a little Father's Day music

Joseph didn't, originally, have his piano recital scheduled for Father's Day.  but all the snow this winter tacked days onto the end of school, so the recital was bumped back a week - landing on the very day.  Joseph was not, particularly, looking forward to this exercise in performance art.  he has been taking piano lessons for about eighteen months and making rocket-fueled progress, so his teacher decided a few months ago that Joseph might be ready to tackle Scott Joplin's The Entertainer (just the first half!)....which is quite a challenging piece for a relatively new pianist.  Joseph really did a great job and, i think, was inspired by some of the more advanced piano students at the recital to continue on at least a little while longer.

Grandpa and Nana came to hear Joseph play

Joseph's piano teacher is really wonderful.  &, thankfully, seems to have an (almost) endless supply of patience for students who have strong opinions, enjoy using part of their lessons to discuss astrophysics, and want to negotiate just about every single detail of the piano-playing process.

getting ready to go up on stage

Joseph picked out this piece back in the fall, when he and his friends were playing a lot of Minecraft.  apparently, it is a theme song for the game...or something like that.  it's called Wet Hands.  (he and his friends have since moved on to the game Civilization, so we'll see what music comes out of that.  but first, he's busy taking over the world.)

just a couple of short clips.  couldn't upload the whole thing.

& here's The Entertainer....

finished!

 ~ we went downtown for dinner and enjoyed eating outside ~

loitering on the street & waiting for a table

Father & Sons........Grandfather & Grandsons

Blue Man Group:  Grandpa, Joseph, & Samuel

i think at least three trains came through town while we ate!

waiting, waiting, waiting for FOOD

back at the house, Samuel got ready to go play trumpet in the wind ensemble for his high school's graduation ceremony.  while Joseph practiced jumping (here he is, about to leap)....

Samuel, who in two short years will not play at graduation...but will, actually, graduate!

Happy Father's Day!

day and night

i have always loved the Pixar short Day and Night.  we actually got to hear the director talk about the creative process behind it at a local lecture series a couple of years ago.  fascinating!  (my other very favorite pixar short is Partly Cloudy....oh, my, but that cloud is such an endearing character!)

so, here's our day and night.

(make sure to increase your volume.)

goodnight room

goodnight room.

goodnight rainbows

& iridescent miscellaneous bobbles

that brighten up the windowless gloom.

 goodnight light.

goodnight red octopus

& fake aquarium scene

that glows in the night.

goodnight iffy fish wishes

perched high up in a tree.

& a bold green eye

that's just looking at me.

goodnight trinkets

that clutter my space.

magic mushrooms and frogs,

fisher price toys all in a place.

goodnight all my stuff

that overspills the shelves.

papers and books,

flowers, tassels, and bells.

 goodnight more toys

stacked high as the ceiling.

moonsand and goop,

things quite entirely (un)appealing.

 goodnight muppets

stuck on the wall.

and goodnight to my crayons,

i so love you all.

 goodnight to a few more toys

piled almost to the door.

puzzles, sorters, blocks, and pop-ups,

finger puppets and more.

 & goodnight to the climber

scaling the rocks.

you can do it!

i know.

just think out of the box.

it's the end of the school year, and i am closing up shop.

my little green-glowing cave (though i love you a lot),

summer is here and i'm ready to be

just a little less busy and a little more free.

near sight

i have worn glasses since i was in the second grade.  it's possible i needed them before that point - are your early childhood memories as blurry as mine?  in any case, we were living in Scotland at the time and had national health insurance.  there was one kind of plastic frames for children, but you could choose a color.  i chose pale pink.  my brother chose brown.  it was a family thing, this blurriness.

i have occasionally wondered what would've become of me had i lived in an earlier time period.  i really can't see clearly more than eighteen inches in front of me.  it's not that i can't see things...i know things are there - it's just like airbrushing-gone-wild.

my pink pair (which, actually, were similar in style to the new ones i got this week because everything that goes around comes around) saw me through the 1970's.  then, as you can guess, it was the magical 80's, and i got big blue plastic frames that resembled the style Dustin Hoffman wore in Tootsie.  at last, though, high school graduation saw the birth of my metal frame decades.

i had these Beatles glasses for all of the 1990's but mainly wore contacts ~

they resemble the current front-load washer/dryers, don't they?

 in the 00's, i entered what i fondly call my granny glasses stage....
(editorial note: the use of this link is entirely tongue-in-cheek.)

complete with clip-on shades!

getting a wee bit back into the color game with purple stems...

 around about this point, i gave up on contacts,

which i'd worn since the eighth grade.

and, my most recent pair, which i finally needed to replace due to ill-advised (in that i didn't take my own advice) use of a friend's lens-cleaning solution.  it partially removed the anti-glare coating, giving me a spotty view of the world.  in addition to the increasing need to slide my glasses to the tip of my nose in order to see my cellphone display or the display on my camera (adding weight to the description of this as my granny stage). or i suppose i could call it my descent into presbyopia.

a quarter century of eyeware

i don't know why i got it in my head that i wanted blue glasses again.  i guess i got to thinking that this is something that is on my face every single moment of every single day (just about), so why should i try to make them invisible?  i should embrace my life-long affair with glasses and be bold...ish.

if you are akin to me in the vision department, we really need to get together and figure out how to solve the dilemma of picking out new frames....without corrective lenses in them....so that you have NO IDEA what you really look like except for when you are practically nose-to-nose with yourself in the mirror.  & taking a selfie is just insufficient.  weird angles, odd expressions, too close.  they need to install photo stations with a variety of lighting options that you can, then, view when you have on your corrective lenses...but why oh why do they not have this available in the optical shop?  i mean, you are there buying glasses because you cannot see.

so in my blindness i picked out these frames.

they were the first ones i grabbed,

although i tried on many.

i came back to these,

to which i had a gut reaction.

which is an odd thing to waste

a gut reaction on.

my left eye -

which, to you, seems my right eye.

i have a scar at the corner,

do you see?

i am told i fell

while jumping on the couch.
i can only imagine
there must have been a lot of blood.

but the sitter

just put a band-aid on it.

i was three.

me:"i look worried."  photographer:"that's how you always look."  (photo credit:  Joseph)

oh, did i mention they are progressive lenses (the politically correct term for 'bifocals')?  i've had them for a few days and, overall, it's been okay.  i kind of miss peering over the top of my glasses at you, though.

sights&sounds along the Nat Greene Trail

it is beautiful here in piedmont north carolina these days.  the cusp of summer, before the high humid days of mosquitoes.  we took ourselves out for a ramble along the Nat Greene Trail and enjoyed it muchly.

moss by joseph

joseph by moss

it was a slight challenge to get all the humans to be quiet

while i took some audio/video.

(mike says i should've posted the ones where i am sighing

just before the video goes dark.)

sunset on Lake Brandt

more bird calls by the lake

boys skipping stones

fellow photogs will understand that i was constantly

playing catch-up along the trail.

walk, walk, walk, OH!  must stop! 

walk, run, walk, run, walk, OH!  must stop! 

and so on.