memories – Page 11 – Life In A Word

Adding Fire to the Fuel

When I step up to the counter at Starbucks for my favorites (hot: Grande Flat White, cold: Grande Cold Brew w/ a splash of cream), I find it interesting how accepting I am of the high price of my purchase. By nature I’m a penny-pincher, monitoring the family budget with a fully-focused microscope. But the scan-and-go Starbucks app makes it easy to overlook the five dollars for a single cup of coffee. On the other hand, a gallon of gasoline for the same price is literally headline news.

I don’t wonder if you’re just like me at the gas station these days because you are. When you pull up to the pump you try to ignore the unbelievable digits on the station sign and on the pump itself. The tank in your vehicle is probably closer to “E” than usual (though my wife still refuses to go below the quarter mark). You may even shop around now before choosing your station. Finally, the price of your favorite octane has you considering a cheaper option, even though none of them are really “cheap”. Just like the Starbucks menu, purchasing gas is no longer the mindless decision it used to be.

$5.00/gallon. Ten days ago the U.S. hit that preposterous average for the first time in its history. Just two months ago the average was $4.00; two years before that, less than $2.00. Forecasters say we’ll see a nationwide average of $6.00 before the end of the summer. No wonder our fiery conversations are all about fuel these days.

When my car’s “low fuel” light pops on (with an annoying “DING!”) I know it’s going to take eighteen gallons to get the needle pointing back to “F”. That’s $90 in June 2022 math. When a stop at the gas station sets you back almost $100, you start to think about what else you could buy with the money. Four or five dinners out. Ten months of Netflix. Twenty Starbucks Flat Whites.

If it’s any consolation, at least we’re talking about self-service gasoline here. Some of you are too young to remember when a “gas station” was a “service station”. Prior to 1980, it was all about full service. I can still hear the ding-ding as the wheels of my parents’ car passed over black hoses, triggering the bell to let the attendant know they needed a fill-‘er-up. Then he (yes “he” because I never remember a “she” working at service stations back then) would run over to the pump, ask what octane and how many gallons, and start the filling. He’d also ask you to “pop the hood” so he could have a quick look at the oil, washer fluid, and engine. Finally, he’d give your front windshield a wash, take payment (in cash, of course), and off you’d go. For all that service, you simply rolled down the driver’s-side window and paid the man.

Full-service is still a thing of course but it’s a lot harder to find these days. Unless you live in Oregon or New Jersey. In those states, self-service is rarely an option. Attendants are still the norm. It sounds like an alternate reality for 2022 (or the scene from Back to the Future below) but two out of the fifty states stubbornly refuse to allow self-service. They stand by the well-worn concerns: fire hazards, difficulties for the elderly or disabled, and loss of station attendant jobs. They also charge a few pennies more per gallon because they can’t make a profit the way they used to – by offering services beyond the gas itself. For the most part, those under-the-hood services moved to car dealerships a long time ago.

Just this week our politicians proposed a three-month “holiday” on gas taxes (and taxes on gasoline should be the subject of its own blog post). The holiday won’t happen, though. Our politicians won’t allow the sacrifices made by not collecting those taxes. Or activists will wonder if gas companies will maintain the high prices and generate additional profit. And if gas is on its way to $6/gallon anyway, it’s kind of like adding a new lane to the highway, where by the time it’s finished the traffic has increased too much to notice any difference.

Not speaking for other countries but Americans won’t be driving less in the next several months. The travel forecast calls for more vehicle miles than even in the summers before COVID. Our lack of efficient mass transit and our woes at the airport (can you say, “canceled flight”?) will, uh, drive us to drive. In other words, we’ll pay $5, $6, maybe even $7 before we’ll pull back on our stubborn habits. Just like I will, admittedly, at Starbucks.

Some content sourced from the CNN Business article, “Why New Jersey and Oregon still don’t let you pump your own gas”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Finishing on a Low Note

I usually associate “finishing” with sporting events. Think about the finish line of a car race, the eighteenth hole of a golf tournament, or the ticking seconds of the clock as a football game runs out of time. In these scenarios, the finish can be a tense, hold-your-breath moment, triggering a burst of euphoria if your favorite takes the win. So it comes as a bit of a surprise to reflect on the completion of my Lego Grand Piano. Tense? Hardly. Held my breath? Not at all. Euphoria? Anything but. No, this finish feels a little forlorn.

Three thousand, six hundred, and sixty-two tiny pieces ago, I began the assembly of Lego’s Grand Piano, just about the closest gift to “perfect” my wife has ever given me. Piano is inextricably connected with my childhood – hours upon hours of practice and playing and determined progress at a tender age, eventually succumbing to other temptations of time. Piano introduced me to commitment, skill, and patience, even frustration and disappointment. My parent’s big, black grand sat patiently in our living room, beckoning me to play every time I passed by. The instrument was always perfectly tuned and sparklingly clean, thanks to my mother’s weekly persistence with a dust cloth. I can still hear her sweeping the eighty-eight keys from one end to the other – a delightfully musical moment.

Believe it or not, the Lego Grand Piano is the second gift of a piano from my wife. On our wedding day in 1987, she presented me with Korg’s “Sampling Grand”, an electronic keyboard with weighted keys and surprisingly realistic sound, much less expensive than the real thing. Thirty-five years later, the Korg still plays like a champ and still earns a spot in our living room. (Unlike the Lego version, the Korg was already assembled when I got it.)

The start-to-finish journey of my Lego Grand Piano has been a more enjoyable ride than I expected. When I opened the box last Christmas, I remember my jaw dropping a little, not only because I never saw the gift coming but because of the sheer complexity of the project staring up at me from the box That’s a complicated-looking instrument, I thought. That’s a ton of pieces, I also thought.

The unopened Lego box sat on my home office desk for a couple of weeks, looking elegant without even being touched. My curiosity eventually got the better of me and I finally had a look inside. Talk about intimidating. A 500-page instruction manual awaited, along with forty-odd individual bags of pieces. Even though this was a twenty-one-step journey, some steps involved “sub-bags” of tiny, tiny pieces, grouped separately so as not to escape! Was I really brave enough to dive into this mess?

