Liza Constable

I’ve been listening to alot of podcasts lately, since I’ve been doing a lot of driving this summer. I always seem to enjoy the program “Speaking of Faith”. I am tired of Christianity and far more interested in Buddhism. Being raised a lax Unitarian, it’s not a far leap. Krista Tippett takes speaking of faith in intelligent directions, always.

Anyway, I stumbled upon Jon Kabat-Zinn in the last year or so, trying to deal with the death of both my brother and mother, searching for ways to live my life, be healthy, be awake, get through greiving, and make this life work…

I stopped the ipod at this moment in the conversation and “rewound”:

“The key to creativity is cultivating spaciousness of the mind”. Exactly, I thought, that is exactly what I am looking for. I know these are the times that I am producing the best work, the best thoughts, the best energy.

So he goes on, “Well, actually the spaciousness is already in the mind…we can’t cultivate it, what we can cultivate is intimacy with it so that we actually know how spacious, how luminous, how creative and reliable our own minds are. Now that would be good to start learning in kindergarten!”

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/

Life: Really, NH weather is so behind. There’s been the tease that spring is here, but there’s not a bud poking out from the garden, from under the few inches of snow left. I made some maple syrup for the first time in years, my neighbor had more sap than she could boil. Keeping the woodstove hot for days made the house unbearably hot. But, it’s like gold, tastes so good, like real food vs fast food. Home baked vs store bought. Or maybe it’s all the bits of tree bark didn’t get strained…

As well as the beginning of mud season, it’s also birthday season. Piper and Zooey turned 9 and 11 respectively in the last 2 months, and we’ve been eating cake. I have been perfecting my vegan cake, it’s the best: from the cookbook “Veganomicon” (the same author as “Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World”). Wicked chocolate with a taste of almond. I also made coconut lemon cake. Everyone loves me.

Family, circa 2009

Music: Rumblestrip is chugging along, festival invites are coming in, which is alway nice to have happen during the long new england winters. We are playing for the Downeast Festival this coming weekend (last weekend in March) in Topsham Maine. Always a fun festival, full of people we know, with that enthusiasm those Mainers are known for. So true! I’ll be teaching a workshop on swing guitar at the festival as well as helping out Nat in his fiddle workshop, playing for dances, including the Survivors Dance in Yarmouth on Sunday afternoon with Perpetual Motion (John Cote and Ed Howe). Google DECDA for more info. You can listen to the beginning of our new CD on our MySpace page,   www.myspace.com/rumblestrip1

Swing A Cat Trio has a concert coming up on the 4th of April, at Del Rossi’s Trattoria in Dublin NH. We’ve been working hard on expanding our repertoire, we’ve got a handful of Boswell Sister’s songs to do, and lots of others from that era, 30s and 40s. The music of my mother. Mom used to play old records, and we’d dance around trying not to make the needle skip. Swing a Cat has some other gigs shaping up for the summer. Check out our new website at http://swingacat.wordpress.com or listen at
http://myspace.com/swingacatmusic

I have lots of ideas for new recordings, and need to get all that in place and get it done. Argh! I got pretty overwhelmed last fall with the sudden death of my brother and the expected death of my mom at the end of the summer. The waves of grief, the purposeful activity as someone’s life comes to a close, like what to do with all the stuff, taxes, paperwork, lawyers. Ugh. Thank god I have 2 sisters, we are all working together, for better or worse. I now have lots of new tools, since my bro was a woodworker and housepainter out on Nantucket. Which is pretty exciting. He would totally understand my excitement. Time to finish the studio that is waiting (as a tarp covered deck) in the backyard… that’s probably what they would have wanted me to do, in fact, they were already insisting that I do. There is no escape from family!!

Family, circa 1969

It was my birthday last week. I am 39 years old, according to realage.com. I’m going with that. I hate pictures of me, but in ten years I’ll think I looked pretty good….that’s what mom always said. Damn if it isn’t true.

Nat gave me a great book. “Two in a Boat”, the story of a couple that sold their house and went sailing. What happened to their relationship through the trials of sailing under stress. Do I know about that? Is he trying to scare me off sailing with him? Haven’t finished it. I have 4 books going now: Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Not Aparteid, 101 Days by Asne Seierstad (Bookseller of Kabul), and Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich. All great reads, and I feel so damn informed

…….But I have to tell how I fixed the iPod.

My 2 year old iPod has been acting up, freezing in the middle of songs, not starting up when cold, when hot, when ignored. This has been happening off and on for months. Nat always fixes it somehow, when I’m through with it forever this time, through hard reboots, reset, restore, etc. then hands it back with a smug little smile. Not so this time. We looked up all the pages on the web we could, then I found one. How To Fix an iPod that Won’t Boot

“These hard drives get warm as they spin, and the metal casings warp outwards. Some hard drives won’t work correctly when the casing isn’t secure. The solution is to put the pressure back on the disks.”

I read though many many thankyous, “OMG, this actually worked!” So I opened the Ipod up (with the edge of a knife and a guitar pick- it took about 10 minutes to figure out), put close to 1/8″ sticky notes on the back of the hard drive, and clicked the back into place again. OMG – it totally worked.