Skunks

I heard skunks skweeling outside my cabin, so I whistled a tune as I passed them by, so they wouldn't expect that I was being sneakrative and bellow from below their tails. Success!

Early Music Week

Swimming, as you may have guessed from previous posts, makes me feel as good as a popsicle tastes. Cherry popsicles are my favorite, although Shark Bars, which are lemon-flavoured (not shark-flavoured), are beginning to dominate this particular arena of my existence. They are like swimming on a very, very hot and humid day, whereas cherry popsicles are more like going to the dentist and having a flouride treatment. Orange popsicles are like going to Funtown, and root beer popsicles are like my mother. Blue raspberry popsicles are confusing, lime popsicles are sort of unsatisfying, coconut popsicles are like vanilla popsicles, and mango popsicles are incomprehensibly delicious.

Yesterday morning I put in my earplugs to swim, and it was a lime/coconut swimming sort of day. I couldn't hear the water sloshing as my feet went in, nor the breeze in the trees, though I could certainly see its force. I could not hear if anyone was coming up behind me with the intent to murder, and I couldn't even hear the gossip in the kitchen, which usually echoes from one edge of the lake to the other. What I could hear, and it cast a great and rather dreary dream quality unto my morning babtism off the Back Lads dock, was recorders, and lots of them. (Note the use of 'was' instead of 'were,' due to the fact that 'recorders' is not really plural; it is a group, a flock, a mob. 'Was' is correct in this situation, according to Strunk and White.). Welcome to Early Music Week at Pinewoods!

Geese

I went swimming after my shift in the kitchen this evening, before drinking my gin and tonic. The geese were down by the crew dock, the ones that used to be small and strictly brown, and who swam with their regular-old-Canada-goose-looking parents, but who are now full grown, and I always knew they would eventually look just like their father (and mother). They were swim swim swimming, and I jumped in, and they didn't change pace, but rather told me a racist joke:

What do you get when you put ten ducks in a box?

A box of Quackers.

Fiddle

My fiddle is not an extension of my body, and only on rare occasions does it feel even remotely so. It is not an instrument of complete expression for me; it is more a method of communication, a language, which I can use to help myself relate to other people. I can have basic conversations, but I can't talk philosophy or politics very deeply. I can use it to discuss ethics and humor, but not medical science or even music theory. I haven't been speaking with it since wee childhood, so it doesn't feel intuitive, and perhaps never will feel as natural as, say, the English language. I don't quite understand the grammar, but with a little drilling, it could come quickly. Tomorrow I will have a fiddle lesson from Amelia, based on rhythm and back-up, and will come a tiny step closer to understanding this strange cancerous thing that sometimes finds itself attached to my neck. However, somethings simply cannot be taught.