What's That Noise?

Pedestrian Adventures

melissatheloud — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:36:30 GMT

So yesterday, I decided to take a walk to the park, which is only a few blocks away. Walking is not easy in Doha. For one, there are no sidewalks. There are piles of construction rubble. This year, I have nice sturdy sandals, and I've always been pretty good at rock scrambling, so I'm OK, although having Thelma strapped to me does throw my balance off a bit. The sturdy sandals are important. The other day, I saw a bevy of 3 girls, all dolled up under their abayas, giggling their way through one of these construction sites on the way to the mall. I could tell they were all dolled up, because they were holding their jet black abayas up out of the pale grey dust, revealing their tight jeans and outrageously high heels. The one who was talking on her cell phone stumbled and almost fell down into a 2-meter-deep pit, but was hauled back up by her friends, who had quite a giggle about it. But I digress. So, I'm in my sturdy sandals, and I have a choice of walking through actual construction sites, or in the highway, which is very busy, and as far as I can tell has no speed limit. They don't seem to build anything narrower than 6-lane divided highways here. I walked along on the edges for a while, which meant jumping over these thick blue tubes, which are what they use to remove the groundwater and dump it into the sea, so they can build the foundations for all these skyscrapers. I pass some other pedestrians, who are almost always short, dark, skinny men, in blue jumpsuits. I know, I'm short, skinny, and dark by most American standards, but not by Qatari laborer standards. (These aren't actual Qataris of course. They're imported workers like Bob.) I eventually got to a roundabout, which are what they have here instead of intersections. Cars never actually stop here, they just enter this vortex, orbit it for a while, and then whirl out in a random direction, sort of like when, um, it hits the fan. To get to the park, I had to cross a roundabout exit, an entrance, another exit, and another entrance. To cross each, I had to wait until all three lanes of traffic simultaneously had a gap. This took a while. There were some other pedestrians attempting the same goal at the same time. We had different standards for how big a gap had to be to justify a run for it. I eventually made it all the way across, and was victoriously in the park's parking lot. After a short walk over baking blacktop, I was on grass. There were birds, two very small cats, and short, dark, skinny guys napping under palm trees. I sat under a tree with fragrant white flowers and unstrapped Thelma, who tried to eat dead fallen flowers. Our patch of shade, like the rest of the park, had a clear view of dozens of construction cranes. In the shade, the heat was almost bearable, unlike on the walk I'd taken to get there. I eventually concluded that this pleasant patch of shade did not really justify the walk, although the air conditioning in the apartment did justify the walk back. So, I strapped Thelma on again, put my had back on, and set out to do the whole thing in reverse. I'd crossed only one roundabout entrance, and was waiting for a gap which would allow me to cross the roundabout exit, when a car honked at me. I figured it was one of the informal taxis, so I just waved it away, but the guy pulled over anyway (although there was no shoulder to pull over onto) and rolled down his window. "Need a ride?" No, I didn't need a ride, thanks, I was just crossing the street. He got out of his car and proceeded to "help" me by jumping right out in front of speeding cars to try to stop them, so I would have a clear path to walk. Cars were honking and swerving. In these roundabouts, it seems like cars are always on the verge of colliding anyway, and he was pushing things over the edge. I yelled at him to stop and get back in his car. Anyway, there was no way I was getting into traffic under these conditions. As he was heading my way, I kept backing away from him down the dividing median. He eventually gave up and got back in his car. I crossed when there was a naturally-occurring gap, which occurred soon enough for the patient. I decided to postpone crossing the next street, but walk on the other side, which had a bit of shade from trees, and less-lumpy construction rubble. Then this same guy pulled his car over and offered me a ride again! He'd gone around the block to intercept me. Sheesh, when some boy scouts want to help an old lady across the street, they just don't give up. I waved him away again, crossed the 3 lanes of traffic when there was a gap, hung out on the median for a while, crossed the next 3 lanes when there was another gap, and was on my home block. I walked into the ridiculously opulent lobby of this apartment building, full of crystal chandeliers and white orchids. I appreciated the air conditioning.

I'm on TV again, whoop-de-do

melissatheloud — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:38:01 GMT

ABC bought some more Djinn music, this time for a special by Michael J. Fox on optimism: http://abc.go.com/specials/michaeljfox/index which will be shown tomorrrow, Thursday, at 10. I can only assume they needed our music to represent the forces of pessimism.

Way too busy to blog

melissatheloud — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:32:52 GMT

I hear some babies fuss in the evenings. That must be because they want to go out and dance to a reggae band, as in this picture. My klezmer band oppened for Adonai and I at Castaways, and a good time was had by all. Thelma rarely has the chance to fuss. I have more pictures, but Bob's hidden them on the computer somewhere.

Back in NYC

melissatheloud — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:42:12 GMT

I'll try to type fast while Thelma naps. I'm in NYC, and will play at Djinn's weekly gig at Je'Bon tonight. My mom was going to babysit, but she's sick. Any volunteers (people I know of course) to keep Thelma entertained at the show while I play? The thing is, she likes dancing, but can't yet really do it herself, so someone has to pick her up and dance her around. I took her out to The Cupping Room last night, and we both enjoyed the show, although Thelma fell asleep as I danced her around. She does that a lot. I should do a more thorough blog than that. My new band, the Mitzfits, is getting gigs right and left. Ithaca apparently has been harboring a huge pent-up desire for a klezmer band for years. Oy, I need to update my website schedule! Thelma enjoys klezmer, and kvetches when we stop playing, so we have to keep playing. Thelma has learned to roll over, and also is playing a new game called "Try to Catch the Stationary Object." You hold an object in front of her, and she looks at it very intently, then carefully swipes both her hands at it, usually missing it or knocking it away on her first several tries. But she perseveres, eventually grabs it, and rewards herself for this achievement by hitting herself on the head with it. I have to select objects for this game carefully.

Baby Thelma gets a bath

melissatheloud — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:11:54 GMT

I thought that once Bob got home, he would get busy taking photos of Thelma, but like me, he's too busy adoring her. Anyway, here's a video my sister took back around Thanksgiving of Thelma enjoying her bath: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QklL03MCxTs You'd be surprised how much dirt can build up in the folds between a baby's rolls of fat. People say she looks like Bob, but I can't imagine Bob with this many chins. And here's one called "Dramatic Thelma" which confused me at first, but apparently there's a whole genre of "Dramatic" videos on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8mEVV77OF8&feature=related Enjoy. Thelma is actually even cuter than this now, as she's getting even more expressive. She seriously overacts every emotion she has.

Communication

melissatheloud — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:15:35 GMT

Another baby blog. Thelma is just so absolutely adorable. I'll use this blog to say a few words in rebuttal to some stuff I read in a bunch of baby books when I was pregnant. A lot of them say something along the lines of, "Don't resent your baby's cries, since after all, that's your baby's only means of communication, so she's just doing the best she can until she learns to talk." That's bull. My baby, at least, has plenty of means of communication at her disposal, and she makes use of them. As much as I'd like to think that my baby is unusually brilliant (and of course she is) I can't imagine she's such an extreme outlier on the communication skills bell curve. Take hunger for an example. When Thelma's hungry, she puts her hand to her mouth in a gesture that very clearly says "Feed me." If a non-English-speaking tourist came up to you and made that gesture, you would know to point him to your favorite local restaurant, or steal his wallet because he's obviously a tourist, depending on who's reading this. Once I see that Thelma is hungry, as I prepare to feed her, she opens her mouth and waggles her head very fast in what is clearly a gesture of excitement. It's not the most practical gesture, as it makes her mouth a moving target, but it is clear. If there's a delay in my feeding her, usually caused by my inability to hit a moving target, she communicates her displeasure by punching me, and occasionally punching her own head. This does tend to further delay delivery of milk, as I now have both a wagging head and swinging fists to contend with, but I never said she was the most logical person, just that she was a fine communicator. For night feedings, these punches are often my first clue that she's hungry, since I can't see her gentler gestures when I'm asleep. She's done all this communicating without crying at all, just perhaps the occasional grumble or giggle. On very rare occasions,she makes more noise. If, for example, I'm in the shower, and don't see her gestures, she then starts saying "Eh" in a kvetchy tone, which clearly means, "What do I have to do to get some service around here?" She'll say this at increasing volume and frequency, until I finally stop whatever unnecessary thing I'm doing and pay attention to her. If even the "Eh"s don't work, then she'll pull out the heavy artillery and start using actual "Wah!"s. Even these will start fairly quiet and sparse. I've never heard her doing a full-blown crying fit since the day she was born, since I generally get out of the shower in time. So when I read these "Your baby cries to tell you she's hungry" sorts of books, I have to wonder how unobservant the authors are, that crying is the first stimulus that they notice. My baby cries when she's exhausted all other means of telling me she's hungry, and probably when she's gotten annoyed at my poor communication skills.

Fattening up for Thanksgiving

melissatheloud — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 02:15:25 GMT

In Our Babies, Ourselves, which I'm sure you all read after reading my last blog, we learned that pretty much the only thing different cultures have in common is that they're all absolutely certain that they're raising babies the one right way, and everyone else is wrong and should be corrected before they do irreparable harm to their poor babies. I, like the rest of humanity, am now an expert in how other people should be raising their kids. As credentials, I have checked many books on childrearing out of the library and read most of them. As if that weren't qualification enough, I can now report that Thelma's first pediatrician's appointment yesterday was great. Not only is she perfectly healthy, but in her first 14 days of life, she gained 13 ounces. The standard expectation for American hospital-born babies is to actually lose weight for the first week or so, and then, by the end of the second week, to return to their birth weight. I didn't go to all the trouble of giving birth to this big baby just to have her shrink afterwards. She's been gaining steadily since she was born. I'm getting an increasing workout every day just picking her up. Now that my credentials are established, I will pontificate on what other people are doing wrong, at, of all places, today's La Leche League meeting. My mother was excited to go there with me, since she's a retired La Leche League leader herself. I didn't need any particular advice or support, but I figured I'd go there to show off Thelma. This month's meeting had a different leader than last time, and the topic seemed to be Problems. One woman had a problem with low milk supply, she said. Her month-old baby weighs a couple pounds less than she did at birth. The mother is pumping her milk with a machine to try to increase her supply. She's feeding her baby every two hours in the daytime, and sometimes at night, but she says she has trouble waking up when the alarm goes off in the middle of the night for feedings. This problem started a discussion of which makes and models of pumps are best, and how some women are unfortunate enough to require the more expensive models to pump effectively. Meanwhile, my mother and I were thinking the same things: What's this about feeding her baby every two hours? Thelma often eats more frequently than that, not that I'm timing her. The baby is hungry when the baby is hungry, not when the clock says it's feeding time. Also, this business about not being roused by an alarm clock in the middle of the night makes perfect sense, when you consider that she didn't give birth to an alarm clock, and has no evolution-honed instinct to respond to its signals. She gave birth to a baby, and if she keeps the baby close enough to her at nighttime, she will be able to pick up on its hunger signals and respond to them. That means she will produce milk automatically in response to her hungry baby, just as all mammals do. Hoping that she can be made to produce milk in response to some more expensive pump is completely missing the point. If you wanted to produce, say, saliva, which would be a better way to do it, being served a mouth-watering meal, or hooking some saliva-sucking machine up to your mouth? But these gearheads kept discussing milk-sucking machines. My mother told me I should interrupt this discussion to offer different advice, but I said she should do it, since she was the retired leader and all. Telling other people how to raise their kids is much easier in a blog than in person. Then it was time to leave the meeting early, since I had to get to a dentist appointment. But my mother, who has no blog, offered the mother of the skinny baby some simple advice on the way out. "Try nursing more often," she said. That was probably better than the long evolution-laced rant I would have come up with. I hope the skinny baby gets enough to eat soon.

Introducing Thelma the Quiet

melissatheloud — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 01:22:43 GMT

