Beff's semester finishes today, and she is due home after dark tonight. Tomorrow night we take Big Mike out for Chinese buffet
Download 2.79 Mb.
|
| Upcoming: more stuff. By using the internets (just a bunch of tubes, they tell me), I discovered that my band piece Cantina gets its Utah premiere on the tenth of the month on which this is the cusp. Dunno what else is up. Just a week and a half of classes left, but tons of meetings, and a literal ton (as in two thousand pounds, once the DGP is factored in) of grading following that. After which I will rest.
Today's pictures include Rasia and Fritz, the Thanksgiving dinner, a shot of Beff and Susan and Hayes hiking Teatown, me at the duck blind structure, and then Hayes, Susan and Beff in the Pleasantville Diner. Bye. DECEMBER 19. Breakfast this morning was lite sausages with cheese slices, orange juice, and coffee. Dinner last night was a Healthy Choice microwave pizza. Lunch was Buffalo wings, a small Caesar salad, and a Berkshire Steel Rail Pale Ale at the Horseshoe Pub in Hudson. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 11.7 and 61.9. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS Boogie Wonderland. LARGE EXPENSES THIS LAST TWO WEEKS Christmas presents $many, First edits plus mastering for Etudes 3, $2400, charitable donations Part 1, $1,000. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: When I was on the faculty of Columbia and actually living in New York, I gave a composition lesson to Donel Young, a former student of Judy Bettina from Stanford. A little while later, she invited me to a reception in Brooklyn for an ensemble that was to be associated with the place she was working; the ensemble was from Germany and did experimental stuff, etc. I didn't dress pretentious enough, but I went, and at one point I was telling someone that I spent weekends in a house in the country (we had just moved to Spencer, Massachusetts), which I found relaxing and a good place to write music. The ensemble's director heard that and left his conversation to come to mine and proclaimed, "You CANNOT create great art in the country! ART IS URBAN!" Don't forget the German accent when saying OOR-ban. It was my first experience of what I now know to be true: Europeans like to make pronouncements. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: See pictures below of Cammy liking to enter any new box or bag that comes into the house. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Compositions, Performances. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: tinscker, from the ancient Egyptian apparently referring to a cat in heat. So far, no pop song from the 1920s has been discovered that uses that word. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 35. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE I get a lot of e-mails asking for permission to use fonts that are not mine, but that someone has atrributed to me. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: New England weather becomes subtropical. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 12,847. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE THIS WEEK: $1.75 and $1.67 in Maynard. OBJECTS THAT EXHIBIT STRANGE BEHAVIOR WHEN MICROWAVED Whitebread sandwiches, green plums, Pez dispensers, ladybugs. My heart was going "boomba-boomba-boom boom," but it turns out I needed a translation from the Portuguese. Snippets of hockey invaded my Polish socks, so I was going to learn where the tooth fairy put my gum, when all of a sudden both flashlights remembered how to get a Nobel Prize. So without four of them (you know what I mean, right?), the Post-It to which I conceded made explosions secretly while Rome figured out its taxes. Notwithstanding, but with alacrity. Dear reader, a frighteningly long 19 days since the last update, but you know, I can splain. The timing was such that when the new update was due, I got a pile of grading that extended from earth to the sun and back, and I pretty much spent three solid days (Tues, Wed, Thurs) on it. I could probably have done it all in a day if it weren't so soul-sucking -- I maxed out after 20 minutes, and in order for my head not to explode, I had to go on and do diversions. More on those diversions on a need-to-know basis. What is a need-to-know basis, anyway? So first, in the last update I solicited ideas for a new feature to replace INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD MAKE A BETTER PRESIDENT, etc., and our double-fiver Alexa from the Home page stepped up with some suggestions. I may make it a different list each update, dunno yet. But next update's list will be different, too, so there. My last week and a half of teaching went as it should, and by that I mean ssssmokin'! After handing out three fake books in Fundamentals for suggestions for lead sheets they would realize on their Finals, I chose five out of their fifteen or so, and on Thursday stepped right up, did the final, and uploaded it to the class's webspace. The last day of class was reserved for some