Signs of Spring

The rain last night melted the last vestiges of snow from our yard. That makes it over two months of continuous snow presence in our yard, which is pretty darned good for Boise. (Or bad, I guess, if you don't like winter so much.)

I've also seen robins in the yard for the last two days, and some bulbs are sprouting in the warmest flower beds.

Looks like spring might be on its way.

But hopefully skiing isn't quite over yet!

Canning

A few months ago a co-worker ordered a bunch of powdered milk in bulk, and as a result of that we ended up with three 50-pound bags of powdered milk. What do you do with all that? Well, we borrowed the dry-pack canner machine and canned it.

It turns out that 150 pounds of milk fills a LOT of cans. We thought we had enough, but did 60 #10 cans and still had a lot left over, so we got some more cans and finished it (and some rice) in a second session the next day.


The kids all had fun helping. Daniel really got into running the canner, and did most of the actual sealing of the lids the second day. I wish I had some pictures of everybody filling the cans the first day -- we had powdered milk everywhere. Andrew had it all over his face and in his hair. He looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy!


Andrew and Daniel have really gotten into classic rock lately, and they had music playing while we were doing it. This may be the first time the Church dry pack machine has been used with a soundtrack provided by Rush and Boston.

(gratuitous Boston album art)

Rachel's Art

Here's a drawing Rachel recently did for her art class.  I thought it was pretty cool. I kinda wish I had some talent... it's pretty obvious which side she didn't inherit it from!

End of an Era, postscript

Some more thoughts as a follow-on to the previous post...

Monday Lisa needed to bring a cassette tape to her violin lesson, and Yumiko had to look around several stores before she could find one to buy.

It occurs to me that at the same time the record industry is whining about Internet-based piracy and other file sharing, the era of easy audio recording has quietly faded away -- a lot of audio devices these days no longer have cassette decks, and the once-ubiquitous cassette tape is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

For many, many years I kept a running record of currently popular music.  I would always keep a cassette tape loaded and ready, and when something I liked came on the radio, it was a simple matter to punch "record" and save a copy for future listening.

As new audio streams came into being -- we had DMX feeds at work for a while, and then still later the streaming audio of Internet radio -- the paradigm remained the same.  Keep a tape loaded and ready, punch the record button when something cool came on.

Piracy?  The recording industry would say so, but then they live in a bubble of their own little reality where laws like the Audio Home Recording Act don't exist, and radio broadcasts themselves are piracy.

The reality is that after listening to a song a few times, I typically either grew tired of it, or more likely decided I liked it well enough to buy it.  Those old from-radio tapes are fun to listen to now as a time capsule, but most of the songs are redundant with CDs I now own.

This effect was even more pronounced with Japanese music.  Here in the U.S., there's really not much chance for hearing new Japanese music other than Internet radio, and taping from an Internet stream is a great way to give music a trial run, to listen to it enough to get to like it enough to shell out some yen for it.

Sorry, took a detour there.  The point is, cassettes are fading away, and it's getting harder to build a casual collection of music.

Or record a violin lesson.  Or record kids' piano recitals.  Or record oral life histories.

Maybe what we need is a good recording accessory for iPods?