It’s 5 am and Bella’s eating for the third time since she woke at 2. After each earlier meal I tried to pop her in the swing, but after a few mintues I’d begin to hear sucks and coos and coughs and that other noise she makes I can’t quite put a word to and sure enough switching on the light revealed two big dark eyes gazing at me.
So I’ve been grazing the net and having one-handed im chats with my insomniac sister (she’s gone to bed now, lucky girl!)
Anyway, here are two of my finds:
From Left of the Dial (he’s Melissa Wiley’s husband and shows a different view of the Bonny Glen household) the alien song.
And courtesy of Joseph Bottum at First Things, well I’ll just quote what he said about it:
It surely means something that we live in an age containing the greatest ukulele player ever born, but I�m not sure just what it means. His name is Jake Shimabukuro, a twenty-nine-year-old from Hawaii, and he can make a four-string ukulele do everything but sit up and beg�and the question, when you hear him, is why: If you are this good on a ukulele, why are you playing a ukulele?
Take a look at him here, for example, playing �While My Guitar Gently Weeps.� It sounds good from the beginning, but the moment, I think, when it ceases to be merely good and becomes simply impossible is the second time through the chorus (at 1:40 in the clip), when Shimabukuro starts adding on the rhythm guitar�s part�approximating two guitars on his four-string instrument. (On the original Beatles song, as I remember, George Harrison played the rhythm part and Eric Clapton sat in to play the lead.) By the time he reaches the piano-like arpeggios at 3:38, the listener�s capacity for astonishment is exhausted: The man is some kind of mad genius, because the ukulele just isn�t capable of doing all this.
Really, if I can’t be sleeping at least I can be diverted. And now as my little bambina has closed her eyes we will try once again…
ps: I know they say sleep while the baby is sleeping. But it’s really hard to sleep at dinnertime.
Melanie, that was just beautiful! Thank you. My third baby is 5 1/2 months right now, and those grins and coos only get better.