The first chapter – shared with you readers on January 6th of this year (a date we Americans wish to forget) – spoke to my hesitation when I wrote an entire post about building the piano without actually building anything. I just poked around the box and marveled at the contents and felt pretty good about even opening up the box. But I did get started seven days later, and the subsequent journey was wholly satisfying and something of a weekly escape.

At first, I made several mistakes as the piano began to take shape. Since the pieces are small it’s easy to place them backward, or even mistake one for another. I also fretted when extra pieces remained after a given section of the build. (For the record, there were 38 extra pieces when all was said and done. I can fit all of them into the palm of my hand.) There were at least two instances where I had to disassemble several pieces to get back to the point where I’d done something wrong. Those moments were utterly unnerving and confidence-shattering (take your pick).

[Author’s Note: After weeks and weeks of building the Lego Grand Piano, it only now occurs to me I’m describing one type of keyboard while typing on another. Don’t you just love the coincidence?]

So let’s finish this post by revisiting “finishing”. What should be a moment of triumph feels a tad sad instead. After the first few weeks, the build of the Lego Grand Piano became a weekly treat, accompanied by some of my favorite classical music. Many stages were mini-surprises, not knowing what section I was building until the last piece was in place. And of course, sharing the progress with all of you was also fun. One reader admitted she would first scroll to the bottom of a post before reading my weekly topic. She couldn’t wait to find out how the piano was coming along.

So, here we are now, finally done. Next week’s post will feel a little empty without a reference to the Lego Grand Piano. By total coincidence, my daughter got married this past weekend, also the end of a journey (months of planning and all). My son just turned 30 yesterday, the finish line of his 20’s. And soon, my wife and I will point our cars east for our move to South Carolina, the finish of our days in Colorado. To be finished is to be sad? You bet it is.

I’ll dive into another Lego build one of these days, I promise. Maybe I’ll even take you along for the ride again. In the meantime, I’ll flip the hidden switch and play the piano every now and then. I’ll also find an acrylic box in which I can display this magnificent project. After all, with my mother’s good habits in mind, I don’t want it gathering dust.

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Lego Grand Piano – Update #21

(Read about how this project got started in Let’s Make Music!)

The finále of the Lego Grand Piano assembly, as expected, was the build of the pianist’s bench and the placement of the sheet music onto the stand. Bag #21 – of 21 bags of pieces – was bigger than I expected. I mean, a bench is a seat with four legs, right? Not according to Lego. This bench raises and lowers with the little dials you see on the sides, to accommodate the height of our fictitious pianist.

Let’s give credit where credit is due. The Lego Grand Piano was designed by the guy you see below, Donny Chen, a 33-year-old piano teacher and tuner from Guangzhou, China. No surprise, Donny’s passions are the piano and Lego. He’s a lot smarter than I am, evidenced by this quote: “I’ve always seen toys as something to be imagined, not just played with”. Me, I just played with toys.

[Pianist’s Note: The Lego Grand Piano DOES play, I know it does. I just have to figure out two things. One, how did I manage to disconnect the cable to the sound box buried deep within the piano frame? Two, how the heck am I going to get it reconnected? That’ll take more time than I have today and is part of why I “finished on a low note”. But I’ll share a concert with you when you least expect it – I promise. “Stay tuned”.]

Running Build Time: 14.0 hours. Musical accompaniment: Jarratt and Reedman’s Hooked on Classics. Leftover pieces: 1

Conductor’s Note: Apologies to the purists but I just couldn’t resist this somewhat tongue-in-cheek accompaniment to the final chapter of the Lego Grand Piano. Hooked on Classics is a top-ten Billboard Hot 100 hit from 1981, a mashed-up perversion of bits of the world’s most recognized classical pieces… overlaid on a drum track. It was recorded by Louis Clark and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and bred several spin-offs (ex. Hooked on Romance) Hooked on Classics came along just as I was wrapping up my childhood piano “career”. I much prefer the originals of the several classical pieces in Hooked but maybe this peppy number is your cup of tea. Have a listen:

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Curtains for Calls

Denver’s getting a new area code next month!

No, I’m not short on blog topics – stay with me here.

“983” will be added to 303 and 720 because Denver’s rapid growth means they’re running out of new phone numbers. But it’s not our state’s fifth area code itself that has my attention (by comparison, California blows us away with 36). It’s the 25 years “983” is expected to last before Colorado needs a sixth area code. Seriously? Will we even have phones in 25 years?

“Area code” feels like an old-fashioned term. I associate area codes with the physical act of “dialing” (also an old-fashioned term). Sure, we need area codes to establish new numbers the first time we get smartphones (as preschoolers?) but then they become more labels than three-digit numbers, don’t they? Think about it. If you need to call someone these days, forget about their area code because you already have it in their profile. You either tell your phone to call the person or you pull them up in “Contacts” and simply touch the number on the screen. In other words, your phone dials the area code but you do not. Not anymore.

Before smartphones, area codes had more prestige. They were required to make “long-distance” phone calls, which meant you had to dial an extra three digits. Outside of toll-free numbers, area codes conjured up exotic destinations, as if dialing halfway around the world instead of somewhere else in your state. Area codes made you feel like you were calling someone important. Today, they’re just labels.

If I really wanted to date myself, I could be talking about telephone exchange numbers instead of area codes. KLondike, WRigley, and TEmpleton all referred to the central offices of telephone exchanges, with every phone number in an exchange starting with the first two letters of the central office. PEnnsylvania 6-5000 was a memorable example because it connected you with the famous Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City, and Glenn Miller made the number into a popular swing jazz tune in the 1940s. I wasn’t around in the 1940s (or even the 1950s), so enough with this topic.

Let’s flush “dialing” out of conversations about phones, shall we? Nobody “dials” anymore. Dialing (for you preschoolers) hearkens back to a time when phones were phones. You picked up the corded “handset” from the “cradle” on the “base”, nestled it against your jaw so the “receiver” lined up with the ear and the “microphone” with the mouth, toggled the “switchhook” for “dial tone”, and placed a call by spinning the rotary dial once for each digit in the phone number (got all that, kids?) The dial would rotate back to its original position after each digit so you could dial the next one. The whole process took 30-45 seconds, followed by a long pause, and then the “ringer” sounded on the receiving phone. With that in mind, do you take the ease of your smartphone touchscreen for granted? Of course you do.