I know, everyone's been wanting an update, so here it is, with the warning that it is not for the faint-of-heart. For months, I've been reading books that casually use terms like "mucus plug," as if they were acceptable in polite company, so you may encounter such terms in this blog. My estimated due date was Oct. 15, and I want to emphasize that this is an estimate. Yet many of my friends seemed to expect me to produce a baby by that deadline. Sorry, folks. I suspected my baby would appear after the estimated due date, if only because the midwife, and the OB she referred me to, both said that the baby was measuring small for date. Now, I say the simplest explanation for that is that they got the date wrong, but the OB in particular seemed to find it more interesting to speculate that something was woefully inadequate in my baby's environment. This sort of slow growth, he said, was just the sort of thing they see in babies that seem to be doing OK, until they suddenly die shortly before their due dates. I was like, gee, thanks for the info. My midwife said that the OB was an old grouch whose grumblings were best ignored. She said it was a much more likely explanation that, as Bob and I are both small but healthy people, our baby would be small but healthy too. On Saturday, October 18, I lost my mucus plug. Here I'd been imagining it as a sort of champagne cork, but it more closely resembled snot. I got all excited and called my midwife, leaving a message on her machine, then googled it. I found that losing my mucus plug is a sign that labor might start any week. I called my midwife back and told her not to bother answering my earlier message. But the very next day, Sunday October 19, my water broke around 6:30. I managed to get to the bathroom in time, so no damage was done to the house. I was impressed at myself for handling that so neatly, but what I hadn't considered is that after the water breaks in the first impressive gush, then there's this constant drip of water after that, way too much water to be handled by feminine hygiene products. I sat on a towel and waited for contractions to start. They usually start before the water breaks, so I was like, let's get this show on the road already. Now I might make a parenthetical comment here, and say that in a hospital birth, once the water breaks, the hospital generally puts some strict deadline on delivery. Like, they'll say that the baby has to appear within 12 hours or whatever. (The time limit can vary by hospital) This is because of the risk of infection to mother and baby, once that sealed-off barrier of water isn't there to protect them from bacteria. The advantage to going to a hospital in this case is that they'll have lots of drugs handy to hurry the delivery along, and if you don't make the deadline, they have the cesarian equipment all set up to go. What hospitals don't tell you is that they themselves are often the cause of those dangerous infections. Hospitals are breeding grounds for all sorts of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Plus, with all the internal checks OB's generally do, they give the resident hospital bacteria a free ride upstream into the uterus. So, I said no thanks to all that, and sat at home on my towel. (Have you read The Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy?) I got a pad of paper to write down my contractions, since the midwife said to call her when they'd been 5 minutes apart, and lasting a minute each, for an hour. When timing contractions, first you have to know what a contraction feels like. Was that a contraction? Was that indigestion? Or do I have to go to the bathroom? If this is all contractions feel like, they're pretty lame. They were maybe 15-20 minutes apart, if that's what they were. Anyway, I waited excitedly for things to get more interesting. I took my towel and waddled the hall a bit, since walking is supposed to hurry things up. By the wee hours of the morning, the contractions were strong enough that I didn't have to decide if each one counted or not, but they were still only about 10 minutes apart. I was getting tired. I tried to lie down to rest, but lying down made the contractions much more painful. Lying down between contractions felt fine, but lying down during a contraction was intolerable, and so was the act of sitting up during a contraction. So, I sat up or stood. By Monday morning, I was getting tired of sitting up or standing, and just wanted some rest. Well no, I wanted my baby already, then some rest. My contractions, meanwhile, got further apart, as if the whole labor was just a false alarm. This would have been fine, except for my water being broken already. Even outside the hospital, it was only a matter of time before some opportunistic bacterium discovered this underutilized resource and moved in. I took a few little naps Monday, and had some snacks. By Monday evening, things finally got interesting. The contractions got more painful, and finally were 8, 7, 6 minutes apart. I wanted to walk to try to speed them up, but I felt too tired. Finally they were 5 minutes apart, mostly, for an hour. I threw up my snacks, timed a few more contractions, and called my midwife. She was busy assisting another woman, whose labor was charging ahead at full speed. Bitch. She dropped by anyway, then left to help the other woman. I don't remember the timing of all the details, but over the course of the labor, I was assisted by the midwife, her nurse, her apprentice, and another midwife who filled in when the first midwife was at the other birth. Plus my mom, who kept my spirits up by saying how much better this was than her hospital births, and Bob, via Skype video chat. With the 7-hour time difference, the interesting part of my labor was taking place at a reasonable hour for him. I tried to drink some water or juice, but threw that up too. This is something really stupid my body always does, that just when I need energy or at least hydration, my stomach rejects it. And I was still leaking a little gush of water with every contraction, too. I don't know where it was coming from, since I hadn't kept water down for, like, a day. I started running a fever, and the midwife (the substitute midwife this time) mentioned how chapped my lips looked, both symptoms of dehydration. Chapped lips were the least of my concerns at that point. The fetal monitor said that the baby's heart rate was speeding up, which meant that it was stressed from the dehydration too. The midwife started talking about setting up an IV to rehydrate me, but I hate IVs, so I suggested taking some ondansetron instead, which was the anti-morning-sickness drug that kept me alive through the first half of this pregnancy. She looked it up, found it to be safe, and let me take it. It enabled me to keep some diluted juice down, which was a good thing. This fetal monitor, by the way, was not some inconvenient machine they strap you into like in the hospital. This was a little hand-held thing that the apprentice would periodically hold on my belly, to hear the baby's heart. We made a very interesting discovery. You know how I'd been in such pain when I was lying down during a contraction? They midwifery team suggested I try lying down anyway, since I really needed the rest. So I tried it, but the fetal monitor said that when I had a contraction while lying down, the baby's heart rate got dangerously low. When I had a contraction while sitting up or standing, the baby's heart rate got slightly lower, which is normal, but not dangerously so. Apparently the baby and the umbilical cord were arranged in such a way that the combination of gravity and a contraction cut off the blood supply through the umbilical cord. I'd instinctively known to avoid this dangerous position, because it had been painful. That's what pain is for, so we don't do dangerous things. If I'd taken a painkiller in a standard hospital birth, I wouldn't have known not to lie down, the baby would have have been stressed, and the hospital would rightfully have had to rescue the baby from this stress by performing an emergency cesarean. Anyway, after a whole lot of waiting around as the contractions got more painful, they finally got so intense that I felt the urge to push. So I pushed. You know how on TV there are always people in the hospital yelling at the laboring woman to push? There is no need to do that, unless she's been numbed up by drugs I suppose. I was perfectly obvious to me when to push, and I didn't need anyone telling me how or when to do it. Thankfully, no one did. They just let me get on with it. Since lying down wasn't an option, I found the least uncomfortable position to be a squat. Call it a plie if you're into ballet. Pushing was the fun part. Here I'd thought that this would be the painful part, when the baby is actually leaving my body, but actually this was when the endorphins finally kicked in, and also when I finally felt like I was doing something useful, not just waiting around. I was really surprised at how it wasn't actually all that painful, compared to all those tedious and very painful contractions earlier. The midwife told me when she could see the top of the baby's head, and said I could touch it if I wanted. So I did, and yes, it was the top of an actual head. I stopped touching it because I'm sorry, that's a really weird place for a head to be. I was holding out for a more proper introduction to an entire baby. So I kept pushing, and there was the head! The hard part was over, and just another easy push or two would free the rest, right? No. Instead, there was suddenly a whole lot of busy scrambling by the midwife's team, and rather more difficulty than I'd been anticipating, but suddenly the whole baby was out, in a disturbingly gory gush of blood onto, yes, another towel, which was over some plastic that was protecting the bed. It turns out that the difficulty had been because this baby had the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around her neck twice. She's a little breakdancer, spinning on her head in there. Despite this, she came out bright pink, not blue. The midwife had to revive her with a bit of oxygen, though. Then my daughter was in my arms! She's beautiful, even with her head smooshed like that. (It has since returned to a normal head shape.) As soon as she was born, she looked around at everyone in the room with total fascination in her big dark blue-grey eyes. Bob and I named her Thelma after Bob's great-aunt. After all that fuss about her being to small, she (the baby) weighed 7 lbs, 6 oz. Once Thelma had done enough crying to get some air into her lungs, she kept crying, which bothered the midwife. I mean really, anyone whose head has been smooshed like that has every right to cry, but the midwife tried various things to soothe her. Nothing worked, until my mother started singing to her. She quieted right down and locked her gaze onto my mother, completely entranced. Here I'm the musician, and I didn't think of singing to her! Not to be outdone by my mother, I sang to Thelma too, and she liked that. The midwife was adamant that Thelma start nursing right away, but Thelma seemed content to just hang out. When I tried to get her to nurse, she pulled away. I was cool with that, and figured she'd nurse in her own sweet time, but the midwife insisted that she nurse right away. She explained that when a newborn pulls away, that doesn't mean she wants to pull away, it just means that she can't control her body yet. And indeed, once I fought past this pulling-away thing she was doing, she latched right on. The midwife was so adamant, of course, since nursing signals the uterus that the baby is finally out, so it's time to expel the placenta. Supposedly. In my case, we were still waiting for it two hours later. For me, holding Thelma, the time just flew by, but for the midwife's team, it must have felt like a long time, since various problems can result from a placenta that overstays its welcome. Eventually, after establishing that it had detached properly, she pulled it out, which was a bizarre sensation. I felt great immediately after the birth, and I've felt great since, much better than during the pregnancy. I didn't need a single stitch. I'm amazed at how fast I'm recovering my former shape, too. I have to gain a few pounds to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight, though. Anyway, Thelma is a delight! I realized I'd better write this blog already, since she's developing so fast, these early days are disappearing. She's very good at her two jobs, sleeping and nursing. Sometimes she tries to multitask and do both at once, which doesn't work very well. The midwife was right that she's not very good at controlling her body yet. Like, when she wants to nurse, which is most of the time, she will often put her hand to her mouth in a nursing sort of way. She's really good at communicating her needs like that. But then when I try to nurse her, she doesn't understand that first she has to take her hand away from her mouth, since only one thing can fit into her mouth at a time. I have to pull her hand away myself, which is hard because she's strong. She gets very enthusiastic about nursing. Think of the Far Side cartoon of dogs at feeding time, saying, "Oh boy, dog food again!" That's what she's like about breastmilk. But to express her enthusiasm, she shakes her head back and forth very quickly, which can make it difficult to keep a grip on her and latch her on. Once she latches on, though, she gets right down to business. Anyway, Thelma is an excellent communicator, and she does it all without crying. She occasionally emits a loud sound or two, to alert any adults in the area to the fact that something is wrong and needs an adult's attention. Once she sees that an adult is on the job, she quiets right down. Then she'll make occasional little distressed noises until the adult has solved the problem. Then she'll smile. You hear about babies crying all the time, but she is definitely not one of those babies. I credit this good disposition to an excellent book, Our Babies, Ourselves, by local Cornell anthropologist Meredith Small: http://www.amazon.com/Our-Babies-Ourselves-Biology-Culture/dp/0385483627/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225498582&sr=8-1 She presents the obvious-once-you-think-about-it idea that babies come out adapted to a particular environment, the environment that humans spent most of our time evolving in. This would be the world of hunter-gatherers, where babies are generally carried around by their mothers as their mothers go about their daily business, and nursed on cue. The modern world, with its houses with separate rooms, its clocks, and its motorized plastic baby-entertaining devices, is completely alien to these creatures, so it generally makes them cry. Professor Small cites numerous fascinating studies that basically show that the more modern "improvements" Americans try to add to the old-fashioned hunter-gatherer model, the more babies cry. Seriously, the crying of American babies is often measured in hours, while the crying of babies from many other cultures is measured in minutes. So, I sewed a simple sling to carry Thelma around in. This was with the plan of keeping her entertained with my daily activities, but actually she mostly sleeps in it. Since separate bedrooms are a modern invention, I take Thelma to bed with me, so she doesn't get lonely and scared in her own room. A hunter-gatherer baby left all by herself at night would be eaten by some predator by morning. Babies instinctively know this, so they'll complain very loudly if you try to put them in this situation. That's what I read. Notice that I didn't say I sleep with her. As she sleeps much of the day, she's up much of the night. Anyway, this is still much more convenient than putting her in a separate room, since she has to be fed and changed several times a night anyway, so putting her in a separate room would just add a walk to each of these nighttime chores. One reason many American babies have to cry so loudly is that they have to reach parents in distant rooms. They just keep increasing the volume until they finally get the response they need. Thelma, on the other hand, could never be called "The Loud" at least not until she gets a hurdy gurdy or zurna. At night when she needs something, she doesn't make a peep, but instead gets my attention by punching me in the face. I'm not saying it's a perfect system.

La Lech

melissatheloud — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 04:01:52 GMT

I realize I've been blogging more about a suburban house and impending motherhood than anything musical recently, but hey, this is all novel and exciting to me, so this is what I blog about. At my mother's urging, I attended a La Leche League meeting today. It was really fun, and not just because of Bob's wisecracks about lechery afterwards. For one, there was all this extremely concentrated cuteness in the room, so it hardly mattered what people were saying. Two, people, at least the ones who could talk, were saying interesting things. The advice fell into two categories: "Just trust yourself and your baby to know what to do, and everything will work out" and "Don't be afraid to ask for help when things go terribly wrong, because there's nothing easy or automatic about nursing." Interestingly, most of the "when things inevitably go wrong" advice seemed to come from women who'd had the more medical type of birth, such as cesarians. I figure it's like this: A newborn baby is only as smart as it has to be. Its job is to nurse, and it's usually born with just enough brain power to figure out how to do that, and no more. (OK, our particular baby will be so brilliant, the moment it's born, it will relate its idea of how to fix the US economy, but I'm talking about the average baby here.) If its squishy little brain gets befuddled with some cocktail of drugs, as it usually is in a hospital delivery, it loses its ability to do even its very simple job. I've read statistics about this, but hearing actual stories from actual people made the statistics seem that much more real. The people selling you these painkilling drugs in the hospital never tell you about the studies showing the side effects these drugs have on the baby. I don't like pain, but I'd rather feel pain and have a healthy baby than feel numb and have a befuddled baby. This is all making me even happier I decided on a home birth (with hospital backup in the rare event I actually need it.) Now that I have a bit of distance between me and my old midwifery practice, I'm seeing even more problems with them. Like, when I first became their patient, they handed me this sheaf of pamphlets and stuff to read. It included information and coupons from a couple of different formula companies, but no information at all about breastfeeding. That's kind of like going to a cardiologist and getting coupons for donuts but no information about vegetables. The proof showing that breastfeeding is best is so completely clear and obvious to anyone who looks at it, it's outrageous that the other midwifery office didn't mention it, but instead promoted formula feeding. Formula companies have the money to influence medical practices, while there's no money to be made off mothers' milk. Here I'd thought that this sort of thing was mainly a problem with drug company reps visiting doctors' offices to give them gifts and talk up the latest expensive drug, but it's apparently the practice of formula companies too. At the La Leche League meeting, the leader ripped a poster off the wall and talked about it a bit. This poster was paid for by a formula company, and it was supposedly promoting breastfeeding, probably as a result of some legal settlement that required it to do so. It basically said, "You can reduce your baby's chance of getting an ear infection by 50% if you submit to the degrading practice of letting the dirty little parasite suck on your tender bits instead of feeding it formula like a normal person." OK, that's a paraphrase, but that was the basic idea. A simpler phrase would have been, "If you give us a couple of thousand dollars a year, we will double your child's chance of getting an ear infection." It's really quite odd how all these things are phrased. Like some study showed that breastfed babies grow up to be kids that have IQs that average 8 points higher than formula-fed babies. 8 freaking points! (And this is normal, cow's milk-based formula, not melamine-enriched.) But this data is usually presented as if these breastfed babies had IQs that were higher than those of "normal" babies. The proper way to present this data would be to say that formula lowers a kid's IQ to 8 points below normal. If some company were to try to market sugar-frosted lead paint chips that were known to permanently lower kids' IQs by 8 points, people would be up in arms, and the FDA would ban them. OK, maybe they wouldn't, because people are really stupid. Now we know why. But formula is such an entrenched business, no one can touch it. It just occurred to me that babies who drink cows'-milk-based formula, while their IQs are lower than those of normal babies, do have IQs that are higher than those of cows. It kind of makes you wonder how smart cows would be if we raised them on human milk. I don't plan to do this experiment myself, but I'm putting the idea out there for any scientists who are looking for a project.

www.melissatheloud.com

melissatheloud — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 23:04:06 GMT

Here's a quick blog post while tribe is temporarily up. I plan to post my blog somewhere on my website, www.melissatheloud.com. If tribe stays up, I'll duplicate it here. (Don't look for it just yet, though, since I haven't set it up yet.) Ideally, I'd like to figure out how to allow people to post comments, but not spam. I sure hope tribe stays up, since I enjoy the discussions here. Anyway, I haven't blogged for a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy. My klezmer band played a bar mitzvah Saturday, that was a lot of fun. Kids know how to dance, and their parents often do too. By the way, my klezmer band needs a name. Ideas? We're a subset of the Cornell University Klezmer Ensemble (CUKE) that's a smaller and more manageable size. Gherkin is a little too obscure. It was pretty hard wedging my doumbek onto the remains of my lap, though. And the baby still kicks off the beat. I've been playing in various rhythms in my various bands, and I expect this baby to be familiar with all of them by the time it's born in about two weeks. I mean, rhythm is fundamental, and I consider it to be more important than the martial arts it seems to spend most of its time practicing in there.

