It's hot, hot, HOT today, and STICKY. Ewwww. Bonita is flat on the kitchen floor. I am wishing I were at the beach, but instead I'm at home trying not to move until we drive downtown and get into the back of a U-Haul truck with other Tango Mucha Labia members and tango dancers wearing local art, ready to show up at undisclosed locations around Portland for impromptu Mobile Tango and Art Show performances as part of First Friday art goodness. Somehow the thought of packing myself (and my violin) into the back of a U-Haul truck in this heat is not making me extremely excited.

I just tried my first homemade lacto-fermented dill pickles. YUMMMMMMMM! They are so much better than the vinegary commercial ones. And dead easy to make. Forget canning! It seems like cheating to just leave them on the counter for 3 days with no blanching and boiling water baths and so on. Since my mom just unloaded more than 20 cucumbers on me, I will be making a bunch more pickles, which means I need more whey. Right now I have a batch coming, dripping through the towel-lined sieve that will, after a day or so, contain cultured cream cheese. Yay raw goat milk. Dairy products make me phlegmy...except for the dairy products I've been making myself out of raw milk. And pickles from the whey! Life is good.

D. is out with his mom and his aunt on some kind of excursion on his last day here, while I am home teaching violin lessons and tearing the wall out downstairs (oh, and eating pickles...) He's been looking forward to trying them too, so I will refrain from eating them all before he gets home. :-)

I'm a morning person, but D. is not generally morning person, and especially not when he has been up late on the computer. So Saturday morning I left him with Bonita (who has been delighted to have another person to pounce on in bed) and took Liz's Xtracycle over to the farmers' market at Deering Oaks. On the way I stopped at Hannaford and met the owner of the homemade bike trailer I've seen around town (so cool! made from a futon frame and some boat trailer tires!) and then went to use up some more of my credit at Fishbowl Farm's stand, plus splurging on some Ruby Kraut from Thirty Acre Farm as I was buying my eggs.

Back home at around 10:00, D. was still not budging from bed and neither was Bonita, so I headed up nohth to my favorite blueberry mountain. It was a perfect day and so nice to be up there again. And great berries. This year I'm saving a bunch in the freezer and will try starting some plants from seed, following directions from the Maine Extension Service, so I went picking with an eye for the kind of berries I'd like to see growing in my yard. And then of course I ended up picking a couple of quarts because I just couldn't help it. Finally I made myself come down from there and returned to cook dinner for the birthday boy. When I closed my eyes that night I still saw blueberries.

On Thursday I drove up to Wilton to visit E. at her parents' house before she headed back home to NYC. I stopped for gas in Gray and thought, as I was washing my windshield, "I'd better remember to take my wallet off the roof of the car before I leave." And of course I didn't remember. And didn't realize it until more than an hour later when I arrived in Wilton.

I've never actually lost my wallet, though I've thought I've lost my wallet several times and usually I panic and cancel all of my credit cards and then find it. This time I knew exactly what I'd done and where the wallet probably was (somewhere on Route 4 pretty close to the gas station in Gray), and I was totally calm. For some reason, I had this unshakeable conviction that my wallet was absolutely fine, that someone nice had picked it up and would find my phone number in the book and leave me a message about it. Very unusual behavior for me. Furthermore, I also had this gut feeling that something fabulous would be happening to me soon. Super unusual. So I went off and had a great day with E. and then stayed for dinner and finally got back on the road about the time a huge thunderstorm was starting and drove in absolutely terrible conditions all the way home. And the whole time I was still convinced that something wonderful and fun would be coming soon.

Well, my wallet was found by a nice man and his wife in Gray, in the middle of the road, untouched--not even run over. And not rained on. And on the way home I noticed a sign for cheap mulch hay on Route 26. I'm going over there on Monday with the trailer.

So far the Fabulous Thing hasn't happened yet, and I'm totally curious. What will it be?! Or curious what I've been eating lately that's making me into an optimist. Maybe it's the return to solitary living?

I took a nap this afternoon after a morning of waking up with not quite enough sleep and biking around until 2:00 doing various errands. Here is my first school dream of the season:

I'm back in school on the first day. There's no classroom space so my classroom is half inside, half outside in a space that looks a lot like the Lincoln Memorial (except without Lincoln). And with more posts for kids to hide behind. I have a huge class, and they keep trying to sneak away across the lawn. They're going right by the principal, but because of the budget, the principal no longer has an office and is tucked behind a huge U-shaped desk between some marble columns, looking out over the lawn. He never looks up from his work because now he is also the secretary and the guidance counselor. (Scarily, this is not that far from real life...) The kids all look really young and are swinging from things and saying that they're in computer class, so they shouldn't have to work, except one student who is huge and looks like she's twentysomething and has some kind of metal cagey neck brace thing like she was in a fight or an accident or something. She is very sullen.

The sullen girl has my head between her hands and has just threatened to do something like break my neck, and says, "why am I here, anyway?" I grab both of her hands and look right at her and say the following:

"You're here because you have the chance to make a difference, to learn how to think! That's what employers want--people who can think, even just about one thing. Gawd, one thing! It's not even that hard, but people, people aren't thinking anymore! [By this point I have tears in my eyes and she looks like she could too, but instead is more interested in seeing whether I'm going to cry] They go home, they eat crap, they're depressed, they go to sleep...and then they get up but they've forgotten how to think. Gawd, it's enough to make me depressed just thinking about it, but I'm here because I can help you make a difference."

