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

Groundhog Day came and went, and it was sunny. Bummer -- six more weeks of winter. Hence this three slopful inches from overnight. Beff still has to go out and do the plow schmutz in the driveway before we go out to Trader Joes, etc. and Staples for staples. We need more coffee beans, for instance, and we have to spend our Staples rewards certificate. But not until the driveway schmutz is dealt with.

Meanwhile, the cheap Black & Decker coffee grinder clogged yet again this morning -- it does so more frequently than weekly now -- so we ordered an actual high quality burr grinder on amazon this morning. Because I am tired of yelling at inanimate objects, especially those that carry the Black and Decker logo. Later, Beff accepted a call from the Bangor Daily News, who is covering her premiere in Bangor this weekend -- WINNIFRED GOES OUTSIDE is to be done by the all-woman jazz band The Edith Jones Project. I will be left at home with all the Jets and Sharks I can eat.

Danny K was fired on last night's The Apprentice. Now my Thursday nights are free again.

Don't look up "Schozzage" on Google. "Schnozzage" is the correct word, and I love how it asks if I really meant "schnozzle."

Mmm. sure could use some good limeade right about now.

Amy D sent another picture of Ranjith, this time looking at this page in last week's manifestation. So I took a picture of Sunny looking at that. Amy's family in New Hampshire is apparently going to start playing the game, too. Martler thought the cats thing was funny, too, so I posed his Oxford brochure with Sunny in his little cat bed. I'm sure you will agree that it is knee-slapping hilarious.

As to the pictures: Sunny and Martler; Sunny viewing Ranjith viewing my web page; one of the unsuccessful poses with Cammy from last week; generic cute kitty picture; the icicles dropped from the roof onto the other roof outside the computer room; the view out the front door this morning; Beff trying to get Cammy in from his hiding place (she is shaking a bag of kitty treats); and a shot of the Assabet River from December 23 that was still on the card in the camera.

FEBRUARY 11. Breakfast this morning was orange juice and coffee. Dinner was 95% lean hamburgers with nonfat cheese, pickles and tomatoes, and Polish fries. Lunch had been hot and sour soup and, later, at the Stein, a basket of signature fries (which came out looking more like Woodstock's signature -- the bird in Peanuts). TEMPERATURE EXTREMES THE LAST WEEK 21.0 and 53.1. LARGE EXPENSES this last week include a new front-load washer, $720 plus tax, and a new CD deck, $129 plus tax. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS Various licks from "A Gliss is Just a Gliss" and comparable licks that might eventually fit into a left-hand etude. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: the one time during our relationship -- pre-marriage -- that Beff cooked for me in a substantial way was Cornish game hens, for Thanksgiving, at Beff's apartment in Portland, Oregon -- this was the year she taught at Reed College and I taught at Stanford. Alas, I developed a stomach virus necessitating much time riding the porcelain pony soon after, and the temptation was to relate the cooking to the virus. There was no relationship between the two. But I sure do remember all those pony rides, which commenced every half hour on the hour and half hour. RECOMMENDATION/ PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS WEEK 0. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK details about the distinctions between front-load and top-load washers, as researched on the internet by Beff. THIS WEEK'S COSMIC QUANDRY: why is there no "th" in "Nor'easter"? RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS: campari tomatoes, jalapeno-stuffed olives. NUMBER OF FRAGILE THINGS DESTROYED BY THE CATS IN THE PREVIOUS WEEK none. FULL NIGHTS OF SLEEP THE LAST WEEK: 0. INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE a ham sandwich, two ham sandwiches, three ham sandwiches, four ham sandwiches. Davy's creativity in this regard is at a low ebb this morning.

This is the week that made me really, really, really, really want to stop being the Chair. Enough details about Brandeis. I was asked for materials for one of my possible antidotes to this friggin place, and sent them out on Saturday.

