David Milano

Fretted instrument intonation is a subject worthy of textbook level analysis, which has of course been done, some might say done ad nauseum. So there’s plenty of informal and formal data out there for the fascinated. Here’s a representative web page for those wishing to take a deeper dive: https://guitargearfinder.com/guides/guitar-intonation/

It’s a funny thing… as a player of fretted instruments and the owner of an OCD set of ears, various intonation “faults” have plagued me forever. Notably, the effect of imperfect intonation in the mandolin, banjo, and ukulele is easily ignorable (for me) but on the guitar, it’s a continual, annoying, mini-problem. I manage it somewhat by making subtle tuning changes for different keys and while playing with a capo, but it never goes away entirely, even on my few very-high-quality instruments.

So... when “true temperament” guitars (they have wiggly frets to compensate for intonation faults) showed up a couple years ago, I thought, “Finally! A solution!” Found a true temperament guitar at a music store and gave it a good go. Turned out to be no bueno for me. Hard to explain why… Short on texture?? Loss of valuable overtones?? Basically it was too perfect. Not natural. Like an AI supermodel, with not even a tiny flaw to prove she’s human.

There’s a permaculture moral to this little tale, having to do with how adapting to nature tends to put controls on the demand side of the equation...

A competent psychologist could make a good living off my coffee habits.

Most of my life I was “okay” with coffee, though gravitated more toward teas, herbal and otherwise. Then the big bang—a seriously expensive, fresh espresso from a high-end cafe. Clearly not coffee, or what I thought was coffee. A revelation! Fast forward several decades, and the household formula is full-on obsession: Buy green beans, roast once or twice a week, brew with a variety of methods. There’s a lot of management packed in there…

Beans have regional characteristics, weather characteristics, processing characteristics, and travel through fair-trade or other channels.

Roasting fetches a nuanced mix of science and art and is a process necessarily tuned, configured and reconfigured over time by experience and product variety.

Now we deal with a mixed bag of biological effects like decomposition, rancidity, off-gassing...

Grinding connects the roast with the brewing method and no surprise carries its own vagaries. It's the part of the process most influenced by money—high quality grinders cost a lot. The poor home coffee nut tends to search out the best he can, which happily opens the door to more fascinations.

If all that isn’t a deep enough rabbit hole, brewing, from espresso to mocha latte, can be so absorbing it can lead one to barista school. I have narrowed down to five different methods.

May I say, and you must believe me that I don’t judge others on this, I make a pretty darn good cup of coffee, and own a well earned reputation for it. Nevertheless (and this is crystal clear) the time and effort I’ve put into coffee cannot be justified by a daily cup or two of high quality beverage. It is, however, justified by the process itself. The old adage applies: The journey is the destination.  

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. If a good psychologist wants to pipe in, I’m all ears...

In our region of occasional heavy snow, our home’s little road system (I calculated our snow-removal areas to be about a half acre total) necessitates using a diesel tractor. Mine is a 50hp, 4-wheel drive utility tractor with a front end loader and a rear-mounted snow blower. The snow blower is old and rather rugged. I bought it used and had to rebuild its gearbox and also had to rig thick rubber “swipes” onto the fan to make it functional. At this point all I can say is that it works, but I really don’t like using it because it’s rear-mounted so necessitates going backward, and because my tractor has no cab, the blowing snow is punishing. Most of the time I do my best with the front loader, which is a mixed bag. It makes a terrible plow (once full the snow mostly just spills around the sides) but it’s really good at picking snow up and depositing it where I want. By the end of winter I usually have at least one 8-foot tall snow pile, and many more smaller piles accumulated here and there (which the grandkids think is awesome!).

Once, after a substantial snowfall the weatherman predicted that temps would rise above freezing in a few days, so I decided to save the human and fossil fuel energy and skip the plowing. It was a terrible idea. We had above-freezing temps alright, but just for a partial day, which wasn’t enough to cause significant melting, but did manage to turn the snow surface to slip-and-fall-inducing, tractor-obstructing ice.

These days I just buckle down, bundle up, and get out there when I need to. Am I complaining? No, not really. For some unknown but undoubtedly biological reason, I enjoy operating machinery, and being productive is of course satisfying.  

To reclaim a crudded up iron pan without chemicals (and without a lot of elbow grease) put it into the woodstove. That will effectively burn off the deposits, but you must remember… DO NOT COOL THE PAN QUICKLY! It will crack! Instead let the stove and pan cool to room temperature slowly and naturally. Remove the cooled pan from the now finished fire, scrub it with soap, water and a relatively non-aggressive abrasive pad (e.g. #0000 steel wool) then begin the seasoning process. I’ve successfully reconditioned many pans this way. Pictured is the latest—a #3 Griswold. As you can  see in the second pic, it performs perfectly (after seasoning of course). That egg was fried in a relatively small bit of lard.

By the way… nothing can fix the pits and scratches in a severely misused pan except a grinder/sander. When scoping out pans to purchase, in addition to going for a good name (Griswold or Wagner), I try my best to determine if the surface hasn’t been too damaged. Pans can be ground flat and smooth, but it’s a job, and of course it thins out the pan a bit, often not evenly. Notably the pictured pan had a wee bit of pitting in the cooking surface, but this one turned out to be good enough, which is to say the pitting was pretty minimal. Nevertheless, it’s best to stay away from a gouged pan.

Noting the number of ukulele videos posted on this thread is all the evidence one needs to see that a portable, (relatively) simple, 4-string instrument is a pretty popular item. The potential for creating a satisfying result simply is truly one of the ukulele’s biggest appeals.

