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

Yesterday, the long-delayed birthday lunch with the Ka-Ching Twins happened, and of course I had wings. I got some Curious George hats and party favors at the Dollar Store and we brought them with us. The close to completely clueless person at the Stein greeted us with, "so, a table for dunces?" A cosmic question here could be -- are birthday hats really dunce hats? And does growing a year older necessarily make you stupid? And could there be a confederacy? But that's all light in the piazza. The Ka-Chings actually paid!

Meanwhile, the weather finally got summerlike, and in a big hurry. After yet another all-day rain -- the edge of Tropical Storm Alberto -- the pattern shifted and we got a Bermuda High in charge. Finally. Air conditioners have been essential, and my biking times have been quite early in the morning -- 7 on Monday, for instance, 7:15 on Sunday. The grass has been growing quite fast -- the mowing I did on my birthday already looks -- old. And there was a severe thunderstorm watch last night, but we got nothing.

When the hot began, I trotted out the old gazpacho recipe and made some. Which is good, very good. 'ceptin' Shaw's didn't have any green onions, so I had to substitute some chives. 'sokay.

Meanwhile, CF Peters informed me that they were taking a whole bunch of pieces that had been languishing, awaiting a meeting of the editorial committee, and that meant a whole day of producing scores and parts. Which became a crappy time for our 12-year-old printer to start screwing up. 11x17 printing was fine for the first 100 pages or so, but the last 10 or so pages involved no fewer than 70 pages getting stuck in accordion shapes inside, and I'm sure my neighbors could hear me uttering the upper-case letters on the keyboard, plus a few spirals and other abstract shapes. It got bad enough that I started looking for the next printer -- hey, the HP 4MV has lasted 12 years, and that's amazing -- but the next generation is going to cost us $2139. No matter who sells this printer, it goes for $2139. So perhaps before the end of the summer, when I am back on full pay...

I made several trips to Trader Joes in Framingham, and I've usually noticed that there is a Whole Foods across the little street from it. After viewing a story on 60 Minutes about Whole Foods, I decided to give it a look, and it's kind of neat. They have a few varieties of things that it's hard to find at the more plebian places -- for instance Bubbies Pickles -- and some nice Asian stuff that I haven't seen anywhere else (probably because I haven't looked). So it looks like TJ's and Whole Foods may become something of a 1-2 punch in the future. Whatever that means. Whole Foods had a special on hothouse tomatoes, but they didn't look so hot. Or so house, for that matter.

Another highlight of my birthday is that Maynard Door and Window finally came over to vent the fan that is in the bathroom. The electricians installed the fan and a long generic piece of venting tube (not unlike the tube coming out of the clothes dryer) emptying into the vastness of the attic, and we contracted MD&W actually to vent it, as in, to the outdoors. So they sent French Accent Guy and an assistant to do it, and they made a bunch of noise, drilled through the south-facing attic window, and left a vent on the outdoors that looks like a drive-in movie speaker. See photo below. So now our long national nightmare is over.

This morning quite early, Beff and I did the Boon Lake ride, which was as eventless as possible and the weather for it gorgeous. Until the turnaround point, where I made my usual sharp turn, got tricked by a bunch of gravel, and didn't quite make it around the turn. As in, my bike went sideways, and I caught myself on the pavement. To only a small scratch on my right shin and a slight bit of roughness on my right hand. Beff said she saw it all in a super-slo-mo, and I wondered how you make that happen in real life. The bike shifted from gear 35 (mod 7) to gear 25 (mod 7) during this process, and getting it back to my preferred gear was no small task.

Very little picture-taking happened this week, despite its eventfulness. My Lee & Kate pictures somehow didn't get copied to my computer, and no camera came with me to any of the other birthday events. So, lemme splain what we got here. The fatigue-color links to the left are little cat movies. The yellow ones are movies from Bogliasco, making their encore. The red links are mp3s of two of my solo hand drum pieces. And the blue links are links to web pages.

Meanwhile, the pictures. First is our scoresheet from bowling. See if you can tell where we were when the glow bowling started. Next is the iced coffee we had after the bike ride this morning, and the new vent for the bathroom fan (it's the little white thing on the window). And finally, the little chick as viewed on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday mornings.

