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

And this morning Sam e-mailed to note that there was no new update yet this week. Well, that and the usual sorts of things he writes about. I now have a small shampoo in the bathroom with the words "SAM'S SHAMPOO" magic markered on it. I figure this is left over from Sam & Laurie's last catsitting gig here, even while Poom was still alive. Either that or the mouse that we had in the house last year was named Sam and got REALLY brazen about his place in our lives.

You'll note that the "days since last beer" shrank rather than grew this week. This is because of two events, which I will cover in reverse chronological order. Wednesday was Beff's birthday, and that was the day she took a bus back from New York and arrived in mid-afternoon to warm weather. We had decided in advance to go to a restaurant to celebrate, and she chose Quarterdeck, the seafood place. In a celebratory mood, we both got Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale on tap, and it shonuff was good. Nice counterpoint to my Buffalo tenders and clam roll. Beff got scallops wrapped in bacon and the Thai ginger tilapia. It was quite a good and filling meal, one of the waitresses mentioned that I got my usual (sorry, but when it comes to seafood I don't get that inventive, and the Cajun blackened meal just seemed too bulky at that point), and our waitress ostentatiously mouthed the words "DO YOU WANT CAKE?" to me, and I just as ostentatiously mouthed the word "WHAT?"

Friday night we rode into Boston for dinner with Lee and Kate, and it was a stay-at-home affair. Instead of bringing wine -- since we didn't know what we would be eating -- we brought a six-pack of the Magic Hat hoppy beer, and Lee served me a bottle -- hence ending my run of beerless days. I'm afraid it was a jinx. When I stopped drinking beer, the Red Sox went on a tear; when I had another beer, the Red Sox went back to being a .500 team. I must remember in the future to use my powers for good. In any case, we had a great plate of appetizers -- I made sure to sit right where the plate was -- and pasta fagioli and melon slices wrapped in prosciutto. It was a lovely dinner -- I had seconds on the pasta fagioli, and we got some to bring home -- and it was entertaining to watch Lee watching the Red Sox and all the body English and monosyllabic words coming out with great force. Now the two of them are about to go to Rome for about three months, and I notice a green-eyed monster sitting just to my left as I type that.

Saturday was Ivan's day to pass overhead, and finally something hit us with a lot of rain, nearly three inches. There was even enough to cause a little bit of water to seep onto the basement floor. So clearly I can not choose the wine in front of ME. (oops, Princess Bride references sometimes just pop out unannounced like that) That was the day I chose for my yearly eye exam. So while a river was forming outside D'Ambrosio clinic, I got to read about laser surgery, the doctor suggested I could get lens implants with a lifetime warranty, and since I knew this would be the year they dilated my pupils, I got Beff to come along for the ride (she passed on the opportunity to shop at DRESS BARN, in the same shopping center). Ooh, the pupil dilating stuff was cartoonishly fun -- as the dreary day looked bright and sunny and wet to me. And my contacts didn't quite fit until the dilation wore off, so I got to be blurry guy all day. I now have 24 new lenses, which are no longer called Optima FW by Bausch & Lomb, but something like a 38 special. Sunday was a nicer, though cooler day, and we took the cats into the back yard several times for their exercise. More separation of personality is evident out of doors: Camden likes to hide under the Adirondack chairs and occasionally climb a little bit up a tree. Sunset likes to jump high for the frisbee when we toss it, and climb the hyndrangea tree nearly to the tippy top. Camden likes to go under the back porch, Sunset likes the wooded area near the canoe. Meanwhile, they are still too naive about nature to be left outside unwatched.

My second week of teaching at NEC was a smashing success. I have been invited to a composition department party at Mac Peyton's in Cambridge on Sunday that I will likely skip. I was also invited by Mac to send him some music for possible performance at NEC either in October or May -- wide range there. Meanwhile, Brandeis teaching continues unabated. Chairmanship was not hard this week, but ominous tones were sounded for the months ahead.

Yesterday I received a summons to jury duty in Framingham. Drat, I knew this would happen if I ever stayed in one place more than three years. What's more, the proposed duty happens to be while I am in Chicago for "Ten of a Kind", so I politely returned the response card with a postponement date of June 16. I don't know what I'm doing then, but it'll be after my birthday. The only alternative is to change our official residence to Maine, and that seems like a bit much just to get out of jury duty (like when B.D. signed up for combat duty in Vietnam in Doonesbury in the early '70s to get out of writing a term paper).

