Melanie's Blog

I ♥ Brahms
Thu, September 27, 2012

Driving around in the sunshine between errands last Sunday afternoon, we had the pleasure of hearing a recent recording from this summer’s BBC Proms concerts in London, featuring the Violin Concerto by Johannes Brahms. It’s a great work, and my husband Bill commented that as...

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Roots
Thu, May 24, 2012

We got the raised garden beds ready for planting at the Lake County house last weekend.  After last summer’s gopher fiasco, raised beds are the only way to go (provided there’s a wire mesh cover on top, to keep Bambi out as well). Gophers do love to munch those roots, almost...

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Community
Thu, June 16, 2011

Webster’s Dictionary (online version) variously defines the word community as:

- a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society <a community of retired persons

- a body of persons or nations having a common...

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True Grit
Wed, May 4, 2011

The spring edition of our electronic newsletter, “Brava,” was emailed earlier this week.  If you haven’t yet read it, it provides an update on some noteworthy events taking place at SFGC this spring and summer, including our annual fundraising gala, the Chorus America...

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The Home Stretch
Fri, April 15, 2011

Spring break is over at SFGC, and the girls returned to Chorus last week. Having completed our annual gala at the end of March, the administrative staff is now in the home stretch of the season, working away at projects and programs coming up in the next 3 months, before the end of this...

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Bramasole*
Wed, March 23, 2011

What a teaser this so-called spring weather has been! What with Saturday night’s gale force winds, (which took some sheets of tin off our barn roof) and the return of the rain on Tuesday, March seems to be roaring out like a mad, wet lion.

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The Red Balloon
Thu, March 10, 2011

I found a red balloon nestled in the sage bush in my front yard last week. It definitely seemed like some kind of omen, since the 1956 French film about a boy and his balloon companion have been an important icon for most of my life. (And then I read in SF Gate the next day that 10,000 red...

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Forever February
Fri, February 25, 2011

It’s the shortest month of the year, but somehow it feels like the longest.  This seems to be a widely shared feeling, and maybe it’s not just about the weather, which, until the forecast for SNOW(?!) this week, has been rather mild.  The jazz violinist Regina Carter wrote...

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Time in a Bottle
Wed, February 2, 2011

Last week I read about a time capsule from 1910, opened by the Cleveland Elementary School in the Excelsior neighborhood of San Francisco.  It was an interesting glimpse of life in post-earthquake San Francisco, as the geographic boundaries and the population of the city were rapidly...

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Burns Night
Tue, January 25, 2011

Today is the poet Robert Burns’s birthday, also known as the holiday Burns Night in Scotland. I’m not especially attuned to Scottish holidays, but it showed up on my European calendar this morning, and then there was a tiny paragraph about it in the New York Times...

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