Farewell 2009.

I wrote a post that was beginning to sound far too "me, me, me."

The delete key is a very satisfying tool.

What shall I do in 2010?

I can tell you what I have done so far. I have learned to play Auld Lang Syne. (But not that good. Maybe next year). I have also discovered that when it comes to Mardi Gras beads, old Ivan is faster than any kitten. I could learn a thing or two from that.

Boy, do I need a better camera

I finally got a good shot with a cat and a mandolin. Clearly, it would have been a better shot with a better camera, but oh well.

This is what I do when my fingers are recovering.

Snow and mandolins

Forgetting I had taken Wed and Thursday off, I had told Nate at Finger Lakes Guitar Repair that there was no hurry on the mandolin because I would never make it to Ithaca before the weekend anyway. Once I realized I was missing three full days to noodle around on it, I gave myself a V-8 bonk to the forehead.

But yesterday the phone rang and it was Nate letting me know the mandolin was finished! I said I'd be right over, but of course the cat facility sucked me in for a heavy cleaning and I was a half hour late. Luckily he was helping someone else.

Having my own crazy space (the cat facility), it's always rather fulfilling and relaxing to wander into someone else's. Finger Lakes Guitar Repair is a workshop on King Road is a warm corner full of hardcase guitars waiting for repair or pickup, a workbench, a rack for woodworking planes, another for small handtools, a computer, and countless other wonderful things I failed to register. My little Kentucky sounded and felt so much better. He straightened the neck, lowered the action, replaced the strings, and did some fretwork, handed me some pages of chords, a list of recordings, and a CD of mandolin music, AND sat me down for a 10-minute "what I wished I known when I first picked up the mandolin" session. All for fifty bucks and a set of new strings.

And he had already sent me down to Ithaca Guitar Works to pick up some proper picks and a dampit.

I cannot begin to express how much better the mandolin sounds and feels. When I looked around on the internet and saw every page yammering about proper set-up (a term I had never even heard before), I initially was skeptical about spending money on a $100 instrument. But looking further I realized a LOT of beginners were playing $100 instruments, and if they have a truss rod, there might be quite a bit that can be improved on a neglected instrument. The action on this one was so high it was eating my fingertips up. I wrote that off to me being new to playing...until I picked her up yesterday and touched the strings. What a difference.

Anyway, the mandolin is nothing special, but she's fine until she falls apart, I'm told, and by then I'll know if I'm going to keep playing, and I'll have learned a bit before even thinking about buying a better instrument. After years of picking up tinny guitars (it's no use wondering how a proper set-up would have improved those instruments since I was starving-broke back then anyway) it's nice to have a playable instrument.

Now, of course, I'm noticing the sound of a mandolin every time it crops up on the radio, and I drop everything, grab mine, and try to play along. It's amazing what you don't notice until you have reason to.

I wonder what else I'm missing in life that I just haven't noticed?



And yes, like everything else in my life, I am arranging to have a hanger on the wall so the cats can't knock the mandolin over when it's not in its case. I considered a floor stand, but quickly concluded the cats and dog would knock it flying in short order.

Just an aside...

Frighteningly, it appears mandolin players are also internet fanatics. There are all sorts of listservs, videos, and online training pages. It's like having a beginning instructor in your den. They appear to be very big on "community" --much like the feral cat folks.

However, the last thing I need is another reason to be on a computer. :)

I'm very pleased with the mandolin. It is exactly the kind of instrument I can curl up with and play. The neck, however, is very narrow. I keep reminding myself I did this with a violin and should be able to deal with a mandolin over time, but it's hard to forget that nice, wide, guitar neck. Ah well!

I realize this mandolin probably needs to be professionally set-up. Luckily that's not a very expensive proposition.

One happy thought I stumbled across as I limped through chords and scales, was that I was relearning my childhood violin fingering. And suddenly there was a little emotional flash... "I could play violin again, down the road!"

So, while nursing my poor string-abused fingers, I punched in "violin and mandolin" and "mandolin set up ithaca" and found this sweet instrument at IthacaString.com.



Which just goes to show, I can find a connection to cats on ANY subject whatsoever.

Mandolins and eagles...

So, I come from a musical family.