Floorwork

melissatheloud — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 04:43:45 GMT

Our living room now has a floor! Deciding what kind of flooring to get was like the last temptation of the environmentalists. There are lots of gorgeous tropical hardwoods available quite cheaply. Plus, many of these trees are so slow-growing, they create wood that's incredibly hard and durable, to withstand any number of dance parties, even the kinds of dances that involve shoes. In a few years, a floor made of these tropical hardwoods will be even more rare and valuable I'm sure, since those species of trees will probably be extinct. There was also the option of bamboo, which is quickly grown on farms, killing no trees whatsoever. Then it's processed into beautiful flooring by Chinese slave labor. There's even a type called "strand woven bamboo" which is every bit as hard as those endangered tropical hardwoods. It's woven and pressed together, with some formaldehyde and probably the occasional unfortunate worker who fell into the vat, a la that Bodies exhibit. This would have been my choice, but Bob nixed it on the grounds that it looked weird, and he wanted a floor that looked like actual wood. So, we finally decided on some good old made-in-the-USA solid oak. It's so rare to find anything made in the USA, I figured this purchase was worth bragging about in my blog. Well actually with the dollar sinking, it's becoming profitable for businesses to make things in the USA again, so that's one good thing. This floor's selling point, aside from the relatively smaller amount of destruction it wreaks on the world, is that it has a Scotchguard (tm) coating. I think that means it repels Scotsmen. Bob pointed out that it might just make their kilts levitate. Any week now, the rest of the house will also have a floor, so there is much to look forward to. I can't wait to invite over some Scots. Bob just interrupted my blogging to have me help him thread wires through the walls. We didn't notice when we first decided to buy this place, but the wiring is bizarre. Bob is redoing everything so that the lightswitches make some sort of intuitive sense, like they control things in the actual rooms they're in, instead of outlets in distant rooms. He's also installing ceiling lights, and threading speaker cables through the walls while he's at it. This means he's always drilling holes in the walls and crawling through the basement or attic or those tunnels that Scotty was always crawling through on the old Star Trek. I think Bob's good at electrical stuff because it's just like neuroscience. In even better news, today, I finally met with a certified nurse midwife who does home births, and she says she can manage to fit me into her schedule! She's great. She measured my uterus, and said right away that it was smaller than average, but that's to be expected because of the shape I am, and the position the baby was in. She did not keep taking the measurement until she got the "right" one, like the midwives I've been going to. She even said that when she's teaching her apprentice to take this measurement, she has the apprentice hold the measuring tape upside down, so she can't see the numbers until it's time to read it. Finally, a midwife who has a good grasp of actual scientific data collection! This midwife has a 6% cesarean rate, unlike the other practice's 20% rate, so I'm happy about that. I'm also tired, so that's all the blog you get tonight.

Post-Pennsic blog

melissatheloud — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:16:03 GMT

Too busy to write, but I have to write something. Pennsic was a blast of course. I wish I had more energy. Near the end of war, I ran into a lot of people who said, "Hey, you're finally here! When did you arrive?" even though I'd been there for a while, because I just wasn't my usual energetic self. I'd set out to busk, but schlepping my hurdy gurdy around was exhausting in itself. Then I'd sit down and try to put it on my lap, but that's a whole intense pilates exercise now, since I don't have enough lap left. I have to lean my torso way back, and lift my legs up, so I'm in a V-shape, with the hurdy gurdy resting at the bottom of the V. Just try doing that on a flimsy 3-legged folding stool on uneven ground. Then I strap it on, using the holes in the strap I've never used before, and then I try to figure out where they keyboard is today. It gets further away every day, and there will soon come a point at which my arms just aren't long enough to reach it. Once I have accomplished all this and am ready to play, that's when I have to go to a port-a-castle. So, I'm sorry to all my fans who didn't get to hear much of me this Pennsic. I assure you that next Pennsic, I will have a lap again, and will have an accompanist on rattle. I'm sure the little virtuoso will be familiar with my whole repertoire already. Anyway, I still got to enjoy Pennsic. Teribus is an awesomely butt-kicking band. The Closer-to-Period hafla went amazingly well, especially considering how little I did to organize it. Jamming with Tina, Mary, Bob, and everyone else at it was fun. And, without amplification or painfully loud modern drums, I could actually hear everyone! But now I'm back in the real world, where I have so much to do I shouldn't be blogging. But anyway, here's a kvetch about my OBGYN office. They want to see me every two weeks, but they don't actually do anything at these appointments. Whenever they want to do anything, like some test, they spring the news on me at one of these useless appointments, and then I have to schedule another appointment, in addition to the useless ones, so they can do the test then. At these useless appointments, here is what they do: After collecting a urine sample, they leave me sitting in the waiting room for quite a while, in front of a TV blaring some special medical waiting-room channel that is nothing but "Ask your doctor" type ads for drugs I don't need. Then they finally call me in, weigh me, and take my blood pressure (which is always low. If it were too high, that would be a problem. I have a long, long way to go before my blood pressure is too high.) Then they take a tape measure and measure my uterus from top to bottom. Now, my uterus is basically a stretchy water balloon, with a vigorously thrashing sea creature in it. I think it might actually be one of those big crabs that provides the crab legs you get at Chinese buffets. Now, imagine I hand you, say, a pillowcase full of water balloons of various sizes. One of the water balloons contains this thrashing creature. I also hand you a tape measure, because your job is to hold the tape measure up to the outside of the pillowcase and measure, to the exact centimeter, the length of the one water balloon that contains the thrashing sea creature. You, if you are a reasonable person, would give me a funny look when assigned this task. But, these OBGYN people are such experts in this, they know they are measuring the exact size of my uterus. In fact, they told me, the size of the uterus, in centimeters, always exactly equals the number of weeks a woman's been pregnant. They just look at my chart, figure out how many weeks pregnant I am, then place the tape measure, and wow, they measure the exact same number they just read off the chart! Miraculously, although they've given me three different due dates, based on different assumptions, they always were perfectly happy with the measurement they got, because it always matched whatever due date they were working with at the time. OK, there was one problem once. One person measured my uterus, but then when a midwife looked at the numbers, she saw that they didn't match, as the cm measurement was smaller than the number of weeks. So, she called me back into the examination room to measure me again, just to make sure she'd get the number she knew she was supposed to get. To take this measurement, they measure from wherever they think the top of my uterus is, to the top of my pubic bone. Now, I might not know exactly where the top of my uterus has gotten kicked to recently, but I sure know where my pubic bone is, and I also know what's below it, which is why I can tell if someone is pressing a tape measure against bone or against what's below it. Anyway, the midwife, after a few tries, got the measurement she was expecting, so she was happy. Making midwives happy is not my job, so I am getting increasingly annoyed at these useless appointments. The one cool thing they do is listen to the baby's heart with something they call a "doppler." It's nice to know the baby has a sense of rhythm, but I don't see the point of this. Any creature that's kicking like this has to have a healthy heartbeat. If its heart were to stop beating, being told this days after the fact at my next appointment would not help matters. Anyway, at these useless appointments, they put on their soothing supporting face and always ask, "Do you have any questions?" I've asked stuff like "What's the cesarean rate of this practice?" The first time I asked that, the midwife acted really surprised that I would ask such a thing, but after she composed herself, she made lots of soothing noises, and said that there was no need to worry about that, since their cesarean rate was probably only about 20%. Now, considering that extreme, life-threatening morning sickness, like I had (and which is mostly gone by now, thank goodness) supposedly strikes only about 1 in 200 women, a rate of 1 in 5 does not sound like good odds to me. Especially when I know that at least half those cesareans, according to the WHO, are unnecessary. Now, 20% is better than the national rate of 31%, but still considerably higher than the World Health Organization's recommendation that no country have a rate higher than 5-10%. Cesarian rates are rising by leaps and bounds across the country. Rates of maternal death are rising in lock-step, because cesarians are, surprise surprise, dangerous surgeries. Infant death rates have shown no improvement. The US is currently the 41st safest country to give birth in. Anyway, at my last appointment, I met with a different midwife, who actually admitted that my water balloon measured a couple of cm smaller than what she was expecting. "But that's still within the normal range," she said. OK, now there's a range, whereas every other person who took this measurement acted like there was one, exact number they were after, and they'd keep measuring until they got it. So I figured this was a reasonable person, and I asked her why this practice's cesarean rate was higher than the WHO's recommendation. She said that it was because they follow standard practices of the US medical establishment, even though these are known to result in worse outcomes than other possible methods. They do all the standard procedures because this reduces their liability, even though it also results in worse outcomes for their patients. I really appreciate honesty like that. Still, I am still looking for a home-birth midwife. The standard practice of these people seems to be not to return calls. Oh, the picture accompanying this blog is Bruegel the Elder's "Triumph of Death" from 1562, which I'm posting for anyone who misses Pennsic. That isn't me in the lower left-hand corner playing the hurdy gurdy. I'd get nauseous if I tried to play hurdy gurdy on a moving vehicle.

Djinn's new CD!

melissatheloud — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:04:21 GMT

We did it! Last weekend, Djinn, after lots of practicing, finally recorded most of the material for our second CD! Now, despite the ridiculous amount of stuff I have to do, I just had to blog about the recording experience. We decided to record with Diko at Atlantic Studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn. We were scheduled to begin at 11 am Saturday. I was actually about 20 minutes late, because I wasn't feeling well. (which deserves a separate blog.) As soon as I got out of the subway and into cell phone coverage, Pete called me to ask "Where is everybody?" Not "Where are you?" but "Where is everybody?" which was odd. It turns out that both Diko and I were missing. I got to Diko's studio soon enough, but Diko didn't. We stood outside the studio door and looked at it. Pete called Diko. Pete reported that Diko's response was something along the lines of a groggy "Wha? Oh sh-- Yeah. Sorry. Gimme like half an hour. I'll be there in half an hour." Well. We went for a walk in the summer heat. In about 20 minutes, Diko texted Pete, saying it would be more like an hour. Now, this is where the story gets a bit confused, since I don't remember exactly how many times Diko texted Pete, but it was quite a lot of times, and it always pushed Diko's ETA ahead by about half an hour. It turns out that, in addition to whatever mysterious thing had kept him from showing up in the first place, he also had to go bail his friend out of jail, which apparently took more time than he'd anticipated. Eventually, Diko wound up being more than 4 hours late, but since he kept pushing the time forward by such small increments, we couldn't make use of that big block of time by doing anything useful in it ourselves, since we had to be hovering within a few blocks of Diko's studio anticipating his arrival. Carmine made some calls to reschedule a meeting with a client he'd planned for that evening, since it looked like we'd be recording much later than planned. Brad changed his evening plans too. Poor Pete, who, in addition to working on our CD, has also been working extremely hard to finish his latest animation project before a deadline, was particularly twitchy about these wasted hours. Pete is the hardest-working musician I know, so I think this wasted time hit him particularly hard. He can do a lot in 4 hours, if he isn't forced to waste time hanging out in Dumbo. I ordered Pete to stop and smell the roses. I pointed to some nearby roses. He said, "Those are roses?" This is a very urban band. Anyway, he smelled them, and said that they smelled good. So, problem solved; Pete was happy, right? Not exactly. Later, I pointed out that Pete had a cute little bright red ladybug on his shirt. Carmine freaked out and rushed to swat away the innocent creature. The band was pretty stressed out that we had to be out here in the wilderness with all these scary wild animals. Brad and I decided not to get stressed out. There was nothing we could do at this point. Well, I could keep saying "I told you so" and saying that we should have gone to Electric Wilburland, a great recording near Ithaca. I guess that wasn't really helping to improve people's moods. In one of his text messages, Diko said he'd be there at 3. Then later he said that it might not be exactly 3, but would be sometime around 3. Pete told him to call us when he was close to his studio, since we were sick of waiting around there. We'd be in the air-conditioned coffee shop around the corner, and head for Diko's studio when Diko got closer, so we could arrive at the same time and get to work ASAP. We left Carmine guarding our pile of instruments in front of the studio, while the rest of the band went to bask in the air conditioning. At 3:15, Carmine called from Diko's studio, announcing that Diko was finally there. He hadn't called us as he approached the studio, although he'd said he would. The rest of the band rushed over there, and watched Diko clean up the clutter that was apparently left from whatever band he recorded last. He had some story about bailing his friend out of jail, which we did not want to hear. Around 3:30, Diko and his studio were ready for us, Once he actually got to work, Diko did a fine job of recording us. He had very expensive mics, and knew what to do with them. We'd listen to what he recorded, and sometimes say that he wasn't catching exactly the sound we wanted, so he would adjust things so he did capture the right sound. Our next CD will be of much higher recording quality than our last one. Once the band was finally playing, that old Djinn magic came right back. I'd been worried, but we actually played well. The only trouble was, we didn't get nearly as much accomplished as we'd planned, since there just wasn't time. The next day, Diko actually showed up on time, and we got back to work, trying to finish up Saturday's job as well as Sunday's. We actually got pretty close, but by evening, our brains were shutting down. We really, really want those missing 4 hours back. I don't know when we could schedule more recording time. Carmine's at Pennsic already, and I'm leaving for there Saturday. By the time we get back from that, we're all so busy I don't know when we could all get together to schedule another recording session. You might think that the one redeeming aspect of this situation would be that Diko must have given us a big discount. You'd be wrong. He gave us no discount whatsoever. He said that weekend studio time was so valuable, there was no way he could discount it, because he'd be "losing money." That's what happens when you don't show up to work. You lose money. I'm surprised he hasn't learned this by now. If I were him, which I'm glad I'm not, I would have given the band at least 4 free hours of studio time, in an attempt to save my reputation, which is considerably more valuable than money. But as he apparently doesn't care about his reputation, I'm sure he won't mind people reading about his business practices in this blog. I'm still considering having the band get together and bill Diko for our time. Pete should bill Diko for 4 hours of animation work, Carmine should bill him for 4 hours of web design, and Brad should bill him for 4 hours of consulting time. If I hadn't been in NYC to record this CD, I would have been home working on my new house. Since I wasn't there, Bob had to hire a guy at $32/hour to work on it instead of me. When Carmine and I get back from Pennsic, we should seriously put a bill together. I have a lot more to blog about, but I have even more to do, so that's all the blog you're getting for now.

