Rolling On One

One of the big annual events in Maine is the Common Ground Country Fair. It’s not so splashy as the Fryeburg Fair, and doesn’t have the harness racing or the midway, but people do seem to know about it. It’s run by MOFGA, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. You would be correct if you deduced that it has a sort of new-age, counterculture orientation. Or maybe leftover ’60s orientation.

It’s pretty much in the center of the state, thirty or so miles northeast of Augusta, which makes it almost 100 miles from Casco. We hadn’t been able to go in past years because if fell on or too close to Rosh HaShanah; but this year it didn’t. We set the alarm for 5:45 so as to get there early and beat the traffic (remembering the traffic jam going to the Fryeburg Fair two years ago.)

Well! We were completely unprepared for how big the event was. Though it’s not nearly as big as the Fryeburg Fair, we were worn out walking by the end of the day and we’re pretty sure we didn’t see everything.

There were lots of very real agricultural exhibits, including a tent from the Maine Forest Service and the Small Woodlot Owners Association of Maine (SWOAM) which we possibly should join. There were craft demonstrations, including a canoe building display. There were native american craftspeople, including a booth where kids were decorating birchbark with porcupine quills. There were as many yarn and roving vendors as at the Fiber Frolic, and more fleeces for sale than at that event.

If you were looking for people to do henna designs on your hands, you could have found three booths. If you wanted to hear about Amnesty International or sign a petition in solidarity with the people of Burma, this was the place. If you wondered what were the best-looking organically grown leeks, or gourds, in Maine, you could have seen them.

(the rule for vegetables at fairs seems to be that you display three of whatever it is, to show that you can grow uniformly good stuff. Just one superb vegetable could be dumb luck, but three all just as good means you’re a good gardener or farmer.)

Or if you were looking for gourds painted as christmas tree ornaments.

There were several tents full of top quality crafts. I mean booths that would have been at home at the ACC crafts fair in Springfield or the Paradise City crafts sale, or at least could have applied to those shows with reasonable hope of being accepted.

I stopped for a while to watch a woodturning demonstration from a woodturning school we had passed on our way to Pemaquid Light three weekends ago. The guy was using a Jet Mini lathe that I’ve read a lot about on the woodturning newsgroup and that a lot of people seem to be very fond of.

What I liked even better was a guy who was really trying to demonstrate how he makes chairs, carving the seat out of a thick slab of wood; but when I started talking to him, he pointed out his treadle-driven lathe and told me I could try it. It was a blast, though I think it would take an awful lot of practice to turn a smooth cylinder with it since you only get one treadle’s worth of turning at a time. But it’s how woodturning was done from ancient Egypt until the development of electric motors.

My other favorite demonstration was a guy doing rush seating with real cattail leaves.

Arlene and I both noticed a story in the Boston Globe about Fabric Place going out of business. Fabric Place is out in Framingham, about 25 minutes from our house. It’s (or should I say was, but it’s just barely still there) by far the biggest fabric store in the Boston area. It used to have several branch locations, but apparently all except the one in the Woburn mall have been closed for some time. I used to go to that one every now and then from work in Burlington when I worked there three years ago.

We stopped at the Woburn one on our way to Maine on Friday. There were big signs, “20 to 50% off everything in the store.” There was still a lot in the store, and we didn’t run into anything that was more than 20% off. I headed for the yarn department and got one ball of something gorgeous (artful yarns?) that had a one-skein pattern for an mp3 player sock on the ball band, two balls of silk-mohair-merino blend that ought to make a really comfortable watch cap (or maybe it deserves something nicer than a watch cap, but that’s the breaks) three 475-yard skeins of bulky Cascade Ecological Wool that ought to be enough for a really warm sweater, and what I really thought would be the reason for the stop. We got a couple of Kaffe Fasset books a while back, and Arlene was thinking she’d like a sweater with some color to it. Fabric Place had a good color selection of Classic Elite Renaissance wool. We got something like 15 skeins of mostly different colors. So when I get my aran sweater finished, that’s on the agenda for the next big project.

Anne and Matt have been talking about a fire pit for quite a while. Last weekend we did some serious planning. Matt and I went to the Naples Aubuchon Hardware store and came back with 720 pounds (9 80-pound bags) of ready-mix concrete. Matt dug a circular trench for the foundation (the middle wants to have plain dirt under it for drainage) and mixed and poured the concrete. He and I went to a stone yard on Sunday; it was closed, but we wandered around and saw that there’s a big variety of stone available to build with.

Not all those trees are going to be left by the time we’re done with the project.

Not this past weekend but the weekend before, Sept. 6 it must have been, Arlene and I went on a guided nature walk at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker village. That’s the last Shaker community left that’s a going concern. There are four Shakers right now, two elderly women, one middle-aged man (one other man was part of the community two years ago, but has gone out into the world since) and one younger woman who joined recently.

One of the eight people on the walk was a reporter for a local newspaper, one of the papers that you can pick up free at the supermarket, the Gray-New Gloucester Independent. Naturally we wanted to read the article, but we hadn’t expected that our picture would be in the paper:

That’s my leather hat from Fort Hall and my Rome T-shirt on the right, Arlene’s hat and red parka on the left, and the tour guide’s hand pointing to the map.

