Fall News

Forgive me Blogger, it has been one month since my last blog-fession. Really, if nothing is going on with me, I don't write about it. Last week was pretty exciting, though.

I've been feeling a little sick, and I was waffling about going out, and the price was high ($25), but I decided to go see Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet after all. I've been a big fan of Abigail over the past 6 months or so. I first started listening to Uncle Earl, and then I got her solo album Song of the Traveling Daughter and loved that, too. Then I read an article about her in Newsweek which talked about her new venture, the Sparrow Quartet. Wow! How cool! Mix up bluegrass, old-timey, classical, and chinese music and you get something amazing. My banjo teacher, Candy, heard the group and didn't really like them, so I went to the website with some trepidation. After listening to all the tunes online, I was hooked! And they were coming to Seattle again! The show at the Tractor Tavern was outstanding. Each musician was well worth the $25. Béla Fleck is famous, and although I hadn't heard of the other two, I gather from the Quartet bios they're well known, too. If you like music, search YouTube for some of their videos and watch these folks play; it's astounding.

Friday night I went to the World Affairs Council second annual Transnational Trivia Challenge Championship with five other librarians. Several years ago I did a similar thing with two other librarians at a Literacy organization's trivia bee. We got booted out in the first round, so I wasn't too optimistic for this one. This Trivia Challenge was run more like bar trivia: teams confer and write their answers on slips of paper which are gathered and scored; at the end everyone's scores are compared. No losing early on in the night! We answered 40 questions on world capitals, national anthems, news, children's book characters from around the world (we got 10 out of 10 on that one!), food, and whatnot. We actually did pretty well with 30 out of 40, and we tied for 3rd place! Woo hoo! There was a tie breaker question that we didn't get, but still, I'm very proud of us. There were 51 teams (we were Dewey, Knowit & Howe), and we did better than 46 of them! We rock. My proudest moment was being the only one to know where a missing condom-mobile had been stolen from: Mexico City! I have to thank BoingBoing, my main daily news source, for that one.

Monday nights I've been going to a String Band class, which I'm loving. A new song every week, learned with 13 other banjoists (an evil number for a wicked instrument) and then played with the whole class of guitars, mandolins, and fiddles combined. The Canote Brothers and Candy Goldman, my banjo teacher, have had this going for years, but I'm only able to do it this Fall due to my work schedule. Bummer.

Michael and I finally saw Cloverfield, and I highly recommend it. What a great movie! A real thrillah.

Otherwise, life has just been turning to Fall around here. The houseplants are snug inside, Bijou is spending all day glued to her toasty butt pad on the bed, and JoJo is upset that it is no longer warm and sunny when I take her outside. I made some tasty Boston baked beans and corn bread, and am snuggled up with warm cider.

Keep warm!