[Author’s Note: The mechanics of rotary phones (base, dial, ringer, handset) made them HEAVY. You can find movies from the 1940s or 1950s where a character uses a rotary phone as a weapon simply by clocking someone over the head with it.]

Dialing eventually gave way to “touch-tones” (thanks to the invention of the transistor). The rotary dial was replaced with a grid of plastic pushbuttons, one for each digit. Yes, we still “dialed” area codes but with buttons instead. The buttons then migrated from the phone base to the handset. The handset then went cordless. Finally, the base disappeared altogether, and voila! – you had the first “mobile” phone.

Area codes make me nostalgic because I associate them with actual phone calls, one voice talking to another. Today we’d sooner text than talk. Delivered mail to your box on the street isn’t long for this world. One of these days it’ll be curtains for phone calls as well. Which re-begs the question about Denver’s latest area code. Do we really need bright and shiny-new “983”?

Phone calls of the future may simply be mind games where we’re able to “ring” each other brain-to-brain. A little far-fetched, you say? Probably, and the idea of thought control makes me squeamish anyway. Call it old-fashioned, but I hope we’re still talking about area codes in 25 years after all.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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Lego Grand Piano – Update #19

(Read about how this project got started in Let’s Make Music!)

Today’s section of the symphony was short and entirely predictable. Bag #19 – of 21 bags of pieces – assembled the rest of the piano’s top lid, shown completed in the photos below. I simply picked up where I left off from last week’s Bag #18, continuing to build up the “wall” of the lid until it was complete. It’s a repetitive process using pieces of similar sizes and shapes. Now, all we are left with – my patient audience members – is the support structure of the piano lid (so it can be raised to its very elegant angle when open), and the free-standing pianist’s bench.

Today’s build took less than twenty minutes. (I could’ve built Bag #20 as well, but why change my weekly pace this late in the game?) As I was finishing the piano lid it occurred to me using Mr. Instruction Manual is a lot like using sheet music. You shift your eyes between the manual and the piano itself constantly as you work, step-by-step-by-step. Just as you would when playing the piano from a sheet of music.

Running Build Time: 13.3 hours. Musical accompaniment: Brahams’ Violin Concerto in D. Leftover pieces: None again!

Conductor’s Note: Johannes Brahms had to be included in the list of musical accompaniments for my Lego Grand Piano build because, well, he’s one of the “bigs” in classical music. His Violin Concerto in D Major sits on Germany’s Mount Rushmore of violin concertos, beside Beethoven’s, Mendelssohn’s, and Max Bruch’s. You, however, know Brahms best for his beloved lullaby “Cradle Song”, which starts “Lullaby, and goodnight, with roses bedight…”

Happy Holiday

If you subscribe to Disneyland’s claim of “the happiest place on earth”, you’re really talking about the several happiest places on earth. Besides the original parks in California and Florida you now have more exotic locales like Tokyo, Shanghai, and Paris – a total of twelve Disney theme parks across the globe. Now throw in Hawaii’s Aulani (Disney) Resort & Spa for a baker’s dozen. But do a search on “the happiest place on earth” and nothing remotely close to the lands of Disney comes up. Instead, you get the land of the Finns.

Maybe you haven’t heard of the World Happiness Report? I have. I first blogged about it five years ago in my post, Happy Days Aren’t Here Again. Back then I wasn’t lamenting the fact the UN established a rather desperate-sounding holiday (“International Day of Happiness” – March 20th). Rather, I was un-happy the United States ranked #14 in the holiday’s companion report. Thirteen countries, including #1 Norway, were happier places on earth. To make matters worse, the U.S. had been slipping in the happiness rankings since the first report in 2013. This year? The Americans dropped again, to #16.

An objective report on happiness sounds a little ridiculous but when one country (Finland) ranks “happiest” five years running, you sit up and wonder what you’re missing with Laplander life. Consider the variables in the happiness report calculation:

Healthy life expectancy
GDP (goods and services) per capita
Social support in times of trouble
Low corruption
High social trust
Generosity to the community
Freedom to make key life decisions

Maybe you assume Finland’s proximity to Ukraine (and Russia) puts it in a nonpareil position to earn high marks for say, “social support” and “generosity to the community”. But this year’s rankings were determined before Russia’s invasion. Finland was already socially supportive and generous (and apparently “happy”). So, does Finland come to mind when you consider the list above? It doesn’t for me, but I will say this. The Finns enjoy day-to-day living. On a Baltic Sea cruise a few years ago we spent several hours in the capitol city of Helsinki, where we had the chance to observe the locals. What were they doing? Sunning themselves in the parks on an unusually warm day. Shopping in open-air markets. Children walking home from school unattended. Peace and quiet wherever you looked. Happiness.

Eight of the ten “happiest” are on this map

Let’s visit some of the other happier-than-America countries. There must be something good in Baltic Sea water because Norway, Sweden, and Denmark also make the top ten. Iceland skates in at #3, which almost makes for a clean (and happy) sweep of the Nordic countries. Switzerland (#4) and New Zealand (#10) are also “happiest”, and I can think of several reasons to spend time in both places.

As the song goes, “don’t worry, be happy”, but I confess I’m a little concerned about happiness here in America. We need to step up our feel-good game from more than just Disney theme parks. Maybe post those seven criteria on our refrigerators as regular reminders. Or, spend more time in saunas like the Finns do. Otherwise, it may be time to pick up and move further north. After all, happiness beckons.

Some content sourced from the CNN Travel article, “The World’s Happiest Countries for 2022, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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Lego Grand Piano – Update #16

(Read about how this project got started in Let’s Make Music!)

Every piano keyboard demands a cover to keep it clean. Bag #16 – of 21 bags of pieces – was entirely dedicated to the protection of the keys. As the photos show, the keyboard cover hinges gracefully up and down, blending seamlessly with the rest of the black piano frame.

