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

Today's (this month's) pictures include my studio at MacDowell, the scrimmed-off dining area at Colony Hall, my work area with lunch bag (not basket!), a fire in my fireplace, the kitchen rebuilding as seen from a Davy's eye view, me at dinner, Tim and John at dinner, and Mark and David Packer at dinner. The end.

JUNE 5. Breakfast today was rice link sausages, potato pancakes, orange juice and coffee. Dinner last night was manicotti and salad. Lunch today was chunky soup, some Italian sausage and leeks thing. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 49.6 and 92.7. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS The MIDI of the Finale of the band piece I am writing (again). LARGE EXPENSES THIS LAST TWO WEEKS are none. BIRDS HEARD RECENTLY: Plenty of veerys and wood thrushes, and a very insistent mockingbird here on Great Road. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: In French II (freshman year of highs school) we spent some time in the spring translating a kid's story in French (duh) called Papa Renard (we translated that as Daddy Fox). In one of the quizzes, a bit of text we had yet to translate was given, and I recall the phrase "heureuse come deux singes avec un puce" or something to that effect. I had no idea what singe and puce were, so I guessed "happy as two mice with a piece of cheese". That was marked X "(good guess, though)". The translation -- oh, those French -- happy as two monkeys with a flea. What? THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: Triggleknacher. THINGS I HAVE GROWN WEARY OF no refrigerator available, dampness, spraying wasps, Monadnock Springs bottled water. RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS anything with hot sauce on it. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK There actually is only one way to skin a cat. THIS WEEK'S NUMBER BETWEEN 1 AND 10: 9. REVISIONS TO THIS SITE: This page. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. DENTIST VISITS SINCE SEPTEMBER: 14. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: Beff and I were boxed in by cats last night. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST WEEK: 1. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE: When I did graveyard shift security at Jordan Marsh, I used to toss light bulbs down the eight-story stairwell. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: Two-hour teaching week. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 10,493. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE THIS WEEK: $3.02 at Cumberland Farms. OTHER INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE the bit of cloth right next to the hole in your sock, the summer cold that just won't go away, the lemon seed clogging the garbage disposal, twelve of those oh what are those called again?.

My time at the MacDowell Colony is done, but my service to the Centennial event is just beginning. But all in good time. I am back in Maynard for one full day, catching up and all that, after four and a half very productive weeks at the MacDowell Colony. Total output: 22 minutes of band music, three whole movements. And I still must write another movement, since I don't have any opening music yet. What I DO have is a melancholy slow second movement with 2-note ostinatos (among many other things), a pretty heavy "fanfares" (third) movement, and a kind of kooky and fun finale ("Toucan" -- Beff nixed the title "Toucan Play" for that movement). Plans, which may change at the last minute, are for an opening movement that is kind of a march. Or a kind of march. This is what I will work on at Yaddo, when I get there. Which is, in relation to the posting of this page, tomorrow.

The usual end-of-residency stuff happened at MacDowell -- the getting to know new arrivals but not too well 'cause what's the point, dealing with the exit forms (note to self: Yaddo doesn't ask you to fill out an exit form), feeling okay to slack off (which I did because i finished my third movement (actually the second movement of the piece, but the third one I finished because, you see, I wrote the third movement first not knowing it wasn't the opening and the fourth movement second, knowing it was going to be a finale, and this slow movement once I knew about the third and fourth movements I knew would come second and just after the movement I have not yet written) and there wasn't time to start another movement and get invested in it), and taking the opportunity to leave the campus for whole days with the spouse of me. And so we did. I mean, I did. So last Friday while Beff was in Vermont, I came in ostensibly to bring in the garbage and recycling bins -- so it wouldn't look like no one was home -- and I ended up mowing almost all of the lawns. I also took a short bike ride for the sake of exercise, and used the air conditioning in the computer room, so there smarty pants. Then I left the compound on Saturday night, spent Sunday with Beff doing things like planting grass seed and taking walks (it got too cold for riding bicycles), drove back Monday morning, spent the day packing up and lounging about (it was raining a LOT), said my farewells Monday night -- after recording the last Mary Worth performance -- and hey, here I am.