That's verbatim. Yessah. Very rare that I remember a dream. In a little more than one week I will be back in the thick of it. And this dream isn't that far off. The great thing is that I really feel for my students. And the terrible thing is that I really feel for my students. This is why I will burn out after a few more years, and that's a real shame.

Now that it's late August we're getting sunny, breezy, cool weather that makes me think "Fall is coming"...until then we have a couple days of hot sticky weather. Just kidding!

Today is beautiful. Yesterday was hotter and I decided to branch out from my standard Banana "Ice Cream" and stuck a bunch of green grapes in the freezer instead. And then forgot about them and went and taught 6 violin lessons and then headed over to North Star Cafe to play with TML. I just remembered they were in the freezer and gave them a whirl, and now I have sherbety goodness on my tongue and a little bit of Brain Freeze.

Grape "Sherbet"
Ingredients: ripe grapes

Procedure: freeze grapes. Whirl in food processor until the consistency of sherbet.

Banana "Ice Cream"
Ingredients: very ripe bananas (as for banana bread)

Procedure: peel bananas, cut into chunks, and freeze on cookie sheet(s). Whirl in food processor until creamy.

At the risk of alienating myself from all other classical violinists, I'd like to encourage all brides/grooms-to-be to feel free to ask your violinist to play Cyndi Lauper on solo violin for your wedding, or to make other such requests. Really.

Last summer I played solo violin at a wedding on one of the Diamond islands. The bride wanted "Air on the G String". After my initial "she wants what on solo violin?" I took on the challenge and created what I thought was a very successful arrangement, incorporating both melody and bass, double stops, etc. It was fun! Having classical music at a wedding is nice, but if you're having a wedding outdoors, nothing beats having a single violinist standing up with no music, just the violin, playing beautifully for people and for nature. It's such a nice image! But I suppose I am biased. :-)

This past Saturday I played a wedding over at Kettle Cove. This was a last-minute affair and the groom called me only three (maybe two?) weeks in advance. I was sort of lukewarm about taking the gig (why I don't make my sole living from violin: so I can refuse gigs when I want to), but when he said that he wanted the bride's processional to be Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" as a surprise for his bride, I had to do it. I mean, it was sooo cute. $0.99 later I had downloaded it from iTunes, listened to it a bunch of times (those were the days! What was that, like fifth grade?) and concocted a version for solo violin. Double stops like crazy. After that workout, "Ode to Joy" was a piece of cake.

I decided that those are my favorite weddings: the ones where I play solo, get to make up my own arrangements, and play outside in gorgeous locations. So don't listen to those musicians who want to charge you extra for it. ;-P

You get a bunch of Portland tango dancers in a room together and the topic is bound to come up: "any new places to dance?" Ayuh. You can't open a restaurant or bar in this town without someone from PortTango going by to check out whether there's a nice floor and a dance license.

Last night, sitting on the stage unwinding after our gig at the North Star Cafe (with wheat free goodies! Wheee!) Liz and I looked at each other and agreed that it's an official "scene". Live tango band, tons of dancers everywhere, new dancers who looked in and decided to take the free lesson, people eating and drinking and hanging out in this fabulous place...yes. This is good. And TML is booked there twice a month until November--2nd and 4th Mondays in September and November, and 1st and 3rd Mondays in October. I really need to do our web site. Argh.

The big question on my mind is "how do I teach a full day at school and then 6 violin lessons and then play tango for an hour, until 10:00?" Last night I hit a wall right before our last song. Hmmmm.

But it's happening. I heart my band!

Sitting on the couch just now I had a thought: next year I will not have to be at school until 9:30 p.m. for several days before school starts, lifting heavy things and drilling and screwing and moving large items around. I guess I'd better teach for one more year after this one so I can enjoy that.

Recently I was puttering around the kitchen, minding my own business, juggling a colander full of eel strips and thinking about how "eely" is overused in crossword puzzles and is it even a word anyway, and if it is a word could it also be applied to the smell of something, since what was in the colander had a very distinct odor, and is it supposed to smell like that, and...suddenly out of nowhere came this thought: hey, I've always assumed that I would fall in love and get married and have kids. And that might not actually happen.

Thinking back on it, I bet it was the crossword puzzle thought that took me from eels to relationships, since the one time I've been in love, one activity my boyfriend and I enjoyed doing together was the New York Times crossword puzzle. Since that time I've rarely done crosswords. Anyway, the strange thing about the "wow, I might not ever get married and have kids" thought was that it only hit me for about 10 seconds, and then my reaction was "Bummer. OK, well, I guess I should adjust my expectations."

Not that I'm against love--I think it's cute and warm and fuzzy when two of my friends are being all kissy, and when Tina said, several weeks back, "Dr. B. is getting married!" my first thought was "Yay! I'm so happy for him!" but I'm wondering whether I should be worried that I love being around people who are in love, without feeling jealous or sad or panicky or...whatever.

Now it looks like I'll have 7 weeks to figure it out with my friends, because a girlfriend has bamboozled me (how does she do that???) into being in a book group discussing a book named "Calling in 'The One'" that is supposed to prepare you to meet your soul mate by doing journaling and changing your life and so forth. I am valiantly trying to keep an open mind about it, but I've already read the whole book and my first thought was "what I really need to be happier right now is 1-2 more hours of sleep a night, and how is meeting my soul mate going to accomplish that?" Being in a relationship has always decreased the amount of sleep I get, and post-MS I really feel it. Because how do I date the kind of person I want to date (i.e. not a couch potato) without getting exhausted? Hrmph.