Before my uncle’s farm became a vineyard, he tried raising various types of livestock on his 10-15 acre plot in the Brown Valley out near Utica.  Horses are too much work, and goats have a nasty habit of escaping from their pens to eat garbage and climb on top of cars.  He may or may not have tried cows, I don’t remember.  I’m just glad he never raised pigs because I visited a classmate’s pig farm once and that smell is an affront to good sinuses.  Anyway, Uncle Bruce finally gave up the giant critters and started this grape ranch instead.  This weekend was the annual raisin roundup, and unlike the past three years, this year I was able to attend!

The grapes were especially sweet this year!  So sweet that the harvesters sampled them without a care for the amount of pesticide or fertilizer on the surface of each one.  Mmm, poison-y!  The honey bees didn’t mind the inedible coating either, and if one wasn’t careful, it was entirely possible to pick a bee instead of a grape.

Without the bees, there wouldn’t be any grapes.  But boy were they annoying!   As Uncle Bruce drove down the row on his tractor, my sister backed into a grapevine only to find she was mere inches away from being… wait for it… COVERED IN BEES!!!  They were especially thick on the “mystery grapes.”  (What mystery?  It was explained to me at one point but I immediately forgot.  Life is better with some mystery left to it anyway.  Feel free to comment with your own solution to the mystery of the mystery grapes.)  Sadly, my sister hasn’t seen The Wicker Man OR Eddie Izzard, so my goofy chanting of, “No! Not the bees! AAAAUUUGHHHH!” fell on deaf ears after she recounted her experience between the vines.  She did, however, find the Eddie Izzard reference funny after I explained that part of his routine to her.

The bees also wanted to cover my soda, as I sat by the barn sketching the small shed that once had a pony in it… until it died and my uncle decided to stop keeping horses since my cousin was allergic anyway.  It was a tiny shed but it had this awesome clump of trees and pot of begonias in front of it, and sketching is the best way for a shy person like meself to relax at a public event.

When you have an open sketchbook, you are freed from the pressure of finding things to talk about and people will come to you instead because they are curious. They have the security of the sketchbook as a conversation topic, plus the excuse of not wanting to disturb your work if they run out of things to talk about.

I was approached thusly by my boyfriend’s dad’s girlfriend, who wanted to know if I had heard from our sailor recently.  When it became clear that neither his dad nor I had heard from Eric in the past three weeks, we were all quite relieved because that just means he is busy and can’t contact anyone.  He didn’t die and he doesn’t hate me! Hooray! Now I just have to send a follow-up email apologizing for the nasty things I said in the previous one.  (Not really.  I just asked if I still had a boyfriend.  After all, one can’t expect to find one’s lover unchanged after not speaking to him for three days.  To loosely paraphrase Confucious.)

I didn’t finish the sketch because 1) I was taking my time since I’m relatively weak with pencils and often rush with them so I can get to the ink and the paint and the fun, and 2) there were people and chairs between me and the shed, so I would stop sketching and rest or eat whenever a large group of people blocked my view.  I also stopped to say, “Thank you,” and talk to the people who noticed what I was doing and wanted to talk about drawing.

I most enjoyed talking to George who is a friend of my uncle and who owns the local Greek bistro downtown.  His bistro catered the harvest party, and that Greek food is what is referenced in the title of this post.  George is a really nice guy, and he said he enjoys art as well.  He agreed with me that charcoal is much easier to use than pencils are, and he seemed excited when I told him how I usually prefer to paint on the computer.  “Photoshop…Photoshop…Photoshop…” he repeated so he could remember.  Who knows, maybe he’ll go buy a tablet now, when he has some time away from the restaurant.  I think that would be a rare occurrence though.

Anyway, I didn’t finish the sketch before it got too dark to see.  But we’re going back in a few weeks to help with the grapes again.  I’ll post the sketch here when it is done.

Amazing.  Practice really does make perfect!

I’ve been a huge Harmonix fan ever since Frequency, but on Frequency and Amplitude there was always a bar of difficulty I couldn’t cross.  I would ace the single player game on both easy and medium, and then hit the bar in the middle of Hard and progress no further.  In both Frequency and Amplitude, Hard mode meant there might be extra notes you could barely hear in the music, and you had to play 16th or 32nd notes on a single button.  That’s hella hard when pushing buttons on a PS2 control pad.  Also, if there was one especially hard part in the middle of the song, you couldn’t just practice that part of the song.  You had to survive the whole song to clear it, and play all the way through up to the point you were having trouble with to try that again.  It was really a shooter, albeit disguised as a music game, and eventually my reflexes just couldn’t take that much abuse anymore.

I haven’t had much time with Guitar Hero on the PS2, but the DS version has definitely fixed the game and made it more like playing a musical instrument.  When you fail a song in Career Mode, it gives you the option to switch to Practice Mode.  (The option is also in the main menu of the game, so you can start a play session with practice.)  In Practice Mode, you can choose any section of the song and have just that section play over and over until you hit Start to bring up the restart-or-quit menu.  And it tells you how many of the notes you played right!  So you know that practicing is actually helping!

Also notable:  playing 16th and 32nd notes doesn’t suck anymore because you can actually strum on the DS touch screen.  My wrists are most grateful, though my left hand is getting a little bit more exercise than it is used to from fingering all those chords.  I’ve gotten to the point where the game is giving me three finger chords and making me switch from 1st and 3rd to 2nd and 4th “frets” a lot.

Last week, I was stuck on “Breed” by Nirvana on Hard.  This week, I finished Bloc Party’s “Helicopter” and am currently working on “I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night” by Kiss.  I’m averaging one or two songs on Career Hard mode and a whole venue in Guitar Duels Medium each day.  I didn’t pass the Kiss song today, but I did go from 20% to 80% completion in just an hour.  So, I’m fairly confident I will clear it tomorrow.