Merry Christmas 1967!

It's been a very long time since my last installment of picture torture. That edition ended with the beginning (6:10-6:18 am) of our Christmas, 1967, festivities. Now, at last!, we get to see the next ten minutes of the fun!

Next, we enjoy a visit with Nene, Jackie, Dan and Steve. There are 41 pictures of us sitting on the couch and a child's folding chair. Well, a few at the end are of us standing in a line and looking (blurrily) at the camera. Not a lot is going on here.

We find out that the fruit trees in the back yard were planted in the Spring of 1968.

We celebrate all the May events, birthdays and Mother's Day, on May 12. We waited till 7:00 to dig into our festively wrapped presents. Poss got some luggage. There was luggage at Christmas, too. Was some message being sent? Whose writing is on the big box (our misspelled last name)? I thought it was Jack's but he wouldn't spell his own name wrong, would he? There's the nice touch of having our artificial Christmas tree set up (but not decorated).

Why do Karen and Grandma get presents? I suppose it would have been rude to leave them out but they got more in November (and I didn't). It looks like Peggy wasn't left out, either. There's her typewriter with the marshmallow keys.

Peggy gets dressed up to graduate from high school.

Carousel-18

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Suar wood relief panel.

Baby Turtles

This was part of my Christmas present from Poss.  Thanks, Poss!

The Sun has risen

Merry Christmas! I hope your day has been full of wonderful surprises!

Ours started out with a nice sunrise.

We got an email last month from Karla Winterowd of Winterowd Fine Art, Santa Fe, suggesting that Jerry and I could do all of our gift shopping at once by giving each other a piece of art that we knew each other would love. We had gotten our Destiny Allison piece from them and had been admiring their glass pieces by Alex Gabriel Bernstein.

So we took her suggestion.

This is what we got.

Red Flash Muse
Alex Gabriel Bernstein

It's very nice. It's being backlit by a little, battery-powered spotlight.

I hope your Christmas was as good as ours!

Another six months in the can

Another (a last?) set of solargraphs taken from my roof. The cans were put on the roof just after the Summer Solstice and I took them down today, a couple of days after the Winter Solstice. I couldn't do it earlier because of the rain. Besides, I get home after dark and I don't want to be scrambling around on the roof when it's dark.

I used two sheets of photo paper in a big coffee can. This time I tried something new to get the full height of the sun's progress by laying the cans on their sides. The pinholes were were aimed about 45 degrees above horizontal. This gave me a larger vertical range of the sun's travels but less horizontally than my other solargraphs.

The cans were attached to the spark screen on the chimney. One faced southeast and the other faced southwest. These pictures don't show as much detail of the roof as the earlier pictures taken with the coffee cans. I wonder why.

And none of the pictures I've taken show as much detail in the landscapes as in other solargraphs I've seen. I think the type of paper I'm using just isn't the best for this project.

Here are the pictures taken from June to December, 2010.

Looking southeast

Looking southwest

This set of pictures finally lets me see the same details in both the southeast and southwest pictures. During the gloomy part of October (where you see a wide band with few tracks of the sun) the same patterns of the sun peeking out of the clouds show up above the ash tree to the south. Next project: figuring out how to merge the two pictures to get the whole scene in one image. I don't think Photoshop has a lens correction filter for a pinhole camera especially for film that isn't flat.

The S-shaped tracks of the sun took me by surprise but that's one of the things that makes this interesting.

I think I'm finished with this phase of the project. I need to find places other than the roof to put cameras.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

An ornament "designed and created of Arizona copper by Dos Damas Designs Inc. Tempe, AZ"

Jerry got this for me on his trip to Arizona.

(The picture of it hanging on the tree didn't show it very well.)

See our other turtle ornaments here.

Geminids

I spent much of last night watching another meteor shower. This time it was the Geminids. I went to my usual spot and set up shop. This time I managed to turn off the interior light of the car so it wouldn't light up to greet me as I went to its rolled-down window to get supplies. (A lot of good that did...many of the people who came to that view point thought nothing of leaving their headlights on for many minutes while they got their chairs and whatnot set up.)

