Lift Up Your Hearts!

The July issue of Reader's Digest has an advice column called "Ask Laskas."  Here is the first question:

Q,  It was my idea to have a family reunion, and I called my younger sister.  She loved the idea and then, without consulting me, ran with it.  The next thing I knew, the party was planned down to the napkins.  I asked why she didn't include me.   She said if I don't like it, I don't have to come.  I'm fuming.  Should I stay away or go?

A. Oh, go and have a good time, secure in the knowledge that you had a great idea.  Getting credit is nice, but a united family is worth a little swallowed pride.  The next time you have a brainstorm, however, think twice before you share it with Sis, who seems to be suffering from younger sibling syndrome.

Huh?  My younger sister knows that if a family get-together is going to happen, she's probably going to have to organize it—and the rest of us are exceedingly grateful when she does.  This lady has a good idea and then is upset when someone else does all the work?  Whatever "younger sibling syndrome" is, I'm glad my sister has it!

Each family has its own Thanksgiving traditions.  Friendly swordfighting is part of ours.  Here Noah and Jonathan demonstrate their eagerness to carry on the custom.

       

If I'd known how big a project book cataloguing would be, I'm not sure I would have had the courage to start, but now that it's done, I'm quite pleased with it.  There's a link to it here, and on the sidebar, and on the Sursum Corda home page.  I'm not yet ready to leave it open to any and all web crawlers, so there's a small amount of security associated with it.  Family members can get in the same way you access the Family News page.  If you're a friend who happens to want to browse in this library, please e-mail me, and I'll be happy to open the door to you.

C. S. Lewis once quipped that the only books we will have in heaven will be ones we gave away or lent on earth. This is a lending library; if you see something you'd like to read that's not in your own public library, please ask!

The effort ended up taking over a month of pretty steady, hard work.  I made much of that for myself, I'll admit.  If I had been content with the content the software downloaded from the Internet, it would have gone much faster.  But I wanted the information to be correct and reasonably complete, though even so I ignored many of the less important data fields, such as cover price.  Even more time-consuming, I insisted on having a cover photo for each book, which required a lot of scanning, because most of our books are too old to have their cover photos online.  No, it's not necessary, but it looks nice!  I know how much I appreciate being able to browse books visually, as well as by title, so I'm assuming others do, too.

The last room to be done was my office; I had saved the hardest for last.  On the one hand, there are more modern books here, so I could use the barcode scanner more effectively.  On the other hand, there are more old books, too—just plain more books!  I offer some statistics below for your amusement.  They are only approximate, because sometimes I let one entry do for an entire series of books, but they're interesting nonetheless.

• Total number of books: about 1800


• Number of books in my office: nearly 900


• Top 10 authors: George MacDonald (77), C. S. Lewis (49), Patrick O'Brian (22), Charles Schultz (22), Dorothy Sayers (21), Arthur Ransome (19), Miss Read (Dora Jessie Saint) (18), Robert Athearn (16 - all in one set of American history books), John Montroll (15), Isaac Asimov (14)


• No, we haven't read all the books.  Some, like cookbooks, aren't meant to be read through.  Many, many others came our way when my father moved from his big house, and I mean to get to them, someday...

Why did I do this?  The most important reason is that a book isn't of any use if it stays on a shelf.  There's no point in having a book if you don't read it (or at least plan to), and you can't read it if you can't find it.

Moreover, we have a great treasure here, and would like others to be able to share our bounty.  That's why the list is online—so others can browse and borrow.  The Book Collector software comes with the ability to keep track of books lent out, which has heretofore been a problem for me.

