fauxklore

I think this is the latest I have done a year in review for the previous year. But I was trying to get various things done at home over the past few days and sitting down at the computer (beyond checking email and facebook) was a low priority. ( Behind a cut due to length )

Here is the usual quarterly run-down on my goals for the year.

I got nothing done on travelogues. In fact, since I did another major trip, I got further behind. I also got nothing done on digitizing LPs and cassettes.

I didn’t add any baseball volksmarch events and, in fact, did only one volksmarch at all during the past few months. I haven’t been to any National Parks, either, but I have solidifying plans for two.

I am still crawling along through the New Testament. I read maybe another 15-20 pages.

I went to a game at one minor league ballpark (Lexington Legends). I had had plans for another, but they got cancelled for complicated reasons.

On the plus side, I have continued doing at least 2 crossword puzzles a day. I finished memorizing The Owl and the Pussycat and learned Philip Larkin’s This Be the Verse. I stalled for a bit out of indecision over which poem to do next, but I’m making good progress now on Richard Cory.

Overall, it was a pretty meh quarter, but I still think I can achieve what I intend to. And I did check off a life list item (the spa at the Hotel Hershey), as well as getting ink in the Washington Post Style Invitational. So I don’t feel entirely unaccomplished.

Actually, I believe that Belgium is the sweetest place on earth, but it was Hershey, Pennsylvania I spent a weekend in a few weeks ago. (Yes, I am behind. I've been busy. And, yes, that is not news.)

I don’t remember when I first heard about the spa at the Hotel Hershey, but as soon as I did, I knew it was something I had to experience and, hence, added it to my life list. Reading the descriptions, it sounded like I could luxuriate in warm chocolately goodness. I’d mentioned this to my friend, Suzanne, who is much more of a spa person than I am and game for all sorts of adventures. (For example, she did the fish pedicure with me a couple of years ago.) It took a bit of effort to find a time that worked for both of us, but we finally managed to make it work.

Part of what makes Suzanne a good person for me to travel with is that she is not into constant togetherness. She flew in (to Harrisburg) on Thursday night. I spent Friday working at home in the morning, followed by finishing my taxes. So it was early afternoon by the time I got out of the house to drive north. Most of the drive was pleasant, but I got stuck in some crawling traffic within the last 30 miles or so. Still, I got to the Hotel Hershey in just about 3 hours. When you check in, they ask you whether you prefer milk or dark chocolate and then give you a chocolate bar. (I am, of course, a dark chocolate person, though Hershey’s dark barely qualifies based on cacao percentage.) I called Suzanne and we set a time and place to meet for drinks, leaving me a little time to rest beforehand.

The Iberian Lounge had some chocolate themed drinks on its menu (misnamed as martinis. Sorry, but just using a martini glass does not a martini make. It must contain vermouth and either gin or, if one is being liberal, vodka.) Ignoring such atrocities, I had a glass of pinot noir, while Suzanne noticed that the beer list had Smithwick’s, which is her favorite. We moved on to dinner at Harvest, where I had a tasty cream of onion soup and a very nice beet and arugula salad. We figured that we would email and text to coordinate plans for the rest of the weekend, with no actual necessity to do things together.

As it happened, she was up when I emailed her that I was going down to breakfast (included in the hotel package we’d booked), so we ate together. Breakfast is served in The Circular and the buffet has a reasonable variety, including made to order omelets and little waffles with the shape of a Hershey’s kiss pressed into them. We then used the tickets to The Hershey Story (also included in the hotel package). This is a museum of Hershey history – both Milton Hershey’s and the company’s – and is reasonably well done. I can’t say that I learned anything much new, but, then, I’d been to Hershey before (and taken the trolley tour around town.) Overall, I’d say it was worth an hour and a half.

While Suzanne drove back to the hotel for her first spa appointment, I drove over to Chocolate World, where I did the (free) Great American Chocolate Tour. This is a ride past animatronic singing cows and such. Key word is free, and you do get a chocolate sample at the end, but it’s really pretty forgettable. The sad part is that I had actually done this ride once before, so I had apparently not learned my lesson.