And today I will be mailing the scores and parts of RULE OF THREE to Cambridge University in England, who commissioned it. I am particularly amused by the commissioning info that is required to be on the score: Commissioned by Kettle's Yard with grant-aid from the Fenton Arts Trust for the 2005 Sunday Coffee Concert Series. I wonder if they serve decaf, because given my piece they might need it. What does that mean? Durned if I know. The only other professional stuff to report is that the Marines asked for a color photo for their December program booklet, passed on the toy piano shot, so they're cutting out my head from one of the control room shots of Amy's 2003 recording session; and an e-mail from the librarian of the Marine band saying they'd gotten inquiries about the many-clarinet arrangmement of "Martian Counterpoint" and from whom can they get it. So there.

Oh yes, and a percussionist in Queens wants to get a grant to pay a few composers, myself included, to write him a hand drum solo. The list of composers is a good one.

I finished the pedal B etude and settled on the name KILLER B'S. The title just happened to come out (no one suggested it) while I was at the computer typing an e-mail and Beff came in the computer room and said, "So, pedal B's, huh?". I HAD already thought of "Where the B Sucks", which one of the almost eleven suggested, but it may send the wrong message. This same one of the almost eleven also suggested "In C-flat," which I thought was extremely clever. But which would have necessitated a lot of going back into Finale and respelling everything.

And sad news this week. Susan Forrest Harding, a composer on whose dissertation committee I was at Columbia, died in August at the age of 47 of undisclosed causes. This was mentioned in the VCCA newsletter. Mortality is just that much more evident this week.

The only pictures we have this week are cats. Two of Sunset with the toy piano, and two of Camden on the stairs. This is what I leave you with.

Beff is on the road as I type again, and as before, I quickly qualify that by saying it's her Camry that is on the road while Beff is merely in the Camry -- "on the road" power is metaphorically transferred to Beff by the Camry by me, and what it is, too. She is making the incredible drive deep into the Confederacy -- her sax and tape/video piece is being done at a mini-festival in Richmond, Virginia tomorrow (Mario Davidovsky is a guest at this mini-festival), and the saxophonist is driving roughly the same distance, from Bowling Green, Ohio. After the performance, she drives as far as Burke, Virginia, where she stays at the Colburn homestead, and then on Sunday she drives almost as far as Yaddo, stopping short to stay with her sister in Cohoes. On Monday she starts her month-long residency at Yaddo. Leaving Davy with dish duty, doody duty, and lots of other alliterative things. The cats will be 16% older when she returns.

Backing off for a moment on leaving chairmanship out of this portion of our program, it had just occurred to me that -- in addition to sleeping all the way through the night only twice now since the beginning of August (yes, it is stressful), I realize that I've also had no dreams I remember in that time period. Except twice. This morning I dreamed about my piece "Hyperblue," it raining, newspaper, and trying to put together a performance score that was soaked. This probably because it was a rare morning that I slept beyond 3 am, and Beff and I were under 376 pounds of covers. Yes, we made it to October without turning on the heat yet, and that meant a rather cold day in the house yesterday morning. Laundering the sheets and cover gave the excuse to enter winter mode on the bed, and it was boiling for a while. Perhaps the extra weight made it possible for me to remember a dream, or to dream at all. Now here's where we stick in the gratuitous metaphor about striving. So go ahead.

As to chairmanship itself, this week it boiled down to: meetings.

Since the weekend was mostly Beffless (she was in Vermont watching her dad and bro' duke it out), and concert-free, I took the opportunity to squeeze out etude #64 on arpeggiated thirds, "A Third in the Hand." Beff and I had several title-considering sessions, and "Revenge of the Thirds" was a strong candidate for a while. Rejected candidates included Third it Through the Grapevine, Seen and Not Third, Thirdy Gurdy, Theater of the Ab Third. Guess what? The lines go up, and they go down. They go at different speeds. And at the thickest point it's almost jazzy. Chalk up another success story. The dotted eighth is the beat, and it begins with the same pitch classes as You've Got Scale. 'cept higher.

The entertainment event of the week was renting and watching the DVD of "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," a Charlie Kaufman script (Being John Malkovich and Adaptation), and it was fabulous. I rate it as 873.6 times as good a movie as "Mystic River." In fact, I might bring up here that W is 1.348 times as good a president as Mystic River is a movie. In any case, all the overlapping weird stuff was great, and the movie itself was almost as claustrophobic as Being John Malkovich. Solid emotional core, etc., and nobody preening for Oscar nominations.

Yesterday Beff finally became convinced that she would like to have a digital camera to record her colony hop, so we went to Staples to see what was inexpensive and small enough. After looking at HP and Olympia lower-end cameras (they looked fairly poopisch), we noticed Nikon Coolpix 3200s in the locked display case for only 200 bucks, and the 15 shooting modes and ability to take movies with sound convinced us. So while Beff did errands and did ironing, I figured out the basics of the camera and challenged her to take some shots for this very page. There will be two of them showing up below. So now she'll be able to send digital pix, if the computers at Yaddo don't continue to lock out the connection of USB drives, etc. And some of them may show up here, too. Brilliantly enough, the camera runs with two AA batteries rather than with a $40 proprietary battery. And Beff has one of the multi-card readers on her trip so that she can transfer them to her computer. It reads SD cards,and what it is, too.