funness -- for instance, telling the story of Whitney Houston's "I'm Your Baby Tonight" and how it's in compound time in America and simple time in Europe (you hadda be there), and playing the Sugar Plum Fairies music simultaneously on piano and toy piano -- and when I dismissed the Fundamentals class, there was applause. Ah yes, what suckuppage. And speaking of suckuppage, I have been continuing the tradition of faculty giving food to the students for the last class -- in this case 60 doughnuts to Fundamentals and 3 large pizzas to Theory 2. It was nice, for once, to talk about dominant prolongations with a mouth full of pizza. Typically, by the way, I also got 3 finals handed to me on the last day of Fundamentals. And for THAT weekend, Beff had to stay in Maine for all of her various important things related to the end of school. So I found myself visiting Facebook much too often (you may recall, dear reader, that I said it was addictive), and I up and withdrew from Facebook. Partly because I got tired of being invited to so damn many events, mostly because it was too addictive. Now it's time to figure out other addictive things to stop doing -- like making snow angels, for instance, or eating tires. So for that blank half-week after classes finished, I actually had to go into the 'Deis six consecutive days. Though on Thursday, there was a pouring rainstorm that was slowly turning to freezing rain, and I decided to stay at home rather than go in for a meeting. So there. And that freezing rain did happen, but mostly overnight, and we were brushed by the very ippy-tippy edge of the historic ice storm that hit interior New England. So lemme splain. It had been a hard, driving rain nearly all day Thursday and the freezing rain that did happen didn't accumulate on roads and sidewalks, but when I woke up around 1 am, I noticed a glaze on various trees that I could see in the light of the streetlight. I thought little of it, since not much was forecast. But at precisely 3 am, I was awakened by the sound of someone trying to break into the house. I turned some lights on and donned my bathrobe and went downstairs and saw that there was a local cat on the back porch. Thought I, "this cat sure makes a lot of noise." Then I heard another big sound out toward the gazebo, and I looked out the half-bath window and saw a bunch of pine branches at ground level, pointing straight up. I turned on the outdoor lights and went outside to look. It was still raining hard, but I heard a jangly sound in our stand of pine trees and another cracking sound, and witnessed the fall of another large branch by about thirty feet. One big one that was leaning against the gazebo I managed to move to the side, and at that point I noticed that there were about twenty or thirty branches of size that had fallen, some of which simply broke the fence. So, tired of being wet, I went back inside, and noticed that the sump pump in the basement -- which goes on about once every third year -- was working, and I was to hear it going on about 30 times that day. The power never went off, though, and it was far, far more devastating as little as ten miles to our west -- where some people STILL have no power. After the sun came up and though it was still raining, I obsessed into dragging some of the downed branches -- they were all on the east or north side of the trees -- to a discard area in the far back yard. After doing that with many very heavy and ice-coated branches for about a half hour, I decided I'd had enough. I called Assabet Tree Service, who took care of our fallen ailanthus from three years ago, and of course by saying "it's not an emergency" I guaranteed they wouldn't call back until the following Wednesday. So ... I stopped moving branches and decided to let sleeping branches lie. Meanwhile, Beff came home on Friday. I had gone into Brandeis to do the funding panel for the Festival of the Arts (as I always do in December), and for the first two miles there were occasional clumps of Verizon trucks tending to places that had also had fallen pine limbs. But by about a half mile past the Sudbury line, there was no evidence of an ice storm. I did the panel and got back, and we had salmon for dinner, along with asparagus and broccoli. So there. Saturday was the day to get the Christmas tree, so after some various errands that included getting a new magic brush for cat hair, we got our $35 tree from the guys in the Shaws parking lot, and as usual it fit nice and snugly in the Subaru, and it was pretty easy to get into the house and stand it up. Last year the tree we had gotten was bulky enough to snap the tree holder, and while I stood there holding the tree Beff had to go to Aubuchon hardware and get a much sturdier model (the one we currently have will withstand a nuclear attack, I am sure), and of course it was a breeze. Last year the cats started drinking the water in the tree stand and, of course, subsequently doing that not very cute kitty-vomit thing, so this year, d'oh! -- the stand is covered up by