Butterflies and other ramblings...

It's been awhile since I posted, so I thought it was about time. This week has been a relatively slowed down and relaxed one for me, no travel! It's only Wednesday and all that could change with one phone call however. My latest project in Baltimore seems like it will never end. Since it is getting closer and closer to football season, the anticipation and excitement is growing (well, with Grammy and me anyway, Mom endures as she sits knitting away!!). Football in HD is just great. Of course Monday Night Football is more watchable now that TK is in the booth.

Work on the old homeplace is nearing completion with the planned project of shelving and deck sealing to be finished this week. Pictures will follow. Speaking of pictures, here are just a few taken of the Butterfly bush just off the deck at the back door. The butterflies have been spectacular this season, and we've even had a few hummingbirds visit. Our backyard has become quite the gathering spot for the local Browntown wildlife community with squirrel and deer. Every day is like a battle zone as I step out and dodge the acorns being hurled from above......Cleo doesn't seem to mind, she just calmly walks off the deck (if the grass isn't wet) and stares at the herd of deer hanging out munching Mom's plants. We did manage to salvage most of the eggplant and peppers enabling us to enjoy that most popular of summer dishes..shlumgullion.. or however that is spelled, you get the idea.

Congrats to Win on the completion of what can only be described as a very active and successful summer camp season. We are all looking forward to the pictures that he's promised. If anyone has not already visited the Southwest Virginia 4-H web site, please do so, it is a great snapshot of life in SW VA 4-H life.

http://www.ext.vt.edu/resources/4h/newcenters/southwest/

I am looking forward to pictures and mp3's of the 991 Rupley St. Front Porch Band too! Founding members Andrew and Jarrett continue rehearsals and are adding to their songlist weekly. Bookings by appointment.

The Dozier Center for the Performing Arts had it's grand opening, and from all reports (see post below) was a huge hit! Congrats to Emma for getting this project off the ground in the Atlanta 'burbs. I am looking forward to a back-stage tour this winter. IDEA: Bring the 991 Rupley band into that impressive studio and lay down some tracks.

Ok, enough ramblings for this morning........enjoy the butterflies!!










Ok, it's not a butterfly, but fish need love too!

As requested.........pictures of the family room. Win, can you spot the speakers?

News From Browntown

News From Browntown
Week-ends "on the compound" in Browntown are certainly no match for the excitement that goes on down south with the younger family members. Sounds like a good time was had by all!

Another lovely time with a friend this week-end. Phylis Benner, Em's colleague from Wolf Trap days, came to visit and spent Saturday night in "the cave"... which she reported to be very comfortable.

Phylis is committed to the Liberia project (she is a board member) and we spent some time planning and strategizing on how best to build LOEP. Her experience with children's foundation work and program planning combined with my experience in fundraising and development is a pretty good combo.

Dad has become quite the Bob Villa of "the compound". Improvements to the TV room have really made it a comfortable spot for his TV viewing and my knitting - quite the fogey picture, huh?. I guess many years of indirect exposure to HGTV has had some effect on Dad ... he is taking an active interest in getting some things done to be comfortable in the post-children homestead. Our new best friend is Steve The Handyman. Every home improvement idea ends up with the burning question WWSD (What Would Steve Do) . The highlight of our week-ends is the trip to Lowe's!

Melanie, if you read this please send me your e-mail address. I have tried to e-mail you several times in the past couple of weeks and it keeps getting kicked back at me. I am using the same address I have used successfully in the past - what's up?

Weekend Redux

Andrew did a pretty good job of summing up the weekend, so I won't write much. Here are the pictures I took at the Dozier, there are only a few.

Weekend Wrap

So this weekend was good fun….Im sure there will be some pictures to follow, as Win was the official photographer for the most part this weekend. Emmalee showed us around The Dozier Center on Saturday, and me, Win, John Marc, RP, Ryan and Lori were all quite impressed, the place certainly spared NO expense when it came to decking the place out in the finest of everything. Flat panel HD screens at every turn, acoustics that would make sound nerds drool, and electronics in the recording studio and video facility that are awesome. Em had to get back to work, and left us to our own devices, and trusted us not to break anything. I was tempted to touch stuff, but managed not to. Auntie Mels and John came as well, and we spoke for a while before Win and I headed back to the neighborhood.