In the meantime, Beff had jury duty yesterday, postponed from last August, and alas, she got selected for a jury, which is in trial today. And what a trial it is (double meaning, for those playing along at home). Beff had scheduled stuff in Maine based on being left unselected, so that's all been moved around. That afternoon rehearsal today -- not happening.

And so I pack for Yaddo. Pretty much by leaving everything in the car for a day, doing laundry, printing off more manuscript paper, taking care of the cats, doing more weeding and the like, mailing packages, depositing a rebate check, using up coupons that Beff gave me, etc. I can report that LAST Monday Beff's trumpet colleague Jack was here for the evening, and I came down to make Whole Foods kebab stuff, and that on Sunday morning we went to Whole Foods for more such stuff, and Sunday's dinner was tremendous. I know it to be true.

Meantime, all 14 Mary Worth performances from MacDowell I recorded are up on YouTube (see that link below on the left), and I uploaded some more etude videos. I still have no friends, but the view count is going up (it could hardly go down), and apparently there is one subscriber to my, um, "channel". My Flip Video 60 is now pristine, ready to record whatever crazy goings-on happen at Yaddo.

And toward the end of my stay I was asked to do a presentation of my music by some of the Fellows, and I declined. Statistics: 9 MacDowell residencies, now 8 MacDowell presentations. Paul Moravec was at dinner when this was asked, and he said we would perform right now, and he launched into "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini". But perhaps, dear reader, this is too much information.

And on that note, I feel like I've said all I need to say for this week. Agh! Well, if there are any new MacDowell pictures, they are in the camera that I don't feel like taking out of the car at this moment. So let me detail what's new that we can look at and listen to.

Waves, Fanfares and Toucan on the left are the 2nd, 3rd and 4th movements of the piece I'm writing: gray links are scores, green links are MIDIs, and the yellow link is an mp3 of the MIDI ('cause on Windows it sounds way different, dude). "Mockingbird" in blue is a movie I took on the Flip Video in our backyard of a mockingbird on Sunday, moving from place to place as if it didn't want to be recorded. All the other links are as they were for the last update.

And the SAME PICTURES as last time remain two of the four non-me Residents pictured are still in residence. Those trees in the outdoor shot eventually got lots of leaves on them, but I don't know if I have a picture of that. If you'd like to see my lameass movie taken in the morning during a thunderstorm, do let me know and I will post it.

JUNE 19 SUPPLEMENT

I, meanwhile, have done a little less than two weeks at Yaddo, and I FINISHED the band piece, and I FINISHED etudes book 8. Shortly to begin a set of songs for Judy Bettina and Collage, and I am poring through Phillis Levin poetry. I am also swatting a whole BUTTLOAD of flies in my studio at Yaddo, which is the Stone Tower -- same one I had last year. On the day after my BIRTHDAY (which was last Wednesday), the flies started to amass in legion, and much weaponry (especially fly paper) is used against them. But mostly, it's gotten to to point that I work 5 minutes, look at my big big windows for flies, get up, and swat for a minute or two, get back to work, etc. Frankly, it's at times disgusting and I considered leaving at a few points, but I don't think I will. As is usual for Yaddo, there is an excellent bunch of people, and the food is quite excellent this summer --- which seems quite in contrast to the takeout meals we were getting at MacDowell. Though to be fair, I actually like delivery pizza.

So the band piece was finished on the morning of my birthday, and in the afternoon there was a small staff party, since Candace, Residence Director, shares the birthday with me. The next day I had Buffalo wings at the mall to treat myself. And on Saturday, Beff came for a visit (she had had her operation on Tuesday), we walked around Saratoga, and I thought we would go to the nice restaurant where I had Buffalo wings last year. It is no longer in operation, and is soon to be replaced by a new place called Cantina. Beff suggested that I call my band piece "Cantina", and it took until last night for me to give in. Laura Schwendinger at Yaddo remarked, "is there any Mexican in your band piece?" and I guess that salsa-like groove qualifies me to use that title -- if that is the only qualification I need. So Cantina, a one-word title, has four one-word movement titles: March, Waves, Fanfares, and Toucan. Toucan fits in Cantina,doesn't it?

