I have edited and uploaded a selection of photos from the 4th of July parade in Takoma Park, MD on my gallery page.

I put this list of webcasts together for my friend Kevin.  But others may enjoy them too.

The American Folklife Center records its events for webcast and so I put together some links to a few that  I thought you might like. I chose a few different kinds of things, so I am sure you will find something you enjoy.  If you find the introductory remarks a bit boring, that's ok, just slide the button a little bit and go straight to the performance.  They are all about one hour long, except the Seeger Family Concert, which is two hours.

STORYTELLING

Mary Louise Defender Wilson and Keith Bear (Sioux and Mandan Hidatsa Storytelling)


Opalanga Pugh: African-American Storytelling


PETE SEEGER AND FAMILY

Seeger Family Concert (Mike, Peggy, and Pete Seeger, with the Short Sisters)

 
IRISH MUSIC

Tommy Sands and family in concert.  (Music and song from Northern Ireland)


Robert Watt and Daithi Sproule and Perform in Concert (Northern Irish music and song. Robert Watt plays Highland bagpipes. Daithi Sprole sings traditional Irish songs. )


COWBOY MUSIC

Bar J Wranglers (Cowboy music)


D. W. Groethe (Cowboy music and poetry)


DANCE

Surati: Indian Dance from New Jersey


Hoop Dances by Dallas Chief Eagle and Jasmine Pickner   (Souix)


GOSPEL SINGING

Reverb  (A capella Gospel singing)
       

Birmingham Sunlights (Gospel Quartet)


IRANIAN MUSIC

Sama Ensemble (traditional Sufi music)

Jennifer Cutting's  Ocean Orchestra entry in the Takoma Park Fourth of July Parade won first prize in the Band category.  We only just found out. No one expected to win anything, and some of us had had little sleep the night before, so no one in the troupe went to the awards ceremony. There were some great bands in the show, too. Perhaps the judges' heads were turned by the mermaid?  As one of a few costume consultants, the sea shell crown designer, one of several dressers, and one of three volunteer photographers, I played a relatively minor role in the event. For example, I did not have to play acoustic instruments louder than the heavily amplified steel drum band ahead of us (thank goodness  we had a bagpipe on our side). But I have been sorting through the 200+ photos I took, and I am glad to find that I have enough to  provide a good part of the documentation of the event.   My little Olympus digital is not the best for capturing motion, but I just took lots and lots of photos and it worked.

King Neptune, right, is wearing the crown I made.

Takoma Park, MD has a reputation for really unusual parades for the Fourth. The community participates fully, and in ways that no one can anticipate.  The talent in this town is staggering, and it is events like this that give a clue as to how deep and varied that talent is.

So here we are. I made King Neptune's crown, helped people with costumes this morning, and photographed my friends, neighbors, and co-workers in the parade. But my question is: should I admit that I know these people? ;-)


Photo: Ocean Orchestra, with King Neptune, his Queen, and Mermaid in tow. Photo by S. Hall, July 4, 2009. See web site for information about their CD OCEAN: Songs for the Night Sea Journey.

Ok, so I am putting one foot in front of the other. So far it is not too terrible. I am learning to be a nomadic bather. I have learned to microwave water and wash my hair in the kitchen sink (I have not had running hot water since the fire happened, June 9).  Friends are being helpful and letting me shower at their houses, so I wind up carrying shampoo and a towel in my car.  It is a little weird, but I am able to stay home while the work is being done this way.   Last week I picked out the tub, sink, faucets, and shower. See bathroom stripped down to nothing, right.

Fuji is very annoyed with all the noise and fuss. She has to stay in the study when I am at work. She has a window to look out, as well as all her necessities.  But she is understandably craving attention.

The weeds and vines have been stripped away from the base of the house so that the architect can do a drawing.  The landscapers did a good job. They were forbidden to go near the daylilies, even though there is work to be done there too. Not only are the daylilies in full bloom, but I have pods developing on several daylilies at this stage.  Last year I didn't get a chance to see some of my seedlings bloom and didn't get any seeds at all because the deer ate many buds and all of the seed pods.  So I am especially anxious to get some seeds this year.  The daylily scapes are fragile and the buds and seed pods can brush off easily. 