The fourth hurricane of the season did a dump here after it was through dumping on Florida, and it was sad not to be able to watch the news coverage of it on a TV in the Chicken Bone Saloon. The issue was timing -- meetings, after all. We had scheduled lunch with Ken and Hillary for yesterday at the Chicken Bone Saloon -- they were intrigued by last week's pictures in this space -- but Hillary begged off because her electronic music class called an extra meeting for the convenience of the instructor (and obviously not of the students). Meanwhile, they were planning on hearing Gusty's piece with the NY Phil last night, an event to which I cannot go for boring chairman reasons.

There was some yardwork done this last week. Beff's brother Bob was with her when she returned from Vermont on Sunday, and we decided to remove the three hugely overgrown hostas from the back yard. Bob did the digging and I did the transporting. Gaping holes remain. Yesterday Beff and I transported the picnic table and chairs to their winter storage place in the basement. And also, all the air conditioners are out of their windows and in the attic now. The amount of brush and stuff left behind by nesting birds in the window of the guest room was fairly dramatic.

Speaking of which. The Brandeis Women Composers festival finally happens this weekend -- the first try at one was snowed out last December. And it presents two of at least four mod music concerts this weekend (the others being Musica Viva and Dinosaur Annex). Since my limit per weekend is two concerts, I am doing the Brandeis events only. My friend Ellen Harrison was one of the winners in the composition competition, and my former student Martha Horst is the other winner (I was not on the selection panel), so they will both be in town. The gala concert is actually sold out, and despite that, there is a big mention in today's Globe about the festival. So there will be plenty of disappointed people at the door, I fear. But it will be nice to see Ellen for the first time in NINE YEARS -- oh goodness, we met at MacDowell in 1995. Ellen corresponds with a lag time of about a year, so it seems like a lot less time since then.

Musica Viva having a concert this weekend means that Geoffy is amongst us, and he arrived last night. For whatever reason, he decided to take us out for seafood. At which point I revised the Exceptions list of my beer prohibition to read "no beer whatsoever except when we eat at the Quarterdeck." So each of us had two Sierra Nevada Celebration Ales. And the beer clock was set back to zero. Beff and Geoff (an internal rhyme!) got sole with capers, and I got salmon on a Caesar salad (alliteration is the big finish for that sentence). Both Beff and Geoff left early this morning -- Beff at 6, Geoff at 7:15. Here I bring up again that Geoff is the only guest that drinks the spring water and that washes his own dishes. A boon, I tell you, a boon.

Through no effort of my own, five of the etudes on the "Martian Counterpoint" CD will be on the next program of WGBH's "Art of the States". This is something where you get free web streaming of lots of American music, and the programs themselves are aired on radio in 53 countries -- as if I'll ever see a dime in royalties out of it. The theme of the program is audible systems (?) and it is grouped with a piece by David Lang and another composer whose name I forget. This just means that looking for my name on Google (something I do more often than I admit) will now bring up a few more hits.

Speaking of Martian Counterpoint. Extremely weird review of the CD on New Music Box, also quoted in Reviews on this site.

There was actually an inquiry about the many-clarinetted version of "Martian Counterpoint," as performed by the Marines in July. Since the inquiry came in, I had to request the parts from the Marine guy (Sgt Ressler, short for Renssalaer, I guess), who got them to me in record time. Now they go to Peters. Though they came in a package with a return address of US Navy. Ah, vive la difference!

During my few lulls in composing last weekend (the next one will be months, I suspect), I took the kitties out and tried to take movies, with my Coolpix, of Sunny jumping for things. In the first (click on "Jump movie" above), Sunny is in the sun and blends in until he jumps and you can see him in relief against the fence. In the second ("Ring Toss Movie"), he is in the shade, and I tried to throw a ring for him to jump at, but instead it ended up turning into a ring toss that I won. As Alex Ross said about my Lexicon, wise and funny stuff.

And my first NEC paycheck arrived. Hot diggity dog.

This week's pictures begin with two from Beff's 3.2 megapixel Nikon Coolpix 3200. Alas, it was cloudy when we took the cats out. But you can see that Sunny likes the hammock. We move to various shots of the many shrooms that have popped up in the side yard since the big rain and cold. There is the backyard azalea bush, which you can see I had to trim so we could walk to our house from the driveway. And then we have shots of the fall foliage, which is just beginning.

