Happy Thanksgiving!
Today we are going to Stephanie's house for Thanksgiving, and I made this pie:
It's an apple pie with real vanilla bean in it, a cheddar cheese crust, and a glazed and sugared top. It sure looks and smells delicious. I can't wait to eat it!
[Late breaking news: the pie was delicious! Recipe in the comments. -JPQ]
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, her is a video of JoJo gorging on a banana.
I've just emptied my camera, and decided to share some photos with you.
JoJo lounges.
JoJo looks imperious.
Bijou and JoJo glare at each other across the no-man's-land of the carpet in Fringe Wars. They both love to nap on the fringe of the rug, and they've each staked out an end. No one ever sleeps on the other's fringe.
JoJo inspects her new Vacation Villa. It has turned 
out to be not much of a hit.
Finally, my Indian Rope plant has continued blooming now that I've brought inside. The waxy pink flowers are lovely and smell like chocolate. Mmmm!
Cool Thing 1:
OBAMA IS PRESIDENT! I can't get over it! On election night I literally jumped for joy many, many times. I got shivers and my eyes got a little wet. They still do! I just finished reading the entire special edition of the latest Newsweek which reads like a mini-book on all the behind the scenes action from Clinton's, Obama's, and McCain's campaigns. I feel SO proud of my country. There is a little store in Ballard that sells flags, and after the election they had a run on US flags. When asked why, customers said they finally feel proud of their country again. Yeah.
Cool Thing 2:
Google Maps StreetView has come to Seattle! Now you can actually look at our house as if you were standing in the street, not just the satellite view we had before (and still have). The drive-by photos of our house look like they were taken last fall. Michael's car is in the drive, but mine is gone. Have a look at our house by searching for our address! Click on the Street View button, and then click in the blue outlined block we live on. Make sure the little yellow person icon is standing in front of our house (you can drag him). It can be a little confusing to orient to our house if you don't know our neighborhood. The brown Volvo is across the street from us, and our neighbors next door to the right are outside their house doing yard work.
If you know other people in Seattle, look for them, too! One of my friends' houses has their cat sitting in a front window, which is cute.
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.
Monday night I called Michael before I left work to see if I should buy bread on the way home. He said, "Nope, we have bread and milk. And a banjo!" Yippee! A banjo came in the mail for me! I ordered an Enoch Tradesman fretless banjo. It's got a scooped cherry wood neck, flush frets, and a pretty black finish on the fingerboard and pot. The flush frets show me where to put my fingers while still getting the fretless sound; kind of like banjo training wheels.
My old Deering Goodtime banjo is on the left, and my new Enoch banjo is on the right. I now have black and white, yin and yang, good and evil banjos. I will use them only for good! I've ordered a pretty black and yellow strap for it, and I'll need to get the gig bag all decorated up like my other case.
I was a little afraid of the new banjo, wondering if I'd be able to play it. Lo and behold! My fingers pretty much go in the right places! I'm very excited that I don't have to retrain myself too much. One thing I need to do is change my fretting to the point of my finger or the fingernail instead of just the flat pad of my finger. The sound is much crisper that way; otherwise the sound is a little plunky.
When I was agonizing about whether or not to get myself a new banjo, my banjo friend Jeff said I was the only person he knew with only one banjo. So now I'm real banjo player! Counting the four string Michael got me for my birthday two and half years ago (which started me on my banjo journey), I now have three! The old four string hangs on the wall as visual art, since it can no longer participate in audio art.
Well, I better go practice ...
I took some footage of the heron stalking. I had my second-string camera with me (in case I dropped it in the water), so it's not so clear.
There's a nice new blog post out there about Michael's software MoI and his recent trip to the 2008 SIGGRAPH conference.
In 2001, I went to New Orleans with my Cajun/Zydeco band Les Femmes d'Enfer. I thought it was my first time to Louisiana. Recently I've been sca
nning old family photos, and I found out I was wrong! Photographic evidence shows I was in fact crawling around on the New Orleans pavement in July or August of 1969! I can tell you, during my 2001 visit we started drinking Hurricanes from Pat O'Brien's at about 10am after a red eye flight which I did not sleep on. I was ready to crawl around on the pavement in 2001, too.
It's a beautiful day, but summer is definitely winding up. We've had some cold nights and are snugging up with more blankets these days. I discovered our comforter is mysteriously deflated, probably by dry cleaning last spring. They're $139 at Costco, so I think maybe we'll just pile on blankets this year.
JoJo's veggie garden is mostly gone. I gave her the bolted lettuce to eat which she liked. Fresh lettuce on a stick! Two more carrots a
wait pulling and eating.
Meanwhile, we're outside enjoying the warmth and sunshine as long as we can! You can see JoJo's wonderful bolt hole in the right corner above the clematis. It "mysteriously" gets filled in occasionally so she gets to work off some fat digging it out. She needs to do some serious digging soon ...
Last Saturday my dear friend Laurie married Steve. Congratulations! It was a fun wedding with a beautiful bride, a teary groom, and a packed hall of friends. May your married life be as wonderful as this day was!