Beff wanted to get me something useful for my birthday, so we did an Airport Extreme hub, Beff rewired it, on my birthday while her mouth was swollen, and voila, we have wi-fi. I can do e-mail as far away as the picnic table in the backyard, which is a little silly in the morning because it's so bright I can't see the screen anyway. In the afternoon it will be killa. And anyway, over the weekend we then went to Beff's sister's house in Cohoes, walked around the nearly-dead mall, saw Knocked Up (liked it), ate at the brewery restaurant, and back I went to Yaddo. So there, so there, so there.

Future --- got to go to Peterborough a few times to meet with Karissa, my mentee in Anna Schuleit's MacDowell Centennial project called Landlines, and will do lunch with friends there -- to be named later. And I'm done with the colony hop on July 8. It will be time to do ... to do ... do ... the parts.

While at Beff's sister's place, we did some e-mail in the back yard, and started fantasizing about getting a gazebo in the back yard, screened in, where work could happen during the summer. Upon lookup, it turns out such things are not prohibitively expensive. So that's a future fantasy, perhaps for next summer. For now, we are waiting to get that new shed -- it arrives July 10.

Upon return, I finished etudes book 8 with #80, an arpeggio etude called FIREWORKS. Shamelessly based on Debussy's piano prelude, which I prepared a lecture for but did not get to give. See links up there.

And on June 30, Alexander Lane does Carson Cooman's organ transcription of my piano piece Sara at Westminster Choir College. I have never heard this version. But it should be good, because I wrote it, and what it is, too.

And that's all I got for now. Time to brush my teeth, and what it is, too.

JULY 9. Breakfast today was rice link sausages, grapefruit, orange juice, and coffee. Lunch was a vegetable and cheese panino from Trader Joe's. Dinner was salmon burgers and salad. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES THIS LAST TWO MONTHS 42.6 and 95.1. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS My own "Winged Contraption". LARGE EXPENSES THIS LAST TWO MONTHS include renewal membership to the Grammys, $180 for two years, and some gourmet food stuff from Santa Barbara Olives online, $106 including shipping. BIRDS HEARD RECENTLY: All of them, especially as some of us started paying attention, and a lot, at Yaddo -- so that includes goldfinches, white throated sparrows, and ESPECIALLY the Phoebes that perched above my window at Yaddo and screamed. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: My first time at Yaddo, which was May-June 1991, there was a double rainbow one night and a moose that poked its nose into one Sunday morning breakfast -- in the latter case, Donna Masini went after it for whatever reason. I celebrated my 33rd birthday there with Rolling Rock (which has the number 33 on the bottle), and the composers with whom I was resident included Robert Carl, Alvin Singleton, and Tania Leon. My studio was Woodland, which I have not had since then -- this was at a time before Lyme Disease and deer ticks were all the rage. In 2007 at Yaddo, some of the principals were back -- me, Rochelle Feinstein, Marcelle Clement and Gardner McFall among them. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: Oogenblick. THINGS I HAVE GROWN WEARY OF full-body tick searches, avoiding the grass on the driveways, carrying the PowerBook to check e-mail, speakers with negligible bass response, colony hopping. RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS Buffalo wing sauce used for dipping any kind of chips, that Mexican olives and capers thing, pouch pickles. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK Tick burrowed into leg. THIS WEEK'S NUMBER BETWEEN 1 AND 10: 4. REVISIONS TO THIS SITE: This page, compositions, Home. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. DENTIST VISITS SINCE SEPTEMBER: 14. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: Sunny is cute when he balls up at night on the floor when you pet him. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST WEEK: 3. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE: My first multiple collection of piano pieces was "Melodies for Snowflake", of which there were 21. I can still play 2 of them. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: Yaddo happens at home. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 10,561. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE THIS WEEK: $2.97 at Stewart's in Saratoga Springs. OTHER INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE the shingle on the corner that was the first one to rot, the screw that holds together the pieces of a pair of scissors, the pockets in your shorts, a blonde wig that you wear on your armpit for reasons not disclosed.

