Category Archives: music

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BIRGing in Memories

Let’s see, I am thinking of famous people, not just that I’ve seen (from a distance) but that I know or knew:

Frankie Manning, one of Whitey’s Lindyhoppers who danced lindyhop at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. He came to teach at the Savoy Swings Again dance weekends in West Virginia in the 1980s. He came to Port Townsend, too, for the dance camps here. I got to dance with him years ago and took classes and watched demonstrations. Hooray for him!

Bernice Reagon Johnson PhD, both for being an historian at the Smithsonian and for being the leader of Sweet Honey in the Rock for 40 years, and it’s still going! Ok, I don’t know her, but she is from my Washington, DC stomping grounds and I love that group.

Darryl Davis, for being an African American man who made appointments with KKK Grand Dragons to talk to them to try to understand. And some have quit! And he’s a fabulous Baltimore blues man and he and his band played at our wedding in 1989. He ran the Centrum Blues Fest for years too.

Ted talk here and music website here: https://www.daryldavis.com/.

Musicians and activists and dancers, that seems to be who I want to BIRG about!

And the photograph is from our wedding.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: BIRGing.

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Sophisticated

We have the best deer. Really.

I took the photograph Tuesday night, from the garden behind the Bishop Hotel. “So what?” you say, “She’s just lying there.”

Let’s pan out.

She is on the hill up to the right. She is listening to the jazz, Johnathan Doyle and friends, first time this year playing outside on Tuesday night. She has at least one fawn, too. I spotted it in the garden on the other side of the band. Mom deer came behind the band, stopped and considered whether the jazz was up to her standards or not, and then she went to the hill. The fawn stayed hidden, back to the left of the dancers.

Mom deer stayed close to keep an eye on everyone and she listened to the jazz.

We really do have the most sophisticated deer.

Maybe next she’ll dance or try the saxophone.

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Garden

This is the Bishop Hotel in Port Townsend, yesterday evening. Next week we hope they will move the Tuesday music to the garden, though it was wonderful indoors too yesterday. The garden patio is lovely, foxglove and iris in this shot.

Inside: Jack Dwyer and George Radebaugh playing wonderful jazz.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day.

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Long Covid and post pneumonia update

I was up above 5000 feet last week and did not need oxygen.

This is wonderful! I was on oxygen continuously from March of 2021 for a year and a half. I was really getting better and then had my Covid booster in early October. I crashed again. Do I regret the shot? No, because the crash is because antibodies went back up. Only some of them, though. My muscles and lungs were not working well again, but brain was fine (ok, some people do not like my brain, but they are idiots) and aside from having to avoid gluten, no digestive stuff.

About a month ago I really started feeling my fast twitch muscles work again. It was two years in March since this fourth pneumonia and I’ve had something Long Covid like after each one. Recovery took 2 months in 2003, 2 months in 2012 and 6 months off in 2014 and then an ongoing mild chronic fatigue, so I worked about half of a regular family medicine schedule. I saw 7-10 people per day instead of 16-22. I was also a single parent running a business with two children, so that has a lot of energy draw as well.

On the second morning there, my pulse was 61 and oxygen level 98% on room air. HOORAY! I am back to baseline from 2014. Since it took 2 years to recover, I really do not want to do this again. No more pneumonia. I have had two more rounds of Covid, but apparently the super high antibody level made it really really mild. An immunologist tested the antibodies since I keep getting pneumonia. He said I have the highest Covid antibody level he’s ever seen. Protective was over 50 and mine was 25,000. I seem to be darn good at making antibodies.

Now what? I have felt better for the last month. I still get tired and have about a half day of the energy level from my 20s or 30s, which was high. I am hiking, up to 6 miles in a day twice two weeks ago. Now to start biking and maybe running. I don’t like to run but it’s good training. I want to ski next winter at least one day. Maybe I will swim too. I used to swim a mile twice a week, but it’s been a long time. Also my swim team daughter expressed scorn for my freestyle stroke. Sigh, children are born to humble us, which sucks.

I am still trying to see if I can work with Long Covid patients. I have rather too much experience with something very like it. But I think I would like to enjoy feeling well for a month or two, first!

Hooray! I hope other Long Covid folks are working their way out of the woods too.

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Daily Evil: R is for Ridiculous

This is Donkey Oatie and Sancho Panda. Helen Burling Ottaway did a series for a book or a show or something in the early 1990s. I do not know if it was ever published. There is no date on this. This is colored pencil and the drawing is 9 by 12 inches. I think she did larger watercolors as the final project.

Is being ridiculous evil? I read that today is National Humorous Day. We need humor to let go of stress and blow off steam and to go from the fight or flight sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic relaxed one. Humor is a really good way to go. So watch those silly cat videos and laugh. Ok, not when you are at work. But even at work, my office manager and I needed to blow off steam and laugh. One day she was playing whale songs. I heard her say very seriously into the phone, “Oh, those are whale songs. Dr. Ottaway insists on whale songs.” I howled, because she had picked them. For revenge I made whale noises at her between patients all day. Anybody walking into clinic might have thought we were loons. I can do loon songs very well, better than whale songs.

I know a slightly different tune for The Dummy Line, a variation. There seem to be a bunch!

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Inadvisable

Don’t be flippant with this one.

Taken on Marrowstone Island earlier this week. I was so busy watching this eagle that I tripped over a rock and face planted. If I’d hit a rock I would have lost teeth or knocked myself out. Luckily both I and the camera did fine.

I tend to spot the eagles in the trees by sound. I do watch for them as well. This one called to another, who circled towards the tree. Sound locates them.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: flippant.

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Telegraph

Sol Duc’s posture telegraphs her thoughts. “Where have you been? This is past your bedtime/curfew. I don’t like that and I disapprove.”

“But Sol Duc, I was listening to a band, and it’s only 9 pm. My muscles are feeling better! I am not sleeping twelve hours a night.”

Elwha: “Mom, I was asleep. Why are you out? Sleeping twelve hours is nothing! I can sleep for twenty!”

Me: “Ok, ok, I am home. I am going to bed!”

Body language can say so much! For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: muscle.