Month: September 2006

The maestro of the Thayer Conservatory Orchestra went to Junior’s school along with a brass quartet for the 3rd and 4th graders, and he decided he wants to play a brass instrument. He had talked about the trombone, which is an excellent instrument, don’t get me wrong, but I’m pretty sure I’m not running out to buy a trombone for an 8 year old with the attention span of dog food. Plus his arms aren’t long enough; that’s what’s saving me.

He changed to trumpet, which he’s also too young for, but I have to say that I’m in a kind of deja vu about the whole thing. In a freaky repeat of my own childhood, I was a year older than him when they brought my class into the music room and had all kinds of instruments out to demo for us, and then we could choose which one we might want to learn to play. And I chose…the trumpet. I’m sure my parents were thrilled with my choice, but the choice was all mine, as was the responsibility for practicing every day for the two years I played. I even played a solo in the annual talent show – Close to You by the Carpenters.

Luckily, there wasn’t any cost to them because I used the school’s trumpet. Have you actually priced band instruments? I went to a going out of business sale that had saxaphones at half price for a thousand bucks.

SO, he’s actually going to start taking piano lessons, and when he’s a little older, if he want to try trumpet he can. My point about all this is that if anyone behind the project financing to have the quartet visit the schools wants to know if it was a good idea, you’ve got at least one little boy who is now signed up for music lessons as a result of the visit.

Blogger ate half of my template tonight. Mr. Dump is sitting and waiting for me to post a message freaking out and giving them the big stink-eye. All I tried to do is correct a spelling error on my previous post, and all of a sudden my web site was just displaying a single line of broken code.

Do you know how hard it is to piece together a template that you haven’t backed up in 7 months? No? Well I do.

Grrrr.

I put an ad over there on the top of the right column, but it’s not really advertising per say. I don’t get paid a penny every time you click on the link, even though that might add up to two or three cents a day, if all my loyal readers become involved. No, it’s an ad for design and marketing services by an old company under a new name. And I was forced at gunpoint to put the ad on the site or Mr. Dump said he was going to let the dog eat my shoes.

So you know, what choice did I have?

If you need these services, by all means go check out the site and let them know you came from here. Maybe I’ll get a little love and recognition and new tires for the JodyMobile(tm). It’s all about the cheese money, isn’t it?

I have to go download and listen to it. Woooooo!

Luckily, we listened to the wise words of Junior. See, we caravaned to Ferncol (in Templeton MA) with my sister and parents to the fair. We should have left a little earlier than we did, but you know how we get when we’re trying to go somewhere. It’s impossible to actually physically get in the car and go. There are many bathroom trips, someone forgot a sweater, someone forgot a bottle of water, maybe one more bathroom trip, get off the computer, dammit! (That wasn’t me, by the way) etc. etc.

As we got off the Route 2 exit, it started to rain. FANTASTIC! A conference between the open windows of the two cars occurred. Do we want to go in or not? It’s five dollars per car. What’s the forecast for the afternoon? Junior says we should go, that it’s going to stop raining. It doesn’t look that way, but that’s what he said. Someone points out that all the profit from the fair goes right back into the program at Ferncol, and in fact it rained yesterday so they didn’t make much money. (Example: If you go on the dairy barn tour, they have cookies and ice cream and apple cider available. Free, but there is a donation jar. I have found you tend to donate more than you would if they were actually charging for the snacks, which I suppose is why they do it. All the money that is donated goes to the client/resident holiday party. How can you not give a few bucks to that worthy cause?) So we decided minimally, we’d go, give our five bucks as a donation and just turn around. Except the rain let up a LOT so we got out. And after an initial drizzle it didn’t rain again the rest of the time we were there – in fact the skies cleared and there were patches of blue. So Junior called it! I’m going to get all my weather predictions from him from now on!

The fair was smaller this year. I guess Saturday was a complete washout and with the forecast for Sunday to be the same or worse (thunderstorms and 60mph winds) many of the vendors weren’t there on Sunday. They didn’t have carnaval rides this year (I was perfectly okay with that. I did NOT like the quality of the rides when I saw them last year) and they didn’t have the big Dollar Sale section (which was usually just boxes of stuff on the ground). I did share my fricot (chicken stew) with Junior, and my parents had the traditional clam chowdah. They said it was just as good as previous years.

No cows were born, but the manager of the dairy is the guy who led our tour so he thought it was cool that we said we were there when it happened a couple of years ago. It’s fair lore that one year a cow gave birth during the fair. And I have photographic evidence!