Category: Stories

Waes Hael

So we’ve been playing around with scents in the house ever since we got here. On our first trip to the store we picked up a couple scented candles to give important rooms a pleasant smell. And I’ve been burning incense, which I do wherever I go, which always makes rooms smell interesting. However, while picking up upholstery supplies from a craft store with Nishi, we noticed these cinnamon scented pine cones they sold (for quite a bit of money). They definitely smelled good, but it made me think of a nice and cheap alternative that we hadn’t yet tried in the house.

Growing up, I’ve always had a wood stove in my house. My parents would sit a iron kettle on top of the stove, which would boil and keep the air in the house from drying out. They would throw little bits of spices or potpourri in there as well, cloves and cinnamon especially, which would fill the room with the scent. I picked up some sticks of cinnamon while doing groceries, and figured I’d try this here.

Now, we don’t have a wood stove in this house. But I have heard of people doing this on a kitchen stove, and that’s what I decided to try. In a pot half filled with water, I dropped two sticks of cinnamon and brought it to a boil – and it worked just perfectly! Today, Nishi was looking at the pot and thought, “I wonder how that tastes.” It was only cinnamon and water (and a dash of vanilla), so it should be alright. She tasted it and told me, “This tastes just like wassail!” She added some Tang and sugar to a mug of cinnamon water, and settled back in her chair.

Staple

So I’ve been walking around barefoot or in sandals for most, if not all of the summer. And I’ve developed some rather impressive callouses on my feet.

Nishi has been upholstering for much of the summer as well, and much of that work is either prying staples out of old furniture, or stapling new fabric. I’ve been fairly careful so far to avoid staples while walking around her workspace, and haven’t had any nasty surprises yet.

However, this morning as I got out of bed, I noticed my heel was dragging – catching on the bed sheet. I reached down, and felt a staple logged into my heel. It was a staple that had been pried off a chair, so replace that new staple image in your head with a gnarled and twisted one. I had to show it off, but I just yanked it out and went on my way. I’ve never been more proud of my feet.

Sleep Logistics

I’m home for the weekend getting various things done. It works out well for my parents, who are out of town – I’m watching Mario for them. Mario likes to be wherever the people are, both day and night. During the day he’ll sit on your lap, and at night he’ll sleep on your bed. For such a tiny dog, he takes a lot of space on a bed.

On my tiny twin bed, I awoke the other night to find he’d pushed me to the side, and was spread over most of the foot of the bed. I nudged him a bit so I could stretch out my legs and get some blood flowing in them again, and we drifted off to sleep again. A few hours later, loud thump woke me, and I saw Mario on the floor looking up at me, visibly annoyed. We’ve been sleeping in the Big Bed since then.

I don’t think I’ve seen him fall off the bed before, but I can remember several times it happened to me. One time in particular, I was so tangled up in my sheets, that when I rolled over the edge, I just dangled there, suspended about a foot above the ground. I woke up hanging there, freaked out, and promptly hit the ground.

Jim

Jim is this really cool guy I met at Grey Fox when I started volunteering. He taught me how to cook fries just right, which is good because I was making really shitty fries before he arrived. He is an incredibly nice guy, who used to teach art to kids (elementary/middle school). He’s shown me a Christmas card he drew, and made me a really cool print of my name, with just magic markers he had in his car.

Jim is always pretty easy to spot – he has a shirt that he uses for festivals. It has seen many, and I’m really amazed it still holds together. He’s usually wondering around the hospitality tent doing odd jobs and helping people out. Every time I saw him he would say how much he loved it there. He’s in his late 70s, lives alone, and doesn’t go on vacations, so Grey Fox and Rhythm & Roots are how he relaxes.

I didn’t see him this year, possibly because the new location is an hour farther away. I didn’t make it to Rhythm & Roots, so I don’t know if he was there either, so I wrote him a letter. A real handwritten letter. Certainly the first that I’ve written in a long time. I hope I hear from him soon – he’s a good dude, and if he won’t be making it to festivals anymore, I’d like to go visit him.

Peace

I was driving home this summer, and one of the roads quite near my house was under construction, so that there was only one open lane, with no one directing traffic. There weren’t many cars, but it still needed to be figured out. So a guy in a truck and I reach this point at about the same time, and I flash my highbeams for him to go, so he does, and right before he was about to pass by me and let me go, the guy behind he decides to go too. So I get to wait again, and he knows I’m a little pissed, and that he should have probably let me go, so he flashes the peace sign before passing me. I really mean flashes, no more than a second. Kind of a quick “I’m sorry.” I really liked it, and instantly forgave the guy, because I had never really seen anything like it before.

Bike to McDonald’s

When I was younger I would bike everywhere. I specifically remember biking to McDonald’s to get fries. The whole experience really just cancels itself out health-wise. Any benefits I would have gotten from biking were offset by the fries, and any fat I would have gained was offset by the biking. So all I was left with was tasty fries.

Astronomy Final

Last semester I took astronomy, which was a fairly easy class, and not as interesting as I was hoping it would be. We didn’t really spend much time on the sky, and talking about constellations and such – apparently that’s more astrology. Oh well. So, much of the class was a lab where we would have to do math, and use equations, and generally do things (the complete opposite of what I had expected).

Like good slackers, many of us managed to get by doing as little work as possible. There were some labs where I never had to leave my seat because people would come by with answers, and I would give them some answers I had gotten from someone else. It was wonderful, and we were all doing fairly well in the class, until the Lab Final came around. The lab final was more strict than the standard labs, and we all had to work alone.