I didn't need to get pregnant after all

melissatheloud — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:55:05 GMT

Let's see how brief a blog I can write about the Ithaca Festival. They moved it to a later weekend this year, in the hopes that it would rain less. It was easy to predict what was going to happen to a plan like that. But we are Ithacans, which means that a little rain, OK a lot of rain, and some lighting, thunder, and hail, does not prevent us from having a good time. The only trouble was, Bob and Steve, those wimps, didn't want to play their cello and accordion in the rain, so Svraka was down to a one-person band, as I attempted to drum, sing, and play tinwhistle simultaneously. The sound crew scurried to hide their equipment under tarps, but I am The Loud. I need no amplification. The dancers danced under their umbrellas. The Hogtie Sessions, possibly my favorite band, was awesome as always. They're so confident in their virtuosity, they can afford to be really goofy. The sun shone on their performance, which was right. I danced a bit, and enjoyed wandering around seeing so many friends I haven't seen for ages. I didn't have the energy to check out every band by running between all the stages, hoping to find my next favorite band. My energy level is still not what it was, but I'm feeling so much better than a few months ago, when I wouldn't have even had the energy to catch my favorites. I was reading some books on everything that can go wrong with a pregnancy and childbirth, and those were not making me feel better. The general impression I got, though, was that modern medicine is always trying to control things, when actually, every intervention they do just causes its own problems. Some books talk in vague terms about how great these interventions are, while other books cite specific, controlled scientific studies, which prove that these interventions generally don't do any good overall, and often cause more problems than they solve. I'm going to put my trust in the books that cite specific studies. Like for example, it sounds great to chose the exact day I'm going to give birth, make an appointment, show up at the hospital on time and have labor induced. That would be great, if it didn't increase the risk of harming the baby, which increases the risk that I'd need an emergency cesarian section, which would make my recovery much more painful and time-consuming. For weeks, I probably wouldn't even have the strength to lift my own baby as I waited for my severed abdominal muscles to grow back together. No thank you. I'm reminded of my mother's stories of how she had my sister and me. My mother showed up at the hospital when she felt my sister was about to arrive, but the nurse said that the doctor wasn't there yet, so she should wait. My mother tried to wait a bit, but my sister was not going to wait, so she just arrived when she felt like it, never mind the nurse yelling at my mother to hold it until the doctor showed up. Really, my sister, and to a lesser extent my mother, were the ones in charge there, not some nurse or doctor with delusions of importance and control. When it was my turn, there actually was a doctor in attendance, which meant that he declared that I was in the wrong position to be born, so he'd have to do an emergency cesarian. As they were preparing to cut my mother open, I turned around into a better position, and was born just fine the normal way, which was no doubt a terrible disappointment to the doctor, who I'm sure was hoping would look all heroic for rescuing me via this daring and dangerous emergency procedure. I mean sheesh, let a baby finish her yoga before being in such a rush to cut her out of her mother's belly. All these unnecessary and often harmful interventions are in the category that I call "white-lab-coat-science" as opposed to real science. I like real science. Real science uses actual controlled studies to see if something works or not. If it works, it's used, and if it doesn't work, it's not used. White-lab-coat-science assumes that if something is given by someone in a white lab coat, it must be good. Maybe a better word for this would be "superstition." So, I've read enough to know to say "No thank you" to just about anything they offer me in a hospital. This makes me wonder why I should bother going to a hospital at all. Yes, I know, there is a slim chance that I will actually need some fancy intervention. The trouble is, hospital staff are just itching to use all this fancy equipment they have lying around, and will jump at the chance to do so, whether the baby and I actually need it or not. This isn't just paranoia on my part, this is from reading actual studies (OK, books that quote actual studies.) My recent emergency room adventure is just the latest in a rather long series of my experiences with medical professionals which do not exactly reassure me that they know what they're doing. Ask me about the time I went in about a serious medical concern, but they ignored that and kept looking for a medical explanation for why I, a woman, would have hair on my legs. Women never have hair on their legs, apparently, so they kept looking for the hormonal problem that was causing this bizarre condition. I never could get them to do anything about the original problem I'd gone in for. And then there was the time-- But I digress. I'm seriously considering home birth, which a friend of mine, and a mother of two adorable children, recommended. In a home birth, the midwife will bother taking you to the hospital only if she feels you actually need to go there, which is quite rare. I normally would steer away from something that seems so hippy-dippy, but those all-important Studies Show that outcomes are actually just as good from home births as from hospital births, in terms of the baby's health, and are much better in terms of the mother escaping from cesarians and episiotomies and all that. This means I have to do more research of course, to find a good midwife. My friend Sareanda, a person I know and trust, is a doula training to be a midwife, so I'm sure she will have lots of good information. Of course, she was one of the many friends I ran into at the Ithaca Festival. Actually, it turns out that I didn't have to go to the trouble of getting pregnant anyway. The highlight of the festival, aside from the Hogtie Sessions of course, was the Pocket Pets booth, which was selling sugar gliders. I had never even heard of them, which means I'm not up on my Australian marsupials. These little creatures are so absolutely adorable, it's a good thing they were prohibitively priced, or Bob and I would have gotten one or two of them and spent the rest of the festival cuddling them, and possibly ignored the baby when it finally arrived. The odd thing is, I had a dream a few days ago, where I had a little pet creature, and I was asking my NYC friends if they could take care of it for me when I went away for a few days. But in my dream, all my NYC friends said that they were completely incapable of keeping a little creature alive even for a weekend. I woke up thinking that my subconscious doesn't think much of my friends, so I hereby apologize to everyone on behalf of my subconscious. I also woke up wondering what the little creature was. It looked sort of like a chipmunk, but not jittery, and it was intelligent like a monkey. When I related this dream to Bob, I told him that I dreamed I had a pet hamster, although that wasn't the right word. So it was pretty darn freaky to see these sugar gliders at the festival. I hadn't gotten every detail right, like the long curling tails, and the gliding membranes that stretch between the front and back legs. But they are just as cute as the creature I dreamed. The vendors would hand them out to people, and they would rest in the palm of someone's hand, or sometimes try to crawl up their sleeves or down their shirts. They especially love crawling into pockets. People would pet them for a while, and then the creature would eventually get tired of these strangers and leap, spreading out its gliding membranes to soar through the booth, looking sort of like a bat, and wind up back on the vendor's shirt, and either hang out there or crawl into his pocket. Except when Bob was holding and petting one of these little creatures, it snuggled into the crook of Bob's arm, its huge black eyes gradually closed, and it went to sleep contentedly. I knew just how it felt. But in general, as the vendors explained, these creatures are social animals, so they bond to the other members of their community, which in this case was these vendors. That's why they always soared back to the vendors. The young animals they were selling were at the age to bond to us, if we'd bought them, which we didn't. We figured there would soon be enough cuteness in the household. I've been reading books on babies, in order to distract me from the 1001 Things That Can Go Wrong With Your Pregnancy type books. The goal, after all, is not just to be pregnant, but to get an actual honest-to-goodness baby at the end of this, who does all the cute things babies do. Like for example, according to my reading, when the baby is 6 months old, it's often able to sit up by itself, rather than just lie there. For comparison, a sugar glider at the same age, according to my googling, can soar up to 150 feet through the air, which any objective judge has to admit is much more impressive. But anyway, we're already commited to this baby thing, and I'm sure it will be fairly cute as well. Bob and I had already been discussing that it's good for children to have pets. You can bet this kid of ours will not be getting a puppy.

I am not a visual person

melissatheloud — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:14:50 GMT

Yesterday, in celebration of the fact that I hadn't puked for a few days, Bob dragged me out to a big-box home supply store to research decorating ideas for the new house. As the photo in my previous blog shows, this new house, although it has many practical features, also has some features that are so ugly, even I notice them. That takes some serious ugliness, since I am not a visual person. Quite a lot of my friends are extremely talented at all sorts of visual arts, be it drawing, sculpture, jewelry design, costume design, computer graphics, whatever. I assume many of my friends are also very talented at interior decorating, but I wouldn't have noticed. The only reason I notice their talents at the above-mentioned subjects is because many make their livings at them, which I assume requires some skill. When it comes to visuals, I have no skill whatsoever. That's why it's remarkable that I even noticed the ugliness of this house. The fact that I have even this low level of sensitivity to ugliness means that we have to do something to get rid of the ugliness. Getting rid of ugliness seems simple enough, but the complication is, we then have to replace it with something less ugly. The number of less-ugly options is so overwhelming, I'm almost considering living with the ugliness for simplicity's sake. It seems simple enough to just paint most surfaces white, but I had no idea how many different colors of white paint there are. We grabbed a paint brochure, and it lists colors like "Ceiling White," "Betsy's Linen," "Blanched Pine," and even "Gilded Endive." Who would gild an endive? OK, I can see some of my artistic friends doing that, and then putting it in a gallery. I might blanch an endive, but I would never blanch a pine, even if it fit in the pot. We picked up some more brochures, including one that promises "Unmatched leading-edge aesthetics inspired by the subtleties of nature. You can match your mood with a range of patterns, from tone-on-tone veining to 'earthy' randomly scattered particulates." This writing doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about plastic countertops. Match my mood? My mood can change quickly enough, I don't even expect my hairstyle to match it, much less any product with a 10-year guarantee. Considering that recently, my mood has ranged from "about to puke" to "exhausted after having puked" I don't want my countertop to match my mood anyway. Although I have to say, a countertop that features "'earthy' randomly scattered particulates" would in fact match my mood quite well. I don't think I've ever been in a "tone-on-tone veining" mood. That's probably a good thing. The previous owner of the house was apparently in a "crawling with millions of tiny orange ants" mood, so we'll have to see which would be worse, living with this ant-print plastic countertop, or having to chose a replacement. So in the big-box store, we were looking at various countertops, wondering why all the patterns were so ugly. Then we saw some granite samples, and went, "Oh!" These ugly patterned plastic things were failed attempts to imitate natural stone, which is beautiful. Imagine someone who had only ever seen the fake wood on the sides of old station wagons, finally seeing real wood for the first time. That was us. The trouble is, even the granite samples were all riddled with cracks and chips, because it's terribly brittle, and from my online research, granite is apparently great for countertops as long as you don't do anything like spill vinegar on it, because it will dissolve. Whose idea was it to make countertops out of this stuff? So that rules out granite. But against my will, I've also learned about quartz surfacing, which is 93% natural quartz crystals, held together by glue and dye. It's almost as pretty as 100% real stone, yet can actually stand up to having food spilled on it and things dropped on it. It comes in a very nice variety of colors and patterns. Imagine my shock, and even a touch of dismay, to discover that I actually have an opinion about countertops. The thing is, this quartz stuff is almost as expensive as real stone, and Bob and I have to ask ourselves, do we really care enough about aesthetics to install a beautiful countertop? Maybe we should just live with the orange plastic ants. Interestingly, there are businesses that sell complete used kitchens, cabinets, countertops, appliances and all, at huge discounts off new kitchens. When they build some high-rise of luxury co-ops, they of course have to install luxury kitchens, but when people move in, they all want their own custom luxury kitchens, so the unused original luxury kitchens get ripped out and usually thrown away. There are businesses that salvage these, so we've been looking to see if there's something that would fit our space, that would be less ugly than the ants. All of this is much more attention than I care to devote to visual matters. In other news, I vaguely remember that someone asked me to play a polka on hurdy gurdy, so I've been working on those, gradually building my hurdy gurdy muscles back up, now that I'm feeling less awful. I don't need fancy countertops when I have a hurdy gurdy.

The Importance of a Small Head

melissatheloud — Mon, 19 May 2008 19:50:38 GMT

Too much news as usual. Zaghareet magazine nominated Djinn in the Favorite Musicians category. You can vote for us here: http://zaghareet.freeservers.com/poll.html but we're up against such good musicians, I hardly knew who to vote for. ABC News used some Djinn originals in their documentary, "Secrets of the Sistine Chapel" which was viewed, and presumably heard, by 2.5 million people. Why would that many people even own TVs? TV programs very rarely feature hurdy gurdies. In more important news, Djinn's live shows have been going very well. We played for Kami Liddle and Sonia, of Bellydance Superstars fame, and they apparently talked us up to Miles Copeland, who would like to put Djinn's Jimmy Hafla on the next BDSS DVD and CD. We're still very proud of thIs CD of course, and we're happy that so many great dancers are dancing to it, but we've written a whole bunch of new material that we have to get around to recording too. I'm sure TV and dancers and such people would find all sorts of uses for it. In other news, Bob and I bought a house. You know that gorgeous house that had received more attention from woodpeckers than from renovators since it was built in 1900? We both fell in love with that house, so we looked at our finances, figured out how much we could afford to spend on housing, subtracted the amount of money that would be required for tasteful renovations, and offered all the rest. The owner laughed in our face. OK, we never actually saw the owner's face, but the real estate agent conveyed the idea pretty well. So, no gorgeous, woodpecker-feast of a house. Instead, we got a non-gorgeous, yet very practical house, with a big yard, in a neighborhood that is currently quiet because we haven't moved in yet. It needs a bit of work too, but all cosmetic. The photo at the top of this blog is of some of the wallpaper. That will be coming off ASAP, obviously. So will the yellow plaid wallpaper in the rental apartment out back. It might not make us that much more money in rent, but I figure it will attract a better class of tenant. Anyone want to rent a huge apartment, which will be guaranteed ugly-wallpaper-free by the time you move in? I've walked around the yard, and am quite excited to see lemon balm growing wild in the woods out back, and water mint and watercress growing in the little stream. There are also lots of jewelweed seedlings, and I've always thought that was one of the most beautiful wildflowers. Also, there's a big boring front lawn that we're planning on ripping up and replacing with more interesting plants. I got so excited, I ordered strawberry plants already. They'll live in pots until it's time to move in. In yet other news, I've been questioning my belief in evolution. I mean, if evolution is correct, I presumably am the product of many, many generations, who all managed to survive long enough to breed. These individuals must have had good genes to enable them to accomplish this, so they've presumably passed these good genes along to me. You wouldn't guess it to look at me. The real reason I've done so little blogging recently is that I've been too sick to do much worth blogging about, and even too sick to sit upright at the computer and write some amusing blog about nothing. I threw up three times today before managing to keep down an anti-nausea pill. If it weren't for those anti-nausea pills, I would basically be dead by now, and they were just invented. How can evolution have produced an organism that requires fancy new pills to stay alive? This is one of those rare occasions where the biblical explanation makes much more logical sense. You know, women's difficulties in childbirth are punishment for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Well, if that story is true, this is going to be one heck of a knowledgeable kid. Oh, yeah, I'm pregnant. The brainy little babe is due in October. This kid had better be one brilliant, nobel-prize-winning, olympic gold medalist supermodel for all I'm going through. It has been absolutely impossible to keep down any food or drink without the help of massive doses of anti-nausea pills (about twice the dosage they prescribe to chemotherapy patients.) While I'm very grateful that they've kept me alive, I don't like the side effects, like the headaches and wooziness. I'm not supposed to operate heavy machinery while on them, and my hurdy gurdy counts as heavy machinery. My hurdy-gurdy-playing muscles have atrophied in the last few months, because I've rarely had the energy or coordination to play. I was running low on pills, so I called the obgyn to get another prescription, and she was like, "What do you mean you're still nauseous? That stage is supposed to be over, since you're in the second trimester already. Besides, we don't really know what the effects are on the fetus, so it's better not to take them." So I didn't take a pill that day, and I threw up literally every 20 minutes for 2 hours, until my throat was bleeding again, so I took a pill. I mean, the effects of these pills on a fetus might be unknown, but the effects of dehydration on an adult are known, and that can't be good for the fetus either. I've decided that I'll only take a pill if I've already thrown up twice that day, and am in imminent danger of throwing up again. I'm actually down to taking them only about every other day for the last week or so, and that is a huge improvement. I went to the dentist a little while ago, and he was horrified at how my teeth have dissolved. Soaking in acid for a few months will do that. Here I'd managed to get through my 34th birthday with only one cavity ever, and now suddenly about 12 perfectly good teeth have dissolved. OK, 11 perfectly good teeth and one tooth with a filling in it. It's kind of hard to chew now, since my teeth crumble like eggshells under pressure. I'll do something about this when all this is over, but I can't deal with it now. My dad recommends medical tourism to Thailand, which is where he had some work done that would have been very expensive in the US. Anyway. The point is, there is a kid on the way. It will have a very nice house to live in, and a yard with beautiful wildflowers and lots of mud to play in, and a short walk to very good schools. It will also have a great dad. Now, when choosing a husband, there are many important factors to consider, like "How often does he go dancing? Can he play cello? Does he have the right political signs in his yard?" but there are also other important factors, like "Does he bring you a fresh puke bucket before taking the old one away?" Bob is a great husband on all counts, even in matters to which I didn't give much thought before marriage. I figured, when choosing the father of one's children, the main thing is that he should have a small head. I have very narrow hips. I wear a size XXL hat. This combination does not suggest an easy labor, if the baby takes after me in the matter of head size. I'm hoping it takes after Bob, whose head must be very densely packed, with all the intelligence he fits into a space that small.