Some people might recognize books of theirs that made their way into our collection, and say, "Aha!  So that's where my book is!"  Stranger things have happened.  I once lent two books to Person A, and never got them back.  I told you (see above) I have a problem with keeping track of what I've lent to whom. By the time I got around to asking, it was so much later Person A had no idea where the books were, so I wrote them off.  Not without some sorrow, but I try not to lend any books I wouldn't be willing to give away, if needed—for just such occasions.  Much later, a dear friend, Person B, died, and I was one of the people who helped sort through her books.  Lo and behold, there were my two missing books!  I knew they were mine because of the inscriptions, and of course I was given them back.  But no one could at that point explain how they had ended up where they did, and it's still a mystery.  Okay, I will give in to a trifling vanity and reveal Person A, because it's amusing to be able to say I lent books to R.C. Sproul.  I also once gave a dime to a Rockefeller who needed change for a pay phone. :)

With a nod to hurricane season, which began in the middle of my efforts, all this documentation should help if we ever need to file an insurance claim.  Not that any of our books are worth much, in an insurance-company sense, but if they express disbelief that we really had 1800 books, I can reply, "Yes, sir, we did—I counted them."  Not that I want to lose a one of them, after all this work

And finally, when the time comes, if our heirs want to fight over who gets what book, they can do it much more conveniently this way.  :)

You'll see a better video almost anywhere else, but here is a bit of natsukashi for our expatriot Floridians!

You can't see the bright orange flame on the video, but those of you who've experienced this stunning sight before can lean on your imaginations a bit.

Shuttle video, view from our driveway

Our router seems to be acting erratically again.  Last time the problem was the power supply, and I have a spare one to try now if necessary, though it's hard to believe this one would fail after just three months.  (Then again, I said that about our car battery recently.)

It's fine at the moment, but in the past 12 hours has twice done strange things like allowing just one half of a telephone "conversation," or allowing e-mail to be received and sent but not allowing web access.  To be on the safe side, I've set up the system to ring my cell phone if it doesn't establish contact via the regular phone.

Computers.  You can't live with them, and...it's hard to remember that we once lived without them.

Two weeks ago, after our exhausting off-road biking adventure, we paid a visit to Fort Christmas.  We went there several times when the girls were young, on our own and for Indian Princess outings.  But that was a long time ago.  The girls have grown a lot since then, and so has the fort.

They now have a large collection of old Florida houses, and we enjoyed a trip back in time as we wandered from one to another.  Bear in mind that Florida is a young state, even if it does have our country's oldest city.  Sometimes it seems more like the Wild West than the East Coast.

Here's a somewhat random assortment of pictures.  I love my digital camera.  (Thanks, Janet!)

The fort as we remembered it

Even the 50's count as historical here.  This house is only slightly smaller and actually has one more bedroom than the house where I spent the first nine years of my life.  I didn't think it small then!

 

Florida's equivalent of tapping maple trees for syrup.

 

Smokehouse from 1900.  Smoked meat hanging from the roof.  Did you ever wonder where smokescreens come from?

These pictures from the 1900 house are for my friend who works in a living history museum and has her own spinning wheel.

 

And this one from the 1915 house is for my other friend who is a master quilter—just in case she ever reads my blog....

From the 1870's—mosquito netting a must-have

From the 1927 house.  My mother grew up about 60 miles from here.  Even though her family kept a hotel, not a farm, I couldn't help thinking of her when we toured this one.

  

When you think cowboys and cattle drives, do you think Wild West?  Florida was the land of the open range until 1949.

  

If you look closely at this fur animal license from the 1930's, you'll learn a few things.  That the Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission, which runs the camp Heather attended when she was nine, has been around a long time.  That nutrition probably wasn't the best for these pioneers and their children.  That this 33-year-old example of these tough, hard-working farmers, ranchers, and cowboys was only 4' 10" tall and weighted 85 pounds!

This ranch house came from what is now the Tosohatchee State Reserve, where we were biking earlier in the day.

  

Hey, wait a minute!  I grew up with that sink!

They say this hurricane season will be a busy one.  But for now we are enjoying the most wonderful May in my memory.  For weeks now the air conditioner has hardly ever turned on.  We are able to keep the windows open for most of the day, if we're careful to close them when the sun is shining directly in.  Those of you who were brought up in Florida know how unusual that is for any month after February!  The humidity is relatively low, as are the temperatures (today's high was only in the low 80's!), and best of all we have been enjoying delightful breezes!  Breezes are unusual here.  Mostly the air is so calm that clothes on a line stiffen into boards rather than attaining the gentle wind-graced softness we remember from our time up north.  It's as if Florida stores up all its wind, only to release it in big hurricane bursts.