OCTOBER 7. Breakfast this morning was Miilton's Healthy Multi-Grain toast with lowfat Shaw's peanut butter, decaf coffee, and orange juice. Last night's dinner was a large salad with Good Seasonings dressing. Lunch was the two-slice special at Cappy's Pizza down the hill from the music deparment, with hot sauce slathered on top. LARGE EXPENSES for the last week were none. Unless you count $9 for three bags of topsoil. Oh yeah; and new firelogs, campari tomatoes, Fuji CD-Rs, cat food at BJs, $79. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS "You're Just Enough" by Tower of Power. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE My favorite late night snack when I was about 7 was a piece of white bread covered with mustard. My nickname for this culinary delight was "mustardbread," with the emphasis on the second syllable. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES THE PAST WEEK 31.3 and 69.6. RECOMMENDATION/PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS WEEK 3. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK Squirrels are not afraid of cats. THIS WEEK'S COSMIC QUANDRY: Why do 40% of Americans still think Saddam was responsible for 9/11? RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS include hot sauce added to stuff where it doesn't otherwise belong. NUMBER OF FRAGILE THINGS DESTROYED BY THE CATS IN THE PREVIOUS WEEK: none. DAYS SINCE MY LAST REAL COFFEE: 60. DAYS SINCE MY LAST BEER: 7. INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE a piece of notebook paper, a stone stuck in your shoe, a vanity mirror, a gardening spade.

As I type this at 7:15 on this Brandeis holiday morning (Sh'mini Atzeret), I note, without irony, that this is a Thursday update, which brings us into classic mode. It is a lovely and cold day, the leaves continue to turn toward red, yellow and orange, and a few of them pile up under the sickly maple in the northwest corner of the front yard. This all reminds me that I continue not to lock the front door with the key because it sticks if you do that -- and the locksmith we called to fix it (and who came to the house and tried to engage us in locksmith-nerd conversation for what seemed like hours but was only fifteen minutes) has yet to get back to us with any updates on the hardware we chose. Fascinating. The weather has turned to fall mode, cracking below freezing for the first time yesterday morning -- alas, our growing season is over. The athletic fields of Brandeis were white-frosted when I arrived at work yesterday, and they were kind of pretty. The weatherman gives us weather into the 70s for the next two days, however; and I have to waste some of that weather tomorrow afternoon in an impromptu short meeting with the President. Of Brandeis.

Beff's humongously long drives got her to her respective destinations, and now she is safely ensconced at Yaddo -- in the East House composer live-in studio -- where she will be until the month name begins with "n". She apparently got pretty lost after missing a turn when looking for the Colburn homestead in Burke, Virginia, but she managed to find the place, eventually; Winnie of the vibrating haunch was pleased to see her. At last check, there was some debate as to where exactly she was supposed to do the sleeping of her, but it was apparently resolved. At Yaddo she is sharing time with three filmmakers at once -- two of whom I know from the MacDowell Colony -- and that brings me back to my first time at Yaddo when the Director was so, um, breathtakingly repressed and, um, less than clueful, that she prohibited televisions or film playback equipment from the Yaddo mansion. Because, you see (I suppose), the Trasks never had a TV. In any case -- I have never seen the East House composer studio, but I suppose I will soon.

In fact, next weekend I plan on driving there for an overnight. And I suppose Beff's sister will work on getting us lodging of cheapness in the area. Meantime, Beff can't get the multi-card reader I lent her from my own computer bag to read the SD card from her digital camera, so I am charged with bringing the original camera box so she can get the pix she's taken onto her own computer. Knowing me, I'll just buy her another card reader. Today. At Staples. After getting stuff from Trader Joe's. Who no longer has those cool grapefruit sours or the pepperoncini I like so much. It'll only be an overnight, because Beff will have to get back to work, AND the kitties will need to be fed.

Speaking of which -- doing the garbage AND recycling AND changing the cat litter is a big job! Especially for someone who raised a nasty bump on his head by hitting his head on a door, on purpose, for comic effect while exiting a classroom at Brandeis.

Speaking of which -- I heard Eric Chafe tell his class that midterms were next Friday. Midterms!?! Now I REALLY have to go to the bathroom.

Almost all of my composition students this week, both at NEC and at Brandeis, had nearly no no music to show. The amount of stuff I had to come up with to fill the full hours for which I was being paid was considerable, AND made my head hurt -- and this was before hitting my head on a door.

The lioness's share of my Saturday was taken up by being at Brandeis for the Women Composers Festival -- a 4:00 concert of music by women graduate students (including former graduate students -- hi, Hillary), and a sold-out event featuring grownups. So at 4 we had double Yoko, Hillary, Grace, and Seungah, and at 8 the two competition winners and a bunch of older, seasoned composers. All in all, both concerts were very, very good. I saw our piano tuning team there twice, of course causing the chair in me to think, "okay, at $125 per tuning, that was..."). Martha Horst's piece was very fin de siecle Vienna, 'cept more whole-toney, and very beautiful, and Ellen Harrison's string quartet was lovely, and beautifully played by the Lyds. Before the concert started, I just happened to find myself seated in front of the Brandeis president and his wife -- and his wife runs the Womens Studies Research Center. So the chit-chat we had before magically turned into major points in her pre-concert speech. She even brought up that Martha had worked with me at "a west coast University that will remain nameless".