A word about leftover pieces (another 3 this week). I need to be more thankful they’re “leftover” and not “missing”. I swear I was shorted an important piece this time around (and maybe I really did swear). But as usual, there it was in plain view in my pile of pieces. I’m grateful to the human or the machine making sure every last piece was included in my Lego Grand Piano box.

Running Build Time: 12.0 hours. Musical accompaniment: Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Leftover pieces: 3

Conductor’s Note: Peter (or Pyotr, if you prefer) Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture was an interesting choice for this week’s build, because I completed the keyboard cover before 8:30am. If you know the Overture, you know it’s fortíssimo, like an alarm clock firing on all cylinders. It’s a blast better meant for an Independence Day fireworks celebration (and some orchestras add a real cannon for the finale). The Overture is also brisk; a mere sixteen minutes from start to finish. I wasn’t that quick with the keyboard cover build, but I did wrap it up in less than a half-hour.

Hold (the) Music!

This morning as I brushed my teeth, I could hear soft music while my wife surfed on her iPad nearby. It was a catchy keyboard instrumental, the kind of tune to put a bounce in your step. Not twenty seconds later however, there was a bit of silence followed by the same melody all over again. By the time I flossed I’d heard this “song” five or six times through and it was getting annoy-oy-oy-ing. Then it hit me. My wife was on her iPad – yes – but she was also on hold.

Elevator Music. Lift Music. Piped Music. Muzak. Call it what you want, but my unofficial survey says hold music is not the satisfying little concert it was designed to be. How many times have you heard, “Thank you for your patience… one of our representatives will be with you shortly…” followed by the same cloying music over and over and OVER again? You pull out your teeth (I mean, your hair) because “the representative” will NEVER be with you (let alone “shortly”). More to today’s point, the persistent music-on-hold (MOH) doesn’t lighten your mood, and, it’s an insult to technology.

MOH had the best of intentions when it debuted in 1962. Like many products MOH was invented by accident, when the phone lines of a small factory accidentally picked up the music of the radio station next door. MOH appealed to businesses because customers stayed on the line longer if offered music over nothing at all. Hold music also found an audience in places where people tended to gather, like elevators, waiting rooms at doctors’ offices, and airport boarding lounges. You should agree; music beats silence any day (in other words, something is better than nothing). It’s just, the “something” should be a whole lot easier on the ears.

I have a personal connection with hold music. Years ago, it was a part of my responsibilities as the switch programmer for a long-distance phone company. If you call customer service today – any customer service – oftentimes “events” happen before you’re connected to a real person. How many times does the phone ring before someone (or something) answers? Are you offered a menu of choices to route your call to a specific department? Would you prefer a callback instead of waiting on hold? A behind-the-curtain person programs these little events and that person was me. I also chose when to offer you hold music.

Mercifully, my long-distance company subscribed to a professional hold music product, which meant calls to our customer service were offered pleasant, non-repeating tunes. You might have to wait fifteen or twenty minutes but at least you wouldn’t get a mindless tune, slowly eating away at your brain cells. Unfortunately, my company was the exception. Professional hold music isn’t cheap (thanks to copyright law) and most companies don’t care enough about their customers to pony up. So, you get “catchy” keyboard instrumentals instead. Even worse, you get the endless loop of tape-recorded music (a tape recording!), including the hiss and pop of too many plays. Like I said, an insult to today’s technology.

You might disagree about the loss of brain cells. “Not ME, Dave; I don’t get hold music stuck in my head“. Okay, but listen to the following YouTube audio and then reconsider. This ditty may be the most famous music-on-hold specimen of them all; the so-called “Opus Number One”, composed by Tim Carleton and Darrick Deel and incorporated into every single Cisco phone system.

The days of hold music are numbered (and thank heavens they are) because the days of live customer service are numbered too. Today’s customer service has you self-diagnosing through torturous “interactive voice response” (IVR) menus or by scrolling online through endless lists of FAQ’s. But MOH still has its place at other tables. The sophisticated InBody body composition scale at my fitness club offers MOH while you stand there getting your vitals measured. Our Samsung washer and dryer play the same happy [irritating] little tune after every load is done. And elevators aren’t going anywhere (except up and down). You’ll still hear plenty of Muzak on elevators. At least today’s smartphones help riders escape their awkward proximity to strangers.

The next time my wife is subjected to hold music, I may have to move to another room to brush my teeth. Then again, maybe it’s not so bad. You can now buy toothbrushes with built-in hold music while you brush (lasting exactly two minutes). This would be detrimental to my dental hygiene. I might tear my teeth out before I even get to the flossing.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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Lego Grand Piano – Update #15

(Read about how this project got started in Let’s Make Music!)

At long last, our piano has a keyboard! Bag #15 – of 21 bags of pieces – added the final key to the right side of the board for a “grand” total of twenty-five. Then the whole assembly slid into the piano frame smoothly, as if closing the drawer to your bedroom dresser. The piece of the black frame running the length of the board just below the keys secures everything into place.

As a part-time perfectionist, I’m a little bothered by the fact the piano keys don’t rest at a uniform height across the board. You can see one to the far left sitting a little higher than his neighbors while one to the far right sits a little lower. Removing the keyboard at this stage in the performance is easy, so I might see if I can level things out. Or, I’ll just make peace with being a little “off-key”. Maybe.

Running Build Time: 11.6 hours. Musical accompaniment: Ives’ The Unanswered Question. Leftover pieces: 1 tiny green square.

Conductor’s Note: Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question is one of the most creative classical pieces you’ll ever hear. It’s a “dialogue” between a trumpet and four flutes. The trumpet asks the question, “What is the meaning of life?“, and the flutes try in vain to answer, a total of six times. The flutes get more and more frustrated (and the music more disjointed) every time the trumpet repeats the question. The Unanswered Question concludes with the trumpet asking its question one last time. Now that you know the story, listen to the short piece through the following video. It’s only six minutes. The Unanswered Question was the perfect choice for today’s topic. After all, how many times do you call customer service only to come away with… an unanswered question?

Blues Choose

When our daughter gets married this June, she’ll include the tradition of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”; all items meant to bring good luck. “Old” is a ring from her grandmother; “New” a necklace. “Borrowed” is still to be determined while “Blue” is the garter her husband-to-be tosses at the reception. Now, if the “blue choose” were mine to make, I’d go with a handful of juicy berries instead.