Left is an unnamed seedling, Indian Giver x Starman's Quest #13. 

I am in my little study with my computer and my cat. Both will be protected here from the dust and chaos that is about to start in an hour.  The construction crew is coming to start work on the bathroom and linen closet that were damaged in the fire. Today is demolition day.  I wish I could take the cat to work with me because the noise will be scary, But she will be safe in here with food, cat box, and a window to look out.

Yesterday I did manage to get together some entries for the DC area Daylily Show.  My best seedlings were not blooming yesterday morning. So I took a couple of the ruffled ones and one purple masked one for the seedling catagory, as well as some registered daylilies to show.  I received a club award for a bloom of the Forsyth Tepaled Double -- a flower that is both polymerous and double.  I don't think there were any other polymerous (extra petaled) daylilies in the show. I really wanted to take some others, but FTD was the only one blooming yesterday, except I'm Different, which was being its spectacular self.  Unfortunately I'm Different can't be shown because it was an early polymerous daylily and it was registered as a double. There was no polymerous catagory at the time. It is very clearly not a double daylily, but blooms with four or five petals and sepals.  There are other early polymerous daylilies with  registration problems because of prior prejudice against them by the American Hemerocallis Society. A few passionate growers defiantly wrote in their AHS registration "poly" or "polytepal" even before there was a catagory. Those can be shown, but those misregistered as double or single can't.  Polymerous daylilies are just emerging from the daylily ghetto to be accepted.

The neat thing at the show was that hybridizers Margo Reed and Jim Murphy were there, and predictably, swept up many awards, including major awards, with their spectacular hybrids.  It was great to see their newer registered daylilies and their seedlings.  Margo Reed won best in show.  The great part was that the daylilies they grow are mainly what are classified as "unusual forms": twisty, spidery, lacy, and etherial. Orchids by any other  name. Daylilies like these were not likely to get recognition as recently as a decade ago.  Like the polymerous daylilies, they were practically outcasts in a world dominated by round ruffled cultivars. So the world is changing to appreciate more variety, and as the other types of  "unusual form" daylilies gain recognition, this is starting to happen for polymerous daylilies too.

I also looked at bathroom tile this weekend.; mainly finding out what I do not want. Ready or not, we start today. Fuji is not amused.

Apparently several bloggers have declared June Pagan Values Month and challenged us with writing something about pagan values in our blogs.  This came to me on the blog-vine from dmiley  and I have been trying to think what to write.  Pagans have a lot of values that are shared with other religious groups, do unto others, etc.  What values are especially pagan?  "Pagan" covers a lot of territory involving several spiritual paths and varied interpretations of those paths.

One thing that I have found as a Unitarian who went visiting pagan groups of various sorts until I found a home among practitioners of core shamanism  -- acceptance is a pagan value.

Well, isn't acceptance a value in other religions?  It is supposed to be, and often is. But for those of us who are somehow different, acceptance is not always there.  I remember an experience when I was to be a brides maid for a friend, many years ago. She was Lutheran, but being married in her husband's church, which was Missouri Synod -- that is very conservative Lutheran.  Members of the congregation and the minister were very concerned about my friend asking a Unitarian to participate in the service. She invited me to go to a church service so that people could see me and be sure that I did not have fangs, claws, or horns.  I myself balked when the selected hymn at the service was one that called for protection from heathens and unbelievers.  Oh, help! I felt I was in the middle ages and about to be found out as a heritic.  The service happened to include a confirmation for the hearing daughter of a Deaf Lutheran minister of a Deaf church. After the service I went to talk with him in sign language. It turned out that he had taken biology from my father at Gallaudet (not that surprising, he taught there for 40 years).  Now, I could talk to the visiting minister when no one else at the church could. So after that, the minister had a talk with me about my beliefs, and finally decided I was ok.