I encountered Ellen just before the earlier concert, and it was the first time I've seen her in nine years -- when we were at the MacDowell Colony together. We did Thai at the Treetop restaurant, I played her some music, and we looked at her son playing the violin on www.violinmasterclass.com. Then we went to the concert, which was hot. Well, the room was, anyway. The "23-voice Boston Secession Ensemble" that sang Amy Beach, Ruth Lomon, Pauline Oliveros and others turned out to have 25 singers in it (one of the pieces was dull enough that I counted). I was wondering how many of the singers were considered to have fractional voices, and by what amount. Maybe four of them sang the "sotto voce" parts? I could go on with this joke, but I won't.

Yesterday turned into a mammoth teaching day because Tuesday I drove to Ken Ueno's teaching 'hood to give a colloquium -- easy money, not so easy driving -- thus having to move one student to a late time yesterday. Driving time from Brandeis to UMass Dartmouth (south and east of Providence) is an hour and ten minutes. The college has a hub and spoke design -- a central bunch of '80s industrial buildings with lots of concrete and parts of buildings seem to fly out like toaster handles -- with a ring road and a bunch of surrounding dormitories. Ken has to share an office with two other faculty, and he is one of only three full-timers. An army of adjuncts does most of the theory and history teaching. I met the Chairman, whose name is different from the Stanford chairman by only one letter (Karol Berger minus the "o"); as the first outsider coming in to give any kind of talk there, I had some sort of special status, and dadburnit, I had to be polite, too. So I played some etudes on CD and on video, and played most of Ten of a Kind, and gave my usual spiel about band music, the military, non-coms vs. officers, etc., and it turned out that the Dean came to the talk, and he is a total clarinet nerd who once played in the Navy Band. He mentioned that in the military, the officers were the ones without much talent who were good at sucking up, but based on the evidence of the Ten of A Kind recording made an immediate exception for the Marines. As no officer he ever encountered in the Navy would be able to come close to Ten of a Kind. So it was a big clarinet nerd moment. And I sure came with the right piece for it.

After the talk, Ken took me out to a local barbecue place. The Buffalo wings I had were excellent, and Ken got the doughnut dessert -- a bag of six small doughnuts that come with a strawberry dipping sauce. Local customs baffle me sometimes.

The cats yearn to go outdoors, and often want to go beyond the boundaries of the fence, which makes me nervous. Beff pulled a tick off of Camden, after all. They now know their names, and know the words "out", "treats" and "kitties", all of which are associated with specific actions (or gastronomic niceties).

I have received notification that the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society is finally cranking up their publicity machine on the Stoeger Prize. They are taking out ads in the Boston Globe and NY Times, International Musicians something, and something else. Look in your Sunday Times on November 14, rip out the page with the ad, and send it to me. I am expecting almost eleven copies of it.

CD BRAND ALERT: Based on much experience with many brands, I'd settled on TDK as the CD-R of choice. Me being as obsessive as I am, I burned TDK CD-Rs AND Fuji CD-Rs for my talk, just in case there were any problems. The TDKs did NOT play in their system (for the first time ever for me for that brand) and the Fujis did. I am switching to Fuji. Now I REALLY have to go to the bathroom.

Today's pictures are of people at the Women Composers event, and of the cats in their outdoor frolic. I took some GREAT fog pictures on Saturday morning near the mill, and STUPIDLY deleted them from the card before I'd copied them to the hard disk. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. First is Ellen, then Martha (third from left) with Stanford friends, the sculpture in the Slosberg lobby, and Mary Ruth and Josh (of the quartet) with Ellen Harrison (Josh thinks hors d'ouevres are a prop). Then we have kitty shots, which are closer than they appear. "Jump movie" and "Ring Toss movie" hold on for another week (top).

Oops. Too soon I spoke. I discovered the fog shots on the iMac. So, there are two fog shots at the bottom -- the Mill and Mill Pond, and the Ben Smith Dam. Then, two pictures showing the striking but eneven way the leaves are turning.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

