At this event. She sang in the chorus. UD is a soprano. “You have the high notes,” says her friend Barbara, an actual true trained soprano who goes for the high A‘s and hits them. (She goes way above high A too.) But UD doesn’t really have the high notes. UD is okay if you’re talking G, but she doesn’t trust herself very much on the high A. Sitting next to Barbara at the concert, UD sort of let her own voice dissolve when the A‘s appeared; she let Barbara take them.

UD suspects that technically she can do the A‘s (that is, she does them pretty well when she’s home alone at the piano), but she has a confidence problem. UD has many weird complexes about her voice.

But anyway she and Barbara had a blast at the Messiah. Extremely rousing moment when the audience suddenly stands up at the end and we all belt out the Hallelujah Chorus. I believe it released quite a few endorphins in me.

… kvells:   My daughter will be performing with (wait for it) …

… PSY.

Yeah, Gangnam Style Psy.   THE Gangnam Style Psy.  THAT guy, sexy ladies.   (Best parody here.)

For reasons known only to the federal government, it has been decided that the annual Christmas is Washington event will feature Gangnam Style.

La Kid sings in the chorus of this event every year, and will therefore share a stage with the dude.

…surrounded by Irish chicks at a
university dance. Galway, Ireland.

… can be found here. Title: Utilitarian.

… after Michaelson’s Cork, Ireland
concert last night.

La Kid‘s the blond
on the left.

(This just in – via Wendy, a reader.)

UD‘s university must now lie – at least for a while – – in the unranked sweat of an enseamed bed. That is, because George Washington University for years misrepresented the class rank of entering students, it is being punished to the nth degree by US News and World Report.

George Washington University on Wednesday lost its U.S. News and World Report ranking as one of the top national universities because the school revealed it had erroneously reported data on incoming students for more than a decade.

The private university held the coveted 51st ranking on the “Best Colleges” listing of the top 200 national universities. But U.S. News said the use of incorrect data in the September publication made the school’s rank higher than it would have been.

U.S. News said the school will have an “unranked” status until the publication of its 2014 edition of “Best Colleges” and until the school confirms the accuracy of its data.

**********************

NOTE TO THE MEDIA:

As a professor at George
Washington University, I
am available to be
interviewed about how

traumatic this is.

******************************

Sing it with me:

So yank me and wank me,
Spank me, unrank me,
I’m yours ‘til I die,
So in love,
So in love
So in love with you, my love, am I.

… of the building where UD covers monthly Town Council meetings for the Garrett Park Bugle reminds her why she loves her town, the town where she grew up. Like the train station (Image 4) down the street from UD‘s house, it’s small and beautiful and for UD at least very evocative – of stillness, simplicity, and long passages of time.

“It must be nice to live in a neighborhood that’s an arboretum,” writes a local blogger about Garrett Park. It is, and not only in the spring and autumn. In winter the trees are a delicate gray against the snow. In winter the town’s small wooden houses surrounded by big trees make it feel like a Japanese garden, a quiet island.

*****************************

Yesterday, for the first time after Hurricane Sandy, I walked to the top of our property, a thickly wooded hill overlooking a plunge down to train tracks. We thought no trees fell during the storm, but here was a massive fall – a dead elm with so broad a bifurcated trunk I thought it was two trees. As I lopped through smaller branches, most of the wood I saw was hollowed and rotten, home to generations of critters. Dry dusty vines looping around the trunks gave them a Southern Gothic feel. The vines came loose in my hand. I raked the logs and leaves that covered a path I’d made through the woods. Now, with some climbing, you can get to the end of the yard.

…UD went to Rehoboth Beach and watched the city replenish the beach. Now, from an apartment in Germantown, Maryland, she watches images of that just-dredged beach overwhelmed by waves, and she wonders if all that money was wasted.

So many of the Sandy images we’re seeing – of the Chesapeake Bay, Rehoboth Beach, Ocean City – show places flooded, if you will, with memories for old UD. Her father graduated from Ocean City High School. He spent summers working at his family’s businesses along the beach. Later, he bought a house on the Chesapeake, and UD went out fishing with him. Most of UD‘s summers for the last twenty years have taken place in Rehoboth Beach (see this blog’s category, Snapshots from Rehoboth). All of those boarded-up shops with their defiant messages to Sandy scrawled on window boards — she knows those shops, and the people who own them.

