Beff's semester finishes today, and she is due home after dark tonight. Tomorrow night we take Big Mike out for Chinese buffet

Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. Birds in the backyard have been doin' it big time in the last several days. Normally we get birdsong from an hour before sunrise to an hour after it, followed by quietude, but lately the sounds of aviary seduction have kept the entire day tweetful. Birds in pairs (naturally) have been witnessed flying from tree to tree, using what I presume is their "let's make eggs" songs followed by the "oh baby, you're so BIG" song. It seems to be rather a complicated affair, as I haven't seen or heard the "don't expect me to do any of the housework or put on good clothes for company" song yet. Last year at this time we had a nest next to the air conditioner in the guest room with loud babies (but not oh babies), but this year we have not put an air conditioner in that window. So we are missing that part of the fun of our existence.

And it was so hot and steamy for most of the week that I had to use the Klavinova in the air conditioned master bedroom to compose on. Normally I prefer the actual piano, out of tune as it may be, because I'm one of those tactile composers (it's true -- I have a membership card and everything). So now I am waiting to hear if I am going to have to write a brief and weird piece for a Philadelphia group for December 2. It's going through channels (like anyone with a good remote and basic cable does), and if I have to do it (it would be way fun) I'll report it here. Otherwise, it's back to the piano trio about our cats.

The humidity finally abated on Thursday. Then it came back. And abated on Saturday. Whoo, I'm dizzy. And now there are Heat Index warnings for tomorrow -- hey, in Maryland we routinely got head indices of 120, so this puny 100 heat index wont phase me. Though I noticed that the flexitone is rusting simply from standing still in the dining room, which DOESN'T have air conditioning. In the drier periods I got to mow the lawns and do some pruning of the bushes the edge the way back yard. I also pruned the hostas that were hanging over the front walk -- I hate excess foliage. And in spare time I started wondering about my favorite dam. Now Barry and his dad -- owners of the dog Samson -- have died or moved along, as their house is now sold. It's become clear that Barry had a hobby of keeping the path to the dam clear, since now it is overgrown. with bushes starting to crowd out even the "Where Stacy and Joe Sat" big stone hunks where it's always been fun to stand. It looks like my next project is to clear another path: I got there yesterday afternoon by inventing a back way through the woods.

This week's movies (yellow text on the left, up there) include part of my drive northwards through Franconia Notch, a pan of the dam, and evidence of Cammy's reaction when he hears me utter the word "Treats!" This week's pictures begin with me and the Lieutenant Colonel relaxing with Winnie, and Winnie herself. Then, a sign at the Canterbury (New Hampshire) rest area that seems to think that "no" can be treated ironically, and the notch that must give Franconia Notch its name (not bad for a pic taken BY THE DRIVER from a moving car). Then, a mushroom encountered in the woods on the way to the dam, the cats looking out the dining room window in the morning (the screen was pushed up), Beff at her high chair at the Blue Coyote, and a bunch of change we encountered on the way home that had melted into the tar (we tried pulling it up, but it was stuck real good, and imagined there must have been someone from America's Funniest Home Videos nearby).