They That Make -- maybe I should start calling them Then What Make -- screwed up pretty badly on the Nor'easter that just passed through yesterday (and which is still having its way in eastern Maine). As usual, the forecast four days before the storm was for snow showers or mixed precip on Thursday, and two days before, lots of dire predictions and big, big letters on TV weather maps called for another big one. As of Wednesday morning all the news channels put our part of the state in a 12-18 inch snowfall or even a 15-18 inch snowfall band, and it was to be heavy, wet stuff that makes hands blister and grown men cry. On Wednesday morning in the South Street Market, the register guy was saying "they say a foot and a half to two feet -- that means a dustin'." Register guy did better than Them What Make. So when we got up yesterday morning, rather early, it was raining. The red-faced Them What Make TV people said "the rain-snow line is 60 miles north of where we thought it would be." Meaning the storm went farther north, and is still a bad storm in Bangor, with upwards of two feet (3-6 inches originally predicted). Here, it rained until 3:30 and changed to light snow, ending up with about two inches on a crusty surface. It was easy enough for me to shovel in my bathrobe (but not WITH my bathrobe). And I was even able to shovel a path from the back walk to the bulkhead. Reasons to follow.

My teaching this week was full of joy and passion, as it always is. Well, at least my part of it was. Even the drive to NEC was fun, the Buffalow wings I had for lunch at a nearby bar was fun, and the lessons there were fun, too. I walked to the Pru to get more CryBaby Tears, which I awarded to Nathan and Mary (the NEC students), and even had a cellphone conversation with someone in California.

During the other times, Beff noticed that more and more of our clothes were getting greenish-blackish spots on them from being washed, and that can never be good -- this has been happening since December, and we tried doing a few blank loads with bleach to make it stop, and it worked for a while. So Beff looked it up on the internet, and it seems that our old washer -- which came with the house when we bought it -- is probably leaking oil. And oil leak is mucho expensive to fix -- not to mention leaking oil means eventually maybe washer explode or overheat or something. So Beff then researched washers on the internet, and we settled on a front loader Whirlpool from Best Buy at 10% off -- we actually drove to BestBuy twice because we had gotten 10% off coupons in the mail, which are only valid the 11th to 14th, and we were told the coupons would be good -- we looked at them, and they would have been only 10% off regular price, which was the sale price anyway. So yesterday, at which time we were supposed to have a foot of snow on the ground, we drove in the rain to BestBuy to order a washer, and I got a new CD deck that specifically says it reads CD-Rs and CD-RWs, since the current one is both old and is unable to read some of the CD-Rs that people are sending me. Monday the washer is scheduled to be delivered, and Wednesday the CD player is scheduled. Oh joy.

So this morning after shoveling most of the driveway and front walk in my bathrobe (not WITH my bathrobe), I shoveled a path from the back walk to the bulkhead leading into the basement -- so that the washer can be delivered Monday. I am proud enough of this new path to include a picture of it below. The cats seem to like it, too.

And after my teaching on Tuesday, Beff and I took separate cars to Home Depot to do something about blocking off the crawlspace under the porch where Cammy places himself when the cats go out -- getting him in on Sunday involved me actually crawling into that space and fetching him. So we got six concrete blocks -- I never knew such things were only a buck and a quarter -- and two pieces of plywood that are about the size of the apertures being blocked. We then installed them as best we could: plywood in front, blocks leaning against them. The cats now understand that they can't go there, and come back in more quickly. In the summer, they may be delighted when we unblock the holes.

Upcoming things include Beff's drive to Maine today for her premiere of "Winifred Goes Outside" with the Edith Jones Project in Bangor; she will get to use her new EZ-Pass for the first time, as the Maine Turnpike has converted to that system. Beff is probably excited (and me moreso) that when she drives to Ragdale (north of Chicago), she'll get all the way through Ohio without once stopping at a tollbooth to hand over cash. Cool. Beff gets back tomorrow, with voluminous tales of the two feet of new snow in Bangor (she already confirmed that the concert, unlike most stuff in Bangor, was not cancelled). On Sunday I drive to NYC and back in the same day, in the middle of which I will hear a dress rehearsal of SESSO E VIOLENZA and then the actual performance. It's Merkin Hall, by the way, in case you are in New York on Sunday. Monday marks the date of the delivery of the washer (we also paid an extra $15 to haul the old one away). Tuesday is a possible day for the installation of a new lock assembly on the front door. Wednesday is when the CD player is due. Thursday is faculty meeting day. And Friday is the day we go into Boston to hear Yehudi's new piano concerto with the BSO, at 1:30. Life is complex.