But for now the weather is so delightful I had to write about it.  Now I'm going to leave the computer and rejoin Porter in the family room, where we are delighting in our books (Threads of Grey and Gold, and Lilith) and in the cool breeze that is wafting in the front windows and out the back door.

Were it not for the probability of disturbing other library patrons, Li'l Writer Guy would be dancing a happy little jig.  Instead, he allows himself a pleased smile and a contented sigh before getting back to work.

You can see why in the Letters to the Editor section of the May/June issue of the University of Rochester's magazine, Rochester Review.  Unfortunately, you can't yet access via their online archives the issue to which I was responding.

One article in that issue detailed the search for a new logo for the University of Rochester.  I participated in a survey in which I expressed my opinon of various candidates, but I think the whole idea is silly.

Another article promoted the university's commitment to increasing the diversity of its faculty and of its medical center personnel, in order to better reflect the student and patient populations.

The March-April issue, with its articles on the great effort being put forth to improve both the University’s logo and its diversity, disturbs me a little. It makes me worry that the administration is concentrating on superficialities rather than foundations; on how things look, rather than how they are. There’s a possibility—though by no means a certainty—that all other things being equal, I’d feel more comfortable if my professor or my doctor were of my sex and ethnic background. But all other things are never equal. I want my teachers to be excellent in their fields, fair in their judgment, and able to lead their students to a knowledge of and enthusiasm for the subject. As for my health care professionals, of primary importance is that they be highly skilled, followed by compassionate, open-minded, and respectful. That any of them look like me is way down on the list, if anywhere. Let’s go for excellence. If the University is known as a place of highest quality, it won’t matter what its faculty looks like—or its logo.

Blushing slightly, Li'l Writer Guy once again buries himself in his books.

Porter put the bikes on the back of the car again this morning, and we headed off to the Tosohatchee State Reserve near Christmas.  That's Christmas, Florida—we're still much nearer Memorial Day than Christmas.

We knew this would be a different kind of ride.  We knew it would be on unpaved trails through a wilderness area, and we thought we were prepared.  We had sunscreen and bug repellent, emergency bike kit (tube, CO₂ cartridge for inflating same, patches, wrench, and those little thingies for helping you put the tire back on the rim), water to drink, and cell phones.  Knowing we'd be in a game preserve, we also had a monocular and a camera.  We had a change of clothes and a picnic lunch waiting in the car for our return.

"Unpaved trails."  I was expecting something like the crushed-shell-and-sand trail at our local park.  Silly me.

Everything went pretty much according to expectations at first.  They do have an interesting honor system for the park entrance fee:  You put your money in an envelope, slip it through a slot, and don't forget to sign in so we know where to look if you get lost.  We drove a little along a very washboard-y road, and parked the car.  (Florida sand roads develop a series of "washboard" ridges that can shake loose anything not firmly attached:  exhaust pipes, dental fillings, whatever.)

It was after we parked that things began to go not quite as planned.  The trail was wide and inviting, but certainly not crushed-shell-and-sand.  This was more like riding over a not-too-well-maintained lawn.

Make that not maintained at all.  Both of us have all-purpose (cheap) bikes, so they were built to take the abuse.  My body may have originally been built to take it, too—but it hasn't been all that well maintained recently itself.  Although the trail was flat, it required the work of a signficant uphill grade, with no hope of a corresponding downhill.  The really fun parts were where we had to put on a good burst of speed to build up enough momentum to get us through the soggy, wet parts.  You don't want to come to a dead stop in the middle of a boggy place.

Little did I know that this was the good part of the trail.

This trail map gives you a rough idea of our route.  I say "rough" for two reasons:  (1) the map itself is not completely accurate, and (2) because of reason 1 I'm not exactly sure where we were some of the time.  Location A is where we parked. (Just a reminder—the pictures are preview links; click on them for the full view.)