JUNE 28. Breakfast this morning was rice link sausages with 2% cheese. Dinner last night was two chicken sandwiches that I grilled myself, and salad. Lunch was a spiced Julius Chicken sandwich from the South Street Market, eaten on a bench in front of Brandeis Admissions, with Carolyn "Ka-Ching" Davies and Beff. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES THIS LAST WEEK: 59.2 and 88.0. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS "Scatter" by me (#2 of Three Encores, about which BMI inquired...) LARGE EXPENSES this last two weeks include Finale upgrade $107 including shipping, percussion instruments from Musician's Friend $107 including shipping, various at K-Mart $117, bindings $14, "staples" at Shaws $117 after the 5% discount, gourmet stuff at Duck Soup, $52. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: When it became evident that we'd be staying at our place in Spencer -- on Thompson Pond -- for a number of years, we bit the bullet and bought ourselves the red canoe, which was on special at The Fair (a K-Mart type place that no longer exists). Our first try at canoeing was on Easter Sunday, we were completely clueless how to go about it, and on our first try -- stepping into it from a dock -- we fell in. Subsequent tries were quite successful. COMPANIES WHO HAVE NOT COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY THIS WEEK are none. COMPANIES WHO HAVE COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY are Whole Foods Market (love that dumpling dipping sauce). THIS WEEK'S COSMIC QUANDARY: how soon before students submit their homework with "signing statements", grudgingly agreeing to do the work but complaining that the method is wrong? THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: guliscia. THINGS I HAVE GROWN WEARY OF are quotes from "the blogosphere" -- both the left and the right -- and humidity. RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS: pitted Cajun olives, pepperoncinis, cherries. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK the hammock -- well, a rediscovery, actually. I hadn't been on it for quite some time. THIS WEEK'S NUMBER BETWEEN 1 AND 10: 7.5. REVISIONS TO THIS SITE: Compositions, Lexicon, Recordings, This page. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT TODAY: 0. FRAGILE THINGS DESTROYED BY THE CATS THIS LAST WEEK are at least one chipmunk and at least one mouse. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST WEEK: 2. DAVY'S BAROMETER FOR THE FUTURE OF MUSIC this week is 23 out of 100. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: massive demonstrations against the olambic. THIS WEEK'S FEATURED FAKE SENDER NAME IN A SPAM: Davy Barrera. SUBJECT OF THAT SPAM: succinct. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 9,517. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE THIS WEEK: $2.99. Beff reports $2.76 in Vermont and $2.74 in Maine. OTHER INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE a festering piece of dung, a red rose for a blue lady, a fallen branch, sixteen eroded pebbles from the bottom of a stream.

Many clusters of events this last week, keeping us busy, off balance, and, frankly, beautiful. I made that last one up. Beff spent the weekend in Vermont and is on her way to Maine as I type this -- apparently for the sole purpose of picking up a repaired lawnmower (bent crankshaft, $120) -- and I spent plenty of time on the road just trying to find a printer that can bind an 11x17 score. But let me time travel a little bit here (which I now know is possible, though my salary is not high enough to purchase fuel for the trip).

Beff and I had decided to try and get together with friends we don't get to see that often before I make my pilgrimage to Yaddo. But only one of the three was available before then. David Sanford is out of town for a relative's wedding, and the Droolie family are entertaining the in-laws. The one possible meal was had with my colleague Palle Yourgrau, at Chang Sho in Cambridge. Chang Sho is one of our preferred places to go, especially since there is no good Chinese around here (Thai, Indian, Korean, definitely yes), and as usual the cold sesame noodles and hot and sour soup went down easily. The other things we got were nice, too. And Palle grew up listening intensely to classical music, and his knowledge of the music -- and which recordings are preferred -- is quite impressive. He teaches philosophy at Brandeis, and we exchanged "research" -- we gave him commercial CDs, he gave us a copy of his "general audience" book about Goedel and Einstein. So far, no indication that he has listened to the CDs, but I spent almost all of a rainy Friday reading the book and writing to him about it (my comment that "I have spent reading your book the amount of time it would take for you to listen to the CDs we gave you three and a half times" went unresponded). It was a little dense because the philosophy and physics are pretty complicated, but I think I got it. It turns out time doesn't exist.