Summer began yesterday.

Which is to say -- beginning at about 8 am yesterday (at which time I returned from Yaddo, meaning I had to have left by 5:12, which I did) I spent my first unstructured time since May 4 -- the date I arrived at the MacDowell Colony. So let me do a full recap of the colony hop I just did, and then we can move to the interesting part of our epistle.

Readers of this space know that I had the MacDowell studio at MacDowell, and that I wrote three movements of my wind ensemble piece there. I also videotaped the nightly Mary Worth dramatizations and put them on YouTube, and also put up a bunch of my own etude movies there. For proof, see the red links to the left. I also came back and forth several times for mowing, etc., and I also did a little bit of my part in Anna Schuleit's big "Landlines" Centennial project for MacDowell -- which included being in on some auditions for the "performing" part, wherein local schoolchildren are mentored by MacDowell artists for a performance on August 11 at the Centennial celebration at the Colony. I am mentoring 13-year-old Karissa Vincent, who is writing a piano piece about being at, leaving, and returning to MacDowell. To that end, the two of us biked the colony, she was given works by past Fellows to study, and off she went. I'll return to this subject a little later.

Then I went to Yaddo, starting June 6 and returning yesterday. I finished the wind ensemble piece on my birthday, and on Saturday of that week Beff came to the area (her sister Ann lives nearby), we looked for a place to eat, and the place I wanted to go had closed and was about to reopen as "Cantina". Which is what I called my piece. Later I finished my 80th etude, loosely based on Debussy's Fireworks prelude, and called it Fireworks. During that time there was a major infestation of houseflies in the Stone Tower studio where I was working, and I didn't realize until my penultimate day that a) there was storage space under the window seating, b) a squirrel got into it and c) died. Thus probably having something to do with the sudden nonscarcity of flies and my much swatting of them.

Meantime, people left Yaddo and new colonists arrived. The more new colonists that arrived, the more people I already knew from previous residencies. Indeed, my last dinner there I sat at a table wholly made up of people I could have sat with last summer. Now given that I had finished two big pieces there -- the wind ensemble piece and Etudes, Book 8 -- the next project, which is songs for Judy Bettina and Collage on poems of Phillis Levin came out quite slowly in comparison. Indeed, it will be maybe five songs, six at most, and I have narrowed the choices of poetry down only to ten -- not many of which would work as fast music. Plus, I'm writing for Pierrot ensemble, no percussion, and that ensemble has routinely kicked my butt. So things went rather slowly, and given that everyone was someone I already knew, the sort of insularity of the Colony Hop scene became quite evident. I love going to these things, and I love seeing what other people are doing -- but I started thinking that I'd try to wean myself from the colony circuit, especially given how much nice stuff we have at home, how few new people it seems there are to meet on these hops, and how much I like Buffalo wing sauce. We shall see in two years when next I have a sabbatical if I get back on the Colony Train, or go Cold Turkey. But that is too much detail.

There was a pool party one night at Yaddo to celebrate the summer solstice (three days late due to weather), and after it was done there had to be a walk through some damp grass to get back to our rooms. Susan S was scared of ticks, so I gave her a piggyback ride to the driveway of West House -- and woke up the next morning with a tick burrowed into my left leg. Sigh. So I started being even more vigilant about ticks, including the full body search for them every night before bed, and getting the tweezers and alcohol rub things for my studio. I even broke open a little blood blister to see if there was a tick -- and that scar became worse than the tick scar. And imagine the waiting to see if a little bullseye rash would pop up around the tick bite. So those afternoon walks for exercise -- trickled to a trickle.

Eventually, Chris F., a poet, talked me into doing a presentation of my music -- there were very few presentations, and I was one of them -- because last year I had forced him to do a second reading of his own poetry after liking the first one so much. So I up and made him read, too, on the same event. And that was the last presentation while I was there, exactly a week ago today. Mine was themed "you know what I did last summer", and it was the two bird-themed pieces I wrote in the Stone Tower LAST year at Yaddo.