The trails are not well marked.  That is an understatement.  As you can see, we veered off the trail and found ourselves on the other side of the park boundary. Too bad we couldn't stay there, because the going was significantly easier on that side.  But we knew we had to get back into the park, because we could now see the trail, just on the other side of the...barbed wire fence.  Porter wasn't going to let a little thing like that stop him.  He climbed over the fence, then took the bikes as I passed them to him.  I was not at all sure about climbing the fence, so he held two of the wires apart while I squeezed through.

There!  We were back where we should have been.  But doing what's right is not always the easier path....

The grassy trail had deteriorated into a humpy, clumpy much-torn-up (by deer, possibly, judging from the hoofprints) ordeal.  At some point, Porter intellgently and kindly suggested we swap bikes.  His is enough easier to ride to make it worth putting up with the fact that I can barely sit on the seat and reach the pedals.  I was having to ride standing up much of the time, anyway.  When I wasn't walking.  Yes, sometimes I gave up and got off the bike.  Walking allowed me to catch my breath and make progress at the same time.

In choir we've been rehearsing a song that includes the words, "I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me."  It's a lively, repetitive song that's a lot of fun to sing (think gospel meets barbershop quartet), which means it's the kind that gets stuck in your head and won't go away.  This one asserted itself about 4 a.m. and didn't stop until we were on our way home.  At first it drove me nuts, but soon it became a prayer....

We began to doubt again:  Were we on the right trail?  Or was this just a firebreak along the boundary line?  Surely the real trail couldn't be this bad.  I wish I had pictures to show you, but I was incapable at that point of thinking about my camera, and anyway no picture could do it justice.  No doubt for a mountain biker this would have been a walk in the park.  No, wait.  For me it was a walk.  A mountain biker would have ridden straight through.  Anyway, we later concluded we were probably on the right trail, because we saw several others that were equally bad.

After the longest four and a half miles (give or take a bit) of my life, during which we thought we were mostly on the right trail but still had our doubts, Porter found a path that connected with a road.  (Approximately location B on the map.)  I was totally exhausted but this brought me back to life.  Here was crushed-shell-and-sand!  Here I could ride!  Suddenly I felt great!  Porter asked if I'd rather take the road back to where we had parked, instead of continuing on our planned route, but the road had inspired me and I was ready to go on, as long as we stuck to the road.  The road and the trail were one for most of the remaining trip, anyway.  We switched back to our own bikes and were on our way again.

Deceptive road!  After about two minutes of delightful riding—still quite a bit harder than paved road, but worlds better than the trail—it became all sand again. The weather has been very dry, and the road is not well travelled.  This translates to loose sand.  My cousin was a lifeguard at Daytona Beach, and he used to train for his job by running on the beach—because running in loose sand is very hard work.  So is biking in loose sand.  Not only does it require a lot of power, but if you don't keep your front wheel completely straight, you immediately go into a screeching-halt skid.

I still didn't want to turn back.  We again traded bicycles.  Sometimes the road was better, especially in the middle where a few springs of grass had grown up.  Sometimes it was awful.  Sometimes I rode—ganbarimasu!—and sometimes I walked.  Porter managed to keep riding, stopping periodically to allow me to catch up.  Here is the resting point where I finally remembered that I had a camera.  (Location D on the map.)

One of the great things about riding in a game preserve is all the wildlife you can see.  And we did, if you count grasshoppers and butterflies.  Riding took so much concentration it was not possible to look around, so all I saw was what happened to be between me and the road.  Despite the park rules that say that all wildlife is protected, Porter did make up his own real-life video game by trying to run over the grasshoppers.  There were so many he was often successful.  When I was growing up I thought grasshoppers were cute.  Now that I've seen the devastation wrought by our giant Florida varieties, I feel differently.  I did manage to see a vulture, and Porter flushed a wild turkey, but other than that all our wildlife was insectival.

It was a long haul, but we finally made it to Long Bluff road (see map).  There the way really did get easier, as the road was more travelled.  There were still bad spots, but they were fewer, and every once in a while we got up to the dizzying speed of eight miles per hour!  Though it might have been exhaustion that made me dizzy.  :)  At some point Porter also took my backpack.  Neither his pack nor mine were at all heavy, but at that point I was taking all the help I could get.  This road would have been much less of a challenge had I not been so worn out by the first part of the trail.