There had been an ulterior motive to having dinner with Palle. He was recently given a named Chair at Brandeis, and on a rainy day when I was in Bogliasco, he gave the "xxxx Chair" lecture to celebrate his new position. What he didn't know, and what I just found out by virtue of him telling me, was that professors who get named or endowed chairs at Brandeis never gave public lectures before -- this was the first. I wanted to find out from him what it was customary to say at such an occasion, since I have to give that talk for the Naumburg Chair on September 24 (if memory serves...). As it turns out, what is customary is 100% exactly what he did (an intellectual autobiography). And I have to do it, too, and will probably start with how I like the awards that don't come with public speeches to give. I also found out that all the important mucky-mucks were there, and the event was catered, and the food was expensive. So I have something to which to look forward. Mine is in the Faculty Lounge, and will involve playing the performance movie of MARTLER. So there.

An interesting surprise at the restaurant was that one of this space's most loyal readers (Rebecca -- who usually retains her anonymity, but not this time) was at dinner at Chang Sho at the same time, along with Charlotte -- the "This Be The Song" duo from Theory 2 -- who had graduated from Brandeis last year, and took composition lessons with me during the nadir of the Chairman experience. So it was old home week. Rebecca now has a job that has "administrator" in the title, and I told her to make sure not to live up to WAFA in Davy's Lexicon. And, by the way, she sang a bunch o' Beffsongs in recital last month, and more than once. So there. Charlotte, meanwhile, lives in Minnesota.

Thursday's big event was Derek's dissertation defense, scheduled perfectly so that it could be followed immediately by Dinner Paid For By Someone Else. The entire composition faculty -- until July 1 when Yu-Hui is officially our colleague -- was there, and the outside reader was John Melby. Which made me the only unbearded one in the room. But I didn't complain. Or notice, for that matter. Derek's paper was a good one, and the composition rather good, too, so there wasn't much about which to argue. I asked a cosmic question about how Tigers talked about 12-tone pieces being "about the properties of the set, but the question didn't have legs. Nor did it know how to use them. As usual, the defense was a mere upbeat to the main event: dinner at a new place on Moody Street -- yet another Asian restaurant, this one Malaysian-Japanese, called Ponzu. Most of the dishes are fish dishes (say that five times fast), so I got chicken. Which was marvelous. Kung Pao Chicken always tastes better when someone else pays.

One night last week, Beff and I went onto the sun porch to relax and to watch the shadows from the candle make, um, shadows. I stretched out on the futon couch -- formerly in the sun porch in Bangor -- and noted a little bit of a smell of putridness. Which increased toward where my head went. We could find no specific thing causing the smell, so the next morning Beff got out the cleaning fluid and the paper towels and started scrubbing the walls and windows, presuming that the record rainfall (more about that later) was causing some mold to form on this part of the house that's been exposed to the elements. After 10 minutes or so of scrubbage, she noticed that a cat toy in with the cat toys wasn't actually a cat toy -- it was an actual dead mouse. Hence the increase in odor on the head end of the couch. I was charged with disposing of the mouse in the woods (such as they are), and we remarked that perhaps we should think about NOT leaving the screen in the living room open so that the cats could go in and out at will. A resolution whose inaction would eventually bite us in the butt. Nonetheless, the porch is now pretty clean, or at least the walls are. And the cow that Sooooozie gave us is still there, if rusted.

My stamina for our programmed bike rides has been increasing, and I have made it up to the second-longest one -- what we call the Other Gropius House ride. Soon I would hope we would do The Airport Ride, which is nearly 15 miles. That one has strenuity written all over it by virtue of the 2 big uphill stretches. But on the one non-juicy day of the last week, we did an even longer ride, which we have only done twice, ever. We strapped the bikes onto the back of the Camry, drove to downtown Ayer, used the port-a-potty at the head of the bike trail, and did an actual rail trail -- the Nashua River Rail Trail. Since it IS a rail trail, there are nearly no hills or significant curves, though there are a few nice views (Beff kept remarking "The Minuteman Trail has BETTER views"). We rode as far as downtown Pepperell, which is about 9 miles -- making the round trip 18 miles, and our butts felt it. Any new buttstix I may have gotten last week are apparently in for the long haul. Our reward for that long bike ride was a delicious dinner cooked by me. My Monday bikeride happened in the morning just as the rain had safely pulled to the west, but a downpour started just as I passed the post office on my way back. So I surprisingly showed up at Maynard Door and Window, gave Zoe the dog my usual bikeride Meaty Bone stash, and finished the trip. And was wet.