Among pagans the experience is totally different.  Going to a pan-pagan event, I am not grilled on what sort of pagan I am, asked what I believe, or anything else.   If I show up, I am welcome. If I bring food, I am doubly welcome (food is a pagan value, maybe that needs another essay).  I sometimes feel that I am not pagan enough to really call myself pagan, with my logical brain and my upbringing in science.  Science gave me my powerful connection with nature, though, and I find that there are people in the pagan sphere who are very much like me and those that aren't are willing to accept me as I am.  In pan-pagan gatherings there is the expectation that everyone is probably some sort of pagan, or trying to figure out if they are. But in core shamanism the variation among us is greater still, as liberal Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and others may be in the mix as well.   As a Unitarian, I feel very at home in that mix. But though acceptance sounds simple, it actually has to be carefully thought out, especially by the organizers of an event, so that there is inclusiveness built into every gathering.  My experience with earth-centered spirituality is that people are willing to go that extra distance for others, and that is a big deal.   

[The photo is of Athena's owl on the John Adams Building, Library of Congress.]

I celebrated the crossover into summer by viewing the opening of this dark goddess, Puppet Lady, which opens at night. To watch this giantess unfold is an awe inspiring experience, and made a simple, but  beautiful midsummer ritual.  It seems that there should be music to accompany the unfurling of  the petals. The mosquitoes drove me in after a short while, but the experience was worth being bitten. 

This magnificent 10" daylily hybridized by, John Lambert, a hero among the creators of unusual daylilies. He was not appreciated enough in his time for what he did for all of daylily hybridization, and especially in the creation of daylilies like this, that twist, curl, and have have long petals.  He created several polymerous daylilies, to the dismay of other hybridizers. Some of his daylilies, including Puppet Lady, almost disappeared; preserved in just a few gardens by Lambert fans. In his day Lambert  received more recognition for producing whites, clear reds, and purples.  His rounder, more acceptable, daylilies were taken and used for hybridization by other growers around the country because of the colors he achived. But the rounder daylilies carried the genes of the unusual forms, and so surprising characteristics kept showing up. Today, people are seeking out his strange daylilies and their descendants to create more eccentric forms. 

So today's lesson is that eccentricity will out. Eventually the unfashionable will become fashionable when people become tired of the conventional.  And even if your own particular eccentric creations do not find mass appeal, they will live on somewhere, in somone's secret garden.

The Summer Solstice is at 1:45 AM tomorrow. Since the time is so close to midnight, I figure, we get to celebrate all weekend!  I celebrated today by taking stock of my daylilies, and trying to figure out what may be in bloom next weekend for the daylily show. It was alternately rainy and sunny, so some of the photos show soggy daylilies, but I don't care. 

What is so neat about daylilies?  All the shapes and sizes of them, to start with. Daylilies, like all flowers, are mandalas.  They are very spiritual in the same way that the legendary Japanese Buddhist monk  who wore a frog on top of his head was spiritual.  Contemplative but not stuck up about it.  I am fond of the weirdest shapes, like Crazy Pierre to the right.  That is a spider, with petals that are roughly five times as long as they are wide. Crazy Pierre also twists and curls so that every blossom is different. Also, this fower is huge. Crazy man, crazy.

Then there are the polymerous daylilies with extra petals. The daylily grower's jargon term, polytepal, is headed for obsolescence. If you want unusual daylilies to be accepted, you have to clean up your language.  Can you believe that many daylily hybridizers weeded these out, hoping to get rid of the "undesirable genes that cause extra petals?"  As I understand it, there are several genes that tell daylilies (and other flowers) when to stop making petals as the flowers develop. In the polymerous daylilies one or more is missing. But the trait can't be done away with, because it became more common as hybridizers have tried to develop whites, purples, and clear reds, breeding out the natural yellow, brown, and orange colors.  For decades the trait has actually been bred into daylily lines because of selection for these elusive colors.  Left is Bobby Baxter's delicate Moosie My Love (which bears his wife's nickname).  Can you imagine wanting to eliminate something so wonderful? Some hybridzers still do.

After a long fight for acceptance, the polymerous daylilies are now grouped in the official daylily show manual to be catagorized under doubles.  Groan!  Genetically incorrect.  But it is progress because now they can be shown, and as people see them they will fall in love with them.  It is possible for a daylily to be both polymerous and double because these are completely different traits.   (See gallery photo of the Forsyth Tepaled Double the petaloids in the center are what makes it double.)