This week I learned a few things about blueberries, my favorite fruit in any orchard, grove, or patch on earth. Just outside the tiny town of Whiting, Maine (pop. 482) you’ll find Josh Pond, a farm known for its “organic hand-raked wild” blueberries. Josh Pond is harvesting into its fourth generation and its 150 acres include a herd of Oberhasli goats and a giant field of strawberries. In other words, shop on the JP website and you’ll find a variety of cheeses, jams, and jellies alongside the blues.

You already know a thing or two about organic produce but perhaps you’ve never heard the term “hand-raked”. Check out the following video (which beats any description in words). It’s a soothing process to watch and a bountiful harvesting technique. Josh Pond can hand-rake up to 2,000 pounds of blueberries a day. They’re then quick-frozen, packed into 5-pound boxes, and shipped directly to you…at $100 USD a pop. Do the math. Josh Pond grosses $40,000/day on its blueberries alone.

$20 for a pound of blueberries is way steep for my purchasing power. I’m reluctant to pay half as much, and even then I drop them sparingly into my yogurt/granola breakfast. But I may be stingier than I think. JP customer Chelsea Balboni gushes in her online review, “My wild organic blueberry subscription has changed my life. Every month a 5-pound case is overnighted to me…” Every month? Who spends $1,200/year on blueberries (besides Ms. Balboni)? For the record, I’m not knocking Josh Pond. If you want the best blues North America has to offer, JP is your go-to. Just be ready to pay.

Maybe I still spend more on blueberries than you do, but I find it interesting my blues choose – when it comes to food in general – is very limited. Quick – name a blue food (besides Josh Pond blueberries). All I could come up with was Blue Curacao, which isn’t food so much as a liqueur served as a cordial or in tropical drinks. Blue Curacao, ironically, comes from the dried peel of bitter orange and is then dyed blue. (Why blue? No idea, but we’re getting off-topic here).

A consult of a blue food list comes up with just a few worthy entries. Blue crab. Blue corn (tortillas). Blue (or bleu) cheese. And Brilliant blue FCF, a synthetic “safe and non-toxic” dye for ice cream, cotton candy, medications, and cosmetics. I half-expected to find Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts on the list but then I remembered: the wholly chemical toaster pastries contain no blueberries whatsoever. (Okay, maybe a dried trace of them, way-y-y-y down on the ingredients list.)

No post on blueberries would be complete without a mention of Violet Beauregarde. Violet who? C’mon now, channel your inner Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Violet was the obnoxious, gum-loving rich kid who sampled a chew of Willy Wonka’s four-course dinner gum, including the blueberry pie dessert that “wasn’t quite perfected yet”. In a wonderful scene (from the classic 1971 version), Violet turns deep blue as she chews, and inflates into a giant blueberry. The last we see of Violet, the Oompa-Loompas are rolling her away to the juice press to be squeezed back to normal size again.

All of this blues talk reminds me I need to read my granddaughters Blueberries For Sal, one of my favorite childhood stories. Also, I’ll probably cave to one of the giant blueberry muffins my wife brought home from Costco the other day. As for the tempting bounty from Josh Pond? Ah, if only I could purchase just a handful for my daughter on her wedding day. Instead, I’ll leave those hand-raked beauties to blues-choosers with a little more discretionary income.

Some content sourced from the Josh Pond website, the Prepared Cooks article, “18 Foods that are Blue”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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Lego Grand Piano – Update #14

(Read about how this project got started in Let’s Make Music!)

You’ve seen this before, as we cruise past the 2/3 DOWN, 1/3 TO GO road sign. Bag #14 – of 21 bags of pieces – added another seven keys to the board for a total of twenty-four. There’s a lone key remaining to the far right; then the whole assembly goes into the body of the piano (and heaven help me on that maneuver).

Piano keys are getting repetitive so let’s talk about Sergei Rachmaninoff. His name is intimidating but his music has an interesting connection with pop. If you remember Eric Carmen, you already know a little Rachmaninoff. All By Myself is based on Sergei’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Never Gonna Fall in Love Again is based on Sergei’s Symphony No. 2. Both Carmen songs were huge hits but they’re also depressing. Did Eric seek comfort in classical music when his personal relationships weren’t going his way? Maybe, but it wasn’t without expense. The Rachmaninoff estate brought “copyright” to Carmen’s attention, and promptly helped themselves to 12% of the royalties on both songs.

Running Build Time: 11.0 hours. Musical accompaniment: Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Symphony No. 2 in E minor, and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Leftover pieces: 6.

Conductor’s Note: Forget Eric Carmen. Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody… is one of the most moving classical compositions you’ll ever hear. The piece starts ever so simply on the piano, then brings in the orchestra to dramatic, sweeping interpretations. My wife isn’t a classical music fan yet she loves Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody… especially since it’s the theme of the romantic time-travel movie Somewhere in Time. Have a listen here.

A Month of Sundaes

I seem to have an affection for the hyphen. The humble horizontal line appears regularly in my posts. The “dash” is more formal than the “dot-dot-dot” yet more relaxed than the semi-colon – perfect for blog pauses, don’t you agree? My hyphen habit may be the result of formative moments in my life, like Hanna-Barbera cartoons (hello, Yogi Bear) and Hewlett-Packard, where I worked most of my professional career. But if I had to pick just one – or should I say, thirty-one, I’d go with my favorite hyphen of them all. Baskin-Robbins.

The next time I write a post, remind me to have something to eat before I sit down to the keyboard. My last four entries cover graham crackers, doughnuts, waffles, and now ice cream. Might be my anticipation of Easter Sunday (when my Lenten sweets sacrifice comes to an end). Bring on the jellybeans, Peter Rabbit! But today is about ice cream – and not just any. It’s about the one you grew up with; the one you still identify with. For me, it’ll always be Baskin-Robbins.