House Shopping

melissatheloud — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:02:23 GMT

It's been too long since I've blogged, so I've accumulated too much to blog about. Rakassah was awesome, amazing dance and music, the usual. But we also had a new experience: Djinn rented a car and got to drive around San Francisco in the carpool lanes! I finally did a dance performance, klezmer bottle dance, in Ithaca, with the Cornell University Klezmer Ensemble. Klezmer dance has a lot in common with belly dance, just as the music has a lot in common. Doing floorwork while balancing a wine bottle on one's head is an old Sephardic tradition. I was nervous about two things: dropping the bottle, and using inappropriate belly dance styling, but I think it went fine. But the main thing that Bob and I have been busy with has been house shopping. Bob has disliked his current house for a while. Me, I'm hardly ever there, so it doesn't matter that much do me, but I will concede that it has a tiny, shady garden, and I want a much bigger, sunnier one. In my previous life, I was a Plant Science major at Cornell. I am doing nothing with this education besides watering my houseplants, but, if I could pick the perfect house, it would have room for more plants around it. Bob also has other complaints, like saying that our kitchen is too small. I tried telling him that it's huge, maybe even too big, but he didn't belive me. He doesn't even cook anyway. He claims that if our kitchen were bigger, he would have room to cook. Whatever. I'm realizing that a person from NYC and a person from Kansas have completely different senses of scale. I concede that our house is not ideal, because a perfect house would have one huge room, with a nice wooden dance floor, for parties. That's all I need, basically: one huge room for parties and a big garden. Throw in a bathroom, a microwave, and a little cot I can set up to sleep on when the guests leave, and I'm all set. Switching houses is a complicated process, since we didn't even know exactly how much we'd have for the new one, and when we'd get the money, until we sold the old one. Selling a house means you have to hide half of your furniture, and all your clutter, including all the stuff you actually use, to make the rooms look more spacious. Our house looked great, but when I wanted a tissue or a doumbek or some basic necessity like that, I had to dig it out of hiding. And forget about hand-washing clothes and laying them out to dry, taking up space and looking cluttered. My cashmere sweater ($6 from the Salvation Army) was starting to smell like it was still on the original goat, which couldn't have helped sell the place. But we finally sold our house, which means we can sprawl out again until the closing in July. The buyer came in and marveled at the nice spacious kitchen. She asked about gardening, so I said that it was possible to fit a few tomato plants in that little strip of earth next to the driveway, and she was delighted. It's actually quite a nice house, and I'm glad we sold it to someone who appreciates it. It was built in 1880. When my sister saw it, she marveled at the intricacy of the hinges. She can't believe we'd sell a house with hinges like that. They don't make hinges like that anymore. Also, they couldn't build houses out of wood like this anymore even if they wanted to, because American chestnut trees are virtually extinct. Bob and I have found some very nice houses to replace our house with, but now we have some tough decisions to make. We've found a beautiful house, newer than our old house, as it was built in 1900. It has a huge living room, with a great hardwood floor, that just begs to have dance parties on it. Plus, it has all sorts of charming details, in the craftsman style, whatever that is. It has cleaner lines, more to my taste than the fussy Victorian style of the old place. It looks down on Cayuga Lake. It has a huge yard. There are lots of old trees in the neigborhood, yet our yard is positioned just right so it's sunny. It's a very short block away from a park with a stunning view down into Ithaca Falls. Bob can walk to work, and I can walk to the Commons to busk there. It even has a separate staircase for the servants. What's not to like? It's a good thing I'm married to Bob, since he pointed out some rather important things, such as the fact that this house looks like it's been neglected since the 1940's. In some ways, that's better than bad remodeling, but in other ways, it's inconvenient. Like, the electrical system needs some updating. I believe it's currently set up to be illuminated by gaslamps that protrude out of the walls. It has no insulation, and the leaded glass windows, while too charming to replace, are awfully leaky, so the heating bills would be higher than rent I've paid for a spacious Ithaca apartment. Bob also has objections to cracked walls. He said that our old place had cracked walls before he fixed them, before I moved in. This is lath and plaster we're talking about, so after you take off the wallpaper, then you have to laboriously remove the plaster, lath, horsehair, whatever the Victorians chose to make their walls out of, then replace it with wallboard, which is a huge job. Me, I say if we have cracked walls, that means we hang some large paintings. I think his irrational urge to have nice smooth walls might be attributed to the lead paint dust he no doubt inhaled when he did all this work on our old house. You'd think that anyone who'd done all that work once would know better than to do it again. Well, he does know better than to do all that again, since he is proposing we buy a house that was built in, like, the 1960's. It also has a large yard, and a pretty large living room, which is all I said I needed at the start of this blog, so I should be happy, right? And Bob is sensibly pointing out that, for all the effort we'd be expending to make the beautiful house practical, we could be instead be making a practical house beautiful. We could install wood floors. We could remove the horrible plastic foam imitation brick from the inside walls. We could remove the horrible plastic imitation wood beams from the ceiling that are trying to make the place look rustic. As for the outside, well, we could plant vines. If we really wanted, we could install a seperate stairway for the servants, but I don't think that would be a high priority. It's more complicated than that of course. This practical house is in a neighborhood of similarly practical houses. I look at this neighborhood, and I think "suburbs." Sure, I would be planting an interesting garden, but the rest of the neighborhood is all about boring monoculture lawns. There are no sidewalks. It's closer to the mall than to a waterfall. As a New Yorker, I have a deep-seated racial hatred of all things suburban, and I'm finding this prejudice difficult to overcome. Bob would have to take the bus to and from work, and I'd have to take the bus, or drive, to get pretty much anywhere. Now, in NYC, I have no problem with taking public transportation, so I should not have any aversion to it in Ithaca. But still, it is nicer to be in walking distance of things. Complicating matters further is that this suburban place has a huge rental apartment in back. Add that rental income to the lower property taxes we'd be paying out there, and there would be a big difference in our yearly budget. Maybe what this means is that we just haven't found the perfect house yet. Of course, if there is a perfect house out there, it would be too expensive. Hm. Anyone have any advice?

One more thing

melissatheloud — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 03:58:58 GMT

For those who enjoyed my last blog, I have one more detail to add. I didn't even realize what this meant at the time, but in retrospect, it might be the best part of the whole story. When that doctor finally took me to that other room to have a private consultation with me, one of the first things she asked me was, "Do you feel safe at home?" This threw me for a loop. I mean, Ithaca is rated the third safest city in the US. There might be some danger of slipping on all the snow and ice, but when I'm in my house at least, I feel perfectly safe. I think I've figured out what she was getting at. She was looking for an explanation for all the black-and-blue marks on my arms! If she had asked me, "Do you feel safe in this emergency room?" I would have given her a different answer. But at home, I feel quite safe from vampires. But seriously folks. I'm still worried about all the other patients in that emergency room, many of whom were not in nearly as good shape as I was, who couldn't stand up for themselves. I'm wondering what happened to them. In the first room I was in, for example, I had a roommate. I don't know what her health problem was, but the nurses gave her a diuretic, which they told her would make her have to go to the bathroom frequently. This seemed like bad news to me, as she didn't look like she was capable of getting herself to the bathroom. Sure enough, I later saw her struggling to get herself out of bed. I'm guessing this was about 2 in the morning. Since she was having so much trouble, I called for help for her, and kept calling and calling, until someone finally came by, said "Oh, you're falling out of bed" and helped her back in. I had my own problems to deal with at that point, since this was around the time I was convulsing from a bad reaction to that first drug they gave me. When I next had some attention to give to my surroundings, I saw that this woman's bed was wet. Now, it was pretty chilly in there. Maybe it was just me, but I was really cold under both a blanket and my down coat. OK, it probably was just me. But it certainly wasn't warm. The staff were all in a few layers of sweaters, and they were very actively running around, so that at least is an objective indication of the temperature. My roommate, already quite ill, had no coat, just a thin blanket, and it was now wet. I'm sure that whatever health problem she'd come in with wouldn't have been improved by hypothermia. Maybe around 5 AM, I heard someone order someone else to change this woman's wet bedding. By the time I was transfered to another room at 7:30, her bedding was still wet. That's just one incident, and I could relate a whole lot more, but I'd rather put it all behind me. OK, one more thing: you have to picture the young yuppie, with blood streaming down his face, charging around the room and shouting, "But you know what really pisses me off? This is very expensive shirt!" A nurse assured him that peroxide would take those bloodstains right out, and that quieted him down. I might complain about them, but these nurses have some serious skills. Oh, and sorry to all my friends who I didn't call. I wasn't very capable of it when I first arrived, with the oxygen mask on my face and without use of my arms and everything. Then later when I was more mobile, it was in the wee hours of the morning, and I didn't want to bother people. Also, my cell phone's battery was almost empty, which was rather nerve-wracking, as it was my only connection to the outside world, and it was fading faster than I was. OK, I'll bother you next time, but hopefully, of course, there won't be a next time. Anyway, I'm now safely in Ithaca. Bob and I kept our appointment to look at houses with a real estate agent today. Ithaca might be safe, but dang, the property taxes on some of these houses would cost more than the mortgage. Just outside the city, taxes are lower, but then again, we'd be outside the city. Much to think about.

Hospital Review

melissatheloud — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 03:29:47 GMT

