Of the many irrational things I have done, encouraging Mr. McP to take up the bass is the one that is currently plaguing.  The bass!  What was I thinking?  He is only big enough for a 1/4 size bass, but even so it takes up fully half of the back of my van. What we will do when he grows into a full size, I don't know.  It towers over Drama Queen's full-size cello, and the bridge sticks out a mile.  Luckily, he doesn't have to take it to school every day, since they keep one at school for him, but for rehearsals and concerts, he is expected to bring it.  The other morning, we stood on the stage, attempting to unpack it, while the orchestra director looked on, and it must have been obvious that the bass spends most of its time at our house, standing in a corner, unplayed.  It is so unwieldy that just getting it out of and back into its case is a project and a half, and Mr. McP's little arms are simply not strong enough to carry it. 

Miss G, who plays the viola, was given first chair and a solo for her concert.  I have been waiting for seven years for one of my kids to get first chair, and what happens?  She arrived at class a little late, wasn't quite prepared to start playing when the director told them to, and for that, the director bumped her back to second chair and took away her solo.  Thanks, Mr. Middle School Orchestra director.  Thanks a lot.

Miss G and I have been scouring the city for black pants that she must wear to this now-ruined-for-us concert.  Charlottesville generally sucks for shopping.  There are nice boutiques, but when you need something basic like a pair of girl's black pants, size 0 long, you won't find them. 

I know a lot of people like Target, and maybe they do have nice housewares, but the clothes at Target are the most pathetic, shit-bag crap I have ever seen.  Unwearable!  In desperation, we went to J.C. Penny.  It just never occurs to me to shop there, but I must say, their selection is far superior to Target's and we did, in fact, buy the very last pair of size 0 long girl's dress pants (black) in all Charlottesville.  Sorry, other orchestra mothers who left their shopping too late.  Next year, at least, she will get the concert dress provided by the high school and we won't have to do this again.

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Speaking of shopping, Drama Queen needs winter boots.  Would you like to see the boots she selected as appropriate for snow-and-ice wear? 


Wait for it.








.

She really really really wants those tweedy clog boots.  They cost $248.  I finally persuaded her to accept something more sensible, but she is complaining that the boots we did buy are too preppy.  When I was in high school, preppy was a good thing.  I was so preppy, my collars impeded the range of motion in my neck.  I was so preppy, I was virtually sexless.  I was so preppy, I appeared to have a sock allergy.  But today's teens follow a different path, apparently.

Election Day will be so anticlimactic, compared to last year.  Be that as it may, we are preparing to vote in our local elections here in Charlottesville and people are fired up about various local issues.  I like the intimacy of local elections, when the candidate himself (or herself) will turn up on your doorstep, or you bump into him at a neighbor's party, or your kids' school's open house, and you exchange the URLs of your respective blogs.  Charlottesville is small enough that the local politicians are truly accessible to the people.

Anyway, our weekly paper does a mini interview of each candidate, and I was happy to see that one question they asked each person was "What are you reading now?"  I love to hear what other people are reading--or in this case--what they want us to think they are reading.  But who knows, maybe these books are what they are actually reading, although I noticed that no one admitted to Three Nights of Sin by Anne Mallory or even something by John Grisham (who lives here). 

I tend to judge people by what they are reading.  It's not that I can't forgive the occasional mindless book--I like brain candy as much as anyone--but there are some books it is best to distance yourself from.  For example, this same paper once interviewed a man who, at the time, was the principal of Charlottesville's only public high school.  He was asked to name his favorite book of all time, and what did he say?  The Bridges of Madison County.  Eee gads.  Of all the books in the world, he picked that one?  He couldn't have said the Bible, or War and Peace or even freaking Pride and Prejudice?  Luckily, he was no longer principal by the time my kids got there.