I set the camera to look up into the sky rather than include the horizon as I did for the Persieds. I set the camera to take 16 second exposures and my intervalometer to take a picture every 17 seconds. I made a movie from these pictures (imagine!).

Along the way I caught a fair number of meteors in these pictures. There was a period of about six minutes when I got six meteors in the camera's field of view. So, if six showed up in this part of the sky, imagine how many were visible in the rest of the sky! It was a good night for meteors. Till the clouds moved in.

I used Photoshop to merge the six pictures from this period into one image. You get to see how the meteors do appear to stream out of Gemini. The twins' shoulders are near the top of the image and their feet are above the image.

Six Geminid meteors
December 14, 2010, 12:40-12:
46am

The bright meteor going off the right side of the image doesn't really split along the way. It seems to be a result of Photoshop's rotating the image to align it with the other images that have moved because of the Earth's rotation. I'll learn more about Photoshop to fix that...my attempts were an utter failure.

In the center there are two short streaks passing by the Beehive Cluster in Cancer.

There were a lot of bright meteors visible before midnight while the quarter moon was still shining.

I'm getting too old for staying up past my bedtime. I got comfortable on my portable reclining chair with my heavy wool blanket and kept coming close to falling asleep. So I spent much of the time standing so I wouldn't sleep. But that is a pain in the neck.

Then the wispy clouds moved in. For a while there was just the area around Orion and Canis Major that didn't have clouds. Bright meteors could be seen through the clouds but I was getting discouraged and decided that I'd just go home. So I packed up and left at 2:30.

It turns out that the clouds weren't all that noticeable to my camera. We get to see the clouds near the end and we can see the stars clearly through them. I should have stayed an let the camera get more of the stars, meteors and clouds. The motion of the stars against the motion of the clouds is fascinating and at was just getting underway when I stopped the show.

I had the camera focused better this time. In August I think I didn't have anything bright to focus on and I just cranked the lens to its extreme distance setting. Well, it can focus to infinity and beyond. So the stars in my Perseid movie are somewhat fuzzy. This time they're sharper.

There are airplanes again but not as many as in August. There was a strange searchlight or something shining through the sky. Its range and focus amaze me. I want to know what it is. It shows up at around 0:50.

Be sure to watch in HD. And full screen.

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Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A turtle box (not a box turtle). The top turtle's shell is the lid.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Pot feet.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Clay turtle with beads.

Signed "MAM 1992."

A great start to another Thanksgiving

Happy Turkey Day!

It's off to a great start.

First, we had our espressos.

The coffee was recently roasted with The Roadster, ground in Rocky and brewed in Silvia (why don't I have any posts that really feature Rocky and Silvia?).

Jerry's is in a coffee mug. It has milk and sweetener that wouldn't fit in an espresso muglet. Since this is a holiday, we got an extra treat with our coffee. I made some bizcochito biscotti from a recipe in New Mexico Magazine.

Then we had breakfast.

(A lot of the following is a repeat from last year's thankfulness. We had about the same breakfast last year!)

The pancakes were made with:

• Wheat and oats that we milled this morning with our KitchenAid grain mill
• Vanilla made the BobBIE-Baby Way

On top of the pancakes we put:

• Peanut butter ground in our BlendTec Blender
• Pomegranate syrup made from juice from our bush

We swallowed our morning pills with:

• Pomegranate juice from our bush. The juice is cloudy since it was what was at the bottom of the pitchers where the juice settled (we wanted clear juice for the jelly I made).

I'm thankful that:

• We had a nice, wholesome, home-cooked meal and didn't get overfed
• There aren't a lot of dishes to take care of
• We have all our gadgets that make fairly healthful meals like this fun to make
• I have friends and family who humor me by reading these silly messages
• I have Jerry to take care of all the hard parts of Thanksgiving meals (and the rest of my life)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Now, we're off for an adventure (with picnic)!

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A Navajo pot.

Thanks, Poss.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Turtle tiles.

You might recognize the one on the right. It's my blog's wallpaper.