The Chocolate Tasting Adventure (about ten bucks) is more educational. There’s a lecture on the history of chocolate. Then you get to do the tasting. There’s a chart with various flavors listed (e.g. caramel, cinnamon, tobacco, leather, etc.) and there are small bars of a number of different Hershey products. Starting with their regular milk chocolate, the instructions were to let the sample melt in your mouth and not to chew. That one was pretty simple, dominated by the (slightly sour) cream flavor. The Hershey’s special dark was more complex. Then came Hershey’s bliss, which is slightly darker. The best piece was a Scharfenberger sample, though it was one of their milk chocolate pieces, not one of their darks (which have a much higher cacao content than the products Hershey makes themselves). Finally, there was a candy kiss. While this was entertaining enough for a 20 minute session, I would have preferred something less mainstream. I am clearly not the target demographic, however, since most of the people present expressed clear preferences for the insipid milk chocolate varieties.

The hotel package also included admission to Hershey Gardens. This was not the optimal time of year for that, but it was still pleasant to stroll around for an hour or so.

Then it was spa time. The check-in area is poorly designed, in that the chairs to fill out their forms are actually out in the hall outside the spa. Your spa host gives you a robe and a locker (and, if your feet are not as average sized as mine, gets you different sized sandals). I changed, then got shown to the three rooms where one can wait for treatments – the aromatherapy room, the silent room, and the quiet room. The latter has tea and muffins (and, of course, chocolate – both hot chocolate and bowls of candy kisses) available and I settled in with some tea and a book. It wasn’t long before my name was called and I was off for the "sweet feet" pedicure. This included a nice chocolate sugar scrub and a cocoa oil hydration thing (as well as more normal pedicure stuff). It was enjoyable but the pedicure area was crowded, so it was kind of weird having all these other conversations going on around me. I did buy some cocoa sugar scrub so I can replicate the best part of the experience.

After that I went back to the quiet room. Suzanne showed up there eventually (in between her pedicure and massage) and we noted that we had chosen way too similar nail polish colors. I was summoned for my other appointment – chocolate hydrotherapy. This was, frankly, disappointing. I love soaking in Jacuzzis, but I was expecting something with more chocolate scent. The water (which did have cocoa essence) had little scent, though the cool washcloth provided had more. And the room was rather bland.

Bottom line is, that as spa experiences go, this was not quite up to what either of us expected, especially for the price. It was worth trying once, but there are other, nicer spas in the U.S. (and, of course, for good value, one should go to Asian spas, like the mud baths I once went to in Vietnam).

Our chocolate adventures were not done, however, as Suzanne insisted that we go to play Chocolate Bingo in the early evening. We were the only adults there without children, but why should that stop us? They used the sort of bingo cards that have sliding windows over the numbers. They started with normal bingo and moved on to several variants. The prizes were, of course, chocolate. I won a 2 piece prize with an H-shaped victory and was ashamed of depriving young children of the victory. Suzanne, who won three pieces (a one piece and a 2 piece prize) and a large bag in the final round, had no such scruples. It was pretty entertaining. We followed that with dinner at Trevi 5, which was reasonably nice. I should note that we had expected the restaurants to have more interesting dessert menus than they did. For chocolate-themed food, one would be better off going to Co Co Sala in D.C.

Sunday morning saw us back to Chocolate World, where we did the Make Your Own Candy Bar attraction. This was fun. You put on an apron and shower cap and swipe your card at various stations to make choices. I selected a white chocolate base with toffee brickle and chocolate cookie crumbs. I watched it go down the conveyor belt and get filled (rather unevenly), then enrobed in milk chocolate. You get to design your wrapper, too. It’s as close to a factory tour as you can get at Hershey nowadays, so think of it that way, versus spending fifteen bucks for a few ounces of mediocre chocolate.

Chocolate World also has a huge gift store. I bought a couple of things for the office. I am pleased to say the bag of little Scharfenberger bars was far more popular than the box of kisses. Suzanne bought a lot more, but it’s more of a novelty for people who live in California. Then I drove home, via the longer route. I ran a few errands along the way. Unfortunately, the outlet mall did not have the right type of pantyhose (it is hard to find the sandal foot ones so I had hoped to stock up). I did get rid of a box of books and magazines at The Book Thing in Baltimore. And, since this was just before Passover, I stopped in Pikesville and bought all sorts of things at the large kosher supermarket there.

All in all, it was a relaxing, albeit expensive, weekend. It is always good to check off a life list item, too. The relaxation was, alas, undone within minutes at work on Monday, but that’s another story.

Here’s my annual year in review. I put it behind a cut due to length. ( Click here for the details. )

I am slowly catching up on things. Being perpetually busy does not help.

