I’ve been in bed with bronchitis since Wednesday afternoon. Fortunately, since I have the ability to work from home when I need, I kept up with the workload and won’t be horribly behind on Monday. The bronchitis gave me a bucket-of-gravel voice and a racking cough, both of which will (I hope) go away next week. (’Cos if they don’t, syncope here I come again! I’ve already come close to passing out a couple of times.)
We’re progressing slowly with the roofer. He’s come up with an estimate that would include not only replacing the roof and building a false gable on the back so we can quit struggling with the problems that come with a flat roof, but also to do a lot of the interior sheetrocking that L and I would otherwise have to do ourselves. We’ve done it before, so I know we can, but it’s a hard job and I won’t cry about letting him take care of it. Next week I need to rent a POD storage unit to have a place for everything to go while the house is torn up, and also to go down and get a building permit from the city. The roofer said that if I do it myself, they’ll probably make me jump through fewer hoops than they would him.
Summer day-camp for M has hit a snag, because we didn’t get her registered the first possible minute and the camp where we normally send her is full and running a waiting list. L tells me that another of the city’s rec centers is closed for renovation this summer, so all the kids who would normally be there have to go somewhere else, which is why our usual one filled up. We’ll have to think about what to do. M is registered for a week of Girl Scout riding camp in June, to which she’s looking forward—and that’s no surprise, she’s at the girls-and-horses age. I’m only sorry that L’s sister isn’t nearby as a resource; in high school, she taught riding to middle schoolers.
I’ve been fooling around some more with my collection of vintage square dance material, and last week ended up buying several albums of dance music and calls from the ’40s and ’50s. Now that I have them, I think that one album may be some of Pete Seeger’s earliest recordings. He was hooked up with a bunch called the American Square Dance Group in New York (a misnomer; they actually danced Kentucky running sets) who put out an album in ’42.
L was surprised to see that the stuff I’m digging up was often released on major labels like Capitol, Decca, Columbia, and RCA Victor, as well as smaller specialty labels. She never knew the majors had had any interest in it, so I explained that square dance had become big enough and “faddy” enough by that time that they jumped on the bandwagon in case it turned out to be a new major market. (It wasn’t, but they didn’t yet know that.)
We haven’t seen T since she got her new store, but she’s going to try to get home for a weekend in April once her store goes into renovation. She’lll be someone else’s loan-in manager while the construction’s going on, and it’ll be easier for her to manage a couple of days away.
A seasoned avocado jerks the window frame. Fnord.