So that is a good way to spend a midsummer morning, wading among sopping wet daylilies to get photos before the rain completely bruises the petals. My house is a mess. I can't find anything because too many people other than me have thrown things into boxes in the aftermath of the lightning strike and fire. But my garden is in a completly different and likable state of disorder, and it is wonderful.

See more photos of my summer garden in my scrapbook gallery, Summer 2009.

Since my house burned down
I now own a better view
of the rising moon.

At about 6:30 this morning lightning struck my house. The bang woke me up. There was smoke but I couldn't see any fire. So I caught the cat (who was freaking out), called 911 and got out of the house. The fire fighters came very fast. It turned out that the fire was in the wall between the bathroom and the  kitchen. They smashed up the kitchen, the bathroom, and the basement ceiling.  There was some confusion about whether the fire came in on the electric lines or through the plumbing.  The plumbing in the bathroom is smashed up. So the fire fighters told me not to turn on the water or electricity until I had someone check them.  The electrician just left and said that the electricity was not affected. So tomorrow morning the plumber will come. 

The insurance company is making things happen really fast, so I got a lot done today. A clean up crew came, mopped up the water, and cleared out the debris of the smashed walls and basement ceiling. At least now I can turn the refrigerator and dehumidifier on. I am staying at a neighbor's house for tonight.

It is a mess and hard to deal with, but it could have been much much worse because the fire was right near the gas line to the kitchen stove. So I have  house that smells like smoke, but I still have a house.

These praying mantises are very busy taking care of tiny pests in my garden. They are still under an inch long and slightly translucent. I find whole platoons of them when I am weeding. They are just where I want them to be, all over the daylily beds eating pests that bother the flowers.   Later, when they are bigger, they will gobble up mosquitoes.  They get to be four or five inches long. I have brought cocoons into the garden in past winters so that they would hatch where I want them, but now they have moved in to stay and decorate the winter garden with their cocoons. I just occasionally pick a cocoon out of the wet or move it where it won't be bothered.  Gee, does this make me a praying mantis herder? They are cute at this age.

The first daylilies have started to bloom.  This one is a favorite. It is called Quad Quiddity because it has eight segments (four petals and four sepals, technically). It was bred by Pete Wetzel of Eldersburg, MD in 2004. It is nearly always the first to bloom. This year it was tied with Happy Returns, another yellow.  I am trying to create other daylilies like this one, called polymerous or polytepal daylilies,  by crossing plants that have this characteristic. There are not many of them that have a high percentage of blooms with extra segments. Quad Quiddity is a rarity, with nearly 100% 4X4 blooms.  In past years this has bloomed so early that it was done blooming before the local daylily show. This year was cooler, and the daylily season is getting off to a late start. The Quad Quddity plant is just loaded with buds, so if there is a good bloom on my plant on the show date, and I make it to the show, I will certainly show this one.

And I am putting up soap "ornaments" all through the garden wherever I can hang one or set up some kind of a stake to hang one.   I have found that I can buy Dial by the eight pack and save money. Hopefully the deer will decide that my garden stinks and go eat someone else's flowers.  They may have to walk a ways, though, because I am telling my neighbors about the deer-repellent properties of Dial soap.  Here is my dwarf peach tree, which has lots of peaches on it this year. Last year the deer got  them all. We'll see if this works.  In the meantime it does look as though the tree is ripening one weird fruit.

Last night my neighbors reported three large deer in my back yard. Then they casually jumped over the fence to check out the fare in their yard. Fortunately, this time they were eating some of the wild grape vines that I am weeding back. But they know as well as I do that there soon will be nice plump daylily buds to eat.  I would like to have flowers of some of the daylily crosses I created myself to take to the daylily show at the end of June.  Last year the deer got many of the flower buds and all of the seed pods, so there were no new seedlings this spring.  The only people who have seen my great big lavender daylily (pictured right) in person are my cousins and I two years ago.

So I have bought several bars of Dial soap. Forget the coyote urine and the expensive repellants.  Agricultural extension agencies have done the studies and found that not only is Dial the least expensive solution, it is also the most effective. Mist netting also works, as do six foot electrified fences, but they are more expensive (and may not be allowed where I live).   Here on the borders of DC, having a hunting season or introducing wolves is probably out of the question -- though interesting to contemplate.  So tonight I will be drilling holes in bars of Dial to hang around my yard.  I hate the smell of the stuff - no wonder it repels deer!