I'm accustomed to having one bottle of water be sufficient or more so when we go riding.  This time we were at the halfway point on the trail when I realized I was much more than halfway through my water.  Comes from breathing so much with my mouth open (i.e. panting), I guess.  Most of the trails we've travelled have water sources along the way, but not, of course, this one.  So we both decided to be a little more conservative in our drinking.  At some point it was going well enough that we switched bikes once more.  I missed my more padded seat, and the extra seat-to-pedal distance on Porter's bike, combined with the bouncy road, was more than a bit uncomfortable for the, um, more delicate parts of my body.

Finally, we reached the "Praise the Lord!" point:  Power Line Road.  (Location C on the map.)  I could see that it was a much better path, and so did not mind taking a short detour (about six tenths of a mile round trip) to see the St. John's River.  This is where we met up with the first people (fishermen) we'd seen since the beginning, except for one truck that had passed us on the road.  We saw a few more cars before getting back to ours, but no one else on bike or foot.

Muddy, battered, but unbowed

Power Line Road stretched long between us and our car, but we were able to make a steady 7-8 mph most of the time, and the riding was easy enough we could look around and actually see some wildlife.  Birds, actually.  White herons and Great Blues and lots of smaller birds.  We heard a couple of alligator-shaped splashes nearby, but didn't see what made them and didn't feel like investigating.  Alligators can run faster than I could pedal at that point.

Scofflaws that we are, we enjoyed breaking the speed limit by bicycle, crossing two wooden bridges a good two or three miles per hour over the posted 5 mph limit.  We were significantly under the 30 ton weight limit, however.

There was one more bad stretch in the final mile, and I had to walk a bit more, having totally lost my momentum having to pull off the road to let a car pass.  But I finished the trip by bike, joyfully greeting Porter who had already opened the car and pulled out a cold drink.  We ate some grape tomatoes, but otherwise were in no mood for our picnic lunch—we just drank and drank.

It actually was a great trip.  A wonderful feeling of accomplishment.  We're both very glad we did it—though neither of us feels any need to do it again.

On the way home we had another great adventure, but that will have to wait for another post.

It was a scene worthy of one of those funniest-videos shows.  As I opened the front door this morning to take out the trash, I obviously interrupted something.  A lizard skittered frantically away from the door, no doubt afraid of me.  At the same time, a palmetto bug* skittered frantically towards me, into the house, no doubt relieved to escape the lizard.

I'm not all that fond of palmetto bugs outside the house, though I acknowledge that they, like vultures, have an important part to play in God's creation.  But I really don't care for them inside the house, so thus began the amusiing scenario.  I don't recall laughing at the time, but it would have been funny to an onlooker with a camera, who I'm very glad was only hypothetical.

I skittered frantically after the bug, whacking at him with my sneaker.  (It's a good thing we keep our shoes near the front door.)  Alas, I whacked at him, but not on him, or at least not with sufficient strength to penetrate his chitinous exoskeleton.  Through the hall he ran, then ducked into our bedroom.

No fair!  This pushed into the red zone my desire to catch him, as anyone knows who has ever been awakened in the middle of the night by a large insect investigating his belly button.  He ran under a suitcase.  I moved it; he wasn't there.  Ah ha!  He thinks he's found safety in the shadow of the treadmill support.  He's partly right, as there is no way for me to whack at him.  I carefully position the shoe over him and press down, then slowly, gingerly lift it up.  Zoom!  He's out again, unharmed.  There are disadvantages to soft, high-pile carpet, I'm learning.

Now I'm mad.  He's in the open now, and I may run more slowly for my size, but my legs are a lot longer than his.  Whack!  This time I know better than to assume he's dead.  I push down on the shoe really hard, though still with care; one wants to kill the beastie, not squeeze cockroach guts into the above-mentioned soft, high-pile carpet.