So, what are Charlottesville's political candidates reading now?  I present a list:

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
Rant:  An Oral Biography of of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk
Lift Every Voice:  The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement by Patricia Sullivan
The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard
The Bible
Moon Shot:  The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon by Dan Parry
Thomas Jefferson on Leadership by Coy Barefoot
The Facebook Era by Clara Shih
The Steel Wave by Jeff Shaara
Biographies of Cicero and Winston Churchill
Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train:  Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop them by Brian Czech
Keeping the Faith by Richard McKinney
The Lost Symbal by Dan Brown
The Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
A biography of Stonewal Jackson
The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed
Game Plans: Sports Strategies for Business by Robert Keidel.
The Restorative Practices Handbook: Building a Culture of Community Schools by Costello & Ben Wachtel
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
Leaderless Jihad, Terror Networks in the 21st Century by Marc Sageman
Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Heavy on the non-fiction and a lot of dull business books, but maybe this is what we want our politicians to read.  I'm not even sure what use I am getting out of this information.  At least no one is reading The Bridges of Madison County.  Wouldn't it be fun if Obama had an online book club? 

What am I reading? 
The Wedding of the Waters:  The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation by Peter Bernstein
and The Wild Colonial Boy by James Hynes. 

The Erie Canal book is good, although I realized--and this fact actually kept me awake for a considerable time the other night--that I have never really seen the Erie canal.  This would be excusable if I were from Kansas, but since I'm from Buffalo, it is not.  Oh, I've seen it from the New York State Thruway, whizzing past at 65 mph, and when I did crew we used to row down the Black Rock Canal, which I always assumed was the Erie Canal, but I I'm not sure if that's correct.   Part of the book's interest for me was the rivalry between the two small villages of Buffalo and Black Rock, NY, each of whom wanted their town to be the terminus of the canal.  Buffalo won, and became a great shipping city, and Black Rock was eventually absorbed by the city.  My brother lives there. It's a gritty neighborhood of 19th century cottages, railroad tracks, drawbridges, abandoned shopping carts, and weedy sidewalks.  The sort of place where you can be pregnant and smoke publicly, and no one will bat an eye.

That's part of the Black Rock canal in this picture.  I used to love rowing under that drawbridge when it was up.  It's kind of exciting to be in a skinny shell, with a lake barge looming over you.


 

Anyway, one of the most impressive parts of the Erie Canal is in Lockport, NY where a series of five steep locks haul boats up the cliff down which Niagara Falls plunges.  I grew up thirteen miles south of Lockport and I have never been there.  According to Bernstein, these locks are still functioning today, much as they did 200 years ago.  I think that may be a project for next summer:  to take my kids to Lockport and view the locks.  Maybe we can take a cruise down the canal, and I can bore my children to death by rhapsodizing about western and central New York.

   

TV shows will sometimes use the device of allowing the camera to be the eyes of a particular character.  It seems this technique is commonly used on hospital shows, so it was fitting that today at work I had the feeling that I was a camera.  My new colleagues bustled about, paying me no attention--not out of rudeness, but because they were doing their jobs--so I felt invisible which is a not unpleasant feeling, really.  I was a tiny bit disconcerted by the two nurse's aides who look exactly alike.  At first, I was like, "Oh, wait, I thought she was wearing a pink top, not a flowered one.  Oh, there she is again in pink. What the...?"  I even surreptitiously looked at their ID badges, which have different last names, but that doesn't mean much since they could be married.  No two people who look that much alike could be unrelated.  What am I supposed to do, ask them:  "Oh, just to satisfy my own curiosity, could you tell me if you two are twins?"  I was taught that it is rude to ask personal questions, and probing people about the possibility of their identical DNA seems pretty personal to me.

Then there's the bike riding.  I did go out an buy myself a bike.  They say you never forget to ride a bike, but I'm not so sure of that.  I mean, I can ride a bike, if my demented careening can be called that, but my skills seem to have degenerated since the last time I sat in the saddle, which was, oh, about 1991.  I did, however, successfully bike to work today, although not without mishap.  I couldn't figure out how to unlock my U-lock (oh, off to a great start) and then I couldn't figure out how to attach it to the special holder the bike shop guys installed for me, and when I got the the hospital, windblown and breathless, the bike racks were gone!  I found them eventually--they'd been moved across the street--and in my intense relief at locating them I blundered across the street in a clumsy manner and almost got hit by a bus.  But I was right about biking to work being less tiring than walking.  I have to exert myself a few times to get up the hills, but I do a lot of coasting as well.