Last Friday Geoffy took us out for seafood, and on Saturday we ordered Domino's pizza to be delivered. Then on Sunday we went briefly to Ken and Hillary's in Cambridge for the pre-Super Bowl party, and we left just as the game was starting. The hors d'oeuvres were very good, as was the salsa. And the snow STILL not removed from many of the Cambridge side streets was nothing less than breathtaking. Which is why it was good that it got into the 50s on four straight days this week. Yes! The bad news, of course, is that Geoffy is now not coming to the area again until May.

In the meantime, I got a suggestion that I should write a piano etude for the left-hand, and I've collected some licks in my brain (which sounds worse if you imagine that literally) to play with, which is what prompted the GLISS IS JUST A GLISS going through my brain (which sounds worse if you imagine that literally). I may try to start one today, I might not. In any case, I am trying to move bedtime and waking time later so that Sunday won't be a problem when I drive back starting around 10 from New York. Eww.

And the new expensive burr coffee grinder arrived. It is nice and quiet, and we have settled on "just a little less than 6" as the correct number to dial for a full French press of coffee. So there, smarty pants.

Today's pictures include two pics taken from the back porch early this morning, proving that we didn't get quite 15-18 inches of snow; Beff snapped me starting the path for the new washer, and I got her (and Cammy) on the porch after I finished the path; the next 3 prove how the cats liked the box the coffee grinder came in (Sunny likes to watch) and what the coffee grinder actually looks like (with pickles and tomatoes ready to become dinner), and finally my washer path (and Cammy). I rule.

FEBRUARY 25. Breakfast this morning was coffee, some strawberries, and echinacea tea. Dinner last night was a big square frozen pizza that had been cooked. Lunch was, I guess, some bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches in Jonathan Wolfsohn's office in Manhattan (I say "I guess" because it happened at 10 am). Breakfast YESTERDAY was nifty pastries at the Hungarian pastry shop on Amsterdam and 111th. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES THE LAST WEEK 8.6 and 37.8. LARGE EXPENSES this last week are parking in NYC, $30, dinner at the Abbey Pub with Marilyn $98 including tip, a temperature and humidity gauge with remote station, $53 (we thought Marilyn's was cool), and the cost of having our taxes done (three figures, barely). MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS Le Sacre du Printemps. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: We had a "way back" yard when I was growing up (the way the plot got divided, there was a back yard, a whole mess of gardens with raspberries, blueberries, failed corn, etc., followed by another strip of yard ending at a big tree and a place where others had previously dumped stuff and buried it), and we kids used it for little football games and little wiffleball and baseball games -- it was just long enough so occasionally a kid could hit a "home run" if it went beyond the apple and pear trees. I was known as having a hard head (still am), and once while I was saying something, another kid threw me the ball, I didn't see it, and it hit me square in the forehead. I paused a moment and finished my sentence. We laughed so hard we drooled. RECOMMENDATION/ PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS WEEK 1. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK The Gates are vast, and they help you find the most efficient ways to cut across Central Park. THIS WEEK'S COSMIC QUANDRY: Am I still cool? RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS: Mongolian Fire Oil (can't find it), Amaro (can't find it), pears, jalapeno stuffed olives, Bubbies Pickles. NUMBER OF FRAGILE THINGS DESTROYED BY THE CATS IN THE PREVIOUS WEEK none. FULL NIGHTS OF SLEEP THE LAST WEEK: 0. INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE the unbearable lightness of being, what the cat dragged in, that which was spewed, a full head of steam.

As ye almost eleven know, I take one more pill now than I used to (four prescription, five vitamin/garlic/poopy pills). By tomorrow the full effect is supposed to kick in. I'll letcha know. The doctor -- beside saying he would have practically ordered me to resign the Chairmanship had I not already -- said people close to me would notice a difference, no one else would. So I've been keeping everyone at arm's length except Beff. And Valerie Guy, but that's for later. So far, not much difference except the vivid dreams one of the almost eleven reported in his/her experience with the same pill have happened on occasion. I dreamed music that was supposed to soothe lions in case you meet them while hiking in the woods -- the tune goes G up a major sixth to E and down a halfstep to E-flat while the chords go C major to E-flat7 in third inversion; then it sequences down by half step. I will use this progression, probably ironically, in a future piece. For the "Lions" movement (followed by the Tigers and Bears movements -- hey, Columbia, Princeton and Brown!).

