Just My Type

When I was a teenager, my family spent a year and half living in Berkeley while my dad was on sabbatical.  California was such a strange and interesting place for me, having spent my early years in the midwest.  I wanted to make a scrapbook of my time in the Bay Area, so I collected photos, ticket stubs, programs, etc. of the things we did and pasted them on the pages.

Here is the geeky part - I had a catalog of fonts (I'm not sure how one bought fonts back in the 1970s, but maybe it was for rubbing them off of a page?).  I scoured the catalog and found what I felt were the right fonts for each caption and title in the scrapbook.

I went looking for this scrapbook yesterday, so I could scan a page or two to post, but I couldn't find it.  Maybe I got rid of it, or it is in a super good hiding place.

All this is just to say, that I finished reading a book about fonts and typeface called Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield.  When I tell friends what I've been reading I get two responses.  One is a blank stare and perhaps the comment, "Are you hard up for reading material?"  The other is, "Oh! That sounds interesting!"  Well, if you fall into the second group, you may like this book as well as the movie Helvetica.

Pilgrim Festival - 2011

It's been a number of years since I went to the Pilgrim Festival at Pilgrim Place, but I decided it was time to return and see the community all turned out for great fun.  I ran into about 15 different friends in various places and enjoyed seeing all the kids with their faces painted and cotton candy.

Happy people riding the Massasoit Train 

Group singing and drumming 

Riding the Mayflower - a boat on wheels

The Pilgrim Pickers ready to perform

My favorite part - the Used Book Sale

A Pilgrim

Some of the homemade wares

Glue-In projects - kids can make creations from miscellaneous items

Velvet Aroma

When in Palm Springs last weekend I spoke with a HMC trustee spouse who has launched this website - Velvet Aroma - which is for cooks who want to organize all the food blogs they follow and recipes into one convenient place.

Now, I'm sure that I am not the only person who finds a recipe on the internet and carries the laptop to the kitchen to use as the cookbook.  I can look through bookmarks of recipes, but often I just look for new recipes.  Or I go through my own blog at all the posts tagged "food" in order to find a recipe I liked in the past.

Velvet Aroma will allow you to import recipes from the web (as well as enter your own family recipes) and organize them in a way that is helpful to you.

You can also follow Velvet Aroma's own food blog - flipcookbook.

Hail on Sunday Night

Palm Springs Air Museum

One of the entertainment choices for the weekend was a trip and guided tour through the Palm Springs Air Museum.  Years ago HMC had an aeronautics program run by Iris Critchell, a backstroker who swam in the 1936 Olympics.  She taught a number of HMC students how to fly and several of her former students are trustees of the college.  Of course it was fitting to take a field trip to this little gem of a museum which features airplanes from WWII.  Although air museums do not usually excite me, our tour guide had enough stories from his days of flying in the war and the particulars about each kind of plane to make the tour quite interesting.

Our tour guide, a WWII pilot

Smoke Tree Ranch - Palm Springs

As we change our calendars over to November every year, the HMC trustees have a retreat in Palm Springs at Smoke Tree Ranch.  Many years H has gone, and often I accompany him.  This was one such weekend.  The Ranch consists of private homes as well as guest cottages, situated on a beautiful desert botanical garden. We gather in the Ranch House for meals, and the meetings take place in the Walt Disney Hall.  The Ranch was a favorite hang-out for Walt Disney back in the day.

This year we drove out Friday afternoon through a winter rainstorm and woke on Saturday to see a little snow on the mountain.  Saturday was clear and sunny, but chilly, and driving home today we came through some more rain (and our house was 59 degrees upon arrival).

View from the dining room

Outside the Ranch House

Lawn Bowling Green

Pool

Linkedin

So, I joined LinkedIn a month or so ago, and various friends of mine have connected to me through this site.  I originally signed up because our Orff Chapter wants to start using social networking sites to connect with people.  Since I am not searching for a job, I find that I have not used this site except to accept connections from friends.  I have set up a page on Facebook for our Inland Counties Chapter of the American Orff Schulwerk Association (ICCAOSA) which has gotten a small amount of traffic at this point.  Anyone out there find their Linkedin account useful?

Further Update on Affordable Housing

Here are some photos of the progress being made on the affordable housing units called Courier Place on College Ave. and 1st Streets.   They are now taking applications, and I think the projected date for occupancy is the beginning of 2012.

October 11, 2011

October 11, 2011

November 3, 2011

Cello Case?

This is what happens when Lynn leaves her cello at our house for a bit after we're done playing and she needs to run errands before going home.  H decides it need a little dressing up.  Sometimes it's good not to grow up all the way....

Music and the Brain

Evelyn Glennie on TED

Because my yoga class has started 30 minutes earlier than usual, Lynn and I were able to catch a lecture at Pomona College called The Musician's Guide to the Brain by Lois Svard, a pianist and professor at Bucknell.

Although I am not a scientist, I am very interested in science (living with a chemist and being the mother to a neurobiologist doesn't hurt), and one of the areas I've done a little reading in is about how being a musician shapes the brain.

Dr. Svard handed out a two-sided page of references and suggested reading and two TED talks (Evelyn Glennie and Charles Limb), so now I have my reading list cut out for me!  While I have heard about plasticity and the brain, I had not heard about mirror neurons, although I had heard that if you are watching your student play their instrument, you naturally feel how they are playing.  If they aren't breathing, you don't breathe.  If they are tense in their right arm, you sense that.  That is, you sense it if you are paying attention.