? (OCTOBER 15) OCTOBER 7. Breakfast this morning is Raisin Bran and orange juice. Dinner was a sesame noodle bowl from Trader Joes (cutely called Trader Ming's on the bowl). Lunch was a bowl of campari tomatoes with salad dressing and a bowl of kimuchee soup. LARGE EXPENSES for the last week include a Nikon Coolpix 3200 for myself with memory card and card reader, $315, and a whole mess of Amytudes 2 CDs from Bridge Records, $825. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS "The Look of Love" as is evidenced on the Groovy 60s collection. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE June 1, 1975, my first public performance of my 7-minute piece o' crap band piece, with me conducting. The opening has an F sus 4 chord sustained in the trombones, etc., over lots of intricate percussion writing. I remember the actual percussionists in the band being quite confused and timid with their parts, but also Verne Colburn sitting in on the percussion section absolutely wailin' away on the claves. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES THE PAST WEEK 37.6 and 73.8. RECOMMENDATION/PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS WEEK 2. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK For Camden, Bly's old hiding place under the porch. THIS WEEK'S COSMIC QUANDRY: Which is rounder -- an orange? RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS include kim-chee purchased at Porter Exchange (all gone now). NUMBER OF FRAGILE THINGS DESTROYED BY THE CATS IN THE PREVIOUS WEEK: lots of crumpled up newspaper playtoys. DAYS SINCE MY LAST REAL COFFEE: 68. DAYS SINCE MY LAST BEER: 15. INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE a squidge, a slurry, a three-corner hat, six pairs of Don El Verzo's tweezers.

As I start typing this, it is a little less than 7:00 with clouds, mist, and occasional stray showers. The cats were allowed to sleep on the bed last night, and they have a tendency to get rambunctious at the worst times for me. And when they do that they purr so loudly that the bed vibrates. The cats now tend to inhale their breakfast can of Fancy Feast and wait around for me to make another crumple ball for them. They now feverishly wish to go out (and know the word "out") when I return from the salt mines, especially Camden. They're not satisfied to stay in the yard, but now instead of hanging out in the stand of pine trees, they like the driveway and the space underneath the porch -- where Bly used to spend all his outside time. Camden often wants to come in pretty soon, because, I guess, he gets spooked easily by stray outdoor noises. They both now like to climb the fenceposts and sit on them -- for a limited period of time. Normally for play, they either chase each other maniacally through the yard or Camden plays by himself in the flowerbed and Sunset chases insects. He now jumps for stuff a little less than he used to, but given the right manic mood, he will indeed jump high.

Hayes called last night and, among many other things, noted that I hadn't updated this space. Here's where I remind all almost eleven that I'm now doing that on Fridays. Yesterday I had to run a faculty meeting and that is a bit too time-consuming, especially when I have kitties to monitor, etc.

On Saturday the weather was nice, and I took my blue K-Mart laceless shoes with me into Boston (they were on my feet). Big mistake. Those shoes are not made for walkin'. I ended up walking a lot on the sides of my feet, since blisters felt like they were about to form in sympathy. In any case. I went to the Boston Deli in South Boston to check on Smak pickles, and they had none, alas, and so this poor dog had none. Instead, I did get the last two jars of Polish Farms sour pickles (a worthy #2), and picked up a pile of powdered Polish soups -- some made by Knorr, some not. Check out the back of one of the packets, reproduced way below -- anyone out there know what this thing is that I bought for 79 cents? After leaving the Boston Market, I had some time to kill before I could get a train out of Porter Square, so I did Tower Records (yes, they have a Rakowski bin) and Newbury Comics (no Rakowski bin), and walked up Mass. Ave. to a gourmet pizza place and had some slices of rather good pizza for rather too much money. Then I checked out the cool paper store near Porter Square, went into Porter Exchange to the Japanese supermarket and got a bunch of kimuchee soup mixes and a large jar of kimchee, hung out at Pier One until the train was due, and took the train. On these train trips, I got to use my iPod battery backup for the first time, as the iPod had run out of juice, and it was ... well, dweeby of me.

Saturday night was a Lydian Quartet concert, sold out, and it was quite an event. Mozart, Schumann and Ives. The Ives Second String Quartet reminded me of what Mark Twain said about Wagner -- nice moments but bad quarter-hours. There was a cute comedy moment in the middle movement where Judy Eissenberg stood up and played her part forcefully (the story Ives gave is of four men having a spirited argument and then climbing a mountain and experiencing serene beauty, etc.) and sat back down.

On Sunday I made yet another trip to Brandeis in order to attend Rachel Liebermann's Performance Program junior recital, because people were needed to grade it. I enjoyed it, it was good music, and I remember virtually nothing about the Poulenc. Sunday afternoon was spent entertaining the cats, of course.

An e-mail from Amy D let me know that the Etudes Volume 2 CD from Bridge was imminent and she asked if I'd gotten my copies yet. I immediately fired off an e-mail to Bridge asking for 100 of them, and they arrived on Tuesday. Sweet. I then spent plenty of time giving comp copies to people at Brandeis -- even the President -- and mailing some out to friends. Since Amy is in Chicago for three weeks and won't have her CDs, I also arranged for a box to be sent to Ursula Oppens at Northwestern University. Now Ursula will get in on the act, and I will be famous in no time. Yes, no time, indeed. The funny thing (to me) about the whole thing is that Judy Sherman is not only the engineer, producer and editor, she also gets the photo credit for the cover. And Beff gets the photo credit for the picture of me that appears on the last page of the booklet (which you see when you open up the case). Better yet, when you take the CD out you see a picture of Amy's ring of scores -- all 24 of her big scores arranged in a ring on the floor of the American Academy. Cool. So I will be bringing a lot of those with me today ...