AUGUST 1 -- revisions and additional text AUGUST 2. Breakfast this morning was Morningside Farms meatless breakfast sausage patties with melted 2% cheese, orange juice, and coffee. Dinner/lunch was Davy-pizza, a cheeseburger, maybe a hot dog, and plenty of hot sauce. And beer. Lunch today was snacky chicken cooked in its twenty-third hour of marinade. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES THIS LAST WEEK 54.7 and 95.9. LARGE EXPENSES this last week include payment to the vet, $188, payment to an emergency animal hospital in Acton, $288, Toast Titanium upgrade $99 (minus $20 rebate), Office 2004 academic edition $139, Adobe Creative Suite academic edition, $389 including shipping. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS Actually, it's my ears this time, as I am on hold as I type this, and it's on-hold crap not even good enough for the Weather Channel. Last week's group ("My Airplane"), by the way, was The Royal Guardsmen. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: during my Tanglewood summer (1982), we often had performers visit the Koussevitzky mansion area, where the composers lived, normally thematically: upper string players, wind players, lower strings, etc. Normally Martler and I would make a whole MESS o' pizza in those expensive ovens, we'd serve them, and there was almost always some sort of dance party after the pizza. I remember the week of winds getting really frisky (and kind of dumb) and actually picking up some of the lighter people (okay, just the women) while dancing. Other composers did it, wind players did it to the composers, but I started it. I remembered that recently when one of the pick-upees, Liz Mann, played in the Orchestra of St. Luke's gig in June where Take Jazz Chords was done. One of these days I'll post the oh so nerdy picture of Martin and me slicing a big, big pizza. COMPANIES WHO HAVE NOT COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY RECENTLY include CompUSA and Logitech. COMPANIES WHO HAVE COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY AND THEN SOME this week include Arthur Marc's hot sauces and Staple Rebates. THIS WEEK'S COSMIC QUANDARY: Where does the word "dill" come from? RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS: Arthur Marc's Chicken Wing and Dipping Sauce, spicy olives, Porino's olive antipasto. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK Mac OS X version 10.4 (Tiger, I guess) -- especially Automator and Widgets. MONEY DOWN THE DRAIN THIS WEEK: $159 at BJ's for a 5 gig flash drive made by Pleomax. FRAGILE THINGS DESTROYED BY THE CATS THIS LAST WEEK are a little bit of themselves, especially sunny. NUMBER OF TIMES THIS NON-CATEGORY WILL APPEAR ON THIS PAGE: 1. SOMETHING I'D LIKE TO PUT WHERE THE SUN DON'T SHINE: photographic film, and Bernard Goldberg. INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE an Altoid, a disk label, a pair of discarded underwear, a 3-prong to 2-prong adapter.

It has actually been a very eventful week, and almost thirteen (or however many it is -- a bunch of new regular readers popped out of the woodwork in the last two weeks, and I'm using it as an opportunity not to count them, or to change the flippant tone of these updates), you are very lucky to see an update at all this week. My Windows computer is very nearly dead, and it was a miracle that I got it to start up at all. As I started this paragraph, I was on hold with CompUSA, from whom I had bought the computer, for 20 minutes and was then cut off. A call back got me on hold another 20 minutes and I got the nice message that I should have called a different number. Prompting me why to wonder how this world has gotten to a point where icky things like this happen to people, like me, who are very good at following instructions. I was going to say "But I digress," but to do that I would have had to been having a point -- and there's a complicated verb tense (past progressive subjunctive passive?) for you. But again, I do not digress. Here's the skinny: bad boot blocks on the windows/web page computer, sometimes it will start up, sometimes I have to go through complicated tricks to get it to start up -- this most recent startup failed about a dozen times, until I tried whistling the piccolo part to the Trio of the Stars and Stripes forever while hopping up and down on one foot, holding my nose, and thinking good thoughts about manila folders. That didn't actually work, but you see, we are back to the impossibility of digression. And its unbearable lightness. Stop me somebody.

But the real big story of the week -- actually there are two, but this one is bigger -- is Sunny's adventures in vet visits (doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it?). Beff was in Maine until late Friday night, so she couldn't participate in the very beginning of the Sunny Affair. Thursday afternoon when I let Sunny in for dinner, he seemed spooked about something -- normally he runs up to me and does the very cute I'm Grown Up But I Want You To Think I'm Still A Kitten thing of rubbing against the (my) legs and purring and stuff, but instead he looked at me like I'd just set off a firecracker, very tentatively approached the back steps, and when he got to his waiting food, he batted at it a little before starting to eat it. I just figured Krazy Kat thing -- after all those years when we'd hear Drip just running maniacally around the house at 3 in the morning, I figured, hey Krazy Kat manifests itself in lots of different ways. Sunny's has a few drops of paranoia.

Well. So. On Friday morning I heard a lot of pretty impressive Kitty Sneezes in the morning, the sound of Kitty-Barf-o-rama, and a puzzled Cammy looking on. After what I figured were six barfs, I called the vet for an appointment. In the meantime, I discovered four more Barf Sites, even slipping on one of them in my flip-flops. Summer is a dangerous time to have a barfing cat in your midst. So, near the appointed time (2:20), Sunny was not to be found. I rolled my eyes (later, I was to roll some dough to make pizza, and here I DO digress) and searched all the nooks and crannies. And there he was, holed up in the pump organ (or American harmonium, as our pretentious friends call it -- or they would if we had any friends). The aperture to get him out was by far at the wrong angle to do so without hurting him -- especially as he had just barfed ten times -- so I rolled my eyes again (by this time I was getting dizzy), took all the stuff off the organ, made a sound that the court stenographer would transcribe as "HrrrUMMMph!", lifted the bass side of the organ, and transferred him into a different location with my only free limbs (my feet). Nope, no kicking, just sliding. Oddly, I did not feel "pumped", even though it is, indeed, a pump organ.

