember now where I got the thing, but it has come in pretty handy. This year our grapes were prolific- nice because I have previously known absolutely nothing about how to prune them. The raccoons tried to sneak in during the night to snatch them but the dog is very enthusiastic about protecting all of our fruit trees from the evil beasts and they seem to have given up lately.

Several years ago we made jelly and it was darned good, but alas, we seem to have eaten it all. The kids don't drink the juice much but this year one of them is enthusiastic about the warm juice coming out of the juicer so I have hopes that she'll continue to drink it once it is canned. I did discover that jelly can be made from the juice so hopefully I'll do that in a few weeks.

We don't have an apple tree but sometimes I find people via Craigslist who do and are happy to let me pick their apples- and grapes when ours weren't so productive. I have a fantasy of making genuine apple cider- the stuff that now has to be called "hard" cider even though it was formerly pretty much what people did with their apples. It looks like I don't need a cider press since I have a Cuisinart but I still need to figure out how to make it safely, without pastuerization. It's not that I care so much if the apples ferment- I just want to figure out how to do it. I've made plenty of juice that I can, which involves a hot water bath, but currently I'm mystified about keeping cider.

Why does ice float?

I've been waiting years for one of my kids to ask me that and really care about the answer. My daughters both inquired at various times but weren't really very interested in the molecular reason that water floats.

Last week my son was concocting pink potions with suds and floating ice in it, and spilling all over the place of course. When he inquired, I could tell he knew he would be interested in the molecular structure of water when it becomes solid. I explained briefly about hydrogen bonding and how the water essentially becomes "fluffy" and lighter than liquid water. He was so interested that I drew the structure for him and showed him where the bonds form between the hydrogen of one molecule and the oxygen of another, forming a triangular structure. He spent a good chunk of the afternoon trying to figure out how to draw the molecules with different types of bonding between them and explaining to me what he was trying to do. I didn't really have a chance to explain how the electrons are shared in order to form these bonds, but I think I may have explained it to him once before so maybe he was basing his ideas of bonding on bits of what he remembered from that discussion.

I've always been a fan of hydrogen bonding in water that causes ice to form on the surface of lakes, rivers and other bodies of water. Although my girls weren't exceptionally interested in the molecular bonding in water, they were able to appreciate that liquid water in the bottom of ponds was a very handy thing to allow fish, frogs, toads, plants, etc to overwinter. Maybe the next time they walked the dog by our neighborhood pond they thought of that as they contemplated the life at the edges.

I love Google's misinterpretations of keywords sometimes

I belong to a group on Dog Scouting- seriously- but we haven't done any of the activities with them because they don't happen in Boulder. I just got a reminder about a Pooch Plunge happening in Fort Collins coming up at the end of the month. Google ads (or is it AdSense?) apparently noticed the word "plunge" so the ads on the right side of my gmail message were mostly for bras- *plunge* bras, I suspect. Probably a lot of people interested in dog swimming events are probably interested in plunge bras too so it's probably ok. I often look at those ads and follow them since I've found some very interesting things by doing that- probably including at least a few plunge bras.

Boulder has a dog swim also. They've been doing it for many more years than I've been going. My last dog liked swimming but not in pools so those events weren't of much interest. My current dog LOVES dogs, playing with dogs, swimming with dogs, seeing dogs, smelling dogs- anything with dogs. We went last year to Scott Carpenter for at least a couple of the doggy swim times and she loved every second of it. I can't imagine how Ft. Collins will get dogs to leave after less than an hour since I know how hard it was to get Keeyush to leave after two or three hours. I can't imagine how she would feel watching other dogs leave after only an hour either.

Just when I get one thing figured out, things keep changing

Once upon a time I put together a website on "The Advantages of Formula"- the reasons people give for not breastfeeding. At the time, it was state of the art, but nothing moved, there were no ads, no area for reader comments (other than my email address), and so on. For awhile it was fairly easy for me to edit but then I had a third child, new computers and just forgot how to do it. Luckily the basic information is still there and current, but I suspect many of the links aren't. I don't want to have the updated, current, maintained version only as a blog but I guess having it current someplace will be useful.

Oddly enough, there's a woman who keeps publishing my site on hers, no matter how many times I ask her, tell her even, not to do that. I wish she'd stop. It's at "Labour of Love" listed in the "breastfeeding category" as "Advantages of Formula Over Breastfeeding (all-the-reasons-refuted!)". It's pretty rude, I think. She takes the page down sometimes when I ask her, but then somehow it just ends up back there on her site, almost as if it has a will of its own! I've repeatedly told her that she can publish a brief excerpt and then link to it, but she's either too stupid or pigheaded to do what I ask, despite repeated reminders as well as a note to the same effect on my site. Pathetic.

Periodically I get my friends at Parent-l and PY-TeenAP to remind her as well. It seems to be time to do that again but this time I'll recruit my readers here to come to my aid. I'm not providing links to her site here but it's pretty easy to find. I would so love it if some numbers of you tell this woman (whose name I have forgotten again) to cease and desist. She knows better so she needs to act better.

Sometimes I'm really out of touch

I know there have been murmurings of a change in liquor laws in Colorado for quite awhile. Liquor stores have been closed on Sundays for as long as I've lived here, creating a minor inconvenience. The bigger issue for me has been the lack of a Trader Joe's and a lack of the wine selection available at Costco in other states. Around the beginning of July liquor stores started to be able to be open on Sundays, but I haven't taken advantage of that yet, probably because I'm just in the habit of NOT buying beer or wine on a Sunday. Part of the problem was also that I'm out of touch- I didn't really realise that the stores really were open on Sundays, despite the signs that said, "NOW OPEN SUNDAYS". I don't know how I missed that, but I guess I really didn't believe it.

Now I wonder what else has to change to allow us to have Trader Joe's and Costco come in with their power buying and power selling. I'd heard for years that the licensing laws were such that there could be "only one store of a given name with a license"- hence, only one Costco could possess the liquor license, and it wasn't worthwhile for Trader Joe's to open stores here if only one could sell beer and wine. Then, I heard that no food can be sold on the same premises as liquor, leading to the same problem. More recently someone told me that Colorado just doesn't issue enough licenses.

Humph.

I could embark on a search to figure this out- using The Google, you know- but instead I'll sit back and see what answers my new readers rushing to my brand new blog offer.