SUUSI, Day 3.

[rivka]

I don't have anything on my schedule today, so maybe I'll catch up with my recaps? At any rate: Tuesday was quite the jam-packed day.

Woke up, dragged ourselves to breakfast, and took Alex to children's programming. Her group was going to have music for the first time on Tuesday, featuring Alistair Moock, one of the SUUSI headline performers. One of the things I love about SUUSI is that they bring serious musicians to the kids' program, even for the youngest groups. Moock plays bluesy, roots-y folk guitar and growls his songs in a gravelly voice that sounds like a cross between Woody Guthrie and a young Bob Dylan. The kids? Adore him.

I went to the morning Theme Talk at nine. The speaker was a young minister who used the SUUSI theme of "Pilgrimage" to talk about spiritual and personal journeys - the voluntary kind and the involuntary kind. She talked about the year that she interviewed for ministerial positions. Christo's "gates" exhibit in Central Park was up at the time, and every day she went and did a walking meditation where she moved through the gates envisioning each one as a different potential future. Then, the day that she got an offer from the church she's now serving and asked for a couple of days to think it over, she walked home through a New York City winter storm and an enormous piece of construction fencing blew over in the wind and hit her full-force on the head, injuring her. Which, she eventually realized, had a lot more to do with spiritual reality than the groovy gates metaphor she'd been focused on. So, yeah. Her theme talk developed the idea of the spiritual journeys that swirl up out of nowhere and slam into you while you are unawares. It was a great talk, but it led me unexpectedly to a processing-my-miscarriage place, and by the time she finished and we all stood up to sing "Get Together" I was in tears. Useful tears, but still.

Fortunately I had a fine transition planned: Tuesday morning was my chocolate workshop. Last year the workshop had been held in a grossly inadequate dorm kitchen with no climate control, and the humidity ruined the chocolate. This year it was held in an actual home economics classroom, with tons of sinks and counter space and kitchen equipment and two big freezers and controlled temperature conditions. Hooray for Radford. The workshop was marvelous. We made three kinds of filled chocolates: raspberry jam, chocolate hazelnut paste, and caramel. Then we made solid chocolates in shell shapes, with the option of making some of them toffee crunch. Although I'm sure that the subtleties take forever to master, the basic idea of making filled chocolates is much, much easier than I imagined. We filled dome-shaped molds with chocolate and put them into the freezer to set for five minutes. Then we dumped them out. The outside layer (lining the dome) had hardened in the freezer, so it stayed in the mold while the still-liquid center ran out, leaving us with a chocolate cup lining the dome. We put in the filling of our choice from a squeeze bag, topped it with more chocolate, and put it back in the freezer so the rest would harden. And that was it!

Theoretically, the chocolates were supposed to harden enough during the workshop that we'd be able to take them out of the molds and finish them with a little decoration. (She had cool dusting powders and so forth.) But with a whole classful of people repeatedly opening the freezers and checking their chocolates, very few of the chocolates hardened enough to come out of the molds during class. Fortunately, we could just take them home and stick them in the dorm freezers, so it wasn't a problem. We talked about maybe having next year's workshop be a two-parter, with the morning focused on making chocolates, and then an afternoon session focused on decoration and presentation. That way they'd have plenty of time to harden over lunch.

I retrieved Alex after class and took her to lunch. When Michael returned from his morning kayaking trip, I put my bathing suit on under my clothes, packed up water and sunscreen, put on tied immersable shoes (my old sneakers), and set out for my first hiking trip. This was described as a moderate trip, suitable for ages 6 and up, involving a hike down a forest road to "a remote and beautiful spot to sun and swim." Total distance three miles. It sounded like a lovely relaxing ramble, and I was looking forward to it. But that was because I'd never been on a SUUSI nature trip that wasn't expertly guided, before. There's a first time for everything.

First our leader got lost on the way to the trailhead, and we had to backtrack. And then? She got lost on the trail. We were hiking down a forest road that split in several places. She took us on a wrong turning and we trudged quite a way over a hot, sunny, scrubby, not particularly interesting-looking piece of ground before she realized that she'd made a mistake. It added a good mile and a half to the trip. By the time we got down to the water (after another, briefer misunderstanding about directions), over a very steep portion of road, it was time to start back up. We did take about 20-30 minutes to float, because we were all exhausted and scorching hot. The water itself was marvelous - cool and refreshing but not very cold, with a strong current in places that, if you anchored yourself properly, gave you quite a massage. The river was also beautiful, which was nice because the hike down was monotonous, with little to see other than trees crowding close around a dirt-and-gravel road. It was good to get that pick-me-up at the bottom, because the slog back up the steep steep hill and the long hot forest road was miserable. I was utterly exhausted by the end, and also bitterly disappointed - mostly, I worried that the unexpectedly long and strenuous Tuesday hike had worn me out so much that I wouldn't be able to take the hike I'd planned to do Wednesday morning with my Dad. I was also worried because I'd previously had some problems with spotting blood after exercise, and I was afraid that I might've overexerted myself enough to cause more bleeding.

So I was in a pretty bad frame of mind when I got back to campus. I wolfed down an enormous and delicious dinner, which helped, and then came back to the room and lay down while Michael took Alex outside - which helped as well. Michael shared the happy news that (a) he'd placed fifth (out of 40) in the poker tournament, and (b) he'd busted the inconsiderate father who left his son for bosssio and I to watch out of the tournament. Eventually I got up, struggled to get Alex to go to sleep, and came out in the hall thinking that I might stagger over to the Cabaret to finally hear some music. At which point, I discovered that it was pouring down rain. So I stayed in the hall for a while talking to Siobhan and Michael and Siobhan's aunt and our friend Lo, and I unmolded the chocolates I'd made that morning and found them to be perfect. Yay!

I was pretty achy and tired, so I decided that I'd wait until literally the last minute before deciding whether I would go on my Wednesday hike. I set the alarm for 6:30 and went to bed.

Comments

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

Hey, I (vaguely) know Alistair! He went to Williams, and I remember hearing him play/sing at an open mic/coffehouse kind of thing. Huh. I'll have to check out his stuff, because that sounds like music we'd all like around here.