So I got Sunny to the vet, and I knew everyone would be bored (as you almost 13? 14? 15? already are) if I told the How I Got Him Here In The First Place story, so I sat quietly. The vet took his temperature, which was normal, Sunny got very distressed and panted a lot, and blood work was done. I was told to feed him some bland food for a while and let the vet know if he got more lethargic. All seemed to be doing better until Saturday night, when both Beff and I noticed that his head was achieving asymmetry -- the left side seemed to be a little bigger than the right side. This doesn't happen in our unretouched photos of him. Sunday night I discovered what looked like what may be a tick or a wound on that side of his head, and Beff called the emergency animal care place near Staples in Acton. Comically, for an "emergency care" place, the wait was three hours. So at about 8 we got there, filled out paperwork and were invited to rest in our car. I took a walk to a scenic place where a house in on some flowing water and came back, and then almost slept. We were summoned at 10, described the problem, and were invited to call back at midnight: they were going to shave that part of his head and fix whatever it was they found. Speculation at that time ran rampant that he had been bitten by another cat, perhaps the one that occasionally hangs out in the garage, as does Sunny. So .. we worked on our computers as we could, and called back at .... midnight. They were just about to finish, and we could come on over.

And that we did. After we waited until 1, they brought out Sunny, now wearing a cone on his head -- I'd only seen dogs with these things, and this looked both pathetic and funny (the humor is somewhat increased by learning that it is called an "Elizabethan Collar"). Clownlike, I guess. Beff had been told they found a worm in the sore that could have grown bigger and gone for his brain (as Woody Allen called it, "my second favorite organ") and we were lucky to get it while it was still very small. What I thought I heard the vet say was that the worm was called a "cuba libre", or a rum and coke to those of us who pride ourselves on our mastery of useless information. Beff thought it was "cutalibre", hence the term "cooties." Given that it was 1 in the morning, we sure were inventive, if dumb. The info sheet said what was found was a "cuterebra," which I looked up online when we got home: a maggot, the larva of the bot fly. Ewww.

Meanwhile, Sunny was waking up from the anesthesia and was simultaneously very groggy and very distressed. He did the expected attempts to get the cone off, and kept losing his balance in doing so -- see the Sunnycone movie over to the left. We couldn't help laughing when he would fall over. The whole distress thing became old, though, as he started poking that cone into wires attached to computers, etc., so Beff volunteered to take him onto the porch for the night and sleep with him. From 2 to 5 Beff was on the porch with him, and apparently he never stopped pacing and going in circles. This afternoon I am grateful that at least he's tired now, even if it's awkward for him to try to sleep with the cone. So ... we have to ointment him twice a day for three days, and on the fourth the cone comes off. Oddly enough, next Tuesday is the yearly checkup for both cats, so there will be MANY stories to tell. And Cammy will just roll his eyes and yawn. I would.

These two Sunny events gave me a lot more empathy for people with small children, for whom similar events are far more traumatic (more shared DNA strands and all that) and incalculably more expensive. "My cat had a worm and has to wear a cone." "My daughter had strep throat." No comparison, folks. I brought this notion up to Beff, who mused, "We are great pet owners. We would be terrible parents."

Another big event of the week, in terms of time spent, is the installation of the new iMac G5 with that 20 inch screen, Tiger software, widgets, etc., and the backing up of files from the old iMac -- which was mondo time consuming. Alas, I found out much too late that files copied in OS 9 are interpreted differently in OS X, and none of my fonts were recognized as fonts, Word docs as Word docs, etc. I discovered the OX 10.4 Automator program that could, by batch, rename files to have the extensions .DOC, .JPG, .MUS, etc., and that sure was a time saver. The fonts, well, I had to get them from an OS X computer, and I did, Oscar, I did. Toast 5 could not recognize the Superdrive on this machine, so I downloaded an upgrade. My Office for Mac OS X is an upgrade and in installing it it asks you where the old version is, and I can't do that 'cause the old version is in OS 9, and this computer doesn't have it. And I finally gave up my old classic Photoshop 5 that came with my scanner, bit the bullet, and ordered the cheaper version of the Adobe Creative Suite -- Photoshop, Go Live, Illustrator, etc. It is fully my intention eventually to move this web page and all its HTML to the other computer. But patience, almost 12(13, 14, 15, whatever). I look forward to being able to code HTML with web links IN THE TEXT -- can't do that in Web Easy. Then, of course, all hell will break loose.

