Yesterday morning was busy for me. After relaxing for a bit, I went to see my elderly mother. She and I made a list of stuff in her room she wants to move to her new room and stuff we can get rid of. I’m planning to try and get her in by Wednesday evening. This gives me some time to box up stuff she is discarding and take it to the thrift shop. She has lost the little emergency button that was hanging around her neck. They gave her a new one and asked me to watch out for the old one as we move her.
I came home and discovered that my noon class had canceled. I emailed Amazon help because the Kindle deal cookbook I attempted to purchase on Sunday didn’t load properly. By the time I received their reply it was working. I also emailed Gateway, the people who manufactured my netbook. I have broken it again and am hoping they will replace the screen for a reasonable price (as they did before when it was under warranty).
I called the American Medical Response of Michigan company. They are the company whose ambulance took my Mom to the ER back in January. I received a bill saying that they couldn’t get Aetna Medicare to pay f0r it. I tried to call them last week, but they put me on hold so long that the twenty minutes I had allotted for the call was insufficient and I had to hang up on them.
Yesterday I borrowed my Mom’s Aetna card, came home, called AMR of M and put them on speaker phone while I typed up the list of what furniture my Mom wanted to keep and discard. Clever steve. Eventually they came on and I cleared it up by providing more up-to-date insurance info for them.
Today is both church day (the day I think about upcoming church stuff like Hell week) and Mom day. Eileen is going to go over and pack a few boxes to go to Bibles for Mexico this morning I think.
After class, I plan to do some of this myself, as well as maybe move some of the furniture into the new room.
I am playing for the March birthday party at my Mom’s nursing home on Thursday. When I do these kinds of gigs I try to mix it up. Most of the music doesn’t need prep but I include some substantial music each time. This Thursday I am planning to perform “Danse” by Debussy as well as a few other classic pieces which I haven’t chosen yet. “Danse” is something I have been practicing and think I can pull off by Thursday. I think it sounds like Spring.
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I finished Woolgathering by Patti Smith and am thinking of a second poet to read besides Ann Sexton.
This morning I read half of the poems by John Updike on the Poetry Foundation site. I like Updike and have read tons of his novels. I bought a little book of his poetry when I was young and still remember poems I read then. Here are a few I enjoyed this morning.
In this poem I like the line: “Is there anything to write about but human sadness?”
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Goldman Sachs Denies Claims It Led to Copper River’s Demise – NYTimes.com
The hits just keep on coming from Goldman Sachs. This is an entirely separate instance from the recent condemnatory public resignation.
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Welcome | The Official Fiona Apple site
Apple has a new album coming out. Yay! This is its name:
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Bookmarked this musician’s blog. He was mentioned in a NYT review as a composer who delineates his work into classical music and popular music. I find this amusing. Reminds me of Graham Greene’s designation of his work as either entertainments or literary stuff. I think this kind of thinking is a bit artificial. As Duke Ellington said (paraphrased) “there are two kinds of music, good and the other kind.”
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Lobbyists, Guns and Money – NYTimes.com
“…. we seem to be turning into a country where crony capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap from a larger prison population.”
*********************************************************************A Mother’s Grace and Grieving – NYTimes.com
The key is to determine who was standing his ground and defending himself: the boy with the candy or the man with the gun
More reflections on Trayvon Martin’s death. I had a Facebook “friend” put up a reactionary link about Gun Control yesterday. A link to a blog post about an incident in the U.K. last year to prove that anti-gun liberals want to destroy the fabric of our society. I had to respond. Allowing things I so disagree with to stand unchallenged is part of the problem of the echo chamber. So I replied, “What this particular soft-headed anti-gun liberal wants is for people not to shoot someone carrying skittles and wearing a hoody….” The Gun people were undaunted of course. But I just had to write something.
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