Blog-azic

Last week was great because my family came down for a visit. My mother, sister, Jessica, and sister Rosalie came in Monday night. Tuesday morning when I awoke and went to shower, I was greeted by an unfamiliar site. It's a particular contrast in my apartment, which is soothingly sparse.

I got my second letter from Susan today! She sent me a nice variety of flowers. Check out the pic below! My summer roomie said that he has never seen anyone actually send a letter, and suggested that the postman would slap someone who sent a letter and tell them to send an email! So, the columbine is fairly well preserved. That's the pretty red and yellow one. The one in the middle, I believe is marsh marigold. What can I say about this one? I think Susan put it best: They are more commonly known as cow slip because cows are supposed to slip on them and fall. However, after countless hours trekking through cowslip I have decided that it is more likely the mucky, marshy habitat that cowslip grows in that is at fault. The actual plant is not slippery at all really. Gawd, what a natural blogger! A gurl after my own heart, indeed.

My home, on and off, for the next six weeks is Saratoga Springs, NY, where I am in charge of a networking install at Skidmore College. The town is high in the mountains and rich in history. It has a legacy of horse racing and wealth. There are mansions that rival castles here. Parks and lawns decorated with Italian statues carved from stone. Rich woods with giant fern and eight-lobed bloodroot where you don't stop for a closer look because of the swarming flies. Yesterday, my co-worker and I visited a music store (where I picked up a new harmonica, key of D), and then a garden restaurant where I took the picture above. After lunch, our hostess gave us directions to a tiny candy store so I could get some treats to send to Susan. I've been able to dig into nature here. The air is sweet with the smell of clover and linden. Hillsides are blanketed with wildflowers: vetch, bird-footed trefoil, red and white clover, daisy, black-eyed susan, and St. John's Wort. This old...

Clitocybula abundans On cool summer mornings, I sometimes find my front lawn carpeted with streaked coincap mushrooms. They grow after dark falls, all together, and wither and die in the hot sun. By the time I come home, there's little left of them except some wiry, black stalks. Peterson's remarks that their edibility is unknown. Does anyone want to join me for a taste test?

Susan tells me the one on the top, with the red flowers, is a wild onion. The bottom one, I'm not quite sure about what it could be. At first glance, it reminds me of pussytoes: silvery stem, small flowers. But, pussytoes produce white flowers, and look! The flowers are not clustered solely at the end of the stalk. Hmm. How about solidago? Is it too early for goldenrods? I might just have to buy a western wildflower ID book.

There's something about the way sunlight falls, through an oak's boughs, through an ash, and onto stone - that is hard to capture with a few words. It's harder to capture with a picture, which is worth a thousand words, but if I played a song about it, you might understand. It's would sound like Bach, rolling melodies over an evolving harmony. Progressions that are organic, that breath, grow. Melodies that are ephemeral, that disappear and come back. There's a slow pulsing to the whole thing, a current of energy, a cosmic background radiation. Maybe our own universe started with a song? The part of me that is compelled to say that, is the same part of me that took a picture of this outside of Coker Arboretum, taken not for the sake of the picture, but for the sake of telling you about it. Again, there's just something about a yellow flower in the sun, and there's something about meeting an old friend in the forest. I'm speaking, of course, of ...

A while ago, I mentioned that I was working on an arrangement of Meditation from Thais. Here is the first page of the arrangement. I also put down an arrangement of Ave Maria, by Schubert. I've been playing this one for years, and just decided to get it on paper. Both of these were made with Symphony Pro for iPad2. The app provides a touch sensitive staff in a Finale-like environment. It's rather intuitive, but also rather buggy in the latest updates. The program often crashes if you get too much notation on screen, as can happen if you add extended chords to a work. For example, a G#dim makes it crash every time! Also, check out the final sixteenth note in measure 2 above. Symphony Pro put it in measure 3! Still, I find the app quite useful and worth the small price I paid over 6 months ago. If you'd like to see more of either piece, I'd be happy to oblige for a small fee. Email me at c_tomazic@hotmail.com.