Celebrity Death Watch: The celebrity deaths I want to note for May include Dr. Joyce Brothers (newspaper psychologist and boxing trivia maven), Andrew Greeley (Catholic priest and author), and Jean Stapleton (actress, best known as Edith Bunker). But the one that stands out the most for me is that of Billie Sol Estes. Unless you are a fan of the Chad Mitchell Trio, the name may not mean much to you, but the short version is that he was convicted of fraud for a scheme involving mortgages on non-existent fertilizer tanks. As the song goes,"“Here’s to the greatest biggest embezzler of all." (By the way, this isn’t just me. My mother made a point of mentioning his death when I called her after getting back from my vacation and we sang, "Hey Billie Billie, Hey Billie Billie Sol" together. That may be proof of a congenital basis for earworms.)

Non-celebrity Death Watch: Ralph Chatham is gone. I’m somewhat at a loss for what to say. Ralph was a storyteller and organizer / promoter of storytelling events, retired naval submarine officer, and physicist. He spent a couple of years at DARPA and worked on things like the Grand Challenge (involving autonomous vehicles) and training tools for language learning. He told Jack tales, personal stories, and literary stories. He shared my fondness for Saki and Gilbert and Sullivan and narrative poetry. I carpooled with Ralph and his widow, Margaret, to many an event and he was always full of wide-ranging conversation. His death was not a surprise as he had been diagnosed with brain cancer about a year ago, but it is still a huge loss to our community. I am honored to have called him friend.

The Yeoman of the Guard: The first weekend in May featured a trip up to Delaware to see The Ardensingers’ production of The Yeoman of the Guard. The significance of this is that I have now seen every extant Gilbert and Sullivan operetta live, which is a life list item. (The "extant" qualifier is there because of Thespis which is mostly lost, though there are sporadic attempts to recreate it.) Anyway, the production was fun. I thought Jay Anstee was good as Colonel Fairfax, but Jeffrey Grant stole the show as Wilfred Shadbolt. I also want to note Mary Punshon as Elsie Maynard. My favorite song from this show remains "A man who would woo a fair maid."

By the way, I stayed up that way (well, a bit further south) overnight and stopped in at Delaware Park for dinner and a bit of gambling. It was amazingly crowded. I’d have thought that the spread of casino gambling to Maryland would have an impact, but it didn’t appear to.

Maryland Sheep and Wool: Part of the reason for staying overnight in Delaware was to make it more direct to stop off at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival on Sunday morning. As I have probably explained before, this is the largest fiber festival in the Eastern United States and is something of a cross between a county fair and the world’s largest yarn store. I was trying to stick to just buying things I needed for a couple of specific projects but a couple of other things (e.g. a book of patterns for knitted dinosaurs) jumped into my bags. Afterwards, I stopped off at knitting group and showed off my purchases.

Washington Jewish Music Festival: I made it to two shows at this year’s WJMF. The first was Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All-Stars Klezmer Bhangra Extravaganza. This featured Deep Singh on percussion and vocalist Manu Narayan, along with the klezmer band. The mash-up of Yiddish and Indian traditions (with a hefty dose of jazz thrown in) worked amazingly well. My only complaint is that the set-up at the Jewish Community Center had nowhere to dance.

The second show was a Broadway sing-along. Joshua Morgan led things at the piano, with Bayla Whitten and Will Gartshore as song leaders. I was disappointed for two reasons. The first was that I thought Morgan did too much shtick. Shut up about how much of the audience you’ve slept with, stop the rambling stories about your horrible auditions, and let everybody enjoy singing! The other issue was some dubious choices of songs. Many of the selections were fine and obvious (e.g. "If I Were a Rich Man") but there were several that were chosen without much thought of their singability by amateurs. I found it particularly egregious to choose "Children Will Listen" as one of the Sondheim selections. "Comedy Tonight" would be a much better choice. Not that the event was a complete flop, but I’d give it a B-minus. Since the premise is one you would think would be an easy A for me, that’s a significant miss.

Ballet – The Sun Also Rises: This was the final show of my Washington Ballet season subscription. An adaptation of a Hemingway novel seemed an unlikely choice for a ballet, but it turned out to be my favorite of the season. (Well, maybe tied with Dracula.) The score (by Billy Novick) suited the story and Septime Webre’s choreography meshed with the music and atmosphere and scenery. I expected the Pamplona scene to be visually exciting (and it was, with added video). That the rest of the ballet worked as well as it did was both a surprise and a delight.

I should also note that prior to this season, I would have said I favor going to ballet programs that consist of a few one act ballets. But it has been the full-length ballets (both from the Washington Ballet and other companies) that I’ve enjoyed and the mixed repertory programs I’ve found unsatisfying. It appears that I need to rethink my strategy.