One more day at the Grand Canyon

After breakfast with the ravens, I went out on Desert View Drive in search of a new spot for a movie. I ended up at Moran Point. I got my camera set up at 8:20 and had it click away until 10:30. I was alone for much of the first hour and the car was parked right by the camera. I was able to sit on something more comfortable than a rock, stump or wall now and then.

A couple from Michigan asked about my automatically clicking camera. I explained what was going on and dragged out my laptop and made them see a movie I had shot the day before. They were politely impressed and took off.

Later, I was sitting on the wall near the camera and I heard a voice behind me saying something like "Well, here's Charles!" I turned around and there was John from Encinitas.

John has a print hanging in his living room of the painting that Thomas Moran made from Moran Point. I had no knowledge of who the point had been named for. I think he said that the print was produced by Moran himself and isn't a modern, mass-produced reproduction.

I showed John the movie I was making when we visited the day before. He was more impressed with the result than the Michigan couple.

Now you have the opportunity to be impressed with watching two hours of the view from Moran Point in just over one minute. (Remember, you can press buttons on the player to show it in HD and full screen. I recommend both!)



Later, as I was turning onto the road to Lipan Point, there was John from Encinitas at the stop sign leaving the point. I didn't make a movie there. I had run out of patience for standing around for long periods. Besides, the camera's batteries were running low and it takes a long time being plugged in to get them recharged.

The rest of Saturday and a bit of Sunday

After the clouds moved back in at the end of my Desert View video I packed up and drove back to the village by way of the many view points. I took some pictures along the way but that was it for the time-lapse videos for the day. I was tired of filming thick clouds.

I went back to Yavapai Point where I had recorded the rain and clearing clouds to watch the sunset.

Sunset, October 23, 2010
Yavapai Point, Grand Canyon

Three minutes after I took the sunset picture I got one of the full moon rising. The clouds reached almost to the horizon to the east but there was a slit where we could see a very narrow slice of the moon rising.

Moonrise

I went back to the campground where I heated up my water for coffee on my little Sterno stove. It takes a very long time to heat water over Sterno. I had warm, but not hot, coffee. Heating my bowl of Madras Lentils was much more successful. It didn't have to reach a state change so it didn't take as much energy.

While my supper was heating I enjoyed listening to the quiet breeze in the dark. There were thick clouds so I didn't get to see stars. There was the full moon that weekend so I wouldn't have gotten to experience the dark, dark sky that I would like to have seen. And it was rather cold.

So I spent much of the rest of the evening keeping warm in the tent. I didn't have a lot of quality sleep the night before so I spent most of the evening in the sleeping bag with my eyes closed listening to the goings on in the neighborhood.

There was a noisy party at one of the nearby campsites. Quiet time in the campground is supposed to start at 10:00pm and I thought that they were going to break that rule. But it broke up just in time.

I slept well Saturday night. I let the pad inflate fully so I didn't bottom out this time. After the party broke up it was quiet for the rest of the night. The sleeping bag was warm.

The party people broke other rules. When I got up on Sunday morning there were a lot of ravens helping themselves to the food that the noisy folk couldn't be bothered to put away the night before. While I was eating my bagel and peanut butter a raven or two perched in a tree over me eying my bagel. I pointed out the easy pickings in the party people's camp. By the way, Sterno isn't the best way to toast a bagel. It gives it a Sterno-y flavor.

I headed out for one more day at the Grand Canyon...

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A little, unsigned bronze.

Circle of Life

Jerry and I went to the Wild Animal Park the San Diego Zoo Safari Park on Saturday. We got there early and snagged a primo parking spot that's about as close to the entrance as mere mortals can get.

A hybrid vehicle

We used our membership cards to get right in without waiting in line. We headed to the Journey Into Africa by way of an aviary. Someone there seemed to want Jerry to feed him (or her).

Big bird (not being fed)

On our way to the Journey into Africa we approached a circle of people all studying the walkway. One was poking at something with a stick. A little crayfish (or some relative) was standing on its tail threatening the group with its pincers. They wanted to rescue the little creature but were afraid of getting pinched.

So I grabbed it by its thorax and wondered what they wanted me to do with it.

They were just trying to get it out from underfoot. But the thing needs to be in water. It was far from any water. I suppose a bird was going to snack on it but it somehow escaped from the jaws of death.