“B-R”, as they’re now called, has a quaint beginning worth a few sentences here. Burt Baskin and Irv Robbins got into the ice cream business independent of each other. Then Burt married Irv’s sister. The now brothers-in-law decided to combine “Burton’s Ice Cream Shop” (10 flavors) with Irv’s “Snowbird Ice Cream” (21 flavors), and there you have it – the birth of “31 Flavors”. B-R was a single shop back in 1948; today, how about 8,000 parlors in 50 countries? Their new slogan – Seize the yay – has more to do with “celebrating small, joyous moments” than ice cream. Even the rebranded logo removes the nostalgia of the B-R I grew up with (though the embedded “31” is clever). But I get it – B-R needs to appeal to younger generations as well.

Baskin-Robbins is inextricably tied to my childhood memories. Our local B-R was one door over from my mother’s hair salon. It was also right down the street from our church. So ice cream for me was often the reward of patience with Mom or simply going to church with Dad, who often couldn’t resist a stop at B-R on the way home. You could always find a container of B-R Rocky Road in Dad’s freezer, all the way up to the last day of his life. He was fond of saying while he enjoyed a bowlful, “Nothing beats Baskin-Robbins’ Rocky Road.” (I beg to differ with B-R’s Peanut Butter ‘n’ Chocolate, but hey, we all have our favorites).

A lot of my posts mention ice cream yet I’ve only mentioned Baskin-Robbins once in all my blogging (in The Sweets Life three years ago). Kind of a crime there because B-R deserves a post of its own, as does your favorite ice cream parlor. Wikipedia has an article called List of Ice Cream Parlor Chains (of course they do). Your favorite is on that list. I may be partial to B-R but I’m familiar with several others, including Braum’s in Oklahoma and Texas, Carvel to the Northeast, Farrell’s to the West, and Lappert’s in Hawaii.

Of course, with Baskin-Robbins I’m talking “ice-cream-parlor ice cream”. Back at home, you won’t find any B-R in our freezer because Häagen-Dazs (ice cream) and Talenti (gelato) earn the shelf space instead. H-D goes a whole lot higher on the butterfat scale so naturally it tastes better. H-D even has a hyphen! And Talenti, well, it’s gelato. Need I say more?

If you live in a bigger city than me, you have better ice cream options than Baskin-Robbins. Big cities have wonderful local places (follow Lyssy in the City for some of the best in New York). But do they have hyphens? Mine does (as does this post – 48 if I counted correctly). Yes, B-R may be updating its brand, but I’ll always insert the rainbow-sprinkle “dash” between the initials, returning me to those ice-cream parlor memories of old.

Some content sourced from the CNN Business article, “This 77-year-old ice cream chain is getting a makeover”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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Lego Grand Piano – Update #13

(Read about how this project got started in Let’s Make Music!)

We passed the ten-hour mark with the build today, which amounts to a very long piano concerto. (Good thing you’re not being asked to sit and watch, eh?) Bag #13 – of 21 bags of pieces – added another five keys to the board for a total of fifteen. Eight more next week will complete the entire set. Maybe we’ll be installing them into the piano as well!

Here’s a stop-sign warning if you take on a project like this. Pieces can easily be installed backwards. For all my “practice” building keys these past few weeks, I got a few tiny pieces reversed today and had to disassemble to make things right. Mr. Instruction Manual includes warning-like diagrams to make sure you don’t do this. In other words, the piano student must pay attention at all times!

Running Build Time: 10.2 hours. Musical accompaniment: Strauss’s The Blue Danube waltz. Leftover pieces: 3

Conductor’s Note: The Blue Danube is familiar from the very first bars (especially if you saw 2001: A Space Odyssey and remember the scene with the rotating space station). Strauss was fond of waltzes and this one is his most famous. With its repeating theme, I thought The Blue Danube would be appropriate this time around since I’ve been building key after key after key.

Sweeter Than Honey

We all have favorite name-brand products, and crackers are no exception. I grew up on Nabisco’s Wheat Thins. Years later I developed a taste for the more sophisticated shredded-wheat Triscuit. When I first met my wife, she introduced me to Kellogg’s buttery Club Crackers. Each of these products is a little different (and today we prefer healthier versions of all three). But I think most would agree, there’s nothing quite like the taste of a graham cracker.

As I put graham crackers under the spotlight today I wonder what comes to your mind first. For me, it’s two things. First, I’m taken back to childhood mornings at Sunday school, where the preferred snack was honey graham crackers and pineapple juice. I can’t think of another time or place where I ever had that combination of foods. Maybe the sugar overload was a strategy to keep us awake during the Bible stories? Second, I endlessly debate whether a graham is a cracker or a cookie. If you’re at all familiar with the ingredients, grahams lean towards “cookie”. They’re called a cracker, they look like a cracker, but nine out of ten stores stock them in the cookie aisle.

It’s appropriate my first memory of graham crackers is at church. They’re named after Sylvester Graham, a nineteenth-century preacher whose constant message was temperance. In Graham’s time, temperance was a movement against the consumption of alcoholic beverages, but also encouraged what may have been the first vegetarian diet. Wheat was its cornerstone, and wheat (flour) is the primary ingredient in graham crackers. To be clear, Sylvester didn’t invent the graham cracker (we’re not sure who did) but his preaching inspired its name.

The sweet ingredient in graham crackers used to be molasses, one of my favorite items in the pantry. Inevitably, molasses gave way to processed sugar. But as I discovered recently, honey is a key ingredient in today’s best-tasting grahams.

For you, maybe graham crackers taste best in s’mores (which I wrote about in Toasty of the Town), or the crust of a cheesecake, or even Moon Pies for you baby boomers. But for me, grahams taste best all by themselves. They play like a “cheat” to the more sugary options out there, and I can pretend I’m just snacking on a “cracker”.

I keep a stash of grahams in my office drawer to satisfy my occasional sweet tooth. I only need a couple of the 2″x 5″s and I’m back on track. The other day however, I pulled open the drawer to nothing but crumbs. Horrors! Grahams have been my go-to since the beginning of Lent because I’ve given up chocolate and “sweets”. So I quickly added them to my store list and vowed to shop later in the day.