Story Swap: I know I went to a story swap. I know it was a small group, possibly because of weather. I have to admit I don’t remember anything else specific about it.

Pro Musica Hebraica: I go to this series largely to support the idea of presenting Jewish classical music. The spring concert featured the Apollo Ensemble performing Jewish baroque music from Italy and Amsterdam. If you are at all knowledgeable about the subject, you are already muttering something about Salamone de Rossi, who is pretty much considered the first major Jewish composer. There were also pieces by Marco Uccellini, Giacobo Basevi Cervetto and M. Mani, as well as by non-Jewish composers (notably Lidarti and Handel) touching on Jewish themes. Many of the pieces were rescued from fragments in the Etz Chayim library of Amsterdam and much of the appeal of the evening (and of the series) was getting to hear rarities. I continue to question what (if anything) makes much of this work identifiably Jewish, but I suspect the answer is similar to the one Howard Schwartz gives regarding Jewish stories. To wit, a story is Jewish if it is told (or written) by a Jew, involves Jewish times (e.g. holidays) or places (all stories set in Jerusalem are Jewish until proven otherwise) or has some other Jewish connection. That still leaves me puzzled over Bernstein’s Mass, but so be it. Getting back to the concert at hand, I should also note that I particularly appreciate the extensive notes by Professor James Loeffler of the University of Virginia.

Vacation: And then I flew off on a trip to Singapore (with a side trip to Melaka, Malaysia), Australia (Perth for OzFest, followed by taking the Indian Pacific Railroad to Adelaide) and Hong Kong / Macau. I accomplished another life list item by drinking a Singapore Sling at the Long Bar of the Raffles Hotel. It was very pricy (SGD30 ish with the service charge) and decidedly not worth it.

Which brings me to June and other things I need to catch up about later.

I like to do a quarterly review of how I am doing on my goals for the year.

1) I have written about half a travelogue. So I am still way behind.

2) I have done next to nothing about organizing my finances.

3) A fair amount of scrap yarn went into the Artisphere Yarn Bomb, though not as much as I'd intended. I have a couple of more months to work on The Butterfly Project.

4) I am signed up for the One Day Hike, which is at the end of this month.

5) I have not yet started on the New Testament.

6) I saw 6 Oscar winning movies, so am well on my way for that goal.

7) The minor league season doesn't start until April, so I get a pass on that one. But I did go to the World Baseball Classic

8) I did one Volksmarch baseball event and have 14 to go.

I'll call this reasonable progress. I will also note that I have firm plans for completing 2 life list items and reasonably good planning towards another.

I did come very close to completing one goal over the past few months. Namely, my postcard collection is about 90% sorted out. It would have been completely done, but I found another stack after I thought I was finished.

I am trying to work on travelogues and slightly stalled on sorting through photos. But I think I will actually get a bunch of that done this weekend, so I might get a couple written before the end of the year.

I have made progress on the Apocrypha, with just the Maccabees left. I am, however, intimidated by those 70 or so pages. I have to just buckle down and do it.

The knitting hasn't had as much attention, though I did knit about 4 rows of the socks last weekend. I am, as usual, not finding time to work on the projects that take actual attention, sigh.

Walking and dancing have been on hold, due to a foot injury. It is getting better, but not as fast as I'd like. And I've had to reschedule the doctor three times due to work conflicts. Sigh.

Speaking of work, I mentioned the change in our payroll deductions for charitable contributions. In the end, I decided to be a good corporate citizen and donate a nominal amount (a buck a week) to WAMU, the better of our local NPR stations. (I have refused to donate to WETA since they changed their format and got rid of all of the local programming I actually cared about.)

In other news, storytelling went okay last weekend. The piece I told (which is almost new - I had told it once before, but revised it heavily for this) wasn't quite where I want it to be, but I didn't completely suck either. You can judge for yourself, actually, as it was recorded. Here's the video:



Now I can turn my storytelling attention to my adaptation of La Llorona, which I am telling at Darkness Comes Early, our pre-Halloween concert on October 20th. My concept is to have her story told by one of the other women in her village, with the focus on La Llorona revenging herself on the women who didn't help her when her husband abused her. The idea is to focus on what turned her into a monster. I am very excited about this approach to the story.

Finally, I went to see One Night With Janis Joplin at Arena Stage the other night. Mary Bridget Davies does a good job of singing like Janis, but I was actually more impressed with Sabrina Elayne Carten, who played a variety of blues singers who influenced Janis (e.g. Odetta, Bessie Smith, Big Mama Thornton). Overall, the music was fine, but I wish the show told me more about Janis Joplin than that she got a thrill from performing. That superficial treatment is exactly why I am not a big fan of jukebox musicals. Give me some narrative!