Meantime, I made a few escapes for Buffalo wings at the Wilton Mall, and got some laceless sneakers at Payless because they were on special, etc. And a few drives into town with other colonists for supplies because cars were at a premium. Not much else happened, though. Now about two weeks ago I got to leave Yaddo for the day to go to MacDowell to meet with Karissa at her house in Greenfield, and I stopped at the colony for a little while. The rebuilding of the kitchen was going beyond deadline, as we all knew it would, and breakfast was now being served in Colony Hall on the ping pong table -- which horrified, a little, the two Yaddonians destined soon to be MacDowellites. Including the one for whom I took that tick. After the meeting with Karissa -- her piece is very, very good -- I stayed in Maynard overnight, while Beff was in Maine for a rehearsal of some sort. Then went back to Yaddo to slog by. And by the way, I DID finish two songs there, so something of consequence did happen.

Indeed -- last summer's output was 31 minutes. This summer's is 39 minutes so far. Not too slouchy.

So I managed to extricate myself from Yaddo like a thief in the night, thankfully not encountering any pleas to make it to one last breakfast, and got here at 8 yesterday morning. After a cursory bit of packing, I set up the PowerBook downstairs on the wi-fi, turned file sharing on, and transferred everying I need to the G5 upstairs. After a little bit of hammock time and a little more unpacking, we went and got some supplies at Shaws, and I spent a long time in the afternoon printing the score and parts to the wind ensemble piece -- 42 parts, and I did them all myself at Yaddo, and separating the parts that were originally two on a line was a BEAR. So there was that, too.....

And today was the first of three consecutive days with morning trips -- this morning I had my physical, I weigh 188, my blood pressure varied, but was nice and low the second time (122/78 or something), and my favorite part happened -- where the doctor sticks his hand up your butt and announces "your prostate is fine". So at the end, the doctor stuck his hand up my butt and announced "your prostate is fine". I reported that TMJ persists even in these summer months (apparently I clench when I write), but no solution was offered, at least not this time. I then stopped at Brandeis to make a folder of stuff I want transferred from my current office computer to the new one I'm getting this summer. And here I am. Beff had gone out to K-Mart to get new cushions for the Adirondack chairs, but they had already put away the patio stuff for the season. So she got some online. Then she got us our lunch at Trader Joe's, and what it is, too.

Tomorrow is a dentist appointment to take care of a root cavity on tooth 15 -- it is right next to the wisdom tooth that came out in February, and its extraction made finding this cavity possible. Wednesday is the Corolla appointment, and the air conditioning has to be fixed, and I'd like the car to chirp a little less in humid weather such as we have now.

And what's new at home? 7 of the 8 asparagus plants that Mindy Wagner sent me last April are doing fine, and I have weeded around them. The old metal shed got taken down by the Door and Window people, and the ground around it was leveled with gravel for a new one from Reed's Ferry sheds, which is set to arrive tomorrow. Beff got an Airport Extreme hub, and we can network with wi-fi all around the house, and in the backyard as far as the Adirondack chairs. The floor of the porch was replaced with composite material that won't stain. The attic windows are new. And we both started drooling about getting a screened-in gazebo for the backyard where one of us could set up to do our work, including wi-fi, during the warmer months. We intend to ask the shed people about one when they are here tomorrow. Friday Beff goes to NYC for an ACA board meeting. Two weeks from tomorrow I have breakfast beer with Lt. Col. Michael. And on July 30 we go to Vermont for the month of August, or for most of it. But lemme splain.

Beff and siblings have now co-inherited the summer place in Burlington, Vermont on Lake Champlain, and her sister has been doing some repairs and a-fixins (including getting a storage shed and a barbecue). Beff and I were there for the 3rd and 4th of July, and I found the place really quite cozy, especially when resting on the new chaise lounges in the "porch" area. There are now five beds to sleep a strangely large number of people, and the beach is so close, and there's a very long bike path that goes across a causeway, etc. Plus, Beff set up wi-fi there. So all is well. It is where perhaps I will write some more songs, and definitely enter them into the computer, etc. For I am the Highlander. I made a Flip Video of a walkthrough of the summer place, so you can see that in the light blue link on the left. Also see a little walkthrough of my studio at Yaddo. For it is what I wish.