a couple of beach towels. And the cats have been remarkably uncurious about the tree. So Beff decorated most of the tree, and when we discovered one of our strings of lights wasn't working, out I went and got the most robust, and expensive, set of 50 lights that was available at Ace. How 'bout that? Saturday night, after an early chicken dinner, there was a grad composer concert at Brandeis, which was spantorific. Indeed, there was so much happy music on it, and pulsed music, that you would hardly have thought we were on the oppressively intellectual East Coast. It was certainly the best such concert since the New York New Music one in 2005, and there wasn't a clinker -- not even one. Both Beff and I felt very tingly about that concert -- or perhaps my feet just fell asleep. One interesting development was that as the last piece (Jeremy Spindler's) started, I got dripped on, and I searched in vain for the source of the water -- but it definitely came from above the stand of stage lights above us. What a revoltin' development! On Sunday Beff left around 2, and then there was the UNDERGRAD composer concert to follow. This one was mostly short pieces, but there were a few substantial ones, and at least two were real standouts. And then -- time passed, and eventually it was Monday. And on Monday at 10 was Max's PhD orals. After talking an hour and a half about Lachenmann, it was Mozart time. And then I sat and waited for final papers and takehome exams that were due at 1, and left at 1:15. It would eventually be the case that one paper and one final takehome exam came in after that time, and Cheryl had to fax me them (I love the word sequence "fax me them" -- watch this: Fax me them! It could be a metal band!). I went from school to BJ's so I could get firelogs and perhaps be inspired to get Christmas presents -- I wasn't. But I did also get myself a headset/microphone for hands-free cellphoning. Because, because ... because, dear reader, I am worth it. Also, for some reason I got a Burger King itch (hmm, taken literally that would be weird) so I went to the one near BJs, and as always, when I was finished I wondered why I had a Burger King itch. Perhaps I was being rash (rim shot). And, and ... the temperature was in the mid 60s on Monday, so frolicsome was I when I got home. Some frolic I did. I was sufficiently frolicsome to put off the grading until Tuesday. And then, and then... on Tuesday to keep my head from exploding, I took occasional respites to go outside and drag all the fallen limbs from the yard to the space just beyond the stand of pines, and then I raked up the smaller bits and carted them to the leaf discard area --- that amounted to four wheelbarrow loads of smaller stuff. The bigger stuff -- well, it's covered in snow for the time being, and Assabet Tree finally did call back. When the snow is gone, be it later this month, or March or April, they'll come by and take care of it plus about five years worth of trimmed and fallen stuff that's in the pile by the leaves. Meanwhile ... grading. Grading. Grading. Just the act of copying the scores into the Fundamentals grade sheet after they had been graded took nearly an hour. The calculating of final grades --- forever. And there was still a bunch of late Theory 2 homework, and final papers... Well, I finished this morning at 7:30, and I am very glad, dear reader, very glad. In the meantime, the pile of Guggenheim letters arrived and, thankfully, this year for the first time these can be submitted online. So the typage for that was somewhat time-consuming. Plus job letters and other various recommendations. During certain weeks -- like two weeks ago -- the time spent simply telling other people how wonderful other people are exceeds the time spent doing what I am actually paid to do. One thing of note -- I actually did give ONE person "my highest recommendation". I've done that four times since 1990, so it's nice and rare. Texas style. On the plus side. The pickles from PickleLicious are great, and so are their hot olives. I immediately ordered four more gallons of them -- two of full sour, two of spicy. Beff got me a five-pepper-spiced thing of olives which are being saved for later. And I did most of my Christmas shopping on line. I like it when that happens. As to Christmas itself, we expect seven at dinner, only two of them without the name "Wiemann". I would be one of them. Beff's sister Ann is making roast beast (which we will ask the Grinch to carve, possibly into the shape of an elephant) and multicolor potatoes (I think my job is to go out and get the potato crayons, not sure). Whoa, I just ran through the list of pieces I have to write in my head, and it's substantial. Though I'm off the colony hop for at least another year, so that means they'll be written right here. The first task is incidental music for Hecuba, and that involves an overture, some stuff to be sung by the onstage Chorus, some "dastardly stuff happening offstage" music, and a whole bunch of short sound effects for the sound designer