I should be writing a quarterly update on the goals I set out at the beginning of the year, but I've made so little progress on them that setting that down would only frustrate me. Most of that is because of just having had such a crappy start to the year, between splitting up with Robert and dealing with a couple of health issues. I complain enough about other people kvetching that I have no desire to spend my time doing so myself.

My fundamental philosophy of life amounts to, "if what you're doing isn't working, do something else." And that is exactly how I have been trying to deal with all the stress of the past few months. I will also note the effectiveness of the heartbreak diet. That is, if you're too torn up to have much appetite, you can lose 25 pounds surprisingly easily.

My other way of dealing with things is, of course, to go out and do fun stuff. This weekend it meant a trip up to Philadelphia for an art-filled day with my friends, Megan and Jack. We saw the Van Gogh exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which was organized in an unusual way. There's a room for blades of grass, a room for wheat, a room for trees and undergrowth, and so on. I'd say my favorite piece in the collection was the final one, "Almond Blossoms." I also speculated on what Van Gogh would have done had he ever been transported to Iowa.

While at the museum, we also checked out "Nude Descending a Staircase" by Marcel Duchamp. This has some personal significance as seeing it (in a book) changed my view of modern art. I had the epiphany that the key word was "descending" and that, if you look at it as being about the movement, it makes sense. So seeing it in person was well worthwhile.

We also saw an impressive photographic exhibit by Zoe Strauss. Her photos cover a wide range of working class experiences and I was particularly impressed by her portraits. We then chased down a few of her billboards, which are being exhibited in a wide range of places throughout Philadelphia.

After a stop for lunch at a brewpub, we visited a couple of exhibits that are part of Fiber Philadelphia. The Handweaver's Guild show was relatively conventional, with my favorite pieces there being a few needle felted birds and a set of temari balls. An exhibit at the Crane Arts Building, titled "Outisde / Inside the Box" was quite different. My favorite pieces at that one included a story quilt by Jenny Iserman which told about women who had been murdered by their husbands and a set of humanoid figures by Brigitte Amarger that were made of x-rays stitched together.

Next came coffee at Higher Grounds in Northern Liberties. Finally, we went over to South Street and the Magic Garden, which is a fascinating mosaic project, before they dropped me back at 30th Street Station for my trip home. All in all, it was a wonderful day.

Today's artwork was limited to knitting group, where I crocheted half an amigurumi uterus.

And now I need to get caught up on household paperwork. I'm hoping the next few months will improve.

I was traveling so much this summer that I didn't accomplish much of what I intended to. The next couple of months look reasonably quiet.

1) No progress on travelogues, and I have yet another one to write.

2) I deliberately took the summer off from dance classes. I am just getting back to speed and did make it to Bollywood workout Tuesday night.

3) I'm about halfway through the Apocrypha. There is no reason (other than laziness) why I wouldn't be able to finish this year.

4) I finished the Artistic Heritage program. I need to do 6 more America's Garden events, and 3 more Historic Churches events. I added one of the latter this quarter, but summer tends to be too hot to walk, so the relatively little progress is no surprise.

5) I am decluttering but I also have a lot more to do.

6) and 7) I don't suppose that buying yarn does much of anything to contribute to actually knitting with it.

8) I did submit one more entry to the Style Invitational. So I am up to 4.

Assuming I don't end up doing lots more traveling in the next couple of months, I might have gotten something done this year.

Looking back at my goals for the year, here's where I am:

1) I wrote a travelogue, but I am still (again) 4 behind. Sigh.

2) I only made it to 7 dance classes during the last term. Still, that is better than nothing.

3) I read maybe another 20 pages of the Apocrypha.

4) I finished the Volksmarch Museums program. I also did 2 more Gardens events, 3 Historic Churches events, and 3 more Artistic Heritage events.

5) Decluttering progress is slow, but some does happen whenever I am home.

6) I have not even cast on socks, though I did buy an instruction book for the ones I plan to make.

7) I have worked a little on one of the 4 sweaters in progress. It's the one I call Frankensweater and has the virtue of being (reverse) stockinette stitch, so I can work on it while carrying on a conversation.

8) I've submitted 2 entries to the Washington Post Style Invitational. No wins yet, but I do try to set goals that are within my control.

Overall, I'd say that I'm not doing too badly, but I really do need to spend more time at home. (As if I didn't know that.)