... as I drive to Saratoga Springs to see Beff at Yaddo. I'll be leaving a little earlier than I have to because of the predicted rain (here they expect a brief downpour with wind -- not enough to make the Weather Bug chirp, but there is a Special Weather Statement on the They That Make page), and I will be bringing her a bunch of stuff she needs -- including her original camera box, bass clarinet (almost forgot to do that), earmuffs, coat, paper, etc. And I will be bringing her guitar back, as she finished her mandolin and guitar piece. Her sister Ann wasn't able to get us a good rate anywhere closer than Glens Falls, so Beff got us a room at the local Super 8 for 90 bucks. Why I never! We also have a reservation at a nice restaurante in Saratoga Springs, and the restaurant called here, Maynard, to confirm the reservation. Since we have cats to tend to, I will be out of Saratoga bright and early tomorrow morning, stop in Northampton on the way back for an early lunch with David Sanford (I'm paying), and then make my way home. And the cats will not have a gun in their pocket, they will be genuinely glad to see me -- as they strongly point toward where their food is kept.

And crap. There was a holiday this week, so garbage collection is a day later. Today. Can't do it, can't do it.

Due to space limitations at the Midwest Conference in December -- something the Marine Band guys had been trying to get details about since June -- Ten of a Kind will NOT be done on the December 16 concert. As a consolation, they have programmed SIBLING REVELRY on their back-to-back concerts the night before, where there IS enough space. So, a premiere a little sooner (by four months) than was thought. Woo hoo and all that. I had Captain Jason do my dirty work by e-mailing Gene at Peters to ask, innocently, if they would have a bunch of scores of that (as well as of TEN OF A KIND) available for sale at Midwest. Soon I will join the fray. Gene never responds when I do that, though. He does respond to strangers, though. So I had to quickly write program notes, which I did.

I also sent a bio and wrote program notes for VIOLIN SONGS for the Chamber Music Society. As mentioned earlier, save your NY Times November 14 and send me the Stoeger announcement in it.

Martler gets here late Monday night. Big woo hoo there. Another raker!

Today's pictures are three of the cats, a nice dragonfly closeup (Sunny had been chasing it and I guess it was out of breath), foliage around the house, Martler's bedroom window with a cute reflection, and one of the soup packets I got on Saturday.

Big event for the week was driving to Saratoga Springs and seeing Beff at Yaddo. Because of They That Make's prediction, I left rather earlier than I had planned, thus arriving at the Wilton Mall outside of Saratoga Springs by 12:30. Luckily, Beff had her cell phone on and I informed her of my nearness. In order to use up a bit of time before getting to Yaddo during the no-outsiders time, I had lunch at Ruby Tuesday's in the mall: it was Buffalo wings (pretty good), a salad bar (mediocre), and a Lime Rickey ice tea (which was bizarre and a lot different from what you would think). From there I arrived Yaddo-ward around 2, where I got special permission to enter Beff's studio during those hours so I could carry her bass clarinet, camcorder, and other stuff she wanted me to bring (in return, I brought the guitar back). Beff has the East House studio, an L-shaped live-in concoction in the basement of one of the buildings, and she played me her guitar and mandolin piece (the MIDI did all the bends and stuff, very cool -- who knew Finale could do that?) and her big band piece she wrote for the Edith Jones project. That indeed was very cool, and it swung (even in the MIDI). Since Edith Jones is actually the name of a dog, Beff called her piece "Winifred Goes Outside." Winifred is the little dog the Colburns own that she encountered on her way to Yaddo.

We checked in at the Super 8 motel near the Wilton Mall and across from Wal-Mart, and then walked around the downtown of Saratoga Springs, walking towards Skidmore College until we got tired of it. On the way back we encountered a fortress-type house on the Main Street, even with a guard. We couldn't tell if it was a church or a museum, but apparently it's an actual house. Hot damn. Then we played around in the big bookstore and went into the stationery and art supplies store that looks from the street like it's a hat store. It is called Soave Fair. We joined the colonists for pre-dinner wine drinks in West House, and I got to see the new Pink Room, which I had once had as a studio: it is no longer pink. We made puns on Elizabeth, the filmmaker's, "brats" project about interviewing children of various kinds of walks of life (army brats is the obvious linguistic model), coming down to Wisconsin sausagemakers' children: brat brats. After all of this intense levity, we ate at a very nice restaurant on Union Street -- not even downtown -- where Beff had made us a reservation. I recall having some rather rare encrusted tuna meal, and I forgot already what Beff had. Given the wine at drinks and the bloody Mary I ordered, I felt the need for an espresso after the meal, so that cut short my string of coffeeless days. It's now back down to five.