The circle of would-be rescuers dispersed and they thanked me several times for rescuing the creature.

The Journey into Africa ride wasn't taking its first trip for forty minutes so we wandered through a part of the park with ponds. We got to a bridge that is just a foot or so above the water. This should be a good spot to toss the little crustacean. There were ducks paddling our way. I quickly gave the little lobster a toss to give it a head start.

I didn't count on the catfish.

Hungry (cat?)fish

I think the little crawdad became a snack after all.

We saw some other animals eating (but not other animals).

Rhinoceros eating (and baby)

Porcupines eating

Poor little crawdad.

More clouds

I left Grandview Point and continued east. The last viewpoint on the rim (or first if you start at the east entrance) is Desert View. This has the Desert View Watchtower.

Watchtower (undergoing renovations)

The inside of the watchtower has murals on the ceiling.

Watchtower ceiling

And murals on the walls.

Watchtower wall

And views of the canyon.

Desert View view

I made a short video here. It was shot in only half an hour starting around 2:15, October 23, 2010. It was getting very cold and windy and I was getting discouraged with all the thick clouds. I wanted scattered, puffy clouds but had to deal with thick ones. You might be able to see the landscape shaking from all the wind. I need a sturdier tripod. And I need to check that the camera is horizontal.

Oh, What a Beautiful Day!

I left Yavapai Point where I had recorded the three hours of thick, morning clouds and headed east. I stopped at Grandview Point.

The clouds were finally breaking up so sunshine reached the canyon floor. This time we see not only clouds moving but their shadows as well.

This video captured the canyon and clouds from 11:20 till 1:00 Saturday, October 23, 2010.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A ceramic tray signed "Christy."

Boo!

Jerry and I got to carve pumpkins today. Jerry's mother's neighbor had a little get-together for lunch and pumpkin carving. I can't remember the last time I carved a jack-o-lantern. We don't get trick-or-treaters so we don't decorate for the holiday.

Mr Bears and Chuckbert's pumpkins

Now we have something to add to the compost bin.

Oh, What a Beautiful Gray Morning!

I set up an alarm on my iPod to wake me up at 6:00 Saturday morning with the hopes that the clouds might disappear overnight. I wanted to have a glorious sunrise to record.

I didn't get the greatest quality sleep that night because there was rain that beat on the tent and the pad wasn't fully inflated. But I was sound asleep when a very loud phone rang. It was the iPod doing what I had asked. It must have roused everyone in the campground who weren't already awake. I turned off the alarm and lay there for a while. The iPod rang again. I guess I just hit the snooze button.

I dragged myself out of the sleeping bag into the cold, damp world. The clouds were still there, thicker than before. A beautiful sunrise was not to be seen.

I took a little Sterno-burning "stove" to heat water for portable Starbucks coffee. But this first morning I didn't have time to heat water. Even though there were thick clouds I wanted to get to the rim and be set up for the time the sun was rising. So I just poured a packet of the coffee into cold water and drank it.

That's not the best way to prepare Starbucks Via. It didn't dissolve. But I figured that the clumps of coffee powder would digest and I'd get my caffeine dose. I ate my bagel with Jif peanut butter (if you can call it that).

How can a product that has more than just fresh peanuts taste "more like fresh peanuts" than peanut butter that's just peanuts and salt? Anyway, it doesn't need refrigeration. I suppose I could have taken a natural product and just stirred it well but it would have been a bit messier than Jif.

I went back to Yavapai Point where I had filmed the rain moving through the canyon the evening before.

There were a lot of low clouds. There was no sunrise to be seen that morning. But clouds breaking up and the sun coming out is a good subject for a time-lapse movie. And there's the Grand Canyon behind all those clouds!

So I set up the camera right at the edge of the canyon. There was a 300-foot drop just a couple of feet beyond the camera. The camera was pointed over the edge so I thought that there was going to be no chance that anyone would get between the camera and the canyon. But I was wrong. There are two frames with a Japanese tourist getting a picture of the canyon from the very edge of the canyon. If you blink, you'll miss her.