The next step after building up the iMac G5 was to convert the old one to Beff's DVD burning computer and move out the old 4-year-old G4. I winced as Beff mercilessly deleted big folder after big folder of mine -- always asking for permission, of course -- and installed OS 10.2 so that she could use Final Cut Express on it. Only hitch was that iLife 4 would not install (it's legal -- I got the family pack, which gives you 5 installs) because it thought iTunes, iDVD, iMovie or Garage Band was already running. Which was a lie! After much browsing on the 'net, Beff got the great idea to check the startup items, where she discovered iTunes helper. Which she disabled. So now we are both set, at least I will be when my last software arrives. A 250 gig drive sure is nice. Oh yeah, I haven't finished updating my iTunes yet -- I had downloaded "iPod rip" to transfer my entire 3700 song collection to the new computer, and it ... uh, doesn't work. So I am slowly reconstructing iTunes with the files from the Power Book G4. I sure have a lot of songs. I look forward to when the process is complete. I am also pleased to report that Widgets is cool. I get to see the weather radar immediately, get dictionary definitions, and see satellite images of any address I want. But I digress, I think.

Somehow in the midst of all that stuff I arranged the funk etude for 9 clarinets (6 B-flat, 2 bass, 1 contrabass) because I'd heard that the 3 BIGgo clarinetists of the USMB were all retiring. I was only two-thirds right. I dedicated the piece to the three of them and called it "It Takes Nine to Funk" -- the only one of many titles on Nine and Funk that passed the Beff test. And Beff and I held a big party for people from the Composers Conference here most of the day yesterday, which involved making 6 pans of pizza and having a dozen hot dogs and 12 hamburgers at the ready -- last time I had done this I ran out of food because some of the composers (Hillary, you know who you are) were having an eating contest, and they wailed and gnashed their teeth continuously about when the next food would be ready. This time, though, the weather got cloudy and coolish, the party was 11 people, and there were no eating contests. Lunch today was leftover snacky chicken, which I had not the chance to make yesterday. I will mention here that after a big beer bash like that, it takes quite a bit of effort to make oneself ready to drive to an emergency animal hospital.

Oh yeah, Font Book in OS 10.3 and 10.4 is cool. I have thousands of fonts, so I figured I'd just create some libraries with all my fonts and enable and disable them as I chose. Bad idea, kimodavy. This slowed down the computer considerably, since I figure every application that uses fonts has to read a library of 3000 of them and disregard the 2700 that are disabled. The trial version of Word started up, gave me the "Optimizing Font Menu for better performance" message and sat there. After two hours it still just sat there. So (sigh), I went and deleted all the fonts from the libraries that I am not using. I still have to get some more stuff off the old iMac, including Petrucci -- hey, the new Finale seems not to have it, so when I open old Finale files they are all lines and big O's and OE's..... I guess I should have put "Finale music" on the list of companies who have not covered themselves in glory.

So speaking of digressing, here's my stuff. Staples rebate for the copier finally arrived after having been cancelled twice by mouth breathers. Arthur Marc sent me two cases of his great hot sauce and billed me -- he trusted me to pay him! And boy do I dig that stuff. Meanwhile, the Logitech optical 3-button mouse I'd gotten for the new computer turned out to be defective. I listed CompUSA up there because of putting me on hold a long time and then disconnecting me. Inko's White Teas will be up there again when they send me the free t-shirt (I had told the founder that his benificence was like that of Sarastro, and he's probably the only beverage company founder out there who would or could have thanked me for comparing him to a character in a Mozart opera).

The old G4 is not in the why-isn't-it-my-former-office-yet while I figure out what to do with it. Sunny almost coned it over a few times. And anyway, back to rebuilding my iTunes library. Sigh. Meanwhile, as the Windows computer saga gets played out, don't grow accustomed to regular weekly updates here. For the computer sucketh. IN FACT, the computer bombed just after I typed the description of the pics below, aargh and all that. Also, f**k and s**t and OLAMBIC.