Once again, I tentatively raise a corner of the sneaker.  There's an antenna, and it's not moving....  Taking no chances, I grab a tissue from my pocket and use it to entomb the bug, then finish the job.  Bug thoroughly squished, and I mean thoroughly, else I would not have felt comfortable consigning him, paper tomb and all, to the trash bin.

Still, for sheer amusement value, this doesn't come close to an occasion several years ago, when similar circumstances led me to chase one of this guy's cousins under our kitchen cabinets.  I was lying on the floor, seeking him out with the help of a flashlight, when he suddenly re-emerged, zipping past my face, through the neck of my shirt, and into my bra.  He died for his presumption, but I'll leave imagining the scenario as an exercise for the reader.

---

*A palmetto bug is a large species of cockroach common here in the South.  It is thought to have come here from Africa, and may be a kind of karmic return for slavery, much as cigarettes and casinos are for our mistreatment of Native Americans.

On one of our recent bike rides, we came upon a dead armadillo.  Dead armadillos happen not infrequently in Florida.  They may be faster in crossing a road than turtles, but they will dawdle.  Worse, their startle reaction is to leap straight into the air, dooming them even when a car would otherwise pass harmlessly over them.

This one had apparently managed to crawl from the road to the nearby bicycle trail, but not before the vultures got wind of the event.  Porter was biking a little ahead of me, and I saw them beginning to circle as he approached.  A few had descended upon the poor beast by the time he rode by.  His presence more annoyed than scared them.  When I reached the scene there were at least a dozen blanketing the pavement, and I chose to veer off the trail and leave them to their vicitim.

Vultures are ugly birds, and their behavior was uglier:  fighting, shoving, greedily tearing the little armadillo apart.  By the time we came to that part of the train on our return trip, there was nothing left but a dark spot on the pavement.

And that's the point.  Carrion-eaters may be ugly, dirty things, but they are also God's creatures, and their work is important.  They are the garbage collectors of the natural world, and they, too, deserve the more lofty title of "sanitation engineers."  Maybe even more so, because they don't just cart the bodies off to the landfill; they are the ultimate recyclers.

I'd rather see a sandhill crane, or a woodpecker, or an egret on our rides any day.  But if there's a dead armadillo on the trail...Who you gonna call?

...but even I am amazed.  Heather introduced me to Book Collector, and I've been thrilled.  I've long wanted to make an inventory of our books, and had made a few half-hearted beginnings, but the enormity of the project always dragged me down.

Enter Book Collector.  I can use a barcode scanner (borrowed from Heather), read the UPC code on the back of the book, and Book Collector searches the Internet for matches.  It downloads all sorts of information:  cover image, title, author, publisher, summary, and often much more, depending on what is available.

There's one problem:  a large proportion of our books are too old to have UPC codes.  But that's okay, I can enter the ISBN by hand, and then initiate the same search process.

We also have a large quantity of books too old to have ISBN's.  For those the program will search on title and author. 

There's still some of clean up that needs to be done with many of the book entries, and I've had to make liberal use of our scanner, because few of the older books have cover images available online.  However, the process is so much faster than entering all the data by hand.  A little concentrated effort over the past few days has enabled me to finish entering all the books—not that we own, but that are in one room of our house.  The family room.  It probably has the second-largest collection of books, although I won't be sure till I'm done.

But here's the shocker:  I catalogued 263 books in the family room alone!  I knew we had a lot of books, but that astonished me.  I wish I could say I've read them all!  I'm working on it....

I'm not ready to make the half-baked list public, but curious family members can see what I've entered so far via the Library link on our home page.  You won't see all the nifty views and searching and filtering possibilities available in the program itself, but it's fun to browse anyway.  The books (at the moment, anyway) are sorted alphabetically by author.

Having written recently about my love of student recitals, I have to mention that we went to a Florida Symphony Youth Orchestra concert yesterday.  In my limited, and admittedly biased opinion, they are far and away the best student orchestra in the area.  Not perfect:  Depending on whose philosophy happens to be strongest at the time, the emphasis is sometimes more on education than on making music. As most of you know, I strongly believe that real learning more often takes place in an atmosphere of "let's do something wonderful and important together" than in a "Me Teacher, You Student" situation.