However, I myself did not inherit the "patience" gene. I played violin as a child (a beautiful instrument of my mother's), dibbled around on our baby grand (a lucky purchase made by my parents when a neighbor had to sell three pianos in a tiny village that should scarcely handle the sale of one), and I've picked up the guitar countless times.

And I've put them all down again. If you don't have patience and dedication, you aren't really a musician. You are a person who appreciates music. There's nothing wrong with that. After all, musicians need an appreciative audience!

I own a Baldwin piano, which came to me via Mark's family. Now and then I lift the lid and attempt to run through the children's pieces I used to play. She needs a tuning, and two of the keys don't play. I haven't called in a technician because I fear a couple-hundred-dollar tuning will turn into a many-hundred-dollar repair.

Yet I refuse to let her go because...well...when good pianos come into your life, it is very hard to let them go.

Lately, primarily because the music of Nickel Creek carried me through my first year here alone, I've wanted to learn the mandolin. I've considered picking up the guitar again instead since I'm already familiar with it, but I would like an instrument small enough to travel with. I had purchased a Martin Backpacker about 8 years ago for that reason, and quickly learned that they are impossible to play comfortably, especially in a classical position.

Yet I always have this silly dream of sitting on my porch, tilted back in a chair, picking away at some stringed instrument or another, on a warm sunny day.

Primarily because my not-so-affluent family somehow managed to stumble across beautiful musical instruments to grace my childhood, I am a tone snob. Really, really a tone-snob. I can't abide an instrument that sounds at all tinny, but I also refuse to spend a lot of money on an instrument I may put aside in six months. I also understand that a good instrument costs good money, and looking for a dirt-cheap good instrument is somewhat of an oxymoron, and shouldn't even be admitted aloud in musical circles.

Mandolins are already a bright-sounding instrument, so there is a very fine line between "bright" and "sounds like a dime-store ukulele" when you are in the price range I am looking at.

Last weekend, while Christmas shopping, I wandered into a store in Ithaca and was confronted by an entire wall of mandolins. Not being able to play, I asked if one could be played by someone in the store. The guy working there picked one up (warning me they were all beginner's instruments of exactly the same model), but he could scarcely get it tuned, and the sound was brash and unpleasant. I thanked him, said "no, thanks," and accepted the fact that I would never find a really-low-cost playable mandolin and perhaps I should just invest in the piano I'd been neglecting.

Even though I couldn't play it on the porch on a warm summer day.

Yesterday, I had a wonderful Christmas here at the house with my sisters and my mother. Because I am hours from everyone, it was a far-too-short visit. But even in only six hours, the shared meal, the visiting, the laughter over gifts, the reluctance to leave...well, it was one of those good jumping off days that you think "OK, maybe I should try really hard to be a better person from now on."

I'm still bundled up in a lot of anger, and I could see moments yesterday when that came through. You'd think after 16 months, it would be gone, and on the phone last night I apologized to my mom for my flashes of rudeness. Her understanding response made me cherish my family all the more.

It really was a good day.

Kind of like my experience with instruments, these starting-over moments can be too-quickly forgotten, so I try to hang onto the glow as long as I can.

I had not forgotten it this morning. I had had a good night's rest. I had a steaming cup of coffee at my elbow.

I clicked on "musical instruments" in Craigslist just for the heck of it.

There was only one post today, also from an early Saturday riser:



It was a Kentucky mandolin, and was a step up from their basic model. In other words, a pretty good little mandolin, and it was $100. That was less than the tinker toy mandolin I'd looked at the week before.

I immediately sent an email, hoping that at 7:30 am the day after Christmas, I would be one of the first fools on Craigslist.

I was.



One of the best things about Craigslist is that you are buying from real people, in their own homes. The seller in this case was a student from Green Mountain College (who had good questions about Marcellus natural gas leasing) at his parent's home in the hills of Newfield not so far from me. Their pretty little plotthound mix didn't much like the smell of me. I had no ideal plotthounds could bell out as clearly as any coonhound.

When I picked up the mandolin, I noticed there was a small crack between the fretboard and the neck, but as soon as I ran my thumb over the strings, out-of-tune and all, you could tell she had a good sound. A mandolin is tuned just like a violin, so there was an immediate memory leap. This instrument had the same depth as a decent starter violin, and she had a comfortable heft and balance.