Another big effort of the previous week was an offshoot of a trip to BJ's for mass quantities of party food materials. After getting extra lettuce, cheese, artichokes, etc., I noticed on the drive home that my next oil change was due 80 miles previous. So instead of going straight home, I went to Jiffy Lube in Maynard (as Martin and I say it, JEE FEE LOOB, which is next to the GAY UH TEE gas station). With a half hour to kill, I walked over to my bank (Bank o' America -- the Irish version) and signed up for online bill paying (it used to be free for anyone with direct deposit only -- and we have that in spades AND clubs -- but now it's free for everyone. It should be, since online bill paying costs BOFA maybe a tenth of the cost of handling actual paper checks). I dealt with a pile of bills, made our list of payees and amounts, and voila -- they got paid. And online we can see what payees got how much, and see scans of our cancelled checks, and ... oh, it's too much to bear! Beff was singularly unimpressed -- I may as well have told her that I got NEW MAP SOFTWARE! until she looked herself, realized she can see in a flash what has transpired in our accounts, including checks that have cleared (this morning she actually POINTED at our payment for seafood dinner Monday night) and now I finally feel like it's a little less of a guy thing. Hey, isn't it usually a woman doing the online bill paying in the ads?

The junior composer job at Brandeis is in Music Vacancy List is posted, but unexplainably without the October 1 deadline. As of Monday, the application pool consisted of 50% men, 50% women, 50% Asian, 50% white, 50% Ivy league degrees, 50% state school degrees, and 100% first name begins with K. Pretty good so far.

I brought leftover pizza from Sunday's party to work, and deposited a bunch in the Dean's office. The Dean, in an e-mail, called it "awesome." The Dean's first name does not begin with K.

While I'm adding superfluous detail here, I spent a bunch of time Monday afternoon calling CompUSA to confirm that I was still covered by a warranty for my HP Windows computer. Comically enough, the first time I was on hold 20 minutes and then disconnected. The second time I was on hold 20 minutes and talked to someone who said I had the wrong number for what I wanted. The third time I called that new number, and ended up being forwarded to the person to whom I had just spoken. Who insisted that their office (Assurant Guaranty something or something like that) didn't have responsibility, CompUSA did. She gave me a new number. The fourth person with whom I spoke said the correct number was the second number and his office didn't have responsibility. When I explained, with tongues of fire emanating from my mouth (perhaps "explained" is too mild a word) that I had called that number already and he was the fourth (actually, third) person to tell me that I had called the wrong number, he politely hung up on me. The fifth person, at that same number, reiterated that it was the wrong number for my issue, and I was given yet another number. The sixth person, at this new number, told me I should have called the first number. This time there were no tongues of fire emanating from me as I explained that I was a little tired of the lack of people taking responsibility and that I had gone full circle. I was informed that was tough. So, back to the first number, where the seventh person predictably told me I should probably have called another number, BUT that she was handing me to someone who she thought was actually responsible. So finally, I got a very nice guy, who knows where and in what sphere of influence he moves, who took down my case, said he thought it was probably a software problem and gave me the number for Hewlett Packard. At this point, Geoff and Maria had arrived and we had seafood. So, this "CompUSA did not cover itself in glory" thing -- blame it on the machines, but somewhere along the line somebody made the decision about how the trunking works in such calls, and this person probably went to a different company years ago. Oh, where is the OUTRAGE?

Speaking of outrage. After seeing Bernard Goldberg on the Daily Show while we were in the Adirondacks, I was actually curious enough about his "100 People Who Are Wrecking America" book to buy it, at a steep discount, and read it. Getting through it was not unlike when you try to run fast in your dreams and something keeps you from moving at all, and you lean into your running and still get nowhere. It was fun, I guess, to read bile about liberals because the argument was so shallow and could have been coming right out of Ann Coulter's mouth. But the writing is very poor. When the countdown got down to #21 or so, I started writing comments in the margins. By the time I got around to #11 or #10, I started crossing out entire articles. Bile started being spewed around #7. But I made it to the end, and ceremoniously tossed the book into the trash. Which I guess turned my marginalia into a kind of performance art -- all emotion and bile, but for no audience whatsoever (sometimes bringing me to those fluoxetine hydrochloride days). Bernard Goldberg can perform an anatomical impossibility with himself, but he's helped me get into cutting edge performance art, and for that I am indifferent.