While I was standing there (I couldn't just wander around and leave the camera unattended), someone asked about what I was doing. We discussed our photography hobbies. He had just started taking landscape pictures. He has a very sturdy looking tripod. I need to get one myself. We introduced ourselves. John is from Encinitas. (Hey, the REI where I got the camping gear is in Encinitas...what a small world.)

I stood there from 7:00 to 10:00. The sun made only a few, very brief, appearances.

Here is what clouds moving through the Grand Canyon the morning of October 23, 2010, looked like. The three hours are reduced to a minute and 11 seconds. It starts out slow with just clouds visible. But the canyon eventually makes an appearance. Give it time to develop.

It was a Grand time

Jerry and a friend of his made their annual trip to Phoenix last weekend. I thought that since I was going to be alone for four days that I might as well get out of town myself. Ever since I got my time-lapse movie gadget, I had been thinking that clouds and shadows in the Grand Canyon might be interesting subjects for time-lapse movies.

I checked the lodges in the Grand Canyon Village but they were all completely booked for that weekend.

Then I checked the hotels in Tusayan, the smallest incorporated town in Arizona, that is just to the south of the park. There were some rooms available but I didn't really want have to travel all that distance every day.

I looked into other alternatives.

Home away from home

I thought that camping might be the way to go. I figured that I might be able to spend what I'd have had to spend for a hotel room on camping gear and end up with accommodations for future outings. Jerry and I headed over to REI to see what this gear would cost.

It turns out that they rent gear. What a deal, for less than what it costs to spend a night in a hotel room 20 miles from the canyon I could rent a tent, a sleeping bag and a pad for three nights! I could see if I enjoy camping before making the full investment. I reserved the gear and a campsite.

I went camping for the first time since the road trip from hell. (Actually, I think I never spent a night in the tent on that trip. I think I always slept on the coffin at the back of the Carryall.)

We went over to REI Thursday evening to pick up the equipment.

The week before my trip the weather here at home turned wintry. Lots of rain and gloominess. That weather headed to northern Arizona.  I drove up to the Grand Canyon on Friday and for much of the drive there was rain but it quit when I left I-40 at Williams. There was hope that the weekend would be dry!

I got to the campground at around 4:00pm. I pitched the tent between the channel that drains the campground and a shallower channel that looked like rain had recently run through. I then drove to Yavapai Point with my camera.

I got my camera and intervalometer set up around 5:20. Sunset was around 5:40 but there was no sun shining. The thick clouds hid it and were dropping rain in the canyon. But there was enough light for the camera. I had it take pictures of the canyon and the rain for a half hour.

Over the weekend I made several time-lapse movies. Mostly of the heavy cloud cover. There wasn't a lot of sunshine.

Here is the movie I shot that first evening. It shows a rain shower moving through the canyon.

I didn't have the best night's sleep the first night at the campground. I think that I didn't give the self-inflating pad enough time to puff up so it wasn't the softest possible bed. And it rained. The tent kept the water out but the rain beating on the tent was a noise I wasn't used to so it kept me awake much of the time. The sleeping bag kept me warm.

Camping might be a fun way to experience nature. At least in warmer and drier weather.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A Randy Chitto storyteller.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Plastic turtle stuck on a rod in a pot of mother-in-law's tongues.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Photo of Hawaiian Green Turtles. Izzy gave this to us.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Print of a Hawksbill Turtle by M. Mello. We got this at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

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Update (thanks to MrBears's comment!): This is an etching by Marsha Mello.

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Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A wooden turtle with a seashell shell.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Crystal Sea Turtle.

Ikea! I'll never stop saying Ikea!

I've shown the construction of my new computer desk, shelf and file drawer that we got from Ikea. Now that it is all put together and Jerry has cleaned up the mess I already made on it, you, too, get to see it.

"What's behind all the new furniture?" one might ask.

A new camera.

This camera of mine is an ever expanding hobby. There was my intervalometer that lets me make time-lapse movies with the camera.

Then, I thought, "What's the point of taking photographs if they're never printed?"