It was a lovely trip, to meet great people, and now I have a lovely little mandolin.

Because I was up and about so early, I ran into Ithaca to feed the cats, came home over the hills, loaded up the trash, headed over other hills to the Barton transfer station, and while coming through the Catatonk Valley, I saw a large line dipping and gliding in the grey sky.

It was an eagle.

It's not many people who can sit in their beat-up old truck with a mandolin in the passenger seat and watch an eagle fly overhead.

Life is good.

Something other than media commentary...

Between work, kitten care, adoptions, and general house stuff, my blogging track record has fallen. Tonight I lurked around the house getting photos of the gang when they were unaware. Ditz, as usual, was in command of the bed.



I finally got a good shot of Molly! The poor girl has been seriously neglected since the temperature fell. Long walks just don't thrill me when it's 7F out!



Thankfully, the kittens keep her occupied. I'm not sure what she'll do when her buddy Cheeto goes to his new home this weekend.



Cheeto has been a true joy to have around, but it's time to him to move on to a new chapter in his life.

Please tell me he did not say this

Chris Denton, an attorney who represents large landowner groups looking to make lucrative deals with energy companies, put it this way: "Right now, we have the luxury of being able to have this discussion about what is the best way to regulate the Marcellus. But you don't worry about highfalutin intellectual matters when you are starving. There might be a time when we are in such economic distress, we just have to do it."

The national economic picture is not looking promising, he added: "Remember, we are at war."

I have been struggling with the Marcellus drilling issue. If you are not local, you may not know that our region is on top of a large band of natural gas deep in the earth. But it is not in pockets, where companies might engage in "hit or miss" vertical wells. It is all through a layer of shale that must be fractured apart with water and chemicals, and accessed via vertical and horizontal drilling, which would enable companies to draw it out.

It also means pumping a huge volume of water out of our creeks and rivers, adding toxic chemicals, pumping it into the ground, and pumping it out again, additionally contaminated with radioactivity.

Guess who is sitting on top of that Marcellus Shale? You guessed it. Little ole Wildrun.

I am one of those landowners who really could benefit from the money from natural gas leases, and royalties, should there be any. I barely manage to meet my bills each month, and that wouldn't change much even if I stopped rescuing cats. A lease extension payment last fall enabled me to keep this place. The lease company then sent me a letter saying they weren't going to honor that lease extension to pay me the remainder of what they had offered. Luckily, my lease with that company has now expired. They came to my door asking for me to consider a new lease, but hey, they didn't honor the last one so I'll be damned if I'll sign another with them.

If they HAD honored the first lease extension, right now they would be paying off that agreement and I would be refinancing my farm, paying off my ex-husband, and wouldn't have to make a large mortgage payment. But they didn't.

I'm desperate, but not totally stupid, to sign with them again. Especially now that additional concerns have arisen about Marcellus Shale drilling.

Tonight yet another article appeared in local press. The local coverage recently has been excellent--primarily because local activists jumped into the picture.

I am one of those who feels drilling is inevitable, but that we need safeguards in place during drilling, and we need to examine what we are going to do with all of this water. We also need to examine the fact that landowner's wells WILL be contaminated. It may not be many, but it will happen.

I was pretty disgusted by the patter that came out of the mouth of the landsman who showed up on my doorstep last week trying to get me to re-sign. He insulted the governor and the DEC, compared NY to southern CA, admitted his job provided no health insurance (!!!!!), and then handed me an offer than was worse than the one the company had not honored before.

However, I'm also not impressed with lines from "experts" like "highfalutin intellectual matters" and "Remember, we are at war." I really, really hope those were unfortunately remarks taken out of context.

Since when it talk about looking before you leap, "highfalutin?" And what in hell does the war have to do with this?

All I see are people wanting to make money. Not starving farmers so much as natural gas companies and lawyers. And yes, I want to make money, too. I want to keep my farm. But I don't want to be the one who contaminates my neighbor's well, either.

I don't find that to be a "highfalutin" concern.

I'm awfully tired of listening to men who want to sound like they are good old boys. I'd like my landsmen and the expert lawyers to sound more like they understood those "highfalutin intellectual" concerns and took them seriously.

I was going to join one of those "large landowner's groups" and now I even wonder about them. Are they really about more protections for the land, or just more bonus money and higher royalties?