I did not pass out on the Times Square 7 train platform Friday night. Instead, I decided to very quickly lower myself to the floor. In dance parlance, this was a level change. I even made a point of choosing a part of the floor that was not signifigantly grungier than other parts of the floor, in the brief time I had available to make this decision. I would have liked to have put my hood up, so my bare head wasn't lying on the grungy floor, but I didn't have that kind of energy. For those of you who have seen those signs in the subway that say what to do when you're not feeling well in the subway, and wondered if the system works as well as advertised, here is my review. When choosing a subway platform to collapse on, just as when choosing one to busk on, I have to say the busier the better. I don't know what would have happened had I collapsed on one of the more obscure platforms, but for the Times Square platform at least, help arrived almost immediately, in the form of one those orange-vested guys who sweeps up litter. As I was too large for him to sweep into his dustpan, he asked if I needed help. I was about to say that of course I didn't, I would be getting up in just a minute, when I realized that that wasn't true, so I said "Yes." It's a good thing that he could differentiate me from the people who regularly lie on subway platforms, presumably enjoying it and resenting interruptions. In no time at all, he fetched some other guys, who again asked how I was doing. It's really hard to say anything other than "Fine, and how are you?" when asked this, but considering how stupid that would sound from someone who is lying on the a subway platform, I fought this instinct. I said that I wasn't feeling well. No, I had not passed out, I had just decided to lower myself to the floor. And, er, well, no, actually, I didn't think I could get up. And why yes, thank you, by bag would make a better pillow than this floor. So more reinforcements were called. Someone put Wet Floor signs around me to stop people from tripping over me as they rushed to their trains. But New Yorkers are nimble at charging past the fallen without a look back, so I don't think this was even really necessary. Subway platforms are cold, and they conduct heat much better than the air. I became keenly aware of this as sweat soaked through my shirt, sweater, and coat, forming a perfect heat conductor between my skin and the platform. I started shivering uncontrollably, almost convulsing really. Shivering was taking so much energy, I was seriously wondering if there was any real advantage to lying on the floor in the first place, and if sitting up or even standing might be more energy-efficient. This was a moot point, however. The advantage of shivering is that it doesn't require any coordination. In really very little time, I'm sure not more than ten minutes no matter how unpleasant those minutes were, some EMTs showed up, with a cheap-looking little orange plastic wheelchair. I mean, this thing had like two tiny wheels on it, like on a shopping cart. Whatever, I was hardly in a position to take issue with the tackiness of the wheelchair. The guys put me in it, piled my hurdy gurdy and gig bag on my lap, leaned me back at a dizzying angle, and off we went. Maybe this model of wheelchair has the advantage of being light, as they really did whisk me up stairs and into the waiting ambulance. My excuse for collapsing on the platform was that I've hardly been able to keep food or even water down since, well, Sunday morning. This has happened to me before, and I could write more reviews for comparison, but I don't have time now. The short of the matter is, my digestive system doesn't work that well in the best of times, and when any little problem sets it off, it shuts down completely, starting me on a downward spiral that shuts the rest of my systems down too. This sucks. We discussed enough current events to establish that I know who the president is, unfortunately. We even theorized a bit about who the next president might be. I've often thought that my veins are my best feature, but it's always nice to hear. The EMTs found a vein worth stabbing right away, and hooked up an IV to fill me with the water and salt that I'd been unable to take in through more conventional means. They also hooked me up to an oxygen mask, like flight attendants always show off on airplanes but never let you use. They did all sorts of tests, and generally didn't like the results, but had some arguments about whether those bad results were my fault, or the fault of the equipment. I remember complaints like this from my last ambulance ride as well. The thing is, people with test results like mine are not supposed to be coherent, or even concious, and this always confuses EMTs. I like to think that I have coherence to spare. The equipment did seem pretty beaten up, with chips taken out of it, and dingy cracks. The EMTs did seem to know how to use it, though. They also were very pleasant. They thanked me for not being homeless and/or fat, since I'm sure such patients are no fun to whisk up stairs. They were so pleasant it was easy to forgive them for splattering my blood all over my sweater and coat, especially considering that these garments were not particularly clean to begin with, although the subway platform might now be a little cleaner. They asked if I had a preference for hospital, which I, not being a hospital connesseur, didn't, so they took me to "Rosie's" that is, St. Luke's Roosevelt, which was nearby, and not nearly as crowded as you'd think an emergency room would be on a Friday night in NYC. Then again, I think I got the VIP treatment, and didn't have to wait in the waiting room with the plebes. The emergency room people put me in a bed with my hurdy gurdy and gig bag, which I appreciated. They didn't like how the EMT guys had done my IV, so they redid it. Twice. They also took some blood samples from my other arm, eight of them I believe, although I was of course getting increasingly woozy with each of these blood samples so I can't be too sure about the number. They also took a tiny drop of blood for some other test by poking a hole in my finger. Why they had to do that I don't know, when there was plenty of blood scattered all around that they could have used. More got on my coat and sweater, not to mention blanket, bed, and floor. It was all different people taking all this blood, which is why they asked me why I had all these mysterious black-and-blue marks around my veins. Because you vampires keep poking holes in those veins! Sheesh. Anyway, although they started out praising my veins, they ended up complaining about them, as they had to keep looking for more and more obscure veins that the other vampires hadn't spoiled already. They also wanted a urine sample, but they actually had to put over three liters of saline into me before I was able to produce one for them. Note to self: do not get this dehydrated ever again. They also hooked me up to a blood pressure monitor, which would strangle my right arm (the one with all the black-and-blue marks) every 20 minutes or so, and some other mysterious device around my left thumb (which was on the arm that also had the IV drip.) A cool thing about the emergency room is that all the beeping things (I think there were two on me alone) form interesting polyrhythms, that drift in and out of synch with each other. With all of this blood loss, I started to feel much worse than I'd felt in the ambulance. I complained about this, and they said they'd give me something for nausea. They injected something into my IV. And I have to say that it was very effective for nausea, if that's the effect you're going for. It also made me shake uncontrollably, sort of a shiver, but also sort of a thrashing like some pathetic attempt to get away from how nauseous and generally awful I was feeling. Shortly before I collapsed on the subway platform had been the worst I'd ever felt up to that point, and now already I had a record breaker. I hope I have the name of that drug somewhere, since I never, ever want to take it again. Oh, and I have to mention that in between all this vampiric stabbing and poisoning, and also in between or sometimes during the blood pressure strangle hold, and under the blazingly bright lights, and while other patients were charging around the room ranting drunkenly or hollering for help, the nurses told me to just close my eyes and get some sleep. I complained that I was still nauseous, so they offered me some more of that horrible drug, which I declined. So the offered me a different drug, which I accepted with great trepidation, and you know what? It worked. The nausea I'd had all week was gone. They gave me a cup of apple juice and I drank it just fine, and even kept it down. After week I'd been having, this was a truly wonderful, marvelous thing. So. I was cured. What was I still doing there? I pestered the passing nurses a great deal as they scurried by, and one finally said (as she was taking yet more blood, or course) that they hadn't liked my blood before, as it was too high in acetone. Yes, my blood can actually be used as nailpolish remover. It's a wonder it didn't eat through the linoleum when they dripped it on the floor. I think I read about this somewhere way back in bio. When your body is starving, it first uses up all the stuff it's stored as fuel, and then when it runs out of that, it starts breaking down more important stuff that is really not meant to be broken down. It's like running out of fuel oil to heat your house, and instead burning the furniture and the interior walls. When the body does this the result is acetone, and also the ketones, whatever those are, that they found in my urine and hadn't liked either. They said they'd send a doctor around to talk to me, and if all went well, I could be out of there by 7 AM. As I'd been there since about 9 PM, it was about time. More time passed amid the beeping and the hollering, and the arm pressure band that hissed like a boa constrictor as it tightened around my arm. It seemed to know exactly when I might be in danger of actually falling asleep. My blood pressure was always ninetysomething over fortysomething, so I don't know why they needed the same reading over and over again, but when I complained about it, they said that they needed it, so it had to stay on. Eventually I managed to snag some passing employee, and said that I needed to go to the bathroom, but couldn't while entangled in this machine, so he took it off me. No one seemed the least bit interested in putting it back on me when I got back to bed. Around 7:30 AM, an actual doctor took me to another room for another examination and consultation. She said that if I stayed this sick, they'd have to admit me to the actual hospital, not just this emergency room, which is apparently only a higher level of hell. I told her that the second anti-nausea drug they'd given me had worked great, and I'd even felt hungry under its influence, so I didn't see why I had to stay here. It was wearing off by now (I think I'd been given it around 3 AM) but if I got another one, I was sure I could eat breakfast like a normal person, and thus give my cells something to eat besides do-it-yourself acetone. So, that was the plan. She said she'd send someone in to give me another anti-nausea pill like the second one, and breakfast. I asked what they had here for breakfast, since I have allergies (which they took note of when they admitted me, and even wrote on my armband) and she said that that was the cafeteria's department, but she was sure they'd have something. If I could actually eat breakfast, and keep it down, and that improved the results of my blood tests, then I would be free to go. I was extremely cheered by the thought of imminent breakfast. I hadn't really eaten, or at least kept food down, for about a week, as evidenced by my chemically starving, self-destructing body. Oh boy. Breakfast. A breakfast I could actually keep down, thanks to the miracle of an anti-nausea drug! This would presumably be forthcoming any minute now. Someone stuck his head in, saw that the room was occupied, and hurriedly withdrew. Someone else came in to take out the trash, and left again. Around 8:30, I wandered out of my little room to see if I could expedite breakfast in any way. "Oh!" said the receptionist. "What were you doing in room 14? We thought you were in room 6. I'll send someone around to do that bloodwork right away." While this was not exactly the news I was hoping to hear, I dragged my acetone-ridden, disintegrating body back to room 14. Around 9 AM, sure enough, a nurse came in with more of those wretched needles and tubes, and no breakfast. She was, of course, there to take more blood. I'd had enough of this. "There's been a mistake. The doctor ordered that I was to have an anti-nausea pill, and breakfast." She took actual offence at this. "You can't have breakfast if you're nauseous! I'm here to take some more blood." Yes, the actual plan, in her mind, was to keep taking my blood until it showed evidence that I was no longer starving, and only then would she allow me breakfast. There were so many possible arguments against that, based on common sense, basic biology, and even thermodynamics, that I decided not to use any of them. Instead, I said that there must be some mistake, since this was not what the doctor had told me. The doctor was the authority figure here, so the nurse should go check with the doctor before doing anything. To my surprise, this argument worked, and the vampire vanished. I'd been picturing being put in restraints, just like several of the other patients in the emergency room I'd seen, as the nurses persisted in draining my blood until I stopped starving. There wasn't much of my body left by now except acetone, but I managed to get out of bed again, stagger to the receptionist again, and again inquire about my anti-nausea pill and breakfast. Nothing came of this. I staggered back to my room. Then, I had a moment of inspiration, like a golden light beaming through storm clouds. I had a small bag of leftover popcorn in my gig bag! Bob, bless his heart, had popped it for me. I'd put it there Wednesday morning in case I ever felt hungry again, and promptly forgotten about it. Fearing that I had misremembered this, I unpacked my gig bag with trembling hands, and discovered that yes! I had popcorn! Enough of that one working anti-nausea pill was still in me that I was able to eat it. I ate it very slowly and carefully. It stayed down. I was particularly nervous about this, since according to the doctor, my whole future was riding on my ability to keep food down, and thus walk away from here a free woman, or else give in to the vampires and possibly to my doom. After eating, I felt remarkably better. It was really hardly any popcorn at all, about half a cup, but it was something besides acetone, and it made a huge difference. There was an old copy of Women's Day propping up one of the trash bins, so I picked it up. This is evidence of my extreme boredom, as well as current inability to play hurdy gurdy with all this stuff done to my arms. It's not my type of magazine. Aside from the topics being boring, it's one of those magazines where it's very clear that the product the magazine is selling is the readership. The customers of the magazine are the advertisers. Almost the entire "non-ad" portion of the magazine was made up of brief articles about great new products the readers could buy. (Boring as this was, I was amused by the ad for frozen peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. Who needs to buy that as a packaged product?) I had just about decided that reading this magazine was more boring than staring at the ceiling, when I realized that the real meat of the magazine was buried on the overleafs of the drug ads. There were oodles of "Ask your doctor" type ads for prescription drugs, that had, for example, a picture of a smiling child happily working at her piano lesson, and a supposed quote from her mom who's delighted that this wonder drug has cured her darling's ADHD, thus enabling her to endure any number of forced piano lessons without complaint. OK, it wasn't exactly phrased like that, but that was the gist. But on the back page of this ad, there was all this fine print listing the possible side effects of this drug, including hallucinations, stunted growth, and, I kid you not, "sudden death." Now this was interesting reading material. I mean really, I'd rather have my kid quit piano lessons. Apparently, some parents think differently. As interesting as this was, I soon finished the entire thing, so I looked for other ways to amuse myself. I posed myself very carefully, poring over this magazine in as healthy, acetone-free a posture as I could manage, while casually snacking on salty hulls left in my popcorn bag. If anyone walked in, I would be seen as a perfectly normal, healthy person, not worth poking with needles at all. Anyone could see that it was about time to take this stupid IV thing out of my arm. It wasn't even feeding me saline anymore, as that had run out long ago. It was now just a needle in my arm for a needle's sake. This bit of theater was wasted, however, as no one came in. Under my new popcorn power, I wandered out to try to snag random passers-by who looked like they worked there, to ask about breakfast, or if I could just leave, since I was really feeling fine by now. This didn't yield conclusive results, so I went back to my room and sulked. It now looked like I'd never get out of here. I called Bob, who was sympathetic. I called Bob's sister Ann, who is a doctor, for advice on how to get service in an emergency room, and she said that just complaining a lot is pretty much all you can do. It also helps to have someone else there looking out for you. I called my sister Thea, who lives in NYC, to see if she could come rescue me, or at least bring me some food. I left a message on her voicemail. Another vampire came in with her needles and tubes, and still no anti-nausea pill or food. I tried reasoning with her, until I remembered that I should just use the argument that worked the first time, so I did that and it worked again. The difference is, this one actually came back much later to say that the doctor had indeed called for more blood tests, but they were just using some of the blood they'd taken before. But if they hadn't needed that blood for anything before, why had they... Never mind. Anyway, around 10:15, someone finally brought in a disposable foam breakfast tray! Although I have to call it brunch at that hour. There was no explanation for this apparent change of heart or odd schedule. She also brought me an anti-nausea pill. I wanted it by that point. I mean really, under normal conditions, if I spend a sleepless night being bled, and then only have a tiny bit of popcorn for breakfast, I'm feeling pretty nauseous anyway, whatever happened the previous week. Don't you get like that? OK, maybe it's just me. Here is a complete listing of items on the tray that I was not allergic to: One hard-boiled, green-yolked egg. One very small cup of orange juice. Two packets of grape jelly. Salt, pepper, and two packets of sugar. There was also coffee, but I probably don't even need to mention how badly caffeine messes me up. A mysterious thing is that there was nothing to put the jelly on, allergen or not, unless I was supposed to put it on the egg. Whatever. I ate the egg, the salt, and even the grape jelly, slurping it out of the packets like it was some slime-themed candy marketed to kids. I drank the orange juice in one gulp. I even considered the sugar packets. At that point, anything besides acetone was pretty appealing. But I know that too much sugar can mess me up at the best of times, and these were not the best of times. In short, I ate what was edible of this brunch in less time than it takes to describe it. I then figured out how the sink in the room worked, and brushed my teeth. I brushed my hair, which was quite a spectacle by that point. I tucked in my shirt. I sat around waiting to impress someone with my ability to both eat and keep down breakfast, and then lounge about in a relaxed, yet vibrant, healthy way, but there was no one to impress. I even would have been willing to give more blood if anyone had wanted it, if it would have gotten me out of there. Blood-acetone-level-sensing-ability is not counted among our senses like sight and hearing, but I was feeling good enough that I was confident that any blood work they wanted to do would prove that the acetone was gone, replaced by nice healthy blood sugar, courtesy of all that grape jelly. I wandered out again, with a perfectly healthy, relaxed, vibrant stride, and tried to snag random passers by to ask how I was supposed to get out of here, and also how I was supposed to get this needle out of my arm. A few people said they'd send someone around to remove the needle, and a few people said they'd send a doctor around to discharge me. This cheered me for a while, until more time passed and I realized that I had to keep working at it. I kept working at it. This is not a job for the timid, but it is a great job for the bored. I eventually got the information that they couldn't discharge me until they got some test results back. That made sense at least. They sent me to sit in the radiology waiting room so they could use my bed for someone who was actually sick. All my strutting around had made the right impression. My sister called, and said she was coming to pick me up, which was great news. For all my strutting, I still felt more secure traveling in company, presuming they would actually let me leave here. I was tired of sitting, so I wandered around. I watched them serve lunch to the other patients. I really don't know what kind of connections those patients had, but they were clearly better-connected than I. What the heck, I asked if I could have lunch. One person said to just take a tray off the trolley, but then another person asked what I was doing messing around with the trolley, and what was I doing here, and was I even a patient anyway or just some healthy person who had snuck in off the streets with no good in mind? I mean, two or three shifts had gone by since I'd first come in, so these people didn't even know me as the puddle of acetone I'd been to the first shift. I pulled up my sleeves and showed her what they'd done to my arms, and she changed her tone entirely. She even offered to get me something I wasn't allergic to, and found a packet of corn chips and some fruit. I was extremely delighted by this, so I took my treasures back to my seat in the waiting room. When my sister arrived, she found a me very happily eating the pear and the corn chips simultaneously. She questioned the health value of the corn chips, but hey, they were technically food, even if they were deep fried. Around 2:30, someone reported that the results were in and were fine, so she could discharge me. Even though I was in a hurry to get out of there, I took the time to ask what these results were that had taken so long, and what all these mysterious tests had been in the first place, and what they'd needed all this blood for anyway. She said that if I wanted the test results, when I checked out at Window 5 (just follow the blue line) the person there would give me the number of the records department, and I could call them to ask about how to get the results. This implies a rather complicated filing system, in which the records of all these tests are not housed anywhere near the hospital where the tests are needed. I'll make as much of a quest out of this as my patience allows. She also gave me a prescription for the wonderful anti-nausea drug, that had cured me despite the best efforts of all these vampires. She even took that nasty old needle out of my arm, and put a really thick bandage on it, tight. Nonetheless, when I bent down to sign the thing she told me to sign ("Wait, what are you signing!" shouted my sister the lawyer) more blood than I thought I had left in me soaked all the way through that thick bandage, and poured down my arm, onto the paper I was signing, onto the chair I was awkwardly resting the paper on, and onto the floor. My sister is never happy about me signing anything without reading it carefully, and here I was signing it in blood. The nurse scurried away to get an even thicker bandage, and put it on even tighter. I somehow couldn't hold a grudge against someone who was handling the paperwork that allowed me to leave this place. After bleeding me one last time, she of course took my blood pressure. I'd rather she'd taken it before, but whatever. It was apparently high enough for her to allow me to leave. If it had been too low, they would, of course, have had to keep me there for longer, taking more blood samples I'm sure, until my blood pressure got high enough for them to discharge me. That is, they would have bled me to death. OK, with my sister there, I'm sure she would have prevented this. But not everyone in that emergency room had a friend there to help them, and a lot of them were in much worse shape than me, and I'm sure less capable of defending themselves from vampires. We headed out into the snow. We went to a drug store, but they didn't have that drug, so we decided to look more later. First, I took my sister out to lunch. It was delicious. I then looked online for all the drug stores in the area, and called around until I found one that had it. I sent my sister out to buy it for me. Due to some confusion between the drug store and my insurance card, they charged me full price, $90 for a total of 4, count them four, pills, which should be taken 3 times a day. I will follow up on this later. Anyway, this will at least get me back to Ithaca, where I can recouperate, hope my left hand shrinks to normal size, and make an appointment with my regular doctor to try to interpret those mysterious test results, assuming I can retrieve them. As I write this, my left forearm, most noticeably my hand, is badly swollen. I can type, but playing hurdy gurdy would be awkward with fingers this thick. I think they damaged the vein pretty badly, either during the three times they put that big IV in, the three times they yanked it out, or possibly just during the 16 hours they had that vein serving their purposes as a needle-storage tube, rather than its natural function to convey blood from my forearm back to my heart. It's not doing that job particularly well at the moment. I assume that it will heal itself just fine with time. I'm not going to a doctor about it, I'll tell you that much.