Then we retired to bed in the Super 8. Next morning I filled up at a Mobil Station and took Beff on a roundabout drive that used to be one of my exercise bike rides. I also promised to show her the barn where Funny Cide (last year's Derby winner) was brought up, but I apparently forgot an important turn and went around 20 miles out of our way. No biggie, since Beff made it in plenty of time for breakfast, and I could get on the road for Northampton. Where I had a nice Thai lunch with David Sanford, who is doing well both personally and professionally. Then it was on to Maynard, where two desperate kitties wanted some canned food, and they wanted it now (which in context means then, but you get the notion).

The next day, Sunday, was the beginning of this year's leaf raking odyssey. From the front yard and driveway I raked up 7 barrels of leaves and brought them to rest in my two hiding places. As of now, I and Martler have raked up 21 barrels of leaves and pine needles (at least 6 barrels are pine needles), with more to come. Beff comes back next Thursday, and her muscle is being counted on. Monday and Tuesday were a bit too wet for leafing, so Wednesday and Thursday were the next days for it. Alas, so many leaves are still on the trees that duplicate raking is in store. Hee hee. Also yesterday I brought in the hammock and the Adirondack chairs for the season. So this colder weather thing is getting pretty serious.

Martler got here on Monday night, and in record time. He had said he wouldn't get through customs until 9:30, and thus that the Framingham Express bus he was able to get wouldn't get to Framingham until 10:15 or 10:45. But then he called at 8:37 and said he was just about to get on the bus, which was just about to leave. Wow. And I got there at 9:20 and Martler was already there. Later in this update, I'll let Martler tell you what's been a-goin' on. Basically, Maynard is his personal artist colony while he is here, but he also is being put in the service of raking and clearing leaves. Mostly I've been gone during the day, but when I am around and he is working, I usually curb the impulse to call out, "did you hear that, or are you rationalizing it?" And of course, Martler helped greatly with the string of no beer being broken, rather dramatically. As of today, I am off beer again.

I had a doctor's appointment on Tuesday for several things. I had another blood test, and I wanted to find out why I have not been sleeping much later than 1 am most mornings since the beginning of August. He had a few possibilities, and right now we're working with "sublimating and internalizing chairman pressures" -- so I got a mild sedative. Option 2, should the sedative not work out, may be actual depression. Oh boy, my favorite. It runs in my family. For the record, I took a sedative last night and slept as late as 3 am. That may be better. Big, serious doings at Brandeis this week are, of course, exacerbating things, and I am within a hair's breadth of finally submitting my resignation as Chair.

21 years now since I got the 'Nard album on vinyl and Ross and I used to listen to it all the time because of the cool funky beats, and the way Ross would stick his butt out when dancing to "Chillin' Out." I spent mucho bucks to get it on CD, as it is available only as a Japanese import. I also got 'Nard's only other CD, which is mostly a real bust, being gobbled up by ridiculous '80s synth sounds. If I'd known that there was a picture of a break dancer on the cover, I would have known better.

Yesterday the UDRs (Undergraduate Department Reps) held a Meet the Majors party with lots of junk food, and plenty of students and faculty came. They also held a raffle in which my new CD was a prize, as was Lunch With Davy. Lianna Levine was the winner of Lunch With Davy, to take place at The Stein as soon as is convenient. I did mention that Lunch With Davy was not the same thing as Take a Class with Davy.

The five etudes from the Martian Counterpoint album have made it in streaming form onto the artofthestates web page, and you can see for yourself by following the link under "A Little Bit of Davy on the Web" on thi Home of this site. The show itself is not up, but the repertoire for it is there and available. Sometimes it's fun listening to the streaming audio because at times it sounds like bad FM reception.

Soozie called! We talked for quite a while about various things relating to songs, a recording she's making, and the Violin Songs that she's singing at CMSLC next month. We made sure she had the correct version of those songs. And she got the brilliant idea of getting me to include "The Gardener" in a larger set of settings of sex poems, using the same ensemble. She is currently in search of such sex poems, and I relish the opportunity. Especially as it would go onto this recording. And especially as it means writing some more for Soozie. She said she was sending a picture that I was not to include in this space, and I haven't because I haven't gotten it.

The neighbor in the IUBR (Incredibly Ugly Blue Ranch) is digging a big rectangular hole in his back yard. To what end I do not know.

Now it is time for the MARTLER portion of our blog. And here he is. I'm putting him in another color, because you're worth it. Vacation pix