to go wild with. Sound designer for Bacchae: J. Sound designer for Hecuba: J. But a different J. The sound design program in the theater department is taking, like, FOREVER to get through the alphabet. Though the FIRST J was never seen by me in the Slosberg building nailing piano keys to a piano. Oh, and the DVD with full resolution pictures (the file size of each pic averages 30 megabytes, zounds!) from Civitella arrived. I sent some of the shots to BMOP/Sound for their designer to consider for the Winged Contraption CD. The others, I didn't. And incidentally, I have not shaved since the last class I taught. I am officially scruffified. So that's how it goes. Next update will have the year-end highlight pictures, oh wow. And a foot of snow or more is forecast to start falling here about an hour after this is posted. For now, I leave you, dear reader, with nine pictures starting with four of the backyard showing the nighttime picture at 3 am, the first light picture, a first light picture from a different angle, and yesterday after the light snowfall and branches moved aside -- note damage to fence. Next a bit of ice encountered on our Sunday walk, Cammy being all cute in a Shaw's bag, the Christmas tree, Cammy jumping out of a box with the no-flash setting on the camera, and me at Civitella working on the bebop movement of Stolen Moments. Bye. DECEMBER 29. Breakfast this morning was bagels with reduced fat cream cheese, orange juice, and coffee. Dinner last night was leftover prime rib, Polish fries, and salad. Lunch was a train of snacky things including pickles, olives, cheese, cherries, and green seedless grapes. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 7.0 and 60.4. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS The overture of The Messiah: A Soulful Celebration. LARGE EXPENSES THIS LAST TWO WEEKS Charitable donations part 2, $1,000, more Christmas presents, Whole Foods and Trader Joes, $$$, two new Espresso coffee makers, Italian style, $32. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: Our wedding (August 11, 1989) was at the Divinity School of Harvard with an outdoor reception planned and an indoor classroom as the backup in case of inclement weather. Naturally, there was inclement weather. Beff's father volunteered to get champagne for the reception in New Hampshire on his way in, and we asked a friend who worked in a liquor store how much was appropriate: he said two cases. Naturally, Beff's dad thought that was an exaggeration, and brought one and a half cases. And naturally, we ran out. So there were emergency beer runs by friends, who brought back cases of Sam Adams, which is why in all the toast pictures from the wedding, Beff and I are holding beer bottles. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: During the warm portions of the seesaw weather we've had, they like to sit in any open window and look out. We call it "kitty TV". UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Bio, Home, Lexicon. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: flurgeola, a short-lived kind of method for keeping nose hair from growing too fast last seen in the 1890s. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 14. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE I own two bright red t-shirts -- one from the Magic Hat brewery, one from the 2008 Brandeis Festival of the Arts. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: Every food, including fat, is lowfat. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 12,865. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE THIS WEEK: $1.63 in Maynard. THINGS THAT WOULD LOOK REALLY FUNNY POLKA-DOTTED The White House, the front page of the Boston Globe, the Amtrak Acela, the head of a pin, the moon on the crest of the newfallen snow, an entire organ recital. Shoe polish. They said it, and I thought of head cheese. So before any of the dogs could object, three of us went in four different directions at once and shaved the pebbles down to a clear, smooth, polish. As the starfish was thinking, "could they have found the best price without first asking for silence?" Twice, apparently. So when the smoke cleared, my head twisted into a pancreas, where the wild things once held flashlights with malice towards none. Tropes are not the same thing as beestings. A mere ten days since the last update, and that must mean vacation or something. The real news here has been the wild, wacky weather of late, which follows a year's worth of wild, wacky weather -- which became apparent as I scrolled through my 2008 pictures for the year-end fest below. We had a dusting of snow a few days after being on the cusp of the wild ice storm, and soon that was followed by a parade of very big snowstorms -- well, two. Each dropped about a foot, and it made us glad that we have plow guys taking care of the big snowfalls. Although some of the pavement of our driveway and some of the ground near the top of the driveway aren't exactly glad (this would be anthropomorphization, for those of you