I can hardly stand how cool FaceBook is. I posted a comment on a 350.org Facebook discussion about writing songs for environmental education and got a message from someone who appears to be in South Africa, wanting songs. I was going to do a living-room recording of one today anyway to send to . . .well, it’s a story, which I told on FaceBook but will retell here: I went to SingSayPlay Saturday night. (That’s a local gathering where everybody contributes a performance of some kind: a story, a song, an instrumental.) I sang my new song, "Solar Power's In." The second verse is about a method of generating power in the desert that uses mirrors to concentrate the sunlight on a boiler that makes steam to run the turbine. After the song our hostess said her brother worked on the first one of those in the Mojave twenty years ago and she had to have the song for him--and his grandchildren! So here it is. I couldn’t figure out how to attach it to a FaceBook message for the woman in South Africa, but it’s easy to link from one to this blog. And since I had already put my old solar power song (Sun, Sun Shine) on the blog, I could link to it in my answer. So here’s my first transfer from Garageband to iWeb. It’s really easy! Solar Power’s In © 2009 by Nancy Schimmel 1. Solar power’s in your future, Solar is for everyone, In the night we’ll use the windmills, In the day, we’ll use the sun. Chorus: Oh, the sun is far away, Close enough to light my day, Close enough to warm my skin, Oh, let the sun shine in. 2. Here’s a trick they do with mirrors: Don’t need coal to make a fire, Bounce the sunlight to the boiler, Send the power through the wire. Chorus 3. You don’t need a lot of money, You just need the sun to shine. Build yourself a solar oven, Dry your laundry on the line. Chorus  Our friends and neighbors Naomi and Kimi throw a lovely Chanukah party, complete with Naomi’s excellent cookies and singing led by Naomi and Bonnie Lockhart. My favorite every year is “Ocho Kandelikas,” eight candles in Ladino. Ladino is to Spanish as Yiddish is to German. We also always sing my mother’s “Eight Candles.” This year someone sang a latke parody of “The Holly and the Ivy” with a verse added about Naomi’s cookies. I’ve put a new quote on my front page that seems to sum it all up for my songwriting and my mother’s: "If you're going to tell the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise they'll kill you." — George Bernard Shaw And I forgot to say that at one of the workshops at the Folk Alliance conference the woman next to me introduced herself to me saying, “I do the music on Weeds” (the sassy program on Showtime that used “Little Boxes” for its theme for three seasons). ©2009 by Nancy Schimmelhttp://www.350.org/0E2CE862-18C7-4C8D-AF09-C88C9AB0CC91.html
Carole Leita took this photo the other day as she walked through the Telegraph Hill, Chinatown and Russian Hill neighborhoods of San Francisco. She’s a walker!
Monday, December 21, 2009, Happy Solstice!
DRY YOUR LAUNDRY ON THE LINE OR WHATEVER