Wood

melissatheloud — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:21:02 GMT

I'm in Ithaca, rooting through the pile of interesting instruments I got at that estate sale way back before I left for Qatar. There's a lot of good stuff in the pile. For one, I have this huge Tibetan conical-bore wind instrument, that you would think was some kind of zurna, except it has a single reed! It's a small, thick reed, so it doesn't sound much like a clarinet. It even plays an actual useful scale, unlike some of the other things in the pile. I've also been busy cleaning off the furniture I brought back from my dad's place. My dad wants to retire to Florida (actually, he says he doesn't want to, but it's the law) so he wants to clear his NYC apartment of stuff so he can rent it out. Anyone need any stuff? I mean any stuff at all, of any kind, I'm sure my dad has a big bin of it. I've already taken a big load of candles to our weekly show at Je"Bon, and the belly dancers were happy to take them. Then last week, I took a huge bag of silly wigs, and those went over well too. There's all this stuff that I'm sure would be useful to someone, so we don't want to just throw it out, but it mostly wouldn't be worth the trouble of putting it on ebay. My dad also has some beautiful furniture that had belonged to my grandparents. Bob actually managed to fit this big beautiful china cabinet into his car, and once we get it cleaned up, it will make a great home for our instruments. We could even put a humidifier in there, so things don't parch in winter. But someone clumsily spattered paint all over it, so we're scrubbing that off the beautiful wood. Speaking of wood, our house, which was built in 1880, has quite a lot of beautiful wood in it. You can't get wood like this anymore, since the American chestnut trees that produced it were wiped out by chestnut blight. But some fool painted over all this beautiful wood with boring, and now flaking, white paint. When Bob first moved in, he set about rescuing the wood from this unjust obscurity, but after making a few rooms beautiful, he decided to live with the boring white paint in the rest of the house. I can't say I blame him, as it's a lot of work. But this is an issue now, as we're thinking of selling the place. It's a fine house, but the thing is, it's just to small to hold a decent dance party in. We have a friend who holds dance parties all the time, and we're envious of the big room she holds them in. (She'd be happy to sell her house to us, as it's usually just below an artificial pond that someone situated on top of the hill in her backyard. That is, the pond is usually above the house.) Plus, our garden is tiny and shady, and I want room to plant some pawpaw trees. You should go google pawpaw trees. They, like the wood in our house, have inexplicably been obscure for ages. And what native North American fruit becomes popular instead? The cranberry, a tiny, hard, sour fruit. Pawpaws are much more deserving of fame than the cranberry, and I want to plant some. And some native plums, which are another unjustifiably obscure fruit. Back in 1779, George Washington ordered Major General John Sullivan to wipe out the native Americans who were living in this area, with orders including these: "The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more." Sullivan followed Washington's orders, and proudly reported that his troops had destroyed "40 Indian towns, vast fields of vegetables and fruit trees, and 160,000 bushels of corn." The people he didn't manage to kill starved to death the following winter. They didn't teach that in your history class, did they? Instead they teach a different story about George Washington and a cherry tree. Apparently the warning signs were there even as child. The lesson I get from this, aside from the fact that our country's history is not exactly spotless, and they don't teach about the spots in standard history classes, is that there are some native trees that produce very tasty fruit, and I want to plant them. I just hope that Sullivan isn't around to chop them down. So now Bob and I are looking for a house with a bit more yard, as well as at least one big room to hold a dance party in. Bob also says stuff like our kitchen isn't big enough, and I'm like, dude, you don't even cook, so you are no judge of kitchens. Our current kitchen is bigger than some NYC apartments. I actually too busy to blog, what with all the stuff to do to get the house salable. Bob and I have decided on a division of labor that involves me destroying things and throwing them away, and Bob fixing them afterwards. First step, that moldy stuff in the basement.

Back in NYC!

melissatheloud — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:03:06 GMT

I am so glad to be back in NYC, I'll keep this blog short. I really missed my hurdy gurdy while I was in Qatar, so I was very glad to return to it, and find it in almost perfect tune! To my further surprise, I still remembered how to play it. I was concerned, since you know how that say that certain things are like riding a bicycle, in that you don't forget them? When, in England, I borrowed a bike from Bob's sister and felt very wobbly on it, as I haven't ridden a bike in years. But I remembered just fine how to play hg. I'm working on getting my crank calluses back. It feels so good to be playing with Djinn again. At the show at Je'Bon last night, I forgot that I didn't know how to play a few tunes, so I played them. Also, it's such a delight playing for such talented dancers! Enough blogging. More busking!

Hey, I'm in England

melissatheloud — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:43:00 GMT

Just a brief post from England on my way back to the states. I have a niece and nephew with British accents! Theyr'e adorable. If all goes well, I'll be back in Ithaca in time for the New Year's Eve contra dance.

Leave the country cleaner than you found it

melissatheloud — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 22:05:56 GMT