As to dinner -- for one of them last week I decided to do Polish fries with actual potatoes (not frozen already-diced ones), and cut myself in the left thumb -- enough to say "ow" fairly loudly and commence bleeding in lots of places where blood doesn't belong. And since the cut is at the tip of the thumb, there was no graceful way to band-aid it. Subsequent uses of my thumb have caused little bits of pain and more bleeding, most noticeably in the car while I was driving on Monday -- by the time I got home my left hand looked like a special effect.

During the weekend I decided to choose my annual addition to my little percussion instruments, and after e-mailing with Mindy Wagner, I settled on a caxixi, a talking drum, a pair of tunable bongos, and mounted castanets. With free shipping. It amuses me that to pronounce the first instrument you have to sound like you're singing the beginning of "Viderunt Omnes". I always love obscure references like that. And speaking of percussion, I have news from "Little" Mike Lipsey that he's in Asheville (I presume the one in North Carolina) recording the first CD (of two) of hand drum pieces, including the two in red on the left. I'll let you know when I know what he knows, which would not be a no-no. No noose is good noose is sauce for the nander. Stop me, somebody.

As beforementioned, Beff is on her way to Maine, and at her request I bopped over to Shaw's for a "sandwich and a refrigerated coffee-based drink" for the road (per la via, pour la rue -- this educational interlude was brought to you by the parentheses that enclose it). The sandwich part was easy. Refrigerated coffee drinks -- well, there are plenty of energy drinks available -- JOLT this and POW! that -- but none of them are coffee-based. What a weird window into our culture that is. She had to settle for a Starbucks frappuccino that had resided five minutes in the freezer.

Another bout of serious rain has been around the east coast, and for once New England didn't get the brunt of it. DC got socked pretty bad by a stalled weather front with tropical flow, shutting down even the IRS due to flooding. Up here we got consistent rain interrupted by occasional amazing wind-less downpours, and I took the opportunity to go to K-Mart to renew the stash of kitty treats -- which they sell for half of what Shaw's charges. While there I picked up the #1's of Destiny's Child (boy are you not ready for this jelly) and the Beach Boys 30 tracks called Endless Summer (boy do I feel old) and a whole MESS of DVD cases -- the skinny types that Beff prefers. I also got orange juice glasses, because I am that guy. The guy that gets orange juice glasses. I particularly enjoyed how, at checkout, the checker robotically gave me his required and ungrammatic programmed spiel: "will you put that on your Sears credit card today and save 30 dollars if you enroll now?" Meanwhile, the local tv stations have been letting us know that, "since record keeping began in 1872", this May and June have been the rainiest consecutive months ever. "The previous record was 1955, and that was with two hurricanes passing through". Take that and the IRS closing due to flooding and W's remark this week that global warming might not be real. Hee hee, funny.

Another big event of the weekend was cajoling my sick printer to print my piano concerto onto 11x17 pages, and on Friday it actually did 79 pages before it started making every page into an accordion-fold fan. So I turned it off. On Saturday I returned to the problem, and with much cajoling (Like Sylvia Cajoli on PBS, only not really), out came another 30 pages without significant problems. Given that I had to print 128, that made the last 10 pages into pretty much hit or miss -- mostly miss. I mused in an e-mail that when the new printer comes at the end of the summer, how will I make those fans? So on Saturday morning I braved the rain, put the originals in a garbage bag, brought a whole bunch of expensive 60-weight paper that I copped from Yehudi, and made two beautiful double-sided copies. Leaving the binding part of the operation to the business week.

