One of the things I’ve made this weekend was tomato ketchup, as part of my attempt to keep up with the harvest. Homemake ketchup is great but it doesn’t tend to come out the rich red we are used to with the commercial products but a slightly pallid orange instead.
It turned out though that I had the ideal solution to hand – beetroot powder. Produced from dehydrating an earlier crop of beetroots, I have mainly used it when baking bread but a little bit went a long way into transforming the ketchup into a very satisfying colour. And as far as I can tell from the first samples, it still tastes much more like tomato than beetroot.
I ended up taking my Squier Jaguar electric bass to today’s sing around – such a pleasingly easy instrument to play. Although it is tuned the same as the upright bass, I can pull off tunes on the electric bass without breaking a sweat that would be hard to impossible for me on the upright or other instruments.
My first contribution was a fairly laid-back, jazzy version of Black Night (originally Deep Purple) and, when my turn came round again, I went for Ain’t She Sweet, a 1920’s tune that I normally do on the ukulele but it also flows well on bass. After the break, I’d been contemplating a few options but, with someone else picking a song that mentioned rain (the hopefully unprophetic Madman Across the Water by Elton John) I hit the session with a lesser-known jazz standard, Here’s that Rainy Day Again.
We were a bit down on numbers so I ended up getting a fourth number, for which I picked another jazz tune, I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free. I’d performed that one at the ‘Mini Monocle’ (formerly ‘Cask Bah Rocks’) on Wednesday evening. Although not a simple tune, it falls under the fingers very easily on a regular bass. I did it a few weeks ago on upright but it was a strong point to finish todays offerings on electric bass too.
Last week we cooked a dish of lamb meatballs in quince halves and it was a bit on the sour side. We probably didn’t needed extra quince cooked with the onion round the base and, even then, it might have been too much. Possibly the original recipe used the fruit of the western Cydonia oblonga quince rather than the oriental ones from the Chaenomeles family? The ornamental ones, gifted by a friend, is what we have though so how to make use of them?
I decided to try dehydrating them and creating a powder, like I’ve done with beetroot and other things in the past. That got to the grinding stage tonight and the result was a muted orange yellow powder with a distinctly sharp tang. However, you can easily control how much you put on. I used a frugal measure on the pork shoulder steaks we had for dinner and it was just a subtle nuance of flavour.
I reckon I could push up the quantity without reaching the sourness we had last week but, for now, I’ve got another batch started. The fruit won’t last forever in raw form and this is one way to help it stretch out without adding lots of sugar to make jellies and cheeses.
I find that a reliable way to warm up on a cool day is to undertake a DIY job involving either water or electricity. There is a certain amount of nervous energy that comes with channelling either of those because there is always the potential for things to go horribly wrong! Today I did both, in the form of fitting a new wireless thermostat to our boiler, so I am feeling nice and toasty inside although I am pleased to report that it all seems to have gone pretty smoothly.
The old thermostat (Honeywell CM-927) was intermittently losing parts of the LCD display. It seemed to be operational but there was too much risk that it would fail completely in the depths of winter. Originally I had planned for our boiler engineer to fit a new thermostat but she suggested that it was well within the competence of careful DIY skills. The CM-927 unit is now obsolete so I picked up a similar Honeywell T3R instead and I decided to do the swap this morning.
I proceeded at a careful pace and it actually all went very smoothly. The main hitches were figuring out which breaker on our consumer unit would isolate the boiler and spotting that whoever put the previous one in wrapped both the boiler control wires in the same brown insulation coating. That wasn’t very helpful, particularly because it matched the brown used for the live mains feed, but I used some electricians tape in different colours to differentiate them before I took everything apart. The new system fired up with no problems and, as promised, automatically paired with the wireless thermostat. I’m hoping there won’t be any further cause to mention boiler thermostats for a good time to come though.
Jane was assisting someone at a hospital appointment in Nottingham yesterday and I was acting as chauffeur. Parking is pretty bad at QMC so the plan was that I would go and find somewhere else in the city I could put the car and it just so happened that I found a place near Alfreton Road, which is home of The Music Inn, a long-established music shop.
As I browsed around, my eye was caught by an Ozark resonator bass. I’ve got a resonator guitar, which has a metal body with an integrated speaker cone to acoustically amplify the sound and I’d heard of bass versions before but this was the first time I’d seen one. Of course I tried it out and I found it to have a powerful, punchy tone. I reckon that, unlike most acoustic bass guitars, it probably could keep up in a small session without needing to be plugged in.
On the downside, the metal body means it is very heavy although I was surprised to find that it still suffered from a tendency for neck dive. It was also without an upper strap button so to wear it standing would mean tying the top end of the strap round the headstock, which I find less comfortable that a body-mounted attachment at that end. Most importantly as reasons for not buying it though were not really needing it and certainly not having proper room to accommodate it!
So, no new bass for me but hopefully it will fall into good hands.