Sunday was of course the Allman Bros./Derek Trucks Band show-A great time was had by all. Me, Win, Emmalee, Ryan, Lori and Jarrett all piled into my Jeep and headed down to the parking lot to tailgate, and cookout, etc. A friend of Jarret’s and I from CNN stopped by as well-The rain came, and came down hard. The downpour lasted for a good while, and we were soaked from head to toe-Derek Trucks was….well, brilliant, as one might imagine. The ABB were great as always, and played some good stuff. The mud was deep, and people were doing mudlsides all the way down the hill, I talked Emmalee out of giving it a try. Tired, damp, beat, and exhausted we headed home, and Win headed out this morning. And now we work. Fun times.

Dad, I didn’t see the Skins Saturday, and haven’t had a chance to listen to Joe’s post game comments. I hear neither the play OR what Joe had to say was pretty. Must have been an ugly performance Saturday night……

News From Browntown

News From Browntown

Hard to believe that it has been 32 years since Dad and I stood in the apple orchard and promised to get at least this far together. It was a lovely summer day and the sun has been shining for us ever since!

News From Browntown

News From Tomatoville

The high point of summer came to pass yesterday when we finally feasted on tomato and mayo sandwiches!! Despite the thieving squirrels of Browntown, we ended up with plenty of homegrown tomatoes thanks to a visit from Bev Nachtrieb. Bev arrived on Saturday afternoon bearing homegrown peaches and tomatoes from Sperryville and we have been eating them ever since.

The visit with Bev was really nice and gave us a chance to re-connect in person after about 30 years of once-a-year Christmas card contacts. Win, Emma and Andrew, you don't remember John and Bev but they lived in Flint Hill when we lived on Stonewall Drive and before that they lived in a house PawPaw and Grammy owned on Utah St. in Arl. and John (Bev's husband), worked with PawPaw. We all go back a long, long way to the time when Win was born and then their first child was born shortly afterward. They have lived in Chicago for the past 27 years or so and have been faithful about keeping up contact with PawPaw and Grammy.

Bev and I share a number of interests including yarn and crafts. Even more important, we share the same kind of "family values" (like Dad and me, Bev and husband John are children of the 60s). Dad, Grammy and I spent a good portion of the day yesterday taking Bev to Liberia. She got the tour of the shipping preparation set-up in the Meeting House and saw the medical supplies and school stuff. Then we viewed the videos of the precious children. No matter how often I see those pictures, I am still struck by how irrepressible those adorable children are in spite of their skinny little limbs, distended bellies and raggedy clothes. They are just beautiful. Bev was captivated too, of course.

The weather this week-end was absolutely perfect - sunshine, blue skies and temps in the mid-80s. It was a perfect two days of meandering up and down the hill from the cottage to the house and back again via the Meeting House and the pool garden and, of course, eating tomato and mayo sandwiches. Dad mowed while we meandered.

Check back for details and pix of little Richie's Big Third B-Day at the Animal Park!

News From Browntown

Ahhh ... Music and Politics Back In The Day

Andrew reports that he went to hear/see Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young last night at the big concert arena in Atlanta. He observes that the music was great, Neil Young is waaayy out there leftwingcrazy and Atlanta yuppies take themselves waaaay too seriously.

Now I know that Dad and Emma are the real musicians in the family. While I find music a pleasant accompaniment to life, they actually find it essential to life. Keeping this in mind, I am about to comment on music with absolutely no claim to any knowledge of the subject- just my own ramblings based on personal experience and opinion with no claim to any actual knowledge. After all, isn't that what the internets are for??

Not surprised that the music last night was great. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young still have such great harmony and their voices blend so beautifully that, as long as they sing together, their music is always good. Only when one or the other tries to stray from the safety of the herd does the truth come out... not one of the four can carry a tune in a bucket by himself. The group is a perfect example of the whole being the sum of it's parts.

The music is also good also because it reflects a political point of view, comments on the times, makes a political statement. It is 60s music and CSNY fans know those politics, expect that and love it! Neil Young, in particular, is such an outspoken song-writer that he sings his own politically charged compositions solo to get the point across. That takes guts considering his awful stuffed-nose caterwauling "singing style". Lots of musicians from the 60s were in the business not just to gain fame and fortune but because they had something to say. Music was the way they said it.