Beff's big thing this week is making a demo recording of parts of her opera, using hired guns. I mean, performers. She's using Slosberg Hall, and last night was the rehearsal, tomorrow night the actual recording. We went into Brandeis to scope out the place and make sure she knew what was what, and what key opened what, and we timed it so that we could do lunch with Ms. Ka-Ching herself, Carolyn. And we did, Oscar, we did. Meanwhile, as Beff was on her way back, Mr. Ka-Ching, Big Mike, called to ask if we wanted to stargaze with his bigass telescope (I have ornamented the conversation). So around 10:15 he pulled into the driveway, and it was --- overcast. We hung out a bit on the now smell-free porch, and suddenly I spied stars. So Big Mike brought out the 'scope which turns out to be even larger than a bazooka -- I thought he was aiming to take out some houses or something -- and he talked about programming the computer on the inside, and ... overcast again. So we have, literally, taken a rain check. Boy, the last time we had guests later than 11:00 who weren't also staying overnight was -- um, never?

Much of Monday was also spent on binding. A printing press close by in West Concord seemed to advertise that they could do hard jobs -- like 11x17 score binding -- but when I entered and presented the problem, I got what I usually get. "What? 11x17? Oh, our machine is only 11 inches. I've never done that before. I don't know if we can." And only at Alpha Graphics -- just outside of the center of Concord -- does that continue with "...well, wait. Let me check the machine. (4-minute pause as he leaves the room and returns) I figured out how to do it. I'll use two bindings and turn the pages over." Ah, yes. I know that routine so well I can spout it in my sleep.

And this morning before our bike ride, we were standing in the master bedroom when Sunny came in carrying a big cat toy in his mouth. Which turned out to be a chipmunk. That was still alive. And (duh) bleeding. After some real excitement -- following the chipmunk under the fax machine, the stereo, onto the porch, and trying to let it know that the opened door was its freedom -- we finally got it outside. And the cats officially LOST their open-window privileges. What confused me was that when Sunny drops the chipmunk, instead of running straight away, it always jumps around in a circle, THEN tries to run away. Is this how the tango originated?

Beff is really, really, really ready to see The Devil Wears Prada. Hey, we were even excited that Maureen Dowd writes about it, albeit lukewarmly, in the NY Times today. We have the movie trailer on both our main computers and Beff has watched it several times (I got points for knowing that the assistant character had been The Princess Diaries person). We are resolved to see the Friday matinee, on the day it is released. What do I get out of it? Buffalo wings, of course. Big Ka-Ching Mike says he will go with us, once we know where it is playing. And meanwhile, on Saturday, which looks like the first non-juicy day in a while, we have plans for recreation (bikey and canoey stuff with both Ka-Ching Twins), and to that end, I got some cookout type food for that day. Nummies.

Actually, now that I think of it, Thursday was a pretty non-juicy day -- or I think it was Thursday. Beff had read in the Globe about a small family operation in Wellesley that makes small batches of pickles and relishes by hand, and local gourmet stores that sell their products, etcetera. So I accessed their webpage and found that "Duck Soup" on Boston Post Road in Wayland sold the garlic pickles, among other products. So we let the Garmin navigate us there, and we encountered a colonial styl little mallette with coffee shop, dress shop, sushi bar, etc., and we tried to calculate just how many times more than what we are making now we would have to make to live in that neighborhood, which is, by the way, gorgeous. Answer: slightly more than two. Meanwhile, I got the special pickles, which went for more than $9 per jar, as well as some grilling utensils, some other sauces, and a magnetized rubber pen. It turns out the pickles are pretty spectacular, the closest thing I've had to Smaks. Smaks are $1.79 for twice as many pickles, but that point is moot when the only place that sells them in the area goes out of bidness. I am thinking I will go back to Duck Soup for more of the pickles. So there.

And a Vanity Google giving unusual parameters turned up an interesting citation: in a psychology journal, a writer notes that he has a painting in his living room entitled "Self-Portrait As David Rakowski" by the painter Max Gimblett, and he wondered about what notion of self would allow this kind of painting, or something far more eloquent. I had been at Bellagio with Max Gimblett and hadn't known he had taken my name in vain on a painting, so I was surprised. It turns out the author was at Bellagio with me 'n' Beff for a few days before we left, so our memory was faulty. So now I have a really weird "citation" to report on my next Activities Report. Zonky.