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

This week's pictures include the new G5 iMac in context (the desktop picture is the Minuteman Trail) and the old iMac in its new context. Followed by Sunny modeling his new Elizabethan collar, and Cammy trying to read Sunny's mind and not being very subtle about it. We finish with Cammy grasping the bed, and my new Arthur Marc's hot sauce collection (where it is stored, on the work table in the basement).

I am no longer claiming a readership of "almost twelve" or "almost thirteen", since more people have told me they have read this page, though of course most did not claim to be regular readers. I now say the readership is "well into the low two figures." As long as the quality of this page declines as steadily as it has been, I have no fear of that being contradicted for some time.

As I type this, Beff is in Vermont for the week teaching at the Vermont Youth Orchestra summer camp -- she actually left a little earlier than anticipated, because she'd been alerted that more faculty would be stuffed into the same size dorm-ish apartments as last year, and she didn't want to be stuck having to sleep in a living room. As far as I can tell from her phone call, she got an actual bedroom. I suggested she take stock of the living situation and be like me -- threaten not to come back next year if status quo holds. I'm like that. She does, of course, get to be close to her dad and, as it turns out, her sister and our nephew, who are in town, too. So there she will be.

That which involved the most physical AND emotional energy this week had to do with Sunny's rum and coke. Or cuterebra, if I remember the term right (as big Mike rightly noted, bot flies are disgusting). We were directed to keep the cone (or Elizabethan collar) on him until Friday, but he was so pathetic and depressed-looking that it plunged deeply into our guilt to make him wear it constantly -- especially as it was humid weather, and the inside of the cone was getting disgusting with his dander and saliva. So at first, on Wednesday, we took off the collar at feeding times, and watched him like a hawk for when he would aim to scratch the injured area. Each time that happened, it actually looked like mass panic, as we kind of yelled, lunged, and used that as a teaching point -- that was when the collar went back on. Actually, on Tuesday night, somehow during the night he managed to slip out of the collar, and I discovered him looking very mundane in the dining room. Quickly I recollared him, plunged into those same feelings of guilt, uncollared him, watched him like a hawk, lunged when he made motions to scratch, repeat as often as necessary. Finally by Friday the wound was solid enough to let him free, and we felt free to concentrate on non-Sunny things. Many of which there were.

On Wednesday morning our insurance agent -- an independent insurance agent who speaks for the actual insurers -- called to let us know our homeowner's insurer was cancelling our home insurance (no small thing, since our mortgage requires we have this insurance) because of the antiquated knob and tube wiring in the basement that one of their inspectors found. It was called a fire hazard, blah blah blah, and as usual my first impulse was to suggest various anatomical impossibilities for the insurance company. Luckily, I've been trained to suppress those impulses. Our agent -- who is really cool, but had a chance 5 years ago when he inspected the house himself to tell us we had antiquated and dangerous wiring -- suggested we could be put on the "Fair Mass. Plan", which sounds like a charity case, and we're too proud for that kind of thing, so I said what if we got it rectified? He called the company and said they'd give us until September 8 to put a deposit down for an electrician to rewire. And we called Casello Electric, and the nice guy scheduled us for September 2 and agreed to bill us for one day's work by two guys: eight hundred bucks. Though I certainly expect such a complicated job to take more than just a day. I will, of course, be asking our agent to get us another homeowner's insurer when this contract is up.

Ooh, look at all that anger seeping out. I stand accused. By me. Well, lots of things happened this week that go into the minor frustrations that add up exponentially file, and the lovely CompUSA phone experience I described last week (five numbers, seven agents, cut off once, only one of those agents acknowledged any responsibility whatsoever) had plenty to do with it. The continuation of that story is that I called HP, as I was directed, since it looked like software problem. They wanted to talk me through the programs that come preinstalled on my computer for reinstalling Windows, etc., and damned if I was going to pay for something that anyone with an IQ well into the low two figures could figure out by himself. So after navigating through the many "this disk is bad" and "this disk is unbootable" messages, I got to the HP Restore utility -- the last resort -- where the hard disk was restored to how it looked when we first unpacked it in May, 2002. The sound of harp glissandi and birds singing could be ascertained from outside (HP has some very powerful backers), and meanwhile many of my programs and files and Shortcuts were still there. Including the files for this webpage. So, temporarily, and for however long it takes me to learn GoLive CS 2, this web page will continue to be edited and updated using WebEasy -- fantastically easy to use, and actually hasn't bombed in more than a year and a half. For as long as this computer will start up, anyway (I had to go through yet another CHKDSK when I started this time).

