I had so much fun ironing pocket squares last night that I didn’t want it to end. So I stopped, and I can do more of them tonight, or another night. It’s a party in the ironing room.
The ironing room? You know, the one with the squeaky board and overheated iron and spray bottle (because our German-engineered iron has a leak and doesn’t hold water anymore). There’s also the bloating towel, and a lot of luggage, and an extra bed.
Alright, you found me out. The ironing room is the guest bedroom. Though I think I iron in it more than we have guests there. So we’re renaming it.
Anyway, a lot of squares were ironed, still a bunch to go.
And, this afternoon, I made some more cufflinks.
I’ll soon have a set for any type of playfully colorful situation. I have so many cufflinks. I need more french cuffs.
If you think that’s all I’ve got today, you, dear reader, are wrong! W-R-O-N-G.
There’s a rabbit living in our backyard. It’s a regular old zoo out there. And this critter is not bothered by people at all. I got within about five feet before it took two tentative hops away, to see if I would give chase.
I did not.
And, yes, look at how green that grass is. The last few days of rain have been what we needed to finally get us out of a drought. It started last September. And we might have emerged from it a little more quickly than meteorologists had expected last fall.
Which is great. This was my first drought on well water. I don’t have a good sense of the size of our watersource below us, and some people around here are a bit thirsty.
I do know the aquifer is glauconitic sand overlying micaceous sand. Obviously. It is porous and permeable, of course. I know this because I just found a state aquifer map. The challenge is that we’re on the geological border of everything, here where the heavy land and the green sands meet. There are seven different types of aquifers running on the diagonal, and the map is just vague enough that we could be in one of three or so. So I do what anyone does when they want to know about the glauconitic sand, I overlaid the aquifer map with a working map … and found that, even when you adjust for size, the scale of one of them is off.
Who to believe? The state’s map? Or Google Maps?
And while you wrestle with that …
Let us return to the Re-Listening project, where I am presently nine discs behind. The Re-Listening project, you’ll recall, is where I’m listening to all of my old CDs in their order of acquisition. Roughly so, anyway. I’m right now working through a book out of order. So the book is from 2007, but these CDs are older. None of that matters. The point of the Re-Listening project is listening to the music, and here I’m just filling space with videos of good music and the occasional recollection. So that matters a little bit.
Which brings us to Melissa Etheridge. I had her four earliest records on cassette, maybe five, and maybe didn’t upgrade all of those to CDs. But this, her seventh album, is the last one I bought. Etheridge turned 40. She’d had her first two kids. She was entering a new phase of life. (All of this is great, of course, but … ) The older material, where she was younger, more intense, raw, dramatic, as she now says, all of that was the best part of her catalog.
And since this was released in 2001 she’s had about two lifetimes worth of experiences. Maybe I should dip back in.
Anyway, the first track is a good one.
And much of the rest is this comfortable kind of at-peace-with-itself pop, when I’m just looking for her to put to words some core feeling and belt it out over a 12-string.
But that didn’t happen a lot here — some artists you just don’t want to change, I guess, even though you know change and growth are good things — and so I never listened to this all that much. I don’t even know all of the lyrics.
She’s still touring. Playing solo dates and with The Indigo Girls. We saw them together last fall. Melissa Etheridge will absolutely tear a building in two from the stage. She’s still got that sort of power and intensity. Its impressive.
And I was blown away by her cover of Joan Armatrading.
The next CD is from Michael Penn, 1997’s Resigned. I’m not sure why that shows up in this book. I’ve had this disc since soon after it came out. (It’s terrific.) I probably bought this off the strength of radio or MTV airplay. Here’s the first track.
Probably it was right about here that I entered into my “I wanna be a songwriter” phase. But, as I told a friend, I’d have to work with someone who sounded like this. My friend laughed at that, and every so often she would ask me if I’d found that person yet. I had not. Also, I never wrote any songs. It was a short phase.
My appreciation for Penn has lasted throughout the years, though. And you’ll just have to believe me that I listened to this record three times this time around.
This whole record was long spring days with apartment windows pushed up and doors opened and the stereo, tied into those big, waist-high speakers, turned up loud. I think there was even multimedia on this disc. But who puts discs in computers anymore? Opportunities lost, there.
Michael Penn has been composing for TV and movies for quite sometime. Probably better than life on a bus. Though, sadly, I never got to see him play live, but I would go to a show.
It’d be “an evening with” event. Black jeans, crisply ironed pocket square.