This turned out to be a nature walk where most of the participants had something to contribute. We pointed out a couple of birds. The reporter, Don Perkins, knew a lot about trees and about the history of the area. The guide was very good on wildflowers and details of the history of the Shaker property and talked about her trip to the monarch butterfly overwintering area in Mexico and her experiences working for the North American Bluebird Society. Another woman was a wildlife biologist with a sharp eye out for frogs and toads, and another man spotted all the blackberries and huckleberries  within range.

Our guide, Carol Beyna, had brought a sample of poison ivy safely ensconced between two sheets of clear contact paper. Although I thought I was good at identifying it, I learned a couple of fine points from her.

Notice that the petiole (stem) of the middle leaflet is longer than that of the two side leaflets. The two side leaflets are not symmetrical about their central vein. There’s a sort of purplish dot where the three petioles meet. If you get close enough to see that, I hope you’ve been careful where you were walking!

OK, right now I have running through my head a song we did in klezmer last night. I’ll follow the strategy Mark Train advocated in “Punch, Brothers, Punch” and try to get rid of the problem by talking it through. Since I don’t have an MP3 of it to post, there’s no real danger of your catching it (as opposed the Twain story. Sorry for the popup in that link).

It’s not strictly speaking a klezmer song, rather an Israeli dance song written by Naomi Shemer, “Od Lo Ahavti Dai”. If you have to have something running through your head, at least being by Shemer is a good thing. She’s most famous for “Yerushalayim shel Zahav”, “Jerusalem of Gold”, which came out just before the ‘67 six day war which reunited Jerusalem and immediately thereafter became the anthem of the times in Israel. It’s a good song, a really good song, but without the fortuitous timing it probably wouldn’t be nearly as well known as it is. She wrote a zillion other songs, of which we did several in Koleinu a few years ago.

Anyway, I know this tune from folk dancing, but I hadn’t known the words before last night. We played it over and over, as we usually do when first learning a piece. It happens to be written in a very comfortable range for me to play on trumpet, so I could concentrate first on transposing and getting the right notes, which was pretty easy since I knew what it was supposed to sound like, and then on enjoying getting good tone and phrasing.

There were English words on the page, but Shemer’s are so much more to the point that I couldn’t be bothered with them. In Hebrew she says something like,

With these hands I have not yet built a town. I haven’t yet found water in the middle of the desert. (… I forget the next line …)
I haven’t yet loved the sun and wind on my face enough. I haven’t yet said enough. And if not, if not now, when?

OK, by the end of last week I finished the back of my Aran sweater. I started the ribbing of the front on Saturday night. Some problem, I forget if it was a counting error while increasing for the start of the pattern or what, on Sunday morning got me disgusted and I ripped the whole front out and started over. By the end of last weekend I was done with a couple of pattern repeats (oh, sorry, checking a previous post, 1 1/2 pattern repeats. So much the more done during the work week!). By now, I’m halfway through the fifth pattern repeat on the front. The back has twelve pattern repeats before binding off the bottom of the armscyes and I think nine more between there and the shoulders. So with some luck I could be halfway up to the bottom of the arms on the front by the end of this weekend. Or by the end of today if I keep going.

I just downloaded the newish (new this week but not brand brand new) browser from Google. The Wordpress “write a post” page looks the way it does on Safari, not on Firefox. That’s mostly to say that a toolbar that lets you put in links and edit the post in HTML (among other things, but those are the things I use it for the most) isn’t shown in Chrome. I’m not surprised, because the Chrome web site says they used the same rendering program as Safari, but I’m a little disappointed. KTHXBYE I’ll plan on using Firefox for my blogging (now I expect to hear people saying, “Hmph, not that you ever post anyway.”)

Two apple pies (Cortland apples picked this afternoon)

Six half-pints plus one Bonne Maman jar, about another half-pint but I guess it’s a quarter litre, hot pepper jelly from three red chili peppers Sue gave us, three long green hot peppers from Hannafords, two small sweet green peppers from the North Pine Hill farm stand, and one large red sweet pepper from Hannafords. The last batch of hot pepper jelly I made had a problem with the sugar crystallizing out, so it ended up like rock candy with jelly in between the rocks. We’ll see…

Two pints watermelon rind pickles.

One birch tree, about six inches diameter at the base, cut down with the chainsaw. The chainsaw started up easily in the driveway, but gave me a lot of grief starting out in the woods. But it did work, and the tree fell pretty much exactly where I was trying to put it. I cut it into logs and carried most of them to the backyard. Some of it should work as turning stock, and Arlene is thinking of what she can do with the bark.

A path to all the walnut trees cleaned up with a set of hedge shears. They worked great for cutting down baby raspberry canes, goldenrod, etc., that had come up in the path.

Ribbing plus one and a half pattern repeats done on the front of my Aran sweater. The back is finished, in just under three hanks of yarn out of the ten I bought. If the front doesn’t take more than another three, two each should be ample for the sleeves and I’ll be OK.

If Barack hadn’t been running, and Bill hadn’t been in the picture, Michelle could have beaten Hillary one-on-one.

The Atlantic flyway seems to have a traffic jam right at our apple trees. Our yard was full of warblers this morning. We’re not positive what most of them were, but we got good looks at a black-throated blue, redstart, black-throated greens, and probable Nashville, Canada, and yellow warblers. The tree just outside the kitchen window was hopping with warblers, and so was the crabapple.