So because of these trials and tribulations -- and who knows when or how either CompUSA or HP will decide which one is responsible for this disk stuff -- we started letting the Windows computer GO (in the emotional sense). Beff talked openly (thankfully, while the HP computer was turned off) about turning this area into the mobile computing area -- with the USB hub, printer, and DSL connection for whichever PowerBook we chose to put up here (on this drafting table, which was, by the way, my college graduation present in 1980). We figured we'd get to know Go Live and transfer the content to the iMac G5 (I even shopped for web hosting packages in the meantime, and hardly understood any of it). Noise reduction software and mp3 encoding is now available to us on our Macs (such things could only be had for Mac for $700 three years ago). And both iMacs are set up for real e-mail software. And then we looked for the last piece: map software. Being remote as we are, we often have to send printed or emailed maps to people to get here, or generate them when we go somewhere unfamiliar for the first time. I bought Route 66 for Mac a few years ago, Beff tried it -- and it sucks big, huge, gigantic ones. I looked for maps on the Delorme site, and they no longer do Mac software (which makes me like them not very much). And the available Rand McNally software got one star on amazon from nearly every reviewer.

So I idly looked through some computer seller sites and we settled on a new Windows computer. And this technology thing always gets me. The computer is two-thirds the cost of what we paid for this sickly one. And it has four times the RAM, three times the hard disk, twice the processor speed, 7 USB 2.0 ports (instead of 2 USB 1.1 ports), 2 Firewire ports (as compared to zero), a DVD-CD burner (as compared to a CD burner and a DVD playback drive that hasn't worked for two years), and -- this is the photography nerd in me going WOO WOO WOO -- card readers for all the cameras we have (Compact Flash, SD, Memory Stick,and Memory Stick Pro). I would have cited similar statistics for this computer compared to the 3-year-old one it replaced, by the way. We will continue to use it for the Windows-only programs that Beff had let go of (including Cool Edit, Acid, Fruity Loops, and Streets & Trips 2004), web browsing, and e-mailing when the other computers are busy. Yes, our computers are pretty busy lately. The most common repeated occurrence this past week involves one of us entering the room while the other is using the iMac and the other saying, "do you want this? I'm almost done."

The one most aggravating thing about returning to a virgin Windows was browsing while the Messenger something blah blah blah was enabled. Three years ago I figured out how to turn off the nasty advertising popups, which at the time were for Viagra and porn websites and very primitive. This time with Messenger turned on, I kept getting "SYSTEM MESSAGE: your file system is corrupted. Download a fix from ...." which I almost fell for once -- because, hey, my file system actually is corrupted. Another reason why I hate Windows. But I hate bacteria, too, and without them I couldn't digest any food. I forgot to mention that today is the Day of the Non Sequitur. Squirrels. True to form, when I googled "stop Windows pop-up messages", the first 7 or 8 choices were sponsored ones, as in download and pay for this instead of finding out where this little switch in Control Panels is. Gregg was right about what the internet has become. Chipmunks.

We ate out in Maynard three times this week. We only do that when people visit, so bear with me. Monday night (as I reported in the last update), Geoff and Maria came for dinner and we went to the Quarterdeck. Geoff has a new 7 megapixel toy (it's bigger than mine -- as guys would tend to say, and hey, I'm a guy), returned Buffy Season 7, and brought a keen new CD of the Davytudes he played this spring -- including the premiere and an encore of Zeccatella. Which is very cool -- both the performance and the piece. His Pittsburgh performance of Bop It was blindingly fast and very cool -- I could have sworn it was Bud Powell except for the being alive thing -- and I reacquainted myself with old favories Horned In and You Dirty Rag (also brilliant, both of us). Actually, according to iTunes I played Zeccatella 12 times (each time concentrating heavily on a different pitch class). So far. The Flea performance I removed noise from using Bias Soap, and it worked about as well as Cool Edit. But anyway, we walked to the restaurant, took pictures, and so on, and fun it was. I gave Geoff an Inko's, Buffy Season 1, and a jar of Arthur Marc's Hot Sauce in return. Actually, I lent the Buffy. The other stuff, well, how do you return it when you are finished with it?

Tuesday night David "The" Smooke drove all the way from the Bard festival where he had been passing the time. I won't go into his motives for driving 3-1/2 hours each way for dinner (he called us an island of sanity, which just goes to show you how deluded you get about things when you pass through Bard), and our conversation ranged from alpha to omega and back. Both of us had the Chicken Ginger at Little Pusan. Okay, grammarly types, EACH of us had the chicken ginger. I played him the MIDI of the funk etude, and, trained as he is to look for references in my etudes, he thought he heard "Girl From Ipanema" (with the triumphant tone that made it obvious he expected a prize or a diploma), while I poo-poohed that. Or perhaps said it wasn't intentional. Or ignored him. I forget which. My branching and trunking has been a little faulty as of late.