But as so often has been the case during the pandemic, I immediately paused and thought, “Wait a minute. Why buy graham crackers? Maybe I can make them from scratch?“

Here then, I present what is the best graham cracker recipe I’ve ever tried. (Okay, it’s the only recipe I’ve ever tried but it doesn’t matter; I don’t need another one.) Gemma’s Bigger Bolder Baking takes grahams to a way higher rung on the cookie ladder (including a helpful video if you’re baking-challenged like me). I’ve eaten a million Honey-Maids yet it took me sixty years to realize grahams can be SO… MUCH… BETTER. Why? Because these contain a lot more of the good stuff and a lot less of the nasty chemical flavorings and preservatives.

You should expect these homemade grahams to taste better when you see the ingredients. The ratio of flour to brown sugar is 2:1 (emphasis on the “1”). Now add another 1/3 cup of honey. That’s a lot of “sweet” for a cracker, er, cookie that looks like a thin cardboard rectangle. But I’m talking delicious with a capital “D”. Think chewy instead of crunchy, with a rich “graham” flavor lingering much longer than store brands. They’re almost too good to be called a graham.

Okay, let’s close the box on graham crackers with a quick review:

They were invented as an alternative to unfavorable indulgences.
They’re a cookie by definition but a cracker by name.
They make you want to try Moon Pies (if you haven’t already).
They satisfy a craving for sweets without being “a sweet” (disregard earlier comment about brown sugar and honey).
They are unquestionably better made from scratch than store-bought.

If I haven’t sold you on how much better the humble graham cracker can be, consider this. They’re simple to make and you already have all of the ingredients you need. So, what are you waiting for? Go bake some crackers, Graham!

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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Lego Grand Piano – Update #10

(Read about how this project got started in Let’s Make Music!)

We worked entirely underneath the piano today, with the instrument flipped onto its back. Bag #10 – of 21 bags of pieces – contained an intimidating pile of tiny parts. I didn’t realize what I was even building until somewhat magically, pedals, legs, and castors appeared before my eyes. That’s right folks, this baby-baby grand now rolls.

I also took a deep breath and tackled the “loose piece” I’ve mentioned with the last two builds. Sparing you the heart-stopping details, let’s just admit I installed a tiny piece ninety degrees wrong. Correcting meant removing all the piano strings and working in a deep, dark corner, with the assistance of an X-Acto knife, eyeglass screwdriver, and pliers. Like I’ve said before, don’t get any part of this performance wrong. It’ll cost you later. Dearly.

Running Build Time: 8.1 hours. Musical accompaniment: Satie’s Gymnopidies 1, 2, and 3 (a deliberate choice to soothe me while I repositioned the loose piece). Leftover pieces: 3

Conductor’s Note: The tiny pedal to the right is called the “damper”. It’s used to sustain the notes you play after you take your hands off the keys. Remarkably, the Lego Grand Piano has the same mechanical action you’d find with this pedal in a real piano. Sit down at a keyboard some time, press the right pedal with your foot, and (with the piano lid raised) you’ll see just how many moving parts it takes to sustain notes. You’ll find those same moving parts in the Lego Grand Piano.

In-Spired Music

Last Friday, I walked out of the downtown salon where I get my monthly haircut to the makings of a beautiful late winter afternoon. A few cars motored by on the street, yet nobody blared the horn or blasted the radio. Pedestrians kept their conversations to a low tone. Songbirds made melody, willing the next season to an early debut. Above all (literally), the nearby Methodist church bells rang out the hour of the day from the steeple, followed by a cheerful rendition of… “The First Noel”?

Found the culprit on Google Street View!

Last time I checked Christmas was well over two months ago. Decorations are boxed and returned to the closet, lights are taken down, and Starbucks no longer offers my seasonal favorite Chestnut Praline Latte. Yet here I was, a block from a downtown church in March, with happy steeple bells daring me to burst into Christmas song.

Talk about a case of bats in the belfry. You think I’d pause for such a strange moment. Instead, I simply took in this carol of the bells with a smile, got behind the wheel, and went on my “merry” way.

So it is with church bells, especially the ones in steeples big enough to broadcast their melodies for miles around. I find church bells comforting, so much so they can play anything they choose and I’ll be happy to listen. Even a tune that sounds so three-months-ago.

The church I grew up in, on the far west side of Los Angeles, had a tall steeple with bells. If you pulled up to the parking lot within ten minutes of the start of the service, the bells were making music. More importantly, they were telling you (as they’ve done for centuries in older churches) it’s time to get yourself inside for worship, buddy. I didn’t watch every episode of Little House on the Prarie but I watched enough to remember the steeple bells summoning the people of the small town to church. Believe me, you didn’t want to be the last parishioner in Walnut Grove to pass through the sanctuary doors, earning a steely-eyed stare-down from Rev. Alden.

Here’s another memory from childhood church. In “Sunday School” they taught us how to lace our fingers together, tips pointing down, palms face-to-face below, and thumbs side-by-side in front.

[Go ahead, I’ll wait while you make your little “church”.]

Then you’d look at your hands and say, “Here’s the church…” (now raise your two index fingers into a point), “Here’s the steeple…”, (now separate your thumbs a bit), “Open the doors…”, (now flip your hands over and wiggle your fingertips), “… and see all the people!” That little ditty was clever enough to recollect all these years later, the moment I heard “The First Noel” from the downtown steeple.

At least in America, the appeal – ha – of steeple bells is probably because you don’t hear them all that often (unless your neighbor is a church). Most modern churches can only afford the structure of the steeple, not the complicated mechanism of the bells within. Just like train crossings, today’s “bells” are often an electronic equivalent, and so realistic you can’t tell the difference. But you can with steeples. If the church was built in the last fifty years, the steeple bells probably don’t ring true (ha again).

Charleston, South Carolina is known as the Holy City because you’ll find over four hundred churches in its rather compact downtown streets. You can’t look in any direction in Charleston without seeing a steeple, and many of them are hundreds of years old. That means bells; hundreds and hundreds of bells. Take a walk in Charleston on a Sunday morning and you’ll be “treated” to the overlapping competition of steeple bells. They’re summoning you to church, of course (but which one, exactly?)