I have too much to cram into one blog, but I'll try. Bob is in the kitchen reassembling the skeleton of something with very long fangs, and he occasionally shows off his work, but I'll try to blog through this distraction. Bob's final grades are in, so we've actually had some time to go exploring in the last few days. Bob turned in his rental car for a rental 4-wheel drive, which was necessary for serious exploring. Bob's colleagues often have suggestions of places to explore, but we've also done well finding a spot on the map, or on Google Earth, that looks interesting and heading in that direction, seeing what we see along the way. The roads are totally under construction, by the way, like everything else in the country. Alongside the roads, which are being built as we drive on them, there is flat desert to the horizon, speckled with subtle hints of green from the tiny, hardy plants that live their slow, harsh lives here. But more often the view out the window is of the construction vehicles tearing up the aforementioned delicate desert ecosystem to build suburban housing. The day before yesterday, we went to the shore near Simaisma, where some folks found a new species of sea slug in March. After driving through a lot of tedious desert, we got to a beach, with pretty shells, but most importantly, mangroves! The land may be barren, but on the shore, there are honest-to-goodness trees, with shiny green leaves and everything, and little tweeting birds flitting between the branches, singing songs that did not exactly harmonize with either of the calls to prayer coming from the two nearby mosques simultaneously. I think it was low tide, which meant that we could walk right up to the mangroves, but we tried not to step on those peculiar breathing tubes they send up out of the sand. A short drive later, we got to salt marshes. It looked almost like a familiar landscape out the window, with low green plants almost covering the sand, and trees (i.e. mangroves) but when we got out of the car, we could see that it was quite alien. For one, this environment was incapable of supporting human life, at least human life that weighs as much as us. What looked like solid ground, or at least damp sand, was, in fact, mud made of water, salt, and a bit of pale grey dust. Bob said that the low plants looked sort of like salicornia, which is edible. Now, Bob is not a botanist, and in general seems to think that two plants must be the same species if they are both green. But he was willing to taste some, and declared that it tasted like salicornia, i.e. like salt. Now, I was pretty sure that everything in this environment, including the lower legs of our pants by this point, tasted like salt, but I was willing to give it a try. So I put a bit in my mouth, but first licked off the salt that was covering the outside, which was considerable. Then when I was sure that was gone, I bit into the juicy, crispy plant itself. It tasted like salty broccoli. I can see how it would be good mixed with other, non-salt-based vegetables. Wandering through the salt marsh, we found a small skull, and wondered what bird it was from, until we saw that it still had a tooth. Then we wondered what mammal it was from, which was a more interesting question somehow, since we hadn't seen any local mammals like this. We looked around to find more of its skeleton, and found leg bones, vertebrae, some fearsomely long teeth, and even a little hand-like paw. It's like a build-your-own-mammal kit. I'm guessing it was originally about as big as a large subway rat. We'll have to ask someone what this is. In our wanderings, we saw many beautiful but timid birds, soaring white birds, little shorebirds that run along the beach on long legs, little chirping birds in the mangroves. But the most birds we saw were on one stretch of beach, where we counted 25, and got really good close-up looks at all of them. This was easy, because they were all dead. Little songbirds, long-legged little shorebirds, two big stout ducks, and a pink flamingo, all lying there on beds of salicornia, feeding the flies. We have no idea what this was about. We have a theory that someone was using them for target practice. I would develop some theory about bird flu (which is the reason there are no eggs in the supermarket) but it seems unlikely it would be isolated on this one short stretch of beach. We didn't see any really old bird skeletons or any really recent ones, which would suggest that bird death was a continuing occurrence on this beach. It looked like most of these birds had died a week or two previously. One of Bob's colleagues had mentioned that he found a great stretch of beach that featured the corpse of a dugong, and bags of very tasty tea that apparently fell off a ship. We soon found a large plastic bag, full of small plastic bags, full of tea. Unfortunately, this was a while after Bob's colleague had been to this beach, and the plastic bags had let sea water in by now. But more treasures had washed up on this beach. Between a couple of rotting corpses of birds, we found a larger skeleton, and I mean much larger. We were wondering if it was a camel, but we didn't see leg-bones. Then we saw a blubbery hide like an old blanket, and realized that it was the remains of the dugong. Now, I've gotten along just fine never having seen the skeleton of a dugong and never felt that I've been missing out, and I also have to say that no part of said skeleton has ever been on my wish list. Then again, when was I going to get another chance to own a piece of a genuine dugong? Someone had already taken the skull of course (wouldn't you?) so we grabbed one of the choicer vertebrae. The rest is still there if anyone wants it. Later, we saw a big flock of flamingos off in the distance, so I was glad that the dead one on the beach wasn't the only one I'd see. Now, the odd thing about them being off in the distance is that they were standing knee-deep in the water, and we were standing on the beach as close to the water as we could be without sinking too deeply, and they were still so far away we could barely see them. This is because the beach slopes less than many dance floors. If you wanted to go for a swim, you would walk for several blocks before the water was even up to your knees. Another odd thing is that there are no waves. There are just little ripples, small enough to fit in a sink. This flat grey expanse is home to a whole lot of creatures that I can't describe since I didn't bring a shovel. All I know about them is that they dig burrows for themselves, and pile up little round balls of wet dust all around the entrances to their burrows. Also, snails like tiny multicolor striped unicorn horns crawl all over this landscape, leaving little trails in the sand behind them. Yesterday, after driving through a lot of construction, we went to Ras Albrouq Nature Preserve, which has a sign at the entrance telling you not to bother the ostriches. Bob actually saw ostriches there on a previous trip, but I'm telling you right now that we saw no ostriches on this trip, so you might as well stop reading. What we did see were mountains! OK, not mountains by Ithaca standards, but certainly by Qatar standards. These mountains were quite bizarrely shaped. They were totally flat on top, then had sides that either went straight down as sheer cliffs, or sometimes actually went in, so they were hourglass-shaped. Sometimes they had sides that sloped out like proper mountains, but those were not the majority. They were all the same height. Anyway, the ones with sides that sloped out could be climbed up, although they were very steep, and composed of tumbling, fluffy rocks and deep dust. You might question my use of the word "fluffy" but I assure you that they were full of holes, so they looked kind of like lace. They somehow didn't look volcanic, so I think the holes were the result of them not being very waterproof, so rain erodes holes in them very easily. Lace made out of rock is rather scratchy. So we sprinted up a mountain, and Bob took photos of me, then Bob sprinted up, and I realized that I forgot my camera in the car, so I went down and took photos of him. OK, maybe it wasn't a real mountain. It's the most geography they have around here, though, so we made the most of it. Then we sprinted up another mountain together, and walked around on top. It was totally flat up there, with grey rocks and grey dust, just like on the lower level. It was like seeing two apartments on different floors of the same building that have exactly the same layout, but one has a better view.Well, it wasn't exactly the same, as the furnishings were different. There were a few little dry shrubs on the lower level, but mostly just lichens on top. Looking down into the gorge between a couple of mountains, we saw an old tent, that wouldn't have looked out-of-place in a dumpster at Pennsic. So I went down to check it out, and saw that it was hand-sewn with big stitches, and the poles were bamboo and plumbing pipes. It was now the same color as the dust. There were little footprints everywhere which we thought at first were from a dog, but we're wondering if they're actually from a desert fox, which supposedly lives around here. After more delightful wildlife, including a closer flock of loudly honking pink flamingos, a large neat burrow entrance with cute little pawprints around it, and something Bob said looked like a dog tick, we drove on. We soon saw a mysteriously sparkling field. Unlike the rest of the desert, it didn't have even tiny plants on it. So we wandered around, and found that it was totally covered with long, clear crystals growing out of the ground like a manicured lawn. Bob tasted a crystal (I am going to lose that man one of these days if he keeps this up) and declared that it wasn't salt, so it was probably gypsum. Moving on, we got to a rocky shore with many little tidepools full of scurrying crabs and things, and more beautiful shells. This charming spot was overlooked by a watchtower that didn't have any Keep Off signs on it, but from the way the stairs were swinging, and the way the ground was littered with pieces of watchtower, it didn't really need a sign. If it were in the US, it would have had a sign, and a big barrier around it, and still there would be graffiti at the top. It was starting to get dark, so we drove in a home-wards direction. By the way, there are no actual roads in these places. There are tracks, which we stick to since we don't want to kill any more of the desert than has already been killed. You can really see the tracks very clearly, since they're double lines of bare sand going through the relatively green desert. Bob decided to take a track over what looked to me like a scary hill, and took us to a bizarre place. There were little round huts made of stone all scattered all around a little gorge. They had no roofs. A few of them were on the second level, that is, the tops of the hills. One was on top of a long-stemmed mushroom of a hill, so it was accessible only by rope, and the rope was broken. These huts were all identical, and, despite the primitive style of their construction, seemed pretty recently-made. Bob's theory is that this was an official park campground. I don't know, as people here seem to camp just fine in tents. We've seen lots. Today, we set out in a different direction, and saw a sign for Al Khor Public Garden! This was very exciting to us, as we haven't seen a real garden for ages. So we drove to it, and saw beautiful green trees rising out of the desert in the distance. Sure enough, we got to a parking lot, where we parked with the other cheerful families, and walked through a gate, where I expected to pay an entrance fee or something, but no, it was free. It wasn't really what I would call a garden, but it was a really nice park. I reminded me a lot of Flushing Meadow Park, in that municipal sort of way. It had well-established lawns with real weeds, and populations of lively insects, not like these scary monoculture lawns we have in Doha. Bob got some pictures of some beautiful butterflies. It also had trees full of cheerful birds, lots of white-cheeked bulbuls, which have looks and personalities sort of like chickadees. The park was full of families enjoying the beautiful day. Oddly, although I saw lots of women in abayas, I didn't see any men in thobes, the traditional Qatari clothing. People wore whatever, Western clothes, beautiful saris, etc. I marveled once again that they'd seemed to make no effort to plant flowers that belong in a desert. Here as in Doha, there were big simple beds of petunias all over the place, with occasional big simple beds of marigolds for variety, with irrigation tubing running alongside each plant. These are the same plants I can grow in Ithaca, and I don't need to see them here too when there are many beautiful desert plants that would probably do well here if given a chance. I've seen many beautiful desert plants in California, Arizona and Colorado, as well as in Oman, and I think they should be tried here. But anyway, as we strolled under the shade of the trees, I heard a distant thumping, and tried to figure out if it was rhythmic. I eventually decided that it was. It sounded sort of like someone thumping on one of those big plastic water cooler jugs, like the Dilbert Marching Band in the Ithaca Festival Parade a few years ago. Anyway, this was the closest to live music we'd been, so I was determined to check it out. We strolled in that direction, Bob photographing insects along the way. Closer, I decided that it actually sounded sort of like a drum circle, with two drums at least. Also, it sounded like someone was banging on a tin can with a stick occasionally. We finally found the source. The two drums were a set of tabla, but not the classical Indian tabla I know. These were bigger, with a seriously big bassy large drum, and even a pretty big smaller drum. I had no idea that tabla could carry all the way across the park, but this drummer was really playing them. I'd say he was playing in a folk style, with an intricate, yet groovy beat, not the highfalutin complicated art style you hear in Indian classical music. I think he was playing in a fast 7 for one song, basically Doum---Tek--, with various fills, ornaments, and breaks. Also, he would occasionally bang on a tin can for variety. The drummer was also singing, great, beautiful songs. Up close like this, the sound was perfectly balanced. Only the bass carried all the way across the park, where it sounded loud, but up close it was just loud enough. There was also a great sarod player, playing a very old-looking sarod, the color of the desert dust, that sounded great, and also surprisingly loud. With its skin head, it sounded sort of like a cumbus. These wonderful musicians were part of a small gathering of guys hanging out and enjoying the music. One guy was dancing in a random happy sort of way, which probably had an unfortunate effect on the video he was trying to take simultaneously. We sat at what we felt was a respectful distance from these musicians, as we weren't sure of the etiquette. Even if we knew Qatari etiquette, which we don't, that wouldn't have helped as we're guessing these guys were Pakistani. After only a few songs, a soccer game, a volleyball game, and cricket match started to get set up simultaneously on the lawn in front of us by a great many cheerful park-goers, so the musicians sensibly put their instruments safely away. Bob and I got up and continued our journey. We theoretically set out today in search of old petroglyphs that are supposedly around here. So, we did as the guidebook said, drove to the abandoned village (which seemed to have been abandoned in the 70's, judging from the remains of the cars in the garages) and made a right into the desert. However, rather than petroglyphs, we found instead a long row of tents and RVs, extending all along the coast until the next town. Whatever. We kept driving. Bob at one point decided to follow a little track off-road, and took us to a beach. This one had rocks off in the water, with birds perched on them, that the zoom on the camera revealed to be pigeons. We could hear them cooing when we got out of the car. There were also cuttlefish bones all over the place. You know, the ones you buy in pet shops for your parakeets and canaries to nibble on for the calcium. They were all over the beach, one with part of a cuttlefish still attached. Many of them had beak marks, as the local birds do indeed nibble on them. Then we saw something very sad. A small sea turtle was on the beach, flies in its eyes. There was still a ragged old fishing net wrapped around its neck and front flippers. Just think about being a sea turtle, and you get caught in this weird thing, and it wraps around your neck and is slowly choking you to death, and you can't get it off because you don't have hands. Now, I'm not a a vegetarian, and I somehow wouldn't have been so upset if someone had killed this turtle for food, but it was just so pointless for this rare creature to have died just because someone was careless about how he disposed of his old nets. I couldn't do anything for this turtle, but I could do something for other turtles, so Bob and I picked up some litter off the beach before it could wash into the sea and kill some more turtles. This was quite a job. I believe I've mentioned this before, but beaches in Qatar are the filthiest, most trash-strewn places I've ever seen. They are worse than the most littered street in NYC after the rowdiest, most drunken holiday. They are worse than the apartments and even the cars of former friends of mine. They are covered with trash, not just the trash that washes up on shore from afar, but trash obviously left by picnickers, still laid out in neat picnic formation. There were trash cans every few yards, so as Bob and I walked along, we would pick up trash to put in the cans, but our hands would get full before we'd gotten even halfway to the next can. The cans were generally empty, so there was at least plenty of room. We threw away plastic rope, plastic bags, plastic nets, plastic bottles... Of course, I don't know where this stuff goes after it goes into a trash can. For all I know, it gets dumped into the sea. We could only do so much of this before getting overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the task, so we drove on. Maybe next time we're here, we should organize a beach clean-up day. Sort of adopt-a-beach. In our drive, we saw what looked like another abandoned village off the road a ways, so we went off road on an established track, and saw that yes indeed it was an abandoned village, like the ones we saw crumbling in Oman last year. It had a sign with some Arabic and a bit of English asking us not to disturb the archaeology. The sign was riddled with bullet holes. This village was so old, the mosque actually didn't have loudspeakers on it! We climbed up the narrowest spiral staircase I've ever been on. I mean, I could barely fit my shoulders between the wall and the inner post. The steps seemed to be very sturdily made of some sort of cement, but then I looked up and saw that the undersides of the steps were made of thin twigs with a lot of insect holes in them, and mud insect nests. This was providing the structure to the mud that comprised the tops of the steps. Whatever, we got up fine, and had a nice view of crumbling buildings. Then we spiraled down to explore the ruins up close, and saw lots of tiny lizards scampering over the crumbling walls. A path led from the ruins to the beach, so we checked that out. This beach had to win the prize for the most trash-strewn. We can't even blame local Qatari picnickers for it, since most of it had clearly washed up from the sea. There were no trash cans to put this stuff in, but when I saw that huge old net half in the water, I had to do something about that at least. It was truly so huge I could barely drag it up the beach. I dragged it up past the high-water mark and dumped it there. Bob, meanwhile, after obeying my instructions to photograph me doing this good deed, ("Be prepared, and be careful not to do, your good deeds, when there's no one watching you") went back to his favorite hobby of picking up rocks and seeing what scurries away. Crabs scurried out from under these rocks to what they seemed to feel was the safety of our shoes. Anyway, more than just trash had washed up on this beach. There were truly ridiculous numbers of cuttlefish bones, piled up like autumn leaves. I also found some parts of a sea turtle, a much bigger turtle than we'd found earlier. It had been dead much longer, so I could pick up parts of it without inconveniencing any flies. Bob found an interesting jawbone, with lots of sharp teeth. After this trip, we have enough souvenirs to furnish a natural history museum, if we can figure out what these things are. These mementos will probably be really valuable once all these creatures are extinct.

Midi carols

melissatheloud — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:34:04 GMT

The decorations in the lobby of this apartment building now include a plastic tree and a very loud midi carol player, playing all the mall standards. Where's Islam's famed hostility to music when you need it? Bob said it sounded like a blog entry, so here it is. Hm, what other news? Bob and a bunch of his fascinating colleagues and I went out for Indian food a few days ago. When we walked in, I thought to myself, "I don't need a place this posh." I mean, I could have done just fine without the jewels set into the tables, and assorted other products of the interior decorator's art that I wasn't interested in enough to recall now. But once we settled in, I realized that not only did I not need a place this posh, I didn't even want a place this posh. The waitstaff kept fawning over us in an annoyingly groveling way. I'm perfectly capable of putting my napkin on my own lap. And they didn't seem to get the concept that we were sharing all our dishes according to which we happened to like best, so we didn't want them spooned out onto our plates for us before we'd had a chance to taste them. The menu was big, glossy, and gorgeous with pictures of India. This restaurant specialized in food from one state, but I forget which one, sorry. The menu was amusingly written, in perfectly good English on one side, Arabic on the other. The amusement came from half the categories having headings meant to discourage you from ordering those items. There was a bread section, but it said that people there don't eat bread, they eat rice. There was a vegetarian section, but it said that vegetarian food is eaten only as a last resort by people who have no choice. One dish in the vegetarian section claimed to be flavored with, I kid you not, "freshly broken clay pot." None of us were brave enough to order that. But, despite the discouragement of vegetarian dishes, we did get an eggplant dish, which had tiny black eggplants the size of cherry tomatoes, served with their long stems in a puddle of brown sauce. It was very tasty. We ordered all sorts of different dishes, but they all came out looking exactly the same, brown puddles of sauce with brown lumps of meat (or eggplants in one case.) The sauces all tasted quite different at least. Except for the tiny eggplants, there were no vegetables on the table. At least two of us found the food, while flavorful, to be lacking in heat, so we asked for a few chillis on the side, but they never came. People sat around trying to figure out which dish was which, while relating stories of professors they knew who had gone insane. This feast came to 50 Qatari rials each, or about $15. When we got home, I ate some vegetables and felt satisfied. Oh, and we taught our dance class Friday! Bob had been very cautious about inviting over too many people, since he was concerned that they wouldn't all fit in our living room. Is this a guy thing, that you think your living room is too small despite all evidence to the contrary? I just measured it, and our living room is 16 feet 3 inches by 30 feet 8 inches. Approximately. In realtor terms, that's frickin huge. Yes there's some furniture, but push the furniture aside and it's still frickin huge. We could hold a contra dance in here. Despite this, Bob was concerned that it might get too crowded, which means that, of the few people who knew about it and wanted to come, only four were able to fight their way through traffic to get here. We got a call from a couple of people who were stuck in traffic and gave up on trying to reach us. We live right across from City Center Mall, which is convenient for me as there's a hypermarket in there, but on a weekend night (Thursday or Friday) traffic is ridiculous. The mall is where people go to hang out, stroll around, see and be seen. Even other times, it's always very impressive to see the young women trying to out-modest each other with their silky black abayas and masks, and the young men adjusting their head coverings at rakish angles. I'm not into malls, but you have to consider that before malls, people here really didn't have any place to hang out besides their homes, so they've made a big change. But anyway, given the lack of public transportation, everyone drives or takes turquoise taxis to the mall, which means that even up here on the 17th floor, we can hear lots of honking from cars trapped in traffic. Oh, although it's called the 17th floor here, it would be called the 18th floor in the states. They start with the ground floor as zero, then you go up one flight and you're on the "first" floor. Lots of people get into the elevator with us, and take it up just one flight, because there's a health club up there. Then I assume they get on the stairclimber. But anyway, Friday, the people who managed to get to our apartment had a good time, I think. Bob and I taught swing, which went over quite well. We also demonstrated a few other dances, and asked people to demonstrate dances they knew, so we got some Lebanese debke and Turksih line dances, and French ceroc as done by a Croatian from Australia in Dubai. This came with stories of what a fun, happening place Dubai is. Anyway, this is the sort of event we'll have to have more often when we come back next year. If Dubai can be a fun place, then so can Doha.

Party by the pool

melissatheloud — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:43:01 GMT

My last blog was a kvetch, so here's a nicer blog. Bob and I just got back from a very nice party, a barbecue by the pool of a beautiful compound where one of his colleagues lives. This being Qatar, the emailed invites asked us to RSVP so our host could give our names to the security guard at the gate of the compound. Also, this being Qatar, we got a bit lost on the way there, and seemed to be driving through miles of interior decoration shops. We finally reached a sort of maximum density of decorating shops, and got to something that's actually called the Decoration Roundabout by our GPS. So we found the compound, which is near there. This compound was beautiful, with attractive buildings, green lawns, and lots of palm trees. But the best part, it seemed to me, was this big common area where the barbecue was, near a common building for events, with a gym with big windows that looked out on the glowing blue pool and hot tub. I'm not into the decorating aspects of this view, but it was nice to have a place where people could hang out. These people really are a fascinating, intelligent, and diverse lot. They really should have their own blogs. They also are good cooks (and shoppers) and brought all sorts of tasty dishes. One guy brought a guitar and harmonica, and sang classic rock songs, accompanied by whoever thought they knew some of the words. It took me a while to figure out that the song I know as Lola does not include the spelling "Y O D A" and include verses about lifting logs with The Force. When we got back, Bob pointed out that this building also has a pool and health club, so we went to those, and sure enough this building has a big glowing blue pool too, open to the sky on the second floor through some miracle of architecture, and a gym, and a big outdoor party area. With all these amenities, it would be a shame not to host an event ourselves, so Bob and I have invited folks over Friday. People who saw us dancing to some of the classic rock tunes were very enthused about the idea of us teaching swing dance. We certainly have the room for it.