And on Friday, Christine Schadeberg and Mike Finckel took time off from the Composers Conference to come to Maynard for dinner at the Quarterdeck. As is my wont, I brought the Sony camera, and took a little digital movie of Mike, um, poseuring for the camera, and I included that movie -- slowed down -- in the yellow text to the left. Christine jovially told us about this year's experiences at the conference -- aw geez, both of them have been there for more than 20 years -- and we had steamers, and ginger fish, and clam roll, and fish chowder, and everything beginning with "p" we could find. Strong thunderstorms had passed just to our south in the mid-afternoon, and electricity went out in Wellesley. But nothing happened here, except -- we exited the restaurant at sunset, and there was a bigass rainbown over the mill pond. I tried getting some shots, but it's too faint for my mere 5 megapixels. While Mike and I filled Chris's vehicle (with gas), it is claimed, by Beff and Chris (passive voice, remember?) that briefly the rainbow became a triple rainbow. I took some nice pix, but mostly I have better ones from other sunsets. Let's call these particular pictures archival. Or archrival.

Wednesday and Saturday nights were occupied by trips to Wellesley itself for concerts where former students or composers associated with me (I'm not going to parse that, dear well into low two figures) had pieces performed, and there was some very stunning stuff. Jeremy Sagala had written a tonal-modal piece for the amateur commission, and last week I hated the piece and this week I liked it. Amy Kaplan had a "funny" piece that reminded both Beff and me, fleetingly, of the Stravinsky Ragtime. John Aylward had some really, really, neat stuff in his piano concerto. Grace's songs came off very nicely with some lovely color combinations, though the things that some people said reminded them of me escaped me. And "iceman" Steve Hoey's piece was gorgeous and colorful, particularly the end when the layers started getting stripped away. There. Did I satisfy everybody? (if I had a nickel for every time I've said THAT one...) Big Mike carpooled with us for the Wednesday show, as he and Amy are old, old, old, old, old, old, old, old friends. Groundhog.

Both Adobe Creative Suite 2 (Photoshop, In Design, Go Live, Acrobat Professional, Illustrator) arrived, taking up 4 CDs for installation, plus 2 discs of goodies which I haven't cracked open, plus a training CD. As has become the custom, there was no printed documentation of any kind, so there was not much to be gained from a first crack at these programs. I did own Illustrator 88, Illustrator 3 and Illustrator 5 but it's gone fairly far since those heady days. In Design opens my Pagemaker documents (I was a registered user of version 1.2), but again there's lots of cool new features that I'll have to discover at some later date. Ditto for Photoshop, which is the Photoshop LE 5 that I know (came with a scanner) plus a zillion other things. I used Photoshop to reduce the resolution of this week's pictures, since I have access to no other program that will do that -- and (geek alert) now the program has a "save for web" feature that makes GIFs instead of JPGs, about half the size (I know, I tried both). And I watched about 20 minutes of the Creative Suite video -- gawrsh, the narrator gets about 7 broken arms from patting himself on the back -- and as you might expect it's not for newbies. I opened GoLive and opened the Home of this webpage, and got this very cool background with absolutely everything smushed up in the upper left corner. No one is going to win a design award for that one. So, more discovery remains, and I may actually have to ask Carolyn some things.

Now thanks to the lack of real documentation, a whole cottage industry of books that tell you how to use this software you already purchased has cropped up. bn.com reveals about 20 Photoshop books, and many, many others for Creative Suite 2 -- most of which have publication dates between September and December. Why, I never. I ordered what bn.com said was available NOW, at a cost of $72 (including tax, which bn.com actually charges), but we shall see what happens with that. Amazon, meanwhile, has been sitting on an order I made last June 20 without shipping it (I went for the free shipping option) and just today told me that only one of them (Star Trek sound effects -- yes, le dweeb c'est moi) was ready to ship, and the rest would come at the end of the month -- maybe. I remember when amazon.com was pretty good. Do you? Hedgehog.

Well. Well, then. Well. Finally, by Wednesday I got the entire iTunes library ported over, plus the new etudes from Geoff, plus a Sheryl Crow CD, and I thought I was done. Then arrived the Creative Suite. And Finale 2006, by the way, but I am putting that off for a little bit longer. As for today, I have been using Finale 2005 -- for the first time ever -- pretty constantly. I have entered what I have of the piano trio so that the trio --which will have a few hours together this week -- can start to rehearse it. I may have mentioned -- the first performance is scheduled at Rice University in September, and NOT in Vermont in October. In other non-news, the Network for New Music had contacted me to see if I'd be interested in writing a piano left-hand piece with ensemble for their benefit in December with Leon Fleisher and I said sure, I'd even do it for free. My brain had been occupied with possibilities for such a piece until they got back to me and kept changing the parameters and finally said it wouldn't work because Mr. Fleisher was too solidly booked to learn a new piece so quickly. Which was fine, though it took a while for me to empty those lefthanded thoughts from my brain.