I have had a little carton containing beneficial nematodes in my refrigerator for over a month now, waiting for the ground temperature to get warm enough for them. It's ok, they slept through the whole thing. Today  was the ceremonial release of the nematodes.  I rushed out between thunderstorms to water them into my daylily beds.  My neighbors may think it odd of me to run out and apparently water the garden between storms.  But the nematodes need to get into the soil and the rain will help.

The nematodes will get to work now and eat up the larve of thrips that lay eggs on daylily blossoms and disfigure them.  They also will eat Japanese beetle larve. They don't like worms and won't harm the local cats, so they are an earth-freindly way to get rid of pests.  The only thing is, you can't see them without a microscope. So it is a bit of an act of faith to  throw the vermiculite they were sleeping in into a bucket of water and sprinkle it around. It worked last year, so I'll just believe that they are out there doing their thing.

The peonies are almost done blossoming. The one at the right is one of the last.

Tiny brown snake
in a peony petal hammock
waits out the flood.

 Below the cut is the draft for  the letter that I will send to the clinic of a doctor who treated me unethically. Perhaps posting the text  here will help someone facing a similar situation. Maybe it could inspire others to write down the experiences they have had as patients in the crossfire of the fibromyalgia wars.

One observation that is not in the letter is that I feel the doctor who claimed I was exhibiting "fibromyalgic behavior" was exhibiting witch-hunting behavior. It is very easy to poke prod and annoy someone until they do or say something that you can claim is mental illness as witch-hunters used to prod and poke their victims until they found an insensitive place.  There are actually some disturbing similarities between modern diagnostic manuals for psychosomatic disease and the Malleus Maleficarum.   These rheumatologists probably wouldn't get the reference. But I think my readers here are more broadly educated and will understand this perfectly.

( Names have been removed to protect the guilty.... )

Daughter of Hecate, on Covenspace, reports that when she went to a lawyer in Ashville, North Carolina  for consultation in a divorce, he cursed at her threw her out of his office when he found out that she was Wiccan.  Read more about these events on her blog.

The House passed the National Pain Care Policy Act of 2009 in March.  Now it is in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, and is expected to go to the full Senate for a vote soon (Senate bill 660).  Please consider supporting this bill by emailing, writing, or calling your state Senator.  This is a bill that would help to foster research on pain conditions and to remove barriers to effective pain management. Information on the bill and talking points can be found here on the American Pain Foundation Web site .

Sigmund Freud once asked “what do women want?” and the behavior of the psychotherapists who followed his model showed how poorly they understood. The way that psychiatry and psychology diagnostic manuals are written today, women with chronic pain are expressly singled out  as much more likely to have psychosomatic, rather than real pain conditions.  The long list of very real chronic illnesses once thought to be psychiatric demonstrates that this is a position of prejudice, not science. It is institutionalized misdiagnosis, based in an ancient belief that the womb makes women hysterical. To treat women as dysfunctional males and so to disregard the health and welfare of half the human race not only damages the scientific efforts to understand the medical health of women, but of men as well. To fail to understand women’s health is to fail to understand human health.

Although women are more likely to have autoimmune diseases and chronic pain conditions, men have these conditions and are treated with prejudice too. All people in pain can potentially be treated as if they have a mental health problem, or drug problem, instead of a physical condition by doctors. All these patients have families and communities who are impacted by these conditions.  When pain and chronic illnesses are dismissed, misdiagnosed as mental conditions, and under-treated, everyone suffers.

May 12 is National Fibromyalgia Awareness Day and the International Awareness Day for Chronic Immunological and Neurological Diseases. That’s a mouthful, but there are reasons why people with these conditions and those who care about them have banded together. A better scientific understanding of fibromyalgia, Gulf War illness, chronic fatigue, autoimmune disease, and neurological disease can have a broad impact on health care for everyone. A movement towards a better ethical medical treatment of these patients can raise awareness of more general problems in ethical medical treatment for all of us. From my perspective, as a patient with fibromyalgia, I see the issues and controversies around my illness as a case study in what is wrong with health care in the US, and in many other countries as well.

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