Because of our lab habits earlier in the semester, none of us really knew anything, and we were all pretty sure we were going to bomb that final. Our TA knew this, and being the cool guy he is, helped us out in an incredibly cool way. With about 10 minutes left in the final, he went up to the front of the class and told us, “I’m gonna go downstairs and get a snack out of the machine. I’ll be back in a little while.”

So the cheating commenced, and as far as I know, we all did pretty well on that final. It’s nice when people let things that don’t matter slide.

ENGR 100

Wasting Time by Animal Liberation Orchestra
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/alo2006-05-04.flac16/alo2006-05-04d1t03_64kb.mp3]

First semester of Freshman year, we had a class called Intro to Engineering, which was a one credit class that didn’t really tell us anything worthwhile, and generally wasted our time. I think the idea behind it was to expose engineering students to everything the school of engineering had to offer, but most of us were decided on a major, and didn’t really care what else was out there. So we ignored the class, and just went with it as much as we had to. The class never really required much of us, just attendance and a project at the end of the semester.

The project was to reverse engineer something. Anything really, but for sanity reasons we were advised to keep it simple. Ryan and Ryan had decided on reverse engineering a skateboard, and Eric and I had decided on a microscope. I remember a few weeks before the end of the semester the Ryans had a skateboard in their room, and they were working on that project.

Eric and I had planned on doing something similar, but we had a hang-up. It turns out neither of us had a microscope, and we didn’t want to buy one. So we started asking around, if anyone we knew had a microscope. It turns out Joe had one, and he was awesome enough to take pictures of it, and send them to us. So we included pictures of a microscope we didn’t have along with a bunch of other stuff we didn’t really know (there were a couple random physics equations we included because we figured they were appropriate). In the end, we completed the entire project without ever touching a microscope, or really knowing anything about one.

In the end, we got a D-, which was a higher grade than nearly everyone we talked to. Even the Ryans, who spent more time on it and had a physical object to work with did worse, and we couldn’t have been happier. I learn such great things in college.

Storms

Isabel by microphone FLy~
[audio:http://john.paganetti.com/wp-content/uploads/Isabelle.mp3]

One of the things I’ll probably miss most about the old location for Grey Fox was the storms. It might sound weird, but they were so incredibly central to the Grey Fox experience. Nearly every year (we can remember two exceptions) there was a good sized storm that rolled through during the festival.

One of these storms prompted my dad to ditch camping in tents and buy a trailer. It had been raining all night, and a section of the tent’s roof had started to collect water. When my dad woke up, he pushed it to knock the water off the tent, but his hand went right through it, and he got a nice cold wake up shower.

The first year I was ever on the mountain, I was about 10 weeks old, and my parents carried me up the mountain, because they had closed the road due to the rain. I obviously don’t remember this, but I’ve been told many times about that year.

I watched a dome tent roll down the road, blown by a strong wind. After a beat, a half dozen people appeared, chasing after it.

I can remember standing on top of the hill after we thought the storm had passed us, and looking at the massive cloud over us, we realized that it was just circling above us. It is really incredible to see. It ended up hanging around our general area for a few days.

In 2001, we nearly didn’t go to Grey Fox. The Tall Ships were coming through, and I guess it was a big deal, because we went out to go see them during the first part of the week of Grey Fox. Late in the week, I started to bug my dad about how we oughta go for the tail end of the festival. He talked to some of our friends already on the hill, and they told him it was rainy, and gonna stay rainy. He checked the forecast, and it said 8-10 inches of rain over the course of the weekend. We went up anyway, and slept in the back of the Pathfinder. The mudfest that year was actually caught on tape in A Bluegrass Journey.

But the one storm I hope I never forget was a few years ago (three? four?). I remember it was a beautiful afternoon, but as evening approached, I noticed some big clouds in the distance. We climbed up on someone’s RV to get a better look. I had never seen a wall of clouds like that before – it was really incredible. It looked like a tidal wave, visibly moving closer and closer to us. When it reached us, we found it that it was a really powerful electrical storm, and they actually had to close down the main stage for a while, something I had never seen happen before. The sound of thunder when you’re outside, in the middle of a gigantic thunderstorm, is not to be missed.

I’m incredibly bored.

Kick It Open by Moonalice
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/moonalice2007-06-02.Moonalice2007-06-02.flac/Moonalice2007-06-02d1t04_64kb.mp3]

I’m bored to a point I haven’t been in a long time. It isn’t good. I dunno, maybe that’s not true, but it feels like I’m incredibly bored. I have school work that I could be doing, but it is very little, and only one of those things is actually necessary. I’m doing better in school that I ever have before this semester, and I’m at a point in the semester where I can’t actually screw that up. So school work is out.

I went over my bandwidth yesterday (or the day before, I forget), but that isn’t the reason for my boredom. I’m not so addicted to the internet that one to two days without it renders me useless. I’m almost there, but not quite. No, the real reason for my boredom is the lack of people to hang out with. And even when there are the people, there’s a lack of time. It seems that I’m the only person who has this amount of free time on his hands, so I get to spend most of it alone.

So I think I’m going to start telling stories. I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, but I’ve never quite gotten around to it, probably because I had better things to do. But I’ve run out of those better things, so its time I got crackin. It’s gonna be weird though, no real rhyme or reason behind the order they’ll be coming out – my memory comes and goes as it wants to, so those stories will as well.