To see the township party, our annual Festival of the Arts, go here!
http://beautifulmetaphor.blogspot.com/2013/09/festival-of-arts-2013-plainsboro.html
Enjoy along with us, as you stroll from event to event.
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Friday, September 20, 2013
Great Literature is Wasted on the Young, or Why My Kindle Is Amusing Me But Not My Cats
The Kindle reader I suddenly found in my life has proved to be better than I expected, to wit: though the cats both try to sit on it and put their paws right where I'm reading, in true feline style, they can no longer stop me from turning pages, yay.
Then, if a book is huge, it still weighs the same on the reader.
And finally, best of all: I've downloaded classics from Gutenberg Project, may they live forever, and find that on revisiting Vanity Fair it's much much funnier than I thought. I had to read it as a teen, and slogged through it, missing most of the irony and deliberate two dimensionality of the actors in it, and now find it's Austen with cap and bells, and I keep having to stop to laugh. And I can enlarge the print -- classics in print often have distressingly tiny fonts.
I know Trollope is very good, having reread some of it as an adult, so maybe I'll download ole Anthony soon. I have the complete Gutenberg Austen, though I have reread her many times, until my book fell apart. This is another reader plus: your book won't wear out!
Just sayin'
But it does cut into my DVD watching. And cooking. And other obligations in life, which I have to scramble to catch up with. Tomorrow is the Festival of the Arts, which I'll cover in Art the Beautiful, but meanwhile I have to make sure all my stuff for the various commitments is organized and processed and generally ready.
Plarn for the giant loom, other interesting materials same destination, art ready to display on the clothesline show, embroidery to show at the guild table area, camera loaded and battery charged for pix of all the above. Good thing I live pretty close to the Festival site, since last year I had to nip home to get another memory card when the one in the camera filled up faster than expected. This year I'm ready.
I am, I am.
Then, if a book is huge, it still weighs the same on the reader.
And finally, best of all: I've downloaded classics from Gutenberg Project, may they live forever, and find that on revisiting Vanity Fair it's much much funnier than I thought. I had to read it as a teen, and slogged through it, missing most of the irony and deliberate two dimensionality of the actors in it, and now find it's Austen with cap and bells, and I keep having to stop to laugh. And I can enlarge the print -- classics in print often have distressingly tiny fonts.
I know Trollope is very good, having reread some of it as an adult, so maybe I'll download ole Anthony soon. I have the complete Gutenberg Austen, though I have reread her many times, until my book fell apart. This is another reader plus: your book won't wear out!
Just sayin'
But it does cut into my DVD watching. And cooking. And other obligations in life, which I have to scramble to catch up with. Tomorrow is the Festival of the Arts, which I'll cover in Art the Beautiful, but meanwhile I have to make sure all my stuff for the various commitments is organized and processed and generally ready.
Plarn for the giant loom, other interesting materials same destination, art ready to display on the clothesline show, embroidery to show at the guild table area, camera loaded and battery charged for pix of all the above. Good thing I live pretty close to the Festival site, since last year I had to nip home to get another memory card when the one in the camera filled up faster than expected. This year I'm ready.
I am, I am.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
New blog for embroidery fans
I've set up a blog for our chapter of the embroiderers' guild, if you'd like to follow our doings, you can go to http://princetonega.blogspot.com/
and see our first blogpost. If you'd like to receive all our posts from now on (that won't be a huge number) directly to your email, just enter your email address at the bottom of the header, and follow the prompts, and you'll never miss a sparkling post full of pictures and fun and works in progress. Even if I do say it myself.
and see our first blogpost. If you'd like to receive all our posts from now on (that won't be a huge number) directly to your email, just enter your email address at the bottom of the header, and follow the prompts, and you'll never miss a sparkling post full of pictures and fun and works in progress. Even if I do say it myself.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Lovely Lazy Sunday on the Preserve
Instead of running about doing errands, catching up with art commitments, working on the computer for organizations, and generally doing, not being, I went to the Preserve, our local wilderness area for the afternoon.
I found a whole new trail has been opened, that I walked, on grass through trees, instead of along the dusty old farmtrack that used to be the main trail to follow on the way to the other areas. Very cool. Whole new vantage point, and I've been wanting to walk this for years,but it was only just made into a trail. Perfect day, in the 70s, cool enough to walk a lot, warm enough to sit and rest when I realized I probably should.
September brings these great black eyed susans, or whatever they are, covered in little brown butterflies, and various little blue wildflowers who come out after the heat of the summer has passed.
And I just had to take pix of reflections of trees and sky and clouds, and teepees built during the summer program by small naturalists, while I was listening to frogs leaping into the water all around, and watching small fish in the shallows of the lake.
Then home to read, except that it consisted mainly of sleeping with two cats on top of me. No pix of the sleeping heap of bodies.
I found a whole new trail has been opened, that I walked, on grass through trees, instead of along the dusty old farmtrack that used to be the main trail to follow on the way to the other areas. Very cool. Whole new vantage point, and I've been wanting to walk this for years,but it was only just made into a trail. Perfect day, in the 70s, cool enough to walk a lot, warm enough to sit and rest when I realized I probably should.
September brings these great black eyed susans, or whatever they are, covered in little brown butterflies, and various little blue wildflowers who come out after the heat of the summer has passed.
And I just had to take pix of reflections of trees and sky and clouds, and teepees built during the summer program by small naturalists, while I was listening to frogs leaping into the water all around, and watching small fish in the shallows of the lake.
Then home to read, except that it consisted mainly of sleeping with two cats on top of me. No pix of the sleeping heap of bodies.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Sunday, September 8, 2013
Recorder players party on!
Picnic 2013 of our local ARS chapter, Princeton Recorder Society. I was playing in the three main playing groups, so I wasn't able to pic and play at the same time, but there was good music at this event.
Here's our treasurer, Bob, taking a bow after playing a series of bass solos:
John Burkhalter, seen here holding soprano recorder after playing brilliantly, is a virtuoso recorder player, and a generous one, too, to less accomplished players, ask me how I know this, and I now find his mother is an artist. He hopes to put her and me in touch, which will be wonderful. She lives in assisted living, far from here, but computers don't care!
And the food, all made by ourselves, was great as usual. My default devilled eggs all vanished, I like this, no leftovers to carry home, just the container!
Time to talk with your friends, catch up.
For outdoor playing you need perfect weather -- we were under cover so rain wouldn't have mattered too much -- but wind can be an issue, so you have to remember to peg down your sheet music on the stand. But the sound of the music drifting on the air was lovely, perfect day in the 70s, sunny.
Good time.
Here's our treasurer, Bob, taking a bow after playing a series of bass solos:
John Burkhalter, seen here holding soprano recorder after playing brilliantly, is a virtuoso recorder player, and a generous one, too, to less accomplished players, ask me how I know this, and I now find his mother is an artist. He hopes to put her and me in touch, which will be wonderful. She lives in assisted living, far from here, but computers don't care!
And the food, all made by ourselves, was great as usual. My default devilled eggs all vanished, I like this, no leftovers to carry home, just the container!
Time to talk with your friends, catch up.
For outdoor playing you need perfect weather -- we were under cover so rain wouldn't have mattered too much -- but wind can be an issue, so you have to remember to peg down your sheet music on the stand. But the sound of the music drifting on the air was lovely, perfect day in the 70s, sunny.
Good time.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Concatenation and Molasses Cookies
This may look like a plate of molasses and ginger cookies fresh from the oven to celebrate White Rabbits the First of September, but in fact it's the end of a concatenation starting with the reading program I took part in this summer.
That ended in my being drawn for first prize, my Kindle. That was the first salvo in a few days' intense learning and frustration and software cursing in the course of finding out how where and when I can upload, how to convert files to something Kindle likes, very fussy over its food, K rations, you know, how to move books from out there to in here, etc.
And I now have uploaded on my K a number of marvellous totally unavailable in print, works, one of which is about food in wartime. The First World War, that is, written in 1917 at the request of the US Gov, for housewives encouraging them to be frugal and stop eating a pound of meat a day, and so on.
And at the end is a series of actually perfectly nice recipes, one of them for molasses cookies. Nothing to do with frugal, since they involve a lot of ginger and molasses and the flour they were supposed to economize on, and I subbed olive oil for the solid shortening they wanted. And added walnuts on the top, also not frugal.
So here they are. Already little care packages are in a couple of neighbors' houses. I actually put the batch into the freezer in the innocent belief they would last for weeks of teatime, but oh well.
Better on the neighbors' hips than mine...
That ended in my being drawn for first prize, my Kindle. That was the first salvo in a few days' intense learning and frustration and software cursing in the course of finding out how where and when I can upload, how to convert files to something Kindle likes, very fussy over its food, K rations, you know, how to move books from out there to in here, etc.
And I now have uploaded on my K a number of marvellous totally unavailable in print, works, one of which is about food in wartime. The First World War, that is, written in 1917 at the request of the US Gov, for housewives encouraging them to be frugal and stop eating a pound of meat a day, and so on.
And at the end is a series of actually perfectly nice recipes, one of them for molasses cookies. Nothing to do with frugal, since they involve a lot of ginger and molasses and the flour they were supposed to economize on, and I subbed olive oil for the solid shortening they wanted. And added walnuts on the top, also not frugal.
So here they are. Already little care packages are in a couple of neighbors' houses. I actually put the batch into the freezer in the innocent belief they would last for weeks of teatime, but oh well.
Better on the neighbors' hips than mine...
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