The storm was quiet here – some wind, some sound from the trees. UD’s Garrett Park house had a little basement flooding. No treefalls.

… in UD‘s sister’s apartment in Germantown, Maryland. I’m one floor up. UD‘s Garrett Park house lies at the bottom of a big hill.

My only companion at the moment is Shadow, a black cat.

UD‘s beloved Rehoboth Beach looks as though it might be exactly where the storm makes landfall. Her friends the Elkins were there for the Sea Witch Festival. They emailed her about it after they came back to Washington.

We could hear the wind howling and see the waves getting rather too close to the boardwalk for comfort. We read after we got back to DC that there was mandatory evacuation for Rehoboth and the beach was flooded. I dread to hear what’s been happening since.

Mr UD remains in Garrett Park, having decided to go down with the ship.

*************************

Update: Local Delaware reporting:

The winds could exasperate flooding along the coast.

… at the moment, the updated information about the storm is bad enough that UD‘s moving to her sister’s upcounty apartment. Downed trees and flooding are real possibilities here in Garrett Park.

The first words I heard on the radio this morning were Pumpkins may become airborne.

So with skies darkening, and with anxious pips coming from the cardinals, I picked up each pumpkin and put it well back on the front stoop. I also took away the two butterfly chairs, and weighted – with stones I’ve collected from Rehoboth Beach over the years – container plants that seemed light enough to be lifted by the coming winds.

Even now the winds don’t seem so far away, as I sit shivering in an old Adirondack chair next to the puffball mushroom woods. The puffballs have gone gray and dented. The winds will finish them off and scatter their spores.

The winds are here already, hissing in the trees and making the air colder by the minute. The leaf fall is like a rainfall.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to blog the storm. We’ll almost certainly lose power in a few hours.

Yesterday we hauled out a ladder and cleaned our gutters. Mr UD tossed down what looked like cow patties and I swept them into our très riche compost pile.

(Tightening my scarf around me here. Should really go inside for a sweater.)

… NORTHEAST US.’

So, what’s it like? you ask.

Well, at the moment we’ve got a lovely mild evening, so one sort of stands out in the garden looking at the sky and thinking what a sneak it is. So calm, so lovely, a thin little moon, everything very still except the crickets, and yet it’s all a ruse. Out in the garden you somehow already feel the rain and the wind, already see the ripped power lines and the tree limbs all over the street.

“Hey,” says UD to Mr UD. “I have an idea. Let’s leave. Let’s drive west for a few hours and find a nice inn and stay there.”

He doesn’t go for it. There’s a stream of rational reasons against it coming out of his mouth but I’m not listening.

“Hey. I’m willing to wait a couple of hours after we lose power – in case there’s a miracle and it comes back on. But after two hours I’m outta here. Hotel.”

Ominous silence from It’s Good for the Soul to Rough It Mr UD.

“And if all the hotels around here are fully booked, I ask that we continue driving until we get to a region with available hotels.”

Silence.

But anyway. We’re calm in the calm before the storm.

… photographs by Tamara Trocki
(earlier work here) of UD’s
famed giant puffball mushrooms.

This is their season, their
moment to … well, calvatia gigantea
don’t shine… The moment
for their pale bruised flesh to
glimmer slightly from the floor
of the woods…

The shadows of grasses on the
surface of the shroom moons…

It’s a spectacular fall day.
UD has been out enjoying it.

She began with brunch at Garrett Park’s
Black Market Bistro, with Rosemary, who
just got back from Thailand and has
many stories.

(Train carrying lumber in background.)

Then she and Rosemary went to
Johnson’s Gardens, where UD bought
mums like these.

Then UD worked in her garden,
stopping occasionally to stare
at her giant puffball mushrooms.

They look like this, only they’re
in the woods, not in a cow pasture.

UD paused in her gardening to
talk to her across the street
neighbor Martin, who with his
wife Tammy (Tammy took the photo
of UD that ran in the Chronicle
of Higher Ed article about UD)
is about to go to Israel, and
who wanted UD to know that they
gave UD’s phone number to their
cat sitters.