playing along at home, unless it isn't). So of course there was a white Christmas to be had here, as well as a few mornings that got *really* cold. Colder still in Maine, as Beff called to let me know the temperature there was 1. So after the grading fest was over was the actual grading fest, as in, calculating final grades for the term. This took much longer than it should have, for several reasons. One of them was the way Brandeis IT has set up the online grading interface. Before grades are officially posted, you must click on the "Approve Posting of Entered Grades" button, after which you click on "Save". The Fundamentals class was so large that for the first time the Approve portion of our program was not finished before I clicked on Save. Little did I know that, since I'd not taught a class anywhere near as large before. So when I got the form e-mail from the registrar on the 24th "Grades for MUS 5A FUND OF MUSIC are not entered", I had a nice back-and-forth. Well, "nice" is not the appropriate word here, more like "naughty". I reentered the grades -- of which there were a lot -- twice before the registrar could see them. Then we laughed it off, and went off in several directions at once (I believe that's a line from the "Bald Soprano", by the way, and I do realize that I overuse it). Meanwhile, Beff's reentry into Maynardhood was in the brief little window between bigass snowstorms -- the storms were Friday and Sunday before Christmas, so gentle reader, you do the figuring as to which day she drove back. And immediately the more complex dinner-making started. Why, there's been snacky chicken, salmon, swordfish puttanesca, and all. And then came the holiday blitz. Which went as follows. Beff's sister Ann came with food for Christmas dinner on the day before Christmas. This was the day the warmthness started, in contrast to the ugly snowy weather of many feet of snow, but this being New England, it started in the early morning as freezing rain. Which made it real fun getting the newspaper from the sidewalk in the morning. It was all rain and up into the 50s by the afternoon, and we took a commuter rail into Cambridge for Christmas eve fun with the siblage -- the 25-minute walk from Porter Square station to Dana street took 40 minutes with the piles of snow of unusual size around which to navigate, but we made it. Beff's bro' Matt now rents the apartment I subletted in 1999-2000, and there were meatballs, horrendously high-fat things, and beer. Then we walked to the place nearby that Beff's bro' Jim bought for dinner, which was cooked by his s.o. Annie. And it was very good. We got a ride to the commuter rail to return, and that's just what we did. On Christmas day, there was opening of presents, and here's how it came out. Ann got all of the siblings embossing things with two plates: "R", and "from the library of". I thought they were very cool, and I started embossing everything I could get my hands on, except the cats. Beff got a classic iPod, two pairs of girly shoes, two pairs of Hotfingers gloves, and some iTunes gift cards from me. Beff got me an HP printer scanner fax thing that I craved simply because it has an autofeed for scanning multipage documents (something I'll be using a lot especially this spring), and an electronic yodeling pickle. In both cases, it was the first time I'd ever had either. The gang of brothers and s.o. arrived midafternoon for dinner and additional gift opening, and Ann cooked prime rib, potatoes, and lots of other things that have vowels in them. During cleanup, the hot water ran out. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The day after Christmas Beff and Ann spent shopping in Cambridge, especially at Crate & Barrel, which is going out of business in Harvard Square. I, meanwhile, started writing music for the Brandeis production of Hecuba (in three days, I wrote the overture). The second day after Christmas saw another huge temperature run-up and, briefly, pouring rain. Ann was on her way back to Albany and was interested in shopping at some places she doesn't have -- Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. So we convoyed to the two of them right next to each other in Framingham on Route 9, arriving just in time for the pouringness of the rain. And we spent $147 at Whole Paycheck. But it was worth it. From there it was a quick drive to the Mass Pike for Ann, and a less quick drive for us to return home. Yesterday was warmer still -- 60 here, 63 in Boston -- and it was fun taking a long walk with Beff in a light jacket and giving bones to the purple-tongued dog who lives on Summerhill Road. A very significant portion of the two feet of snow is now gone, and I reveled yesterday in taking out some shrubs in the stand-of-pines area. Since the branches that dropped in the ice storm took out the fence there, a little of that area is going to be reclaimed as backyard. Not that there is anything wrong with that. And of course, while I was doing that I served as kitty TV. Download 2.79 Mb. Share with your friends:
|