On a recent episode of the SBL podcast, the question was asked whether In-Ear monitors are the way of the future and if that means there is no more need for bass amps? Like most SBL podcasts, the title is a bit misleading but I guess that’s how you get the views. They mainly talk about the pros and cons of IEMs but my take on the ‘death’ of the bass amp is an unequivocal no.
It’s not that I don’t like working with IEM systems but, to date, I’ve only had the opportunity to use them a mere handful of times despite continuing decades of frequent musical activity. The sound you can get from a well set up system is like listening to an album, the level is controllable and you can also feed in things like click tracks and a mic for the band leader to comment on what is coming up. However, at the grassroots level I play at, the infrastructure isn’t there. Even when places like churches move to digital desks and have more aux mixes than musicians on the stage, there are still all sorts of additional things that need to be put in place. Some churches use them (playing for a conference at Emmanuel in Loughborough earlier this month was my first ever IEM-only ‘gig’) but most don’t and the benefits when everything works right have to be weighed against the problems if it doesn’t (and the fact that low budgets and mainly volunteers playing and running sound increase the chance of the latter happening too often for comfort).
I’ve got two bass outings this week – a concert band rehearsal tonight and an open mic in town tomorrow. IEMs wouldn’t work for either. In the first setting, I’m using a smallish amp because, unlike a tuba, the electric bass is far too quiet on its own and everyone else needs to hear it through the air. For the second, I’ll get on stage, plug in and then it is pretty much time to start. The sound check amounts to checking a signal is coming through and both performers and audience are hearing the same sound in the room.
I’m glad that the days seem to have passed when I might need to own an amp too large to carry with one hand but I’m not convinced I’ll either see the time when there is no point owning an amp at all.
This week, Kensington Temple (a large Elim church in London) is running an initiative called ‘Hear the Word’, with the whole Bible being read out loud from cover to cover over the course of this week. Readings will be going on throughout the day and night and there are facilities to take part online as well as in person.
I’m due to read Numbers 9, in theory sometime from midday although they seem to be quite well ahead so I’m going to log on to the assigned Zoom chat room sooner rather than later. You can dip in at any point during the week via their livestream (also Facebook but the YouTube one is easiest to embed below):
While I was cooking yesterday evening, I was listening to a video from Mike Winger (included at the end of this post). I count him as a pretty good guide to thinking through theology, including the fact that he is willing to recognise and acknowledge when he slips up.
The particular thing that caught my ear was the mention that the NIV now renders Philippians 4:13 as “I can do all this through him who gives me strength”. If you go to the BibleGateway site, you can ask it to show the verse in all English translations. Most stick closely to the wording used in the King James Version: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” and the idea of being able to do all things through Christ is a popular topic for sermons and inspirational messages. Indeed, that is the wording I find if I pull one of my print edition NIV Bibles off the shelf : “I can do everything through him who gives me strength” is what my 1984 edition says.
Why the change and is it a good one? I’ve looked at the online Greek Bible and the traditional translation does seem to fit, as far as I can tell. However, I know that the verse is often pulled out of context and people happily apply it as if it means Christians can happily succeed in anything they fancy doing, glossing over the many times when we experience difficulties and failure. What the new NIV rendering does is to keep the verse focused on the context, which is Paul explaining that he has learned to be content in all the circumstances he has experienced.
Given that the original was written as a coherent letter and not a series of chocolate box promises, I think this is a good decision. The best messages I have heard on the passage make this very clear, encouraging us to trust Jesus as he leads us through life rather than claiming that he can let us have what we want. I know that other major modern translations, such as the ESV, regular check and revise details and I won’t be unhappy if, in a few years time, we see more versions choosing to recast their wording in a way that forces the reader to look at the context rather than jumping on a potentially incomplete and selfish meaning.
The video below should start about 9 minutes in, which is when Mike discusses this topic.
For the last couple of days, Jane and I have been dog-sitting again, providing a bit of respite for someone who went into hospital for a major operation. Dogs normally have sensitive hearing but not this one. My evidence for that is that I went ahead with my regular Friday morning banjo session yesterday and she didn’t bat an eyelid. She let out a couple of low moans while she was dreaming but raised not a whimper about the loud, enthusiastic and not always fully masterful banjo playing that was going on! As a hearing test, I’d say that was pretty conclusive.
Jane and I have recently taken on custodianship of the training band’s Christmas library. We’ve been given a box of paper copies and a collection of files containing scanned images but the two don’t entirely match up. I’ve been working on the question of how to create scans of what we only have in paper form so that I can email people in the various sections of the band to show them what we will be looking at after half term.
My current technology set up allows me to scan to image files but the composite PDFs I could generate were on the large size. I looked at some online programs to compress them but all the ‘free’ options turned out to require a subscription to download anything… so not what I would define as free! After some fiddling around, I’ve discovered that the best tool I’ve got for compiling images to PDFs is my old MacBook and then I can shrink them down on command line back in Windows (using Ghostscript under the Linux subsystem). The first piece took ages but I’m hoping the second will be much quicker and the band will find the pieces of suitable quality to play from.