I had gotten notice from Alex at Inko's Teas that BJ's now had 12-packs for 10 bucks -- a considerable bit less than the $1.89 per tea we had just paid at Shaw's -- so we went to BJs to get some, as well as some salad, tomatoes, USB cables, and other various things that hit our fancy. On the same trip we had gone to Target (next to BJs) to get Beff some new shorts, but the selection was pitiful, so we up and went to TJ Maxx, where success was had. Beff had carried around some flaming red ones, but settled on blue. Raccoon.

Blast from the past yesterday as I spoke with Michelle Green (-Willner) for the first time in many a year (probably about seven). For the uninitiated (that would be all of you), Michelle was a student of mine in my first year at Columbia, and is now raising four children (all of them hers) in sunny southern California. There is a prospect for the family to come to the other coast, hence our conversation.

This week the appointments of note include The Maids, Tuesday morning, checkups and rabies boosters for both cats Tuesday afternoon (boy will I have stories to tell the bet), and a meeting about the composer search at Brandeis on Thursday afternoon. Thursday is our 16th wedding anniversary, and normally we would expect appropriate gifts well into the low two figures. But there is no appropriate gift. If you didn't get us anything last year, you might be pleased to be informed that it is the crystal anniversary.

This week the movies up there are Mike Finckel gesticulating at the Quarterdeck, and a sped-up and chopped up movie of Beff leaving for Vermont late yesterday morning. Underneath, yesterday's breakfast in the Davy context and the Beff context. Follow that with Sunny resting with his scar visible, and the knob and tube wiring in the basement that makes insurance companies absolutely loathe us. Then, Friday's sunset and very faint (to cameras) rainbow, the new Inko's tea from BJ's, Mike and Christine at the Quarterdeck, Maria at the Quarterdeck, and Geoff's 7 megapixels perfectly catching the flash of my camera.

AUGUST 15. Breakfast this morning was somebody's lowfat turkey breakfast sausage links, orange juice and coffee. Dinner was Trader Joe's random seafood chunks in Trader Joe's cioppino sauce. Yesterday's lunch was Oscar Mayer fat free hot dogs with dill relish, Arthur Marc's hot sauce, Gulden's mustard, and Heinz ketchup. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES THIS LAST WEEK 64.4 and 95.0. LARGE EXPENSES this last week include $188 for checkups, distemper shots, and rabies vaccinations for both cats, Windows software at $99 including three rebates, Windows MS Office, $99 from amazon, $178 for office supplies at Staples (on tax-free Saturday) and $350 in electronic supplies at Radio Shack (on tax-free Sunday). MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS "For Pete's Sake" from the Monkees Headquarters album -- for a while it was used over the closing credits on their TV show. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: there were two items I craved mightily in the early portion of my double-digit years: a small, portable, battery-powered movie projector and the second Monkees album (you see I wasn't hip enough at the time to crave the Beatles). In each case, my mother made me do chores around the house to accumulate enough cash to buy them. At the time I didn't know I was being taught "responsibility" because I wasn't. At the age of ten, the only word that came to mind was "torture". Eighteen cents to dust the living room? A dime to shovel the sidewalk? How would I EVER make $2.88 for the record, or $5.88 for the projector? Nowadays it's the Citibank Thankyou rewards that accumulate this glacially. COMPANIES WHO HAVE NOT COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY RECENTLY is Roxio, through their proxy RebatesHQ.com. COMPANIES WHO HAVE COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY AND THEN SOME this week is Inko's White Teas, who sent a couple of free t-shirts. THIS WEEK'S COSMIC QUANDARY: Why does anyone, but anyone, work on Windows? RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS: Arthur Marc's Chicken Wing and Dipping Sauce, Inko's white tea, Bubbie's pickles, Real Pickles. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK The wall of the Ben Smith dam, recently exposed because of light flow of the Assabet. And the fact that pictures filed in your Mac OS X address book show up on e-mails you get from those people. THIS WEEK'S NUMBER BETWEEN 1 AND 10: 7. FRAGILE THINGS DESTROYED BY THE CATS THIS LAST WEEK is nothing. BIKE RIDES CONCLUDING BEFORE 9 AM THIS WEEK: 7. DAVY'S BAROMETER FOR THE FUTURE OF MUSIC this week is 31 out of 47. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: G5 chips that run cool. INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE an Altoids apple sour, frozen pizza, a burning pile of tires, that word on the tip of your tongue.