We had a photo printer that turned out to be a BIG DUD. It used up ink like it was free. It would churn and grind for minutes any time we wanted to print anything. It seems to have done a deep priming of the print head every time it was used. It quickly ran out of ink and I gave it a new set of cartridges and it emptied those in a short time. According to this very long thread on a forum, it is a common problem for that model of printer and that a fix was never to be expected.

So I started shopping for a photo printer.

One of the things I thought I wanted to do is get my panoramas printed. I had looked at online processors but their services were rather pricy. I wondered if there are consumer printers that can print panoramas. It turns out that Epson makes printers that print on roll paper. So I got myself an Epson Stylus Photo R1900 printer.

It can print on sheets from 4"x6" to 13"x19". They've got specialty paper and canvas for it if you're in a very artistic mood.

And they've got rolls of paper in 8.3" and 13" widths.

You can see my second successful panorama picture on the desk just beyond the chair in the picture above. The image is 8"x44". I took it this summer at Blue Mesa in the Petrified Forest National Park. Here's a tiny version of the image (click on it to make it less tiny, but still tiny).

Blue Mesa in Petrified Forest

Picasa web albums seem to have a limit on the size of photos so I can't show you a full resolution file. It wouldn't do much good anyway. You'd either have to shrink it to fit on your monitor or pan and scroll to see small bits of it at a time.

My first successful panorama printout was this image from the Grand Canyon taken the day after we were at the Petrified Forest.

Grand Canyon

The photo printer doesn't work as a network printer and we wouldn't want to use it for our day-to-day printing anyway so we got an HP printer that was on sale at Costco to replace the BIG DUD from Canon. It does copying and network printing and scanning. It prints photos as well. But I'll use the Epson for that.

And you can't expect me to do photo processing on a little screen on a notebook computer, can you? No, you can't. So I got myself a new iMac. Ooooooh!

The weather machine still wants a Windows system so that is still here. You can see its monitor to the right of the iMac in the first picture.

So now I have a new, large photo printer, a workhorse printer and a beautiful iMac. My old computer desk was a six foot wide table. It wasn't big enough or functional enough to hold all this gadgetry. So we got the desk and storage for all the supplies and accessories. With any luck I'll use the storage instead of just heaping piles of junk on the vast horizontal surface.

I'm still using evaluation versions of image processing software. I'm getting toward the end of my evaluation period so I'll have to stimulate the economy a little more in a couple of weeks.

I'm in geek heaven!

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Pad of notepaper. It has a magnet on the back so it can be used as a refrigerator magnet! It's stuck on the door to the garage for this picture...it usually just sits near the phone to let us take notes.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Some clay planters and a sprinkler.

Cohen the Violinist, Very Special Edition

2013 Edition is here.

Labor Day Weekend is here again. Time to celebrate the accomplishments of Ms. Magic Meryle Cohen, Cohen the Violinist!

We get to read about Cohen the Violinist each Labor Day weekend in the "Celebrations" section of the Sunday San Diego Union-Tribune. For the last two years I've been posting her stories.

These posts are about the only ones where people other than friends and family have posted comments. People from around the country have done Google searches of her name and have found my posts.

I've gotten some emails through my profile's Contact link that have given me pointers to information on the web about Ms. Magic Meryle. I was pointed to a YouTube video that I included in last year's post. Unfortunately, that video has been removed by the user who posted it. :-(

I had thought that these emails were coming from another fan of hers but it turned out they were from Ms. Magic Meryle herself.

Earlier this year I got a note from her alerting me to the program "Night on the Town" on Oceanside Community Television KOCT. Unfortunately, the Oceanside government access channels aren't on Escondido's cable TV...it has Escondido's government channel (imagine!). So I wrote back to say I couldn't watch the program since I don't get that channel. She wrote to let me know that they have it on their web site.

"Night on the Town" is a half hour program that shows various activities that you can do evenings in Oceanside. One activity they showed is Oceanside's weekly Sunset Market. The Sunset Market segment of the show was introduced with a snippet of Cohen the Violinist playing her signature "Theme from 'The Addams Family'."

A few months ago I got a message from Magic Meryle telling me that the YouTube video had been taken down and asked if I could get it back. I wrote to say that it wasn't my video so I couldn't help. But, since she introduced the Sunset Market segment of "Night on the Town," I asked if there was a time she'd be performing there again. I said that maybe I could go over some Thursday evening and record some videos to post to YouTube.

