Tonight's Gig

Below is a simple cut and paste of a semi-mass email i sent out to some buddies here in Charleston today. If you live within 5 or 6 hours of Charleston, you may want to consider jumping in the car right now and getting yerself on down here. These are the most fun gigs i've ever played in my life.

Hi all:

I have been kindly asked by many folks to let them know when i'm playing a gig. I've been asked to update my Myspace page , send a small email, give the tiniest hint as to when i'd playing a show. I haven't done any of that...until now...

Tonight--and evidently every Tuesday for the rest of the summer--i am being given the privilege of sitting in with Bob Sachs and the Maniacs out at Dunleavey's on Sullivan's Island. We start at 7 and finish up most the time around ten.

I don't know if you've ever heard these guys play, but you need to: Roger Bellow, on fiddle and banjo and guitar and vocals, is probably the best musician i've ever been honored to play with and funnier than Groucho Marx. Mandolin playing wizard and high tenor, Bob Sachs, is a veteran of some great New England buegrass bands, Gary Hewitt on bass has been said by many a musician here in Charleston to have the "deepest groove in town." We play anything from texas swing to old country to new bluegrass to jazz standards to tin pan alley to...you get the point. Actually, you might not: last week, for instance, we played that great hit from the roaring 20's The Sheik of Araby with a visiting ukulele expert, followed that up with the Merle Haggard's the Bottle Let Me Down (with one verse in Spanish) and finished up with a twenty minute medley that ended with three part harmony on Take Me Out to the Ballgame. Really.


Come on out and see us.

walter

My desk

I love stacks of books. I think they're an art form all their own that tell you about the inside of a person's head. Or, I supposed they don't tell you as much as they suggest, evoke, invite. You can imagine and suppose a lot about Biffle and me from the books Baxter's reclining among on the masthead of our blog.

I was getting ready to clean off my desk this morning and decided I'd record the books stacked there before reshelving them all. I'm finishing up my own book (not finished yet, but the end is in sight), and these are the books that have been accumulating beside me as I work.

Why NOT to Give a Camera to a Piepmeier

Alison used to do photo albums. We have a cabinet full of beautifully dated and arranged photo albums. Since we went digital, however, all that's kinda fallen by the wayside and we just keep everything on my computer. It's a shame really, cause while we get those photo albums out a lot, we rarely look at pictures on the computer.

Anyway, back when we used those photo albums, Alison was the one who took on the chore of editing the shots and placing the photos on their little sticky pages. Since the format change that job has been mine. That's cool, but we there's a problem: while Alison had no problem with the tactile problem of assembling the photos in a book, she can't stand the more abstract editing of the digital realm (probably one of the reasons some folks continue to make zines in a bloggy kind of world , right Alison?)

So. Where this disconnect of A's leaves me is often with a 9 gillion gig photo card full of images of people's shoes, blurry images of dog faces and various ill-framed shots of visiting feminist scholars. And it's my job to go through and sort the wheat from the chaff. And there's a lot of chaff.

You may recall Alison's visit to the Ben and Jerry's factory up in Vermont. She wrote about it here complete with a pretty little photo of her in front of a bus. It looked like this:





Below, however, is the process of what it took to get there:

Feminists don't have a sense of humor

I know I'm behind the times on this one, but maybe some of you missed it:

A Few Words About The Banjo

Not Really. What i really want to talk about here is the article of clothing i'm wearing in these photographs: A sarong.


I went to visit my friend Sarah recently and she had one of these that she let me borrow. More or less, it was just a really large tube of cloth that one steps into, turns the top over to assure a proper length, folds it back on itself to assure a fit around the waist and then simply rolls down the top to hold the thing on. It takes all of 15 seconds to do, which is about 2 or 3 seconds more than it takes to actually make on a sewing machine.

For the one i have on in this picture, Alison and i went to the fabric store and bought two yards of cloth (44" inches wide--the standard width). It was on sale for a couple dollars a yard. It had selvaged edges which only required me to sew one end of the cloth to the other with a straight stitch on the sewing machine and voila! a sarong!

Now, for the more obvious problem: I'm wearin' a skirt. While it doesn't matter a hill of beans to me if i'm wearin' a skirt, i've kinda reached an age where i've gotten weary of scandalizing other people. While, if given the chance, i think i would wear nothing but these for years to come, i'm just not sure how that would go over in Charleston. I sure wish i could though...What could be sarong with that?

One ring to rule them all

Because I'm pregnant in the heat of the Charleston summer, my feet and ankles have swollen, and it turns out my fingers have, too. I discovered several days ago that I couldn't get my wedding ring off. We tried everything we could think of, learn from friends or our midwife, or find on the internet: dishwashing soap, Windex, butter, etc. Nothing worked. The ring wasn't hurting yet or cutting off circulation, but I was starting to feel a little claustrophobic.

Here's a photo essay to show what happened on Monday.

It was first thing in the morning, when the swelling was at its lowest. I held my hand over my head for ten minutes, with my ring finger wrapped in ice.

Biffle then rubbed banana on my finger, acting on the belief that banana is a superior lubricant. He also supplemented the banana with dishwashing liquid.

My midwife suggested we use strands of dental floss to pull the ring off--that way Biffle could get a good grip without his fingers being all greasy. You can see in this picture that the ring is going nowhere, despite aggressive pulling.

So Biffle, being the incredibly handy person that he is, got out the vice and the jeweler's saw blades. That tiny thing under the ring is the saw blade. He didn't have handles, so he had to use pliers, but they worked really well.

Ta da! A clean cut across the ring, so clean that Biffle will be able to solder the ring back together for me when the swelling has gone down. Note the gold dust sprinkled across my finger.

And here is the finger, freed from the ring. The red line toward the knuckle is the bruise I/we caused by all the pulling. It's a little odd not to be wearing a wedding ring, but as my dad pointed out, Biffle and I are so fully committed that it's visible from a mile away without any symbolic markers.

Pregnancy and conversation

Something I've learned through my interactions as a visibly pregnant person with loads of folks in the world is that pregnancy doesn't give you a lot to talk about. People really seem to want to talk, but after the basics--"When are you due?" "Do you know the sex?" "Is it your first?"--there's just not a whole lot more to say without verging into the very personal. (I have plenty to say about the various physical things going on in my science-experiment-like body, but I'm kindly refraining from sharing that stuff with casual acquaintances.)

I had the clever plan for a while to make people into my own social experiment. If someone I didn't know, someone I wasn't likely to see again, asked whether the baby was a boy or a girl, I was going to tell them one or the other (even though we don't know and aren't going to know). The idea was to see how their responses differed.

This was a great idea, but the problem was that people didn't have much to say. I'd throw out, "It's a girl!" or "It's a boy!" and they'd respond, smiling, "Ohhh!"

I suspect that if I'd kept it up I would have encountered some useful differences of opinion, but I wasn't committed enough. I will say that the world at large seems to believe that the baby Biffle-Piepmeier is male. Two of my good friends have had dreams that the baby's a boy, and our next door neighbor is adamant that it's male.

"Let me rub on that boy!" she'll say if we meet each other on the sidewalk.

I'm not sure if this is some sort of subconscious male preference expressing itself or not.

One other thought I had: because pregnancy doesn't provide much material for casual conversation, people get creative with how they ask questions. They'll say things like, "How's the expansion project coming?", or my personal favorite, "When are you going to subdivide?"