Back in the day when we rode around listening to the radio we got our political point of view from musicians not from radio talk show hosts. That is the tradition from which CSNY comes and their music is going to be political, folks.

The fact that Neil Young comes off as an extremist ties in exactly with what I posted yesterday. Everything is skewed so far rightward nowdays that what was considered pretty normal counter-culture, bit-left-of-center politics back in the day is now leftwingcrazy!

What were the Atlanta yuppie-types expecting? Why would they go to a CSNY concert and then boo or walk out when a political statement they didn't agree with was thrown their way? Didn't they expect 60s music? Do they think CSNY's most famous song, the anthem of student protest, Ohio, is just a recruitment promo for Kent State University?

It's 60s music!!

News From Browntown

News From Browntown
It's a sad day when the party of FDR and LBJ, both of whom presided over some of the most progressive legislation and effective government in U.S. history, can only offer voters this;

a) in Virginia a candidate for Senate whose main qualification for office, apparently, is that he was a highly-placed Republican?! ...
b) in Connecticut a candidate whose main qualification for office seems to be that he is a wealthy businessman who thinks that Bring the Troops Home can serve as both campaign slogan and philosophy of government...
c) also in Connecticut, a (former) Democratic Senator who seems to believe that repeatedly invoking the name of Senator John McCain, a Conservative Republican, is his own ticket to ride to victory in November.

In context of current slang, if 50 is the new 40, then Democrats are the new Republicans. The problem is that becoming just slightly less awful clones of those Republicans now in power is not enough to win an election, much less govern the country. Democratic leadership these days appears to be reduced to "vote for us, we're a smidgen less of a mess than the other guys". How inspiring!

How broken can the system get? I read somewhere the other day that the last time our democracy was in such shambles, we ended up fighting the Civil War!

This is why I knit. It is a mind-altering activity that involves ingesting nothing and ignoring selectively. I can sit in front of the television and knit serenely and calmly while John McGlaughlin, Randi Rhodes and Chris Matthews rant and rave. I don't yell at the television anymore because I am focused on finishing one row so I can move to the next... and at the end I have a nice, colorful, knitted thingie.

News From Browntown

News From Browntown

It seems especially quiet "on the compound" this week with Dad in Baltimore, no construction going on at home and just Grammy and me to hold down the fort. Quiet or not, I have decided to step up my own blog entries even if there is nothing exciting to report. I have no idea yet how to post pictures. That will come sooner or later.

The flora and fauna around our place are a bit the worse for wear now. Once the heat and humidity of Dog Days settles in it just becomes so difficult to keep up with watering and feeding. One plant that thrives in this awful weather, however, is eggplant. The three plants we have are looking very well and the little heat-loving lavender blossoms promise some excellent eggplant parmigiana in the next few weeks. The green peppers are also quite happy and some will be ready to pluck this week.

The sad news is that there are no tomatoes or squash. They were destroyed by we-knew-not-what in spite of various electrified barrier devices that were placed carefully around the plants in Grammy's pool garden. Since that destruction we have experienced several mornings of heavy shelling (literally) from squirrels in the oak trees surrounding the house and overhanging the deck. Acorn bombardment (the squirrel version of "shelling" attack) has become a routine morning and evening occurrence. The deck stays covered with acorns and the rain of nuts on the tin roof sounds like machine gun fire.

Apparently, the little critters were also busy snatching tomatoes and squash between military maneuvers. They picked the tomatoes very carefully off of the plant (Dad and I opted for a single plant in the planter in favor of making more space for the eggplant), leaving the entire plant intact. They weren't so careful with the squash though and those plants were destroyed.

The high point of summer, if not it's main purpose, is a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich made with tomato picked right from the vine. Not to be this year so ... I guess it might as well snow.

News From Browntown

News From Browntown

Emma and Andrew, you two have been busy! Congratulations Em on your job and Andrew, I can completely relate to the WV "mountain mama" feeling.

Grammy and I had a great time in Atlanta. I completely forgot to take even a single picture (didn't even think of a camera the whole time!) but will soon fill everyone in about the good time we had with family and re-connecting with old friends.