Monday, June 02, 2008, 14:39
Music Festival
Note: I have to say that I am getting really tired of the Wild Blue satellite service taking more than 1 1/2 hours to send out one e-mail. I set up a Rural Route 2 Newsletter to go out, and 1 1/2 hours later, the computer was still trying to send the e-mail. So I stopped it and started it again. At this rate, I will never get the newsletter sent out!
I signed up to be a vendor at a Christian family music festival on Saturday. The event was held at the Northern Wisconsin state fairgrounds in the next county over. The vendors were indoors, which was all right. It was cloudy and dreary and misty and wet on Friday, so if it was still going to be wet Saturday, I did not want to be outside.
Like I always say: Many things can get wet and be dried out and be none the worse for wear and tear. Books are not one of them!
As it turned out, Saturday was a nice, sunny day, even though it was a bit on the cool side, or at least the breeze was cool. The sun felt warm. And by evening, it had become much more humid, and there were rain showers and a few thundershowers around as I drove home at 8 p.m.
I had to be at the fairgrounds and set up by 10 a.m. After I got set up, I found out that the main gates did not open until 11 a.m. I don't know why they insisted that the vendors had to be set up an hour early. I was there 2 hours early, actually. Vendors were supposed to stay set up until 7 p.m. A few left early.
The long and short of it is -- I do not think their music festival was nearly as well as attended as organizers had hoped it would be. It seemed to me that is was mostly children and teenagers wandering around the fairgrounds. I'm thinking it was a case of Mom or Dad dropping the kids off at the fairgrounds and thinking that because it was a Christian musical festival, the kids would not be able to get into any trouble.
In my opinion, the pounding bass and the loud, raucous music was not the right venue in which to also hold a craft sale. There is a tavern a few miles down the road from here out in the country that regularly generates complaints from people who live nearby because of the outdoor music they play on the weekends. The rock bands have a pounding bass and a cranked up volume that makes the noise able to be heard for several miles.
The musical groups at the festival on Saturday would put the rock bands at the tavern to shame for the pounding of their bass and the volume they were able to generate.
Interesting. I must be getting old . I am sure that type of music has an appeal to a certain target audience. And the target audience seemed to be kids from the ages of maybe 7 or 8 on up to about 14 or 15 (or a little older) who were occupying the grandstand Saturday evening.
I had to smile to myself as I was loading up and getting ready to leave when I heard the lead singer boom out over the microphone from the grandstand area that the audience was "welcome to sing along." If they were able to sing along, I couldn't hear them. That's if they were able to sing along, because it wasn't really music that lent itself to being sung along with.
On the flip side of the coin, there was a small stage and an electronic keyboard set up in the building where the craft sale vendors were set up. For most of the day, someone was at the keyboard playing and singing. The vocalists varied. The volume was incredible. When the occasional person stopped by my table, I had to shout to make myself heard, and they had shout back. It was impossible to carry on a conversation. The keyboard music wasn't the hard rock pounding type of music, but still, it all sounded the same -- same kind of chords, same kind of rhythm. The voices sounded the same. Some were male. Most were female. You could catch a word or phrase here and there sometimes.
Anyway. Live and learn. I violated my own rule. Never be a vendor at craft sales that are tied to another event, or, perish the thought, a festival. It reminded me of the craft sales I attended at Dairy Days and the Cheese Curd festival the summer before last.
By the time I arrived home Saturday evening, I had such a headache. . .
LeAnn R. Ralph
Thursday, May 29, 2008, 20:52
Bummers, Hummers and Cliff Swallows
Here's the bummer part
My blog and my photo album have not been working very well for the past week. At one point, all of my blog entries disappeared completely. My husband thought he had it fixed, but then I discovered Wednesday night that even though I could log into the blog, I would not post anything to the blog.
My Rural Route 2 photo album is a little messed up, too. The photos are there, but all of the captions are missing. My husband tells me I should count myself as lucky because there are some domains from which the pictures are missing completely.
This is all related to a server change last week at the ISP which hosts my domain.
When the photo album is working again, I will post pictures of the giant hail we got on Sunday.
Hummers
I cannot hardly believe how fast the hummingbirds are going through nectar. This is unprecedented. Usually first thing in the spring, I fill the hummingbird feeder, and then the hummingbirds come once in a while, and eventually the nectar gets cloudy. Then I dump it out and put in fresh. The hummingbirds come once in a while again, the nectar gets cloudy, then I dump it out and fill it with fresh once again.
During a normal spring, I have to refill the feeder twice before the hummingbirds are sucking it down fast enough to keep the nectar from getting cloudy.
Not this spring. I have never, not in the last 13 years, seen the hummingbirds sucking down nectar so quickly this early in the season.
I think we have four pairs of nesting hummingbirds around our yard because I have seen four females around the feeder at one time. Randy, however, said he thought he saw five females around the feeder one day.
Over the past several years, it seemed as though we did not have as many hummingbirds. I think the severe drought had something to do with it.
In a "normal" year, the hummingbirds slowly increase their consumption of nectar so that by the middle or the end of July, I am filling the feeder every 24 hours. I wonder how often I will have to fill it this year if they keep it up at this pace?
To tell you the truth, I don't really care. I'm just glad to see the hummingbirds are back in full force.
Cliff Swallows
The cliff swallows also are back in full force this spring. The past few years, because it was so dry, they could not find enough moist dirt to build their nests, and they left for someplace where there was more rain and the ground was softer.
They are making up for lost time this year. I think we have several dozen cliff swallows nesting up along the eaves of the house. Whenever I walk past, a whole flock of cliff swallows fly out. I don't know how many of them can fit in one nest, but I think it's quite a few.
It's interesting to see how they build their nests. They make them into an connected colony of nests all glued together with mud. Each nest has a small "tunnel" going into the main part of the nest. I was afraid that the rain on Sunday, which came out of the west driven by a 50 mph wind, would dissolve the nests on the west side of the house. But the cliff swallow nests appear to be just fine.
In not too long, we will be able to hear the babies chirping in the nests. Once the youngsters learn to fly, we are going to have quite a large flock of cliff swallows flying around.
Good. Between the cliff swallows and the barn swallows, they ought to be able to eat quite a few of the flies and mosquitoes around here. I won't mind that a bit. And neither will the horses.
Isabelle
The welt on Isabelle's neck from the vaccinations she got last Friday has gone down considerably. I can hardly see where it was. And Isabelle is able to put her head down to eat out of her tub again and to graze to her heart's content.
Katerina and Dora
Katerina and Dora have gotten to the point where they are only coughing occasionally from the respiratory problems they had following spay surgery. They still need to be on the antibiotic for a while yet, but that's all right. I want to make sure that the pneumonia is gone completely, once and for all, by the time they're done with the medicine.
LeAnn R. Ralph