an excellent weekend

22 May 2006 in journal

first things first: i passed. officially, i’ll graduate on june 19th – though i don’t think i’ll attend the ceremony, i’m just not big on those – but really i’m allll done. i have class still, true, but the real pressure is off. regarding the actual portfolio presentation, i’ll go into detail at a later date as there’s still one aspect that has me seeing red. grr. but for now, i’m trying to just shake that bit off and enjoy the fact that i’m done. done!

and i had an excellent weekend. friday i was all sniffly and lost in memories, but saturday was much more relaxed – plus on saturday, the yarn in my preferred color came from elann in a record two days and i started on another project as well. so, here they are for now: crinkle from the latest rowan using knitpicks’ shine and urban aran in elann’s peruvian highland chunky.

sunday was the really exciting day – i went to my horse place to watch a horse show. man, there’s some fearless eight year olds out there! i think i’m small compared to horses! no comparison to those little kids, woah.

from there, i went straight to the topanga banjo & fiddle festival. they’ve been having it for almost fifty years and it takes place at the paramount ranch, where they filmed all kinds of westerns, including dr. quinn, medicine woman, and is part of the mailbu state park, i believe. anyhow, even though there was the threat of rain all day, the weather was perfect and in fact, the clouds kept the weather warm-ish but not baking and the crowd big but not smothering. the best part was wandering away from the center stage, walking among the vendors set up in dr. quinn’s town and hearing the various impromptu jams going on in every nook and cranny.

literally, you could stand in some spots and hear five different groups. and the mixes! the bass-playing hipster girl with the jackie o. glasses and a 70 year old with a sassy red bandana strumming on a banjo, the two of them jamming away while a middle-aged woman sang her heart out as she swayed back and forth. an early 30s hiker (well, he had a fancy backpack, shoes, and one of those collapsible hats) with a teeny mandolin playing with a group of handlebar-moustached guitar players, all singing very softly but sweetly some old bluegrass. just lovely – so inspiring! i really admire musicians – especially those that are into spontaneous jams and singing and all that. i used to play piano – not terribly well, though i enjoyed it – but i was always too shy to play with others, much less improvise and all that. i kept grinning as a i walked around listening to all of them – who doesn’t love being surrounded by the sweet sounds of a guitar, a banjo, shoot, there was even a muscial saw! it didn’t hurt that a great spinning guild member who is a crackshot felter had a booth there, and there was a spinning demonstration as well, with some other guild members spinning and chatting away. last but definitely not least, i hung out with a couple of women from my library program – they totally rock, and we just had a great time sitting on a blanket and talking for a few hours.

then after that (yup, i was busy), i went to path to freedom to watch a documentary on how cuba survived an equivalent of peak oil when the economic support from the soviet union disappeared and the u.s. went even crazier on their trade embargo. a real interesting film, but better than that was the crowd – a cool mom and i had a nice brief conversation that just set a great mood for the rest of the night, then a woman (hi there ) who took the same drop spinning class i did almost three years ago recognized me from this website (how cool is that!) and so we chatted a bit, and then i had this great long conversation with a man about bikeriding and permaculture and all kinds of other fun stuff.

all of this definitely revitalized me – bring on the weekdays, i’m ready for them! hope your weekend was equally lovely – and thanks for reading this far if you did. so chatty, and so few pics! there’s still my shawl also, which i wore all day today – i’m determined to take an outdoor shot with it, to do it justice, but hopefully i’ll get to that on wednesday.