Be that as it may, the FSYO is the best game in town for a young person who wants to play good orchestral repertoire, and it's good listening, too. The only reason we don't attend more of their concerts is that there are so many other great things to do in life.

But we went yesterday, because it was the last concert of the season, and we hadn't been to one yet this year.  More than that, we went because the concert included three commissioned pieces, one of which (Mountain Air and Dance) was written by our friend John Dupuis.  Unfortunately, John's composition was for the Prelude Orchestra (third from the top of the four orchestras, one above the strings-only group of beginnners), which for various complicated reasons had not had enough time to practice it.  It was a bit of a stretch for them.  Still, there was a gorgeous melody in the middle, and in the rest I could detect an interesting piece that reminded me of why I fell in love with John's Atlantis many years ago.  (Atlantis, which was written with a particular group of FSYO musicians in mind, was recorded by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and used by Universal Studios for the grand opening of their Islands of Adventure theme park.)

The Prelude Orchestra was interesting to hear.  (They did much better with their other pieces).  My experience with student orchestras has been that the winds are, as a section, better than the strings.  For one thing, the competition is more fierce (fewer positions); for another, good orchestral music tends to have very hard string parts.  But this time the situation was reversed, probably because the strings had a few really good players, and in the winds there's no place for a less confident player to hide.  Playing tentatively is a major mistake for an oboe or a trumpet, and these kids haven't yet learned to "sin boldly."  There was a lovely oboe solo in Edelweiss, however.  (Hmm, I did manage to work a flower into this post after all.)

The Philharmonia Orchestra's commissioned piece (Stephen Foster Song-Suite) was by Joe Kreines.  He may be world famous, but "Mr. Kreines" will always be remembered in our family as the person who came in occasionally to enliven band practice, and who could get more out of an ensemble that any other conductor.  He still can, as today's concert proved.

We don't know the composer of the Symphonic Orchestra's new work (Sojourn), Robert J. Brownlow, but I suppose two out of three is pretty good!  His work matched the ability of the orchestra best of all, I think.  The Symphonic Orchestra itself has been better.  Don't get me wrong—it was still very good, just not up to the standards of a few years ago, when it was absolutely stunning.

Not that I'm prejudiced in this matter or anything—but not one of the orchestras had a decent A to tune to.  I'm a bit particular when in comes to oboes.  Their solos were fine; it was just the A's.  A 440, 460, 415...whatever!

Being involved with student musical groups for so many years, it was impossible for us not to notice the frequent coorespondence between musical and general academic ability, today's Frazz comic—in which Caulfield asserts that we need arts education so the bottom half of the math class can do something for a living—to the contrary.  This year's FSYO graduates are no exception.  Take the assistant principal cellist of the Symphonic, for example.  Valdictorian of his high school, going off to Harvard to major in biochemical sciences, and scored a perfect 2400 on the SAT (on his first try, even).  Hmm, only assistant principal cellist?  The slacker!  Oh, wait, the principal is taking her cello to the Eastman School of Music next year, so I guess the competition was a bit stiff.  She, by the way, is graduating with a mere 4.7 weighted GPA....  C'mon folks, invest a little time and money (okay, maybe a lot of time and money) in your children's musical education.  It'll be great for their brains!

All in all, the concert was a delightful way to spend a Sunday afternoon, and we even ran into some friends we hadn't seen in ages. 

Not long ago, a friend was lamenting to me about how tedious elementary recitals are.  Little piano and violin students plunking and scraping away on the same, boring pieces, making the same mistakes you've heard hundreds of times.  I couldn't disagree more.

She has a different perspective, mind you:  she's a music teacher, so no doubt that makes a difference.

But I love music recitals, elementary and otherwise.

Today we made up for our disappointment with the Tuileries by visiting Leu Gardens. It was delightful to wander amongst the palms, bromiliads, wildflowers, camelias, cacti, roses, and other Florida and non-Florida flora.  Especially the gardenias, which take me right back to my grandmother's garden.