She wrote back to tell me that she's allowed to play the first Thursday of each month. So three days later I packed up my camera and tripod on the first Thursday of August and headed over to Oceanside's Sunset Market.

There she was! After she finished a tune I went up and introduced myself as "Chuckbert." She apparently couldn't hear all I said, it looked like she was adjusting a hearing aid, so I explained that I was the person she had been emailing information to. "You're 'Chuckbert'?!?" she asked excitedly. "I can't believe you came all the way from Escondido!"

She's thrilled that I repeat her story on this blog. She's amazed that there are people out there who have the newspaper clipping on their refrigerators.

I set up the camera and tripod and yelled "Action!" The camera can take 18 minutes of video at a time. She gave us a performance that lasted nearly that long. I've broken it up into four sections. Here they come. Beneath them I've listed the tunes I recognize. There are some that I know I know but the titles just don't come to me. Any help in naming those tunes will be very much appreciated.

But first, let's get the ball rolling with this year's celebration of her accomplishments (click on it to see a a more readable version).

Congratulations on all of your accomplishments, Ms. Magic Meryle Cohen! (I am humbled by your mention of this blog. Thanks, Ms. Magic Meryle!)

And now to the concert she promised starting with the theme from "The Addams Family"...

Theme from the Addams Family
Theme from I Love Lucy
Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini
Hokey Pokey
Don't Cry for Me Argentina
The Glory of Love
Yankee Doodle
?
Theme from The Odd Couple
Theme from The Lone Ranger
Uptown Girl
Michelle
Beethoven Symphony 7, 2nd Movement





Theme from The Dick van Dyke Show
If You're Happy and You Know It
Theme from Bonanza
?
Beethoven's Ode to Joy
A Whole New World
Maria
Time to Say Goodbye
?

Over the Rainbow
Baby Elephant Walk
Can Can
The Itsy Bitsy Spider
Oh! Susanna
If I Were a Rich Man
Greensleeves
I'm an Indian, Too
Day Tripper
?
So What
I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Weiner


Hit the Road, Jack
Those Were the Days, theme from All In the Family
Love and Marriage
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
?
There's No Business Like Show Business
?
Theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark
Polly Wolly Doodle
?
Auld Lang Syne
For He's a Jolly Good Fellow


Here's a picture of Cohen the Violinist and Chuckbert.

If you're in the area some Thursday evening, you might want to go to Oceanside's Sunset Market and see if Ms. Magic Meryle is playing. She'll give you a nice performance and recommendations of places to eat. Mmmmmmmmmm...donuts!


And take note of the tip can.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Remember our new Pokey Park sculpture of a Navajo-Churro Sheep dancing "La Bamba"? And remember how I mentioned that she does turtles, too? It turns out that she had a turtle in her Works in Progress section. If you buy one of her pieces before she turns it over to galleries you get it at a discount.

Who could pass up a turtle?

Yesterday, "El Pensador" arrived! Just in time for Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday.

El Pensador (plastron view)

El Pensador (carapace view)

Of course, this isn't a mere tchotchke...it's art.

Pancho Villa Car

The most common way that people, other than friends and family, find posts on my blog is through Google's image search for "pancho villa death car." The first result is the Wikipedia image I linked to in my story about our trip to Chihuahua, Mexico. I didn't include the photo, I just linked to it. When the searchers click on that image, they're taken to the August, 2008, archive of my blog. The image isn't there and the link to it buried deep down in the page. This probably leaves them confused and dismayed.

So, for the possible convenience and pleasure of people searching for it, here is...

Pancho Villa Death Car

This is taken from Wikipedia's article of Pancho Villa (where we're told we can copy, distribute and transmit it).

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A turtle we got at a Native Americans' market in Balboa Park.

I don't know who made it. Its glaze looks a lot like the Navajo pieces Poss gave us.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A clay ball hanging from a string of wooden beads.

The ball.

This came from one of the artist cooperatives in Balboa Park's Spanish Village Art Center.