The Sound of Music has a brief but charming steeple scene in the movie, just before or after Maria weds Captain von Trapp at Mondsee Abbey. The camera points to the very top of a steeple, where the abbey bells are visible just below the cupola. In the era of the story, steeple bells were rung by hand. In this scene, the “ringer-boy” is shown holding on for dear life as he clings to a rope, the weight of the bell dragging him up and down like a pogo stick. The moment always makes me laugh.

One of these days you’ll be walking down the streets of your own town and church bells will ring. Stop for a second and give them a listen. You’ll probably hear a melodic hymn. You might even be gifted with an “unseasonal” Christmas carol. Doesn’t really matter. Those big, happy bells make beautiful music no matter the tune.

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Lego Grand Piano – Update #9

(Read about how this project got started in Let’s Make Music!)

We are closing in the piano’s insides now, as you can see by the almost complete black frame in both photos. Bag #9 – of 21 bags of pieces – contained a good chunk of the frame curves, including the graceful “S” you can see just beyond the right side of the (future) keyboard.

Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 was just about the perfect length for today’s build, with a couple of hold-your-breath moments where pieces from previous builds snapped off and skittered away. They’re back where they belong now,

Running Build Time: 7.5 hours. Musical accompaniment: Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in G-Minor. Leftover pieces: 2 (tiny unnecessary extras for the frame).

Conductor’s Note: We have a hinged trap door built into the frame now, for access to the battery pack and on/off switch. When it’s closed, the frame is seamless and you’d never know the door was there. They have clever people at Lego.

Small Fly

Whenever we travel to our favorite little town in South Carolina, we have the option of a connecting flight through Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) or Atlanta (ATL) to get there. DFW is the fourth-busiest airport in the world, with five terminals, seven runways, and 164 gates. The airport property covers twenty-seven square Texas miles, with its own zip code, police, and fire departments. Meanwhile, ATL is merely the busiest airport in the world, hosting 300,000 passengers and 60,000 workers every day. One of ATL’s runways is so long they hold an annual 5k running race on it. DFW and ATL are mega-ports and can be mega-stressful to pass through, which is why landing in little Augusta, Georgia, our final flying destination, is like a breath of small-town fresh air.

Augusta Regional Airport (“…at Bush Field”, or simply “AGS”) is the smallest airport in the world. Okay, that’s not even close to true (especially if you consider landing strips in cornfields) but it sure feels like it. AGS sits quietly on the banks of the Savannah River, just west of the Georgia state line. It’s served by the smallest aircraft of Delta and American. Its tiny terminal building is shaped like a capital “T”, with two little ticket counters at the top, followed by a quick stroll down the middle to a boarding lounge the size of an oversized living room. If you average out the flight schedule, AGS has a single plane touching down every two hours. They should hire the Augusta High School marching band to welcome each landing (“Go Orioles!”)

The first time I realized AGS was big-time-small was after a late landing on a weekday night. Walking down the brief concourse the airport was noticeably dark. The rental car counters were already shuttered for the night. At baggage claim, the single attendant (literally, the only employee in the building) announced bags would be hand-delivered to the curb instead of circulating on the belt. Yep, they just lined ’em all up by the waiting cars.

My other AGS big-time-small moment was the first time I saw the parking lot (free for 30 min, $8/day). Half the lot was given over to rental cars. Think about the number of rental car spaces you need for an airport where just a handful of planes land each day. Now double the number. That’s the size of Augusta Regional’s parking lot.

The design of AGS, boasting one-story red brick, proud white columns, and suburban landscaping, reminds me of the clubhouse of a golf course. In fact, Augusta Regional bears the nickname “The Country Club Airport”, entirely fitting since The Masters professional golf tournament is held every April just twelve miles from its runways.

Lounge outside (past security) before you board…

AGS reminds me of my first small airport experience back when I was a freshman in college. Flying from Los Angeles (LAX – second-busiest in the U.S.), I deplaned in a modest midwestern town, and for the first time ever descended stairs onto the outside tarmac instead of through a jetway to the terminal. I happened to be the first passenger off the plane, which meant leading a line of people to the glass doors of the boarding lounge. Only I couldn’t open the glass doors. They wouldn’t “push” despite my best efforts. Several greeters on the other side of the glass (this was pre-9/11) gestured to “pull” instead of “push”. Took me just a little too long to figure that out. Believe I heard the words “city boy” as I was on my way to baggage claim.

When we landed in Augusta most recently, we were the last flight of the night. As we sat on the park-like benches at the curb waiting for our daughter to pick us up, I watched one of the few remaining employees bring in the trash cans and turn out the lights. She made sure we had a ride, then locked the terminal building doors. Only one other passenger was waiting to be picked up. It was a little strange to be among the last couple of people on the property. I mean, most airports don’t even close.

At Dallas/Fort Worth, you can rent private rooms at the “Minute Suites” for naps or freshening up right there in the airport terminal. There’s even a full-service spa. In Atlanta you’ll find a Starbucks in six of the seven airport concourses. Augusta Regional? How about a soft pretzel at the one concession stand, or an overpriced unofficial souvenir from The Masters? Doesn’t matter. You can show up less than an hour before your departure, and you can take in the take-offs from a comfy rocking chair. Yep, this little small-fly is a pretty sweet landing pad.

Some content sourced from the Augusta Regional Airport website.

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Lego Grand Piano – Update #8

(Read about how this project got started in Let’s Make Music!)

Our instrument really came together this week, as you’ll see in the second photo. Bag #8 – of 21 bags of pieces – not only connected both large pieces, but also added strings! We now have enough of the black frame in place to where our little gem is finally starting to look like a piano.

I went with Haydn’s “Surprise Symphony” today because I completed this section in the early morning hours and needed the famous jolt the orchestra gives you at the end of an otherwise piano movement. (Yes, “piano” can be an adjective). Haydn was famous for these little “jokes”, placed randomly the middle of his compositions.

Running Build Time: 6.75 hours. Musical accompaniment: Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 in G Major. Leftover pieces: 4 (including a couple of piano strings).

Conductor’s Note: We’re getting very close to boxing in the complex mechanics of the instrument… and I’m nervous. We have a couple “loose ends” in there which must somehow attach so they’ll do something productive (like make music). Hoping next week’s Bag #9 addresses this concern.