Standing by the lake, watching the fish, a turtle, and a white heron—while watching out for alligators and water moccasins—we heard music.  Violin music.  Suzuki violin music.  Talk about natsukashii!  We had to investigate...at the main house there was a luncheon, for which a single violinist was providing entertainment, and she was working her way around the Suzuki repertoire—books three and four, if I had to guess; it's been a while.

Our first live Suzuki contact was made at Leu Gardens; we happened to be there when a group from the Suzuki Music Institute of Maitland was playing on the grounds.  For me, it was love at first sight (sound).  That great music coming from those tiny kids!

Well, that was the beginning for us of more than ten years of Suzuki music.  There were plenty of frustrating times, but one thing I never tired of was hearing the kids play.  I loved to hear our own children practice, I loved to hear all the students—not just ours—play at the recitals.  True, I no longer attend them, now that we've moved on, but truly, I wish the music we heard today had been a public group concert, so I could have heard once again the tiny kids and the old, familiar pieces.  Even Twinkle!

A day of rest, recovery, last-minute shopping, and…packing.  None of us wanted to think about the next day's departure; we weren't ready to part; and yet each of us was looking forward to getting back to "normal."  It was a fantastic vacation, but life is not, should not be, and cannot be, all vacation.  The pleasures and projects of "ordinary life" are the attractions that make the end of such a lovely time bearable.

This may be a good place to mention BaselWorld.  If you're planning a trip to Basel in 2008, don't even think of going in the first or second week of April.  When this watch and jewelry show comes to town, Basel is a different city.  They create new facades for the buildings, build temporary entrances complete with cascading waterfalls, haul in trees as well as tents, and take over the world.  It's a very good thing Janet's host family allowed us to stay at their house, because otherwise we'd have had to stay in Paris.  Or Luzern—that's how far you had to go to find a hotel room.  Actually, Porter's Diamond status with Hilton guarantees him a room anywhere, anytime—but it doesn't guarantee the price, so I'm sure it would have been astronomical.  I'm told that the restaurants in Basel use a different set of menus during the week of BaselWorld, ones with much higher prices.  When we went into town to one of Janet's favorite bakeries, she barely recognized it.

When Janet writes about this day, she may post a picture of us under a BaselWorld sign, which is the closest we got to a world where we SO did not fit in.  I mean, if Paris Hilton is there, should I be?  Besides, it cost about $37 to get in—the Louvre itself was under $12.  Not my kind of place.  This, by the way, was the only time we worried about pickpockets in Basel.  If I were a pickpocket, I'd plan a trip to Basel during BaselWorld—if I could find a place to stay.

Update: Here's the picture:

Speaking of pickpockets, the only place we really worried was in Paris, particularly in the high-tourist areas.  There were conspicuous signs in many places warning of them.  But I'm told that the problem has diminished significantly because of the many well-armed soldiers now present.  They're obviously there for fear of terrorism, and probably wouldn't bother to collar a pickpocket, but I can see how the sight of a machine gun might be somewhat of a deterrent to lesser crimes….

We even found time to watch a movie today:  Die Schweizermacher.  Otherwise known as The Swissmakers, it was a window into Swiss culture the way Swing Girls provided a glimpse into Janet's Japanese school life.  Both are comedies, and exaggerated, but contain enough truth to be insightful as well as amusing.  I'll write more about the movie in an upcoming post on my recent insights into socialization and homeschooling.

Today we finally managed to be together in the same room long enough to enjoy a chat with our hosts.  They even showed us their bunker, part of a legally-mandated system designed to provide safe, underground shelter to the entire Swiss population in case of emergency.  There's been a lot of grumbling recently, because the requirements add significantly to the cost of housing, and people are doubting both the necessity and the efficacy of the bunkers in this post-Cold War, suicide-terrorist age.  But to a Floridian without so much as a basement in which to ride out a hurricane, the bunker was very impressive.  If the Swiss response to potential disaster is overreaction, the American response of burying our heads in the sand cannot be any better.

You can tell it was a day of miscellanea when I'm reduced to philosophical ramblings rather than photos and stories.  But it was a good day, and when it was over we were packed and ready for an early start on our journey home.