I once taught an adult, group ukulele class that covered no theory, no note-reading, no nothing at all technical. The goal was to play nice stuff without having to become a “real musician” (as a couple of the participants noted). It went over real well. In a few short weeks everyone was singing and strumming and, clearly, enjoying themselves.

I attached a link to a (little-viewed) video of myself playing a Joni Mitchell tune. It was posted for the adult class to help  a couple of the more advanced beginners transition from strumming to finger-picking. The song is pared down to minimize complexities. If you look at the YouTube description you’ll see that I also posted sheet music for it in tablature form, which the students thoroughly ignored. Fun is so much more pleasant than the technicals, especially when one is getting older and not sopping up new ideas and skills like a hungry child might!

I’m a woodturner and rustic furniture maker. Most of my shop turning time is spent making finer, gallery-type items, which frankly can be a hard sell in our small, rural town, thus can end up shipped to a city gallery somewhere, which for some reason is, to me, kinda sad. But… if commerce is the metric, fancy things need to be sold in fancy places!

So I’ve been spending more time lately with small, crafty-type items, which are affordable and pretty popular locally, especially around Christmastime. The pics show a representative sampling.

The Christmas tree is adorned with shop made, functional toys (that are, dare I say, wholesome) and ornaments that span from the whimsical (mini rolling pin that spins around its handles) to the semi-fine (hollowed wooden globe). The top spinner is pure fun for kids who are used to needing batteries for their toys (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W4GW2RLHw8Y).

The birdhouses are a new idea, made from tree trimmings and cheap plastic mini-birds. The idea with the birdhouses is that the roof/lid can be lifted and a special gift, or perhaps a spare house key, placed into the cavity.

Since my shop work soaks up an often alarming amount of time for what is essentially a hobby, it’s good to be able to get a bit of a financial reward. And I can’t help but notice that each completed project, big or small, brings a bit of self-satisfaction.

Denis’ description of Bayside, Maine, tugs at the heart.

Happily, and not incidentally, his description could easily stand in for my own town, and of course many other old places.

Denis wrote that Bayside is “… still thriving with a core of folks that are multigenerational in Bayside alongside a nice diversity of newer folks from all over the country…”

It occurs to me that, of the two groups, the former (the multigenerational family) is the indispensable one. These are the folks most securely tied to their place and thus the ones with the fullest knowledge of it and faithfulness to it. It’s difficult to overstate the importance. Without an investment of time it’s difficult, maybe impossible, to developing a complex understanding of a place, and it is complex understanding that prevents inhabitants from being careless with their place.

Notably, old-timers seem to have an innate, natural tendency to adapt themselves to their place (another way of saying “preserve” their place) while newcomers can easily go the other way, expecting a place to adapt to them. The latter invites a squandering of conventions and traditions that maintain long term functionality (ironically the very characteristics that make a place attractive to newcomers in the first place).

There’s a joke where I live that you’re not a “local” until your grandfather was born here. I used to roll my eyes when I heard it, but as time has passed and more knowledge of my place has come to light (stuff "I didn’t know that I didn’t know”), the joke holds more sagacity than humor.

I hope this doesn’t come off as lecturing…

Wendell Berry’s compact description of a community says it all to me:

“A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”

Curiosity compelled me to search my vast store of digital photos with the term “community.” The search algorithm (that most devilish of inventions) actually got it right this time, more or less. What appeared was pic after pic of people grouping together for all sorts of purposed activity. Also mixed in was a pic of my ouse, my garden, our town’s main street, and one particularly poignant, somewhat grainy pic of my daughter’s wedding, which I attached. The attractive young lady with the black sweater and big smile, standing there in front, is shown just before she caught the thrown bouquet. Seven months later she became my daughter-in-law.

I’m sure there will be nothing original in this post, but I feel compelled to pipe in with this:

The appeal of a scythe for our tiny farm was irresistible. I thought, “Cheap mowing, good physical exercise, and another tether on my sometimes type-A rushing about.” Two out of three isn’t bad. The miss was “cheap.” Actually it was not completely a miss… rather just mostly. In the end, unless I counted my time as free (laughable), mowing hay with a scythe was pretty wasteful, as it overwhelmed everything else, leaving me unable to get my other work done.

For the record: I used an old American scythe (curved handle—a barn find that I had to modify to fit me) for mowing our hayfield, and a new European scythe (straight handle with a ditch blade—wider and shorter than the hay blade) for mowing banks, between fence posts, and generally at the edges of things to keep the flora from going woody.

The first year I struggled with everything—sharpening, work endurance, and efficiency were all terrible, and of course all tied together, which made me wonder if I could ever make the scythes really useful. The second year everything magically improved, but while the ditch blade compared favorably to gas-operated machines both in cost and time, the haying was still woefully uneconomical, even though I was, while not a champion scyther by any means, pretty okay compared to the expert demonstrators I had seen. For haying then, I reverted back to machinery, and then subsequently to having a local farmer do it.

The scythe still holds top honors for ditch and similar mowing. As you can see in the photos, my beloved ditch blade is a bit chewed up (from hitting bits of fence wire, stones, etc.) but judicious peening and of course very frequent field sharpening keeps its performance more than adequate, even with jagged spots.

Hi Cécile.

You are quite right that currants and elderberry share the characteristic of being very easy to propagate from cuttings. Sean from Edible Acres covers this thoroughly, and much better than I could, in a YouTube video: