I started this blog because of the gift of a hot air balloon ride on my last birthday. I started ticking off other items on my busket list. So, a year on, here’s how THIS birthday weekend went:
Wed Oct 9 – Fri Oct 11, I worked 15 hr days (2 jobs) so I was VERY ready for the weekend! Also, it has gotten too cold to ride my motorbike to work so Bill has been driving me to work all week!
Saturday we slept in, lounged around all morning, did a few errands and talked. Perfect. Then Saturday night Bill took me to see the Blue Man Group here in Portland! A terrific show! First time seeing the show for both of us. If you have not heard of it, this show became a phenom shortly after it opened which was in Boston a FEW years ago. (I was in high school when the Blue Man Group got started.) I have wanted to see this show for well over 20 years! My 21-year-old son has seen Blue Man Group 3 times over the last decade or so. I just saw it Saturday night!
I asked the pair of young ladies sitting next to me if they had seen it before. They said ‘Many times!!’ Turns out they are friends with a couple of the Blue Men so they’ve been following them for the portion of this tour that is in New England. One of them texted her Blue friend to say ‘The lady next to me has been waiting 20 years to see the show.’ He texted back, ‘Tell her we’ve been waiting 20 years to play for her!’ Awwww. Too sweet. Those Blue Men! (Of course none of the Blue Men in the several companies of the show now were in the original cast, but so what – the blue runs deep!)
We had excellent seats (Row 11, center) and in the finale when white paper streamers come out of the ceiling and fall on the audience, a huge load of the stuff landed right on us!! But even though streamers fell on at least 50 or so people, we were the only ones WEARING our streamers, exactly how they fell on us, as we all exited the theater after the show. We thought other people were weird NOT to keep wearing their streamers, but we acknowledged that we were probably being seen as the weird ones. Whatever.
We proudly wore our gifts of streamers though no one else did. We got to feel weird and conspicuous but also superior in our participatory bent. Others probably saw a couple of happy whack jobs. But what Really Matters is that we were on the same page with each other. We’re the same kind of weirdo. This is a very important bond between us. We see creative expression and art and music in quite similar ways and we feel that we are (that everyone is) meant to be a part of all the art and artistry around us.
Then on my birthday Sunday, we walked the dog in the morning, ending up inviting another dog-walker back to our place to talk and join us for breakfast. Bill’s brother Glenn came to visit as well so we had 2 guest humans and 2 guest dogs. I got to cook for a small crowd and that always makes me happy.
Then I went to church but didn’t sing with choir because I’d missed rehearsals due to that 2nd job! Still, the service was delightful – all about bird song and dawn chorus and what we can learn from the birds and how to act so as not to disturb the birds when we come across them in the wild. A very useful sermon. And I had an appropriate occasion to squeeze my stuffed crow that sings in real (recorded, natch) crow.
After-service schmoozing and networking is always the REAL stuff of church and there was plenty of good work to be done there! I’m being invited onto several committees and trying hard not to over-extend myself, but it’s nice to feel wanted and needed and useful. I sing in choir, I use the church kitchen for my own baking business and there are two other businesses who use the kitchen facility so we are going to become a committee of sorts. I need to work up a proposal for us to collectively buy a used chest freezer.
Then there’s the history committee – a fun thing but I don’t want to have to put much time into it. All three of the current committee members want to retire from the committee – I believe they are all in their 90’s and running out of steam for church committee work! Sally Breen, an amazing woman who was a serious activist back in the day, who is now coping with three kinds of cancer and not going to recover her full health in this lifetime, is still a mover and shaker in church AND the head of the history committee – whew!! She invited me to have dinner at her place tonight to visit the church’s historical archives which apparently reside in her house!
Church service was 11-11:45 and coffee time usually goes to noon or noon:15 but I didn’t get out of there til 1 pm. The minister and I were the last ones there and I wanted to ask her about some music ideas for upcoming services. I really enjoy being involved in this particular congregation. This is probably my sixth UU church and this one suits me much better than all the earlier ones.
So, around 1 pm I went over to my former roommate’s house which is very near the church. I did a little sacred grove maintenance – my sacred circle is just behind her backyard in what is officially city property. I swept and tended the altar, I did MY church there at the base of a big red oak which is a copse with 5 10″ – 12″ diameter ‘trunks’ and a lovely flat hollow about the size of a standard chess board in the hollow. This is the altar, the oak is the heart of the circle and the circle (about 12′ across) is my sacred space. So I tended my altar, raked fallen leaves out of the sacred space and generally tidied up, made an offering of flowers, meditated and figured out some stuff and then I left to go meet Bill.
We got some organizing done in the back yard, starting setting out his extremely abundant Halloween decorations, I made a were-wolf headed ‘scarecrow’ that is now sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch, along with a motion-sensor 3′ tall witch. When anyone walks up the front stairs, the witch will say things and make a lot of bubbling cauldron, screaming cat and generally eerie sound effects. It’s a lot of fun!
Then Bill, his visiting brother Glenn and I went to a local restaurant/pub and watched a football game along with the other patrons. The food was great, the beer was nice local microbrew and I even got a cannoli with a birthday candle stuck in it. We made friends with other patrons and had a great time, alternately cheering and yelling at the tv screens as the Patriots – Saints game went along. We left, got home around 6:30pm and Glenn promptly went upstairs to watch ANOTHER football game (Washington – Dallas I think) while Bill & I decided a long nap was in order.
A great birthday!!
I’m on a rol!! Last year I got a surprise birthday party from my kids and by best friends in Boston with the gift of a hot air balloon ride!!
This year I saw the Blue Man Group with my very own special weirdo who is weird just like me, PLUS an impromptu brunch with a neighbor and guest family AND Sunday pub football! WOW – I’m a very happy camper! (Only I didn’t get my room cleaned up which was a birthday weekend goal. Oh well. Fun trumped getting organized this time, but I think I’ll still get it done over the course of this week. )
Whilst trying to get organized I ran across an old carousel slide holder that had slides of Marian’s. Mostly they are close-ups of manuscript illuminations, some are pics of half-timbered homes in England and a few are of museum examples of Elizabethan and Tudor clothing.
ALSO, I recently saw Gary Dryfoos (at Eliza’s graduation party) and he had found a box labelled “Jill’s stuff” in his storage unit. This means it was stuff that survived the apt. fire in 2000, which was actually Gary’s apt. So… inside the mystery box was a tin box (thank goodness for that! The box was sooty and black but the contents had been preserved intact!) and inside the box were my copies of the slides from Ian’s trip to Pakistan with me and Flora to see Basil back in Summer 1976. So now all I need is to find a way to rent a slide projector that will take that carousel and then, for the first time since 1976, actually have a look at slides from our trip to Pakistan! Woohoo!!
Hopefully I can manage to find such a projector sometime this winter and we’ll have a ‘Look at my vacation slides!’ dinner party. Maybe Bill can throw together a sampling of pics from his ‘skiing the Italian Alps’ vacations that he used to do on a fairly regular basis up until a couple years ago. Compare and contrast: Athletic guy in expensive ski gear enjoying the Alps – 13-year old girl looking much larger than her host family in Rehman’s backyard… or up in Swat… or checking out Mohenjo-Daro with Basil and Flora and Ian… and then, just for random fun, a few slides of Marian’s trip to visit old manuscripts in England or a few dresses she saw in a museum. We’ll just call it “Family Vacation” and keep the viewers guessing how all these scenes happen to be related! FUN Fun fun!!
As the Distracted Crow Flies 