Dream Pop and Nature Drone

Holly is at her friend London Cabada's 18th birthday party. At 8:00 she'll be going to a music show at The Treehouse. The groups were described to her thusly in a text—one of the best texts I've ever seen:

It's a variety. Girlfriends is real dreamy surf rock, like the beach boys or animal collective but with a bit of noise, omotai is a stoner metal band which means it is metal but is not intense, sandia man is really heavy rock, glacier saint is dream pop, and reading rainbow is nature drone. It will be a lot of fun, and starts at 8 on the dot.

After she left, the texted me a new improved rundown of the show:

Show tonight $5. surf rock indie pop with Girlfriends and Glacier Saint. Stoner metal with Omotai and Sandia Man, and a closing drone set with omen and my band Reading Rainbow. 8 pm 1323 Coal SE.

So if anyone in Albuquerque is curious about what stoner metal or dreamy surf rock with a bit of noise would be, there's the where and when!

I don't have a picture to go with this (yet....)

Kirby and I will be here!!

Pam Sorooshian says the video is by some of the teens from the conference!




Online Registration Deadline Extended through July 18th!
http://www.hscconference.com/

This is an awesome video for everything except learning how my name is pronounced. (I was named in West Texas, so it's a twangier/brighter "a" in the Sandra, is all.) But it IS that fun! This video is not any exaggeration.

The schedule can be seen here: hsc2010schedule0708.pdf, and it's easily printable from that file. But you can look without printing or downloading.

The workshops I'm doing:
Writey Drawey (you can see more here—examples from home)
Connect the Dots (real dots, real connections; real thoughts, real connections)
Words that Can't Be Used (by request--information about insults, oaths, curses and "bad words")

Presentations:
Partnerships (Friday afternoon)
Unschooling: How To Screw It Up (in the last slot on Sunday)

I might also be on a panel about video games, or be a lovely assistant to Rosie Sorooshian, her boyfriend Daniel, and Kirby Dodd (and Pam, and then me, and I'm willing to smile and say nothing, in that company).

Kirby will be on the Grown Homeschoolers panel on Sunday morning.

Bobby McFerrin sings the Alphabet

The first time I was aware of Bobby McFerrin, he was on TV singing (vocalizing) for dancers who were doing a stage thing with balloons all over the floor. It was on a PBS series about dance, I think. Or maybe about arts in San Francisco, or at some particular theatre. It was the early 1980's. If anyone knows what that was, and if there's video somewhere, I would love to see it again. Keith and I just stood and stared. We had the TV on while we were doing things around the house, and when we heard him, we just looked at him, and listened to him, and the dancers were like backup video. That was way before any way to look things up, so I wrote his name down from the credits at the end of the show, and that's one name I've never forgotten.

This is at the end of a video of Star Wars. We don't use our videos anymore, but I'm really glad it's available for others to see. I used to pull out that video and find it for guests sometimes. The Wizard of Oz, the whole show, in less than eight minutes. He gets audience participation, another of his trademarks. SO cool:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1mvfzoHm9g

I think this is my favorite of his stuff:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRfyyq-tlyc

Tam and Holly

Our friend Vincent King was credited (in an intro speech, and in the movie credits) for a "full dome" animated movie called Tales of the Maya Skies, which had a reception and special screening tonight at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. Many of those who worked on it are here in Albuquerque; the musicians are from Santa Fe.

If you can see it, please do! It's beautiful. Three times a day in Albuquerque, and it's in some other places too (well.. maybe Mexico and California... and Philadelphia! but it will probably get around other planetarium theatres).

Besides Vincent, we saw his parents and his sister Tamarind, who's been at Stanford dancing and doing art and being otherwise busy for a few years.



(if you didn't move your cursor over that, please do!)

Tam is Marty's age, and was homeschooled. Vincent is between Holly and Marty in age, and was homeschooled until high school, when he went to the Albuquerque Academy and he's at UNM now (I think; I'll correct this if someone clarifies). Their younger brother had already seen the show and was occupied elsewhere tonight.

Proof of locality (Holly's Home!)

Holly and I spent a good chunk of the day together, and visited Beau Tappan who has a broken leg and so is not off camping where Keith and Marty (and her husband Steve, and dozens-to-hundreds of her friends are in Colorado). We played Five Crowns, and told stories, and saw the progress of her garden and the perpetual beauty of her yard, and hung out a while.

After Beau's house, I dropped Holly off at her friend Caiti's house, to reconnect with her Albuquerque yoga and party crowd. They're probably off watching fireworks in some good place.

I came home and slept, and woke up to the pops of the fireworks in all directions. We have newgrown kittens (cats in their second year) so I opened the windows and gave them good window seats so they can hear and maybe see something of fireworks. I know the dog doesn't love this day. I remember the year she was a little puppy, just a few months old, and we did backyard fireworks, and took turns holding her and reassuring her, when she wasn't hiding under my chair. She's an old dog now, and those three little kids with the Chinese sculpture fireworks that turned into lanterns and tanks with flags and stuff that night are all grown and in three different places. Marty is at a medieval-re-creation campout in Colorado; Kirby is at work in Austin.

I'm thinking of fireworks over my lifetime, in back yards, rodeo grounds, stadiums, viewed from Sandia Crest (from which the largest fireworks are all miniature and silent) and at the reflecting pool between the Washington Monument and the capitol building in Washington, when Holly had left her backpack on the Metro and was very sad. Fireworks shows viewed from the nearby yards or next-to-house parking lots in Española (the Maestas' back yard in Valley Estates one year) and Albuquerque (the church parking lot on Sunshine Terrace, where my kids ran around with sparklers with Valla and Jeff). Those are just the 4th of July fireworks, not Christmas Eve in Texas, or the fire works competition at the fair grounds when Keith and I went on "blue night," pre-kids.

I am content.

My birthday, compared to the 4th of July

This is an 11:11 situation.
Today my age is 56 years, 11 months, and 11 days.

I was born on a Friday. Cool. There was a waxing gibbous moon.

Holly, home, working her Canada puzzle, telling me stories.

A politician I never heard of named Claire McCaskill is the same age. More important to me, in northern Germany (on the east side, in Lübeck) Wolfgang Marquardt was born, and he and I trade notes on the adventures of our same-aged lives. He was always really interested in the U.S., and lives in Belleview, Washington now.

Some of this trivia came out of my head, but some came from http://www.wolframalpha.com, a cool search engine that specializes in numbers, which I do not.

And while it says no Observances for July 24, 1953 (United States), there is specific to Utah "Pioneer Day", and specific to the unschoolers anywhere who want to play, "Learn Nothing Day." Twenty more days.

Keith and the benches he made

These are photos of Keith and the top-of-trailer packing artistry. The inside-the-trailer packing job was just as cool, but I didn't take a photo. Sorry.

The benches were made by Keith, and he packed them pretty impressively (as usual). This doesn't show the carving of the handles (cross bracing). I'll look for photos of that and maybe be back.

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Clickable images of
the benches after they were unloaded, added 7/6, Keith's birthday: