Sunday — the 24th: Pretty much a light day with no trips to town. Getting ready for my start of the fiddling/mandolin week in Kittitas, WA that starts Monday at 9:00 and goes till 3:30 with some evening events I will attend. John bought sandwich making materials for the week, to save my paying $5.00 for lunch each day. To that we will add low salt chips, cookies, and home ripened cherries.
Monday. Great reunions with people I haven’t seen in a year or more, and last year, while I was there, I was in no condition to be exerting myself. The next week I collapsed from anemia, ended up for another week of ICU, and had to endure the second bout with Endocarditis and 30 days of IVs containing two antibiotics. I only managed through last year because a was given a small room with a big soft chair to rest in, and so, I participated only enough to say that I was there, but I did play in the ending recital of classes.
This 2011 year, my morning class (Beginning Mandolin) went fine, and I had a nice 1.5 hr lunch break and found a comfortable chair in the janitor’s lounge they let me use (all week). I have been using a pillow to subdue the classrooms chairs – they of the hard and strangely shaped mold. My afternoon advanced fiddling class went well. It was with my teacher of 19 years there at the workshop. She is from Nampa, ID, and this year her daughter, Katrina, is also a teacher at the WOTFA workshop in Kittitas, WA. From 2007:
http://www.idahopress.com/community/article_51a2d468-20f9-5417-b371-d9d7f36847a8.html
This video shows Katrina (a left handed fiddler), in 2008 as “Pearce” but she continues winning now as “Nicolayeff” and won the Championship for this year’s Weiser, ID celebration – again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gcOhO8PWfs
This one is fun and Roberta (mother) had our class learn this and we did it for the show on Friday (and Katrina played piano).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXS_sfUuUro
Tuesday. Learned lots in both classes and then went back over to Kittitas for a performance in the cold wind outside at the Gazebo. It was great, and a couple of my friends joined me there. Way too cold though.
Wednesday. What a way to start this day, sadly, with driving out the driveway to go to Fiddling Camp and finding Sunshine, our pretty kitty (only 10 months old) dead at the end of the driveway, apparently bumped on her head from being rolled by a car. She had not been run over, just hit. But she was dead, and not for very long. We get so little traffic that it is amazing. She also has not been going up to the road to our knowledge but stayed in the back or front yard. If a car came in the driveway she would run for the house and dive through the window-flap. She loved to climb the trees with John when he was picking cherries or lay on a horizontal limb of a black walnut tree. This is definitely not our year for animals. To lose 2 of our buddies tragically from accidents, in the last week, has us in an emotional pit.
I got home and told John it was crazy because it hit me so hard. He said he kept thinking of her all day as well. I’m glad if she had to go this soon, that at least we know what happened to her. If she had been carried off by a coyote or a very large owl (but, she was probably too big and heavy), and just disappeared, we wouldn’t have known. I had to pick her up and put her on my car hood to take her back to John to bury. She wasn’t stiff so it hadn’t happened long before I found her. She does leave a big hole. Just last night she crawled up into John’s lap in his chair. She often crawled up beside him on the sofa or the bed, but not usually in the chair, instead next to him in a little box with a towel in another chair. She always met me in the middle of the night when I went to the bathroom to be my companion and get petted. She also always ended up in bed for the last hour before time to get up. This morning not. All outside cats we have had lived to be 18 or 20 and died of old age (or in the case of Midnight, a stroke that paralyzed him and we had to euthanize him.) Thought I would share our sad news.
Fiddle and mandolin classes went all right today, but my mind wouldn’t allow me to be completely there. Tomorrow is another day.
Thursday. Classes were fine, and I went back at 7:00 p.m. for playing in the Kittitas Gazebo, one last time this week. We had a tremendous turnout, of entertainers and a big audience.
Friday. Today was the final morning of classes, and then we practiced for the afternoon performance. John was able to come out and view the recital. My fiddling class was 6th to play, and we did 3 songs. The first one always highlights the instructor, but she included us in her choice. We did Dueling Fiddles, a takeoff on Dueling Banjos.
Tune from the movie Deliverance, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tqxzWdKKu8
She led us off, and we returned as the “duel” echo. Katrina composed this version, and accompanied us on the piano, after the “dueling” beginning.
Then we switched to “hokum” bowing, which really got the audience’s attention and appreciation.
This is an ad, but explains the idea http://www.onlinelessonvideos.com/product.php?productid=16351&cat=0&page=0&featured=Y
And this one will exhaust you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xunOH7haPK4&feature=related
[John says if you can’t perform Orange Blossom Special you aren’t a fiddle player, you are just playing – Roy Clark and crew can do both.]
We merged into Foggy Mountain Breakdown, also with hokum bowing, and then went back to Dueling Fiddles again for the ending. After that, the class did a medley of a very beautiful song, Bygone Days, followed directly, by There’s an Old Spinning Wheel in the Parlor. Then I had to wait around for my Beginning Mandolin class to play. We were 2nd from the end. Oh well, it allow us to enjoy the entire show. In that class we played Rubber Dolly, and were assisted by an advanced guitar class. I had given John my camera and set for a movie, but I forgot to empty the memory card, so it was full and couldn’t record. Luckily, he watched a woman recording some of the show, and thought she got most of ours. He pointed her out to me and I went up afterward to see if she was willing to put on a CD and send to me if I paid the cost of the CD and the postage. She said she would.
Saturday. I was beat from this busy week. I slept in this morning and have done little else except pick cherries with our neighbors.
It brought back sad memories of losing Sunshine: My friend wanted to come pick cherries for jelly, and his mom from across the street came too. Things around keep reminding both John and me of Sunshine. Today our most recent reminder was out in our front yard, in the shade of the trees, sitting in lawn chairs with the 2 neighbors, picking from limbs John cut down from the trees. It was so sad, because Sunshine was such a part of our picking cherries this year, climbing up the trees, resting, watching John, and even climbed the ladder and went out on opposite branches from where he was standing cutting. Then she’d come down with him, and lay on the ground with us, getting up every so often to chase a butterfly or grasshopper. I suppose these memories will fade, but right now they are very vivid.
Nothing else is planned for this Saturday, but tomorrow morning we will meet friends in Kittitas, probably, for breakfast on their way back from Seattle, via Mt. Rainier for Spokane, and then they fly back to Michigan in their own plane.
Wishing you the best,
Nancy and John