But enough about me. Here's more about me. Brandeis is on vacation this week, so I had the time to finish the left hand etude (which I reported last week is called "Ain't Got No Right" -- gotta pat myself on the back for that one at every opportunity), and then did the busy work of entering it in my List of Comps on this site, and on the List I use for my CV on the computer. And then I sent copies to the usual suspects (I always get a thorough analysis from Geoffy, which is why I let him drink my water when he stays here). Corey Hamm, for whom it was written, says he will premiere it in Minnesota on May 6. I presume he'll take it on the road (sulla via) from there. In the meantime, Geoff reported that his premiere of Zeccatella in Pittsboigh went well, and he reported a distinguished crowd to witness his recital. I look forward to getting the recording, since my damn computer plays it the same way every time. Actually, that's not quite true -- Finale 2004 on Windows, if I use one of the "human playback" settings chokes on the piece, and randomly distributes some of the notes in clusters of events on occasion. The excitement of live performance (assuming the players are not competent) is back!

On Saturday Beff and I drove into Groton, which is one of our recreational things to do when it's sunny and we're a little stir crazy. Groton has a Main Street of all white clapboard houses (must be a town ordinance) and three (now four) places we like to frequent. There's a nice health food store that sells Bubbies Pickles -- I got three jars -- where I also got some garlic pills. Sometimes we get some staples at Donelan's Market (not this time). We always get something unusual and exotic at the beer and wine store there. And we discovered a cafe restaurant where we got some lovely healthy sandwiches -- Beff got the Bagel with capers and other stuff, I think I got a chicken pesto roll-up (which dripped a lot, in a nice way). Predictably, this was the sort of place that plays the same sort of Gipsy Kings stuff on the stereo that similar such places tend to play.

Which leads me to an incredibly boring sidebar. When I was the Djerassi Foundation in March 1991 was when the Gipsy Kings were first making it big (sort of on a parallel with pesto, Starbucks, and stoneground bread, all of which seem to have been made for each other). One of the writers there was infatuated with them (as it was not yet possible to go to a lot of Starbucks or get pesto or stoneground bread), and he played them at dinner time every night. Strangely, hearing Gipsy Kings at the stoneground places doesn't bring back those Djerassi dinners -- but it does occasionally make me dizzy from the number of times I feel it necessary to roll my eyes.

Sidebar over. We got Belgian style wheat beers in Groton, which were good. Then we drove home.

I think we had more snow in the middle of the week, which was a pain -- the storm on Monday and Tuesday lingered such that I had to shovel two inches Monday and three inches Tuesday morning, all of that while Beff was in Maine doing admissions (her colleagues sent sage advice: "don't let the bastards get you down" -- I think "astar" actually was replaced with five asterisks in the way Beff said it). For the sake of completeness, we got three inches overnight, which is nearly all shoveled now (Beff is outside doing the bottom part of the driveway as I type this).

Midweek was our big trip to New York. I, of course, did all the driving, and Beff did all the iPod programming (Alanis, Prince ...). The purpose of the trip was to see Jonathan, our accountant, in Manhattan on Thursday morning. But there were side benefits. I had already reserved Marilyn Nonken's couch for us for Wednesday night, and on Wednesday afternoon, Augustus Arnone came to be coached by Marilyn on his upcoming recital -- which includes a bunch of Davytudes. So we met for the first time, and I got to play composer guy (which is what I am in real life, anyway) while he played through Zipper Tango, Cell Division, and Eight Misbehavin'. Of course, I thought it was marvelous -- hey, I was hearing Cell Division for the first time, and I was like, how soon can we take this on the road? But to be composer guy, I had a few very basic things to say, but then I was able to sit back while Marilyn got real particular with piano playing technique kind of stuff that this trombone boy never thinks about. Which voice do you emphasize when playing slow octaves? How the heck should I know? How do you describe how grace notes should be played in a tango? Dunno. How do you de-emphasize a line that's emphasized in the writing anyway? Uh.... But it was all cool, and afterwards Beff and I and Marilyn went to the Abbey Pub, as is our want, for dinner. Then we walked back and slept on the couch. While Marilyn and I were getting on Augustus's case, Beff went to the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Before that, we had eaten Chinese at Pearl's on Amsterdam and 99th (good), and walked across Central Park at 96th, encountering a portion of the big Christo thing. I got to see them in two separate paths, as we walked all the way to Park Ave and I walked back a little farther north -- and in the right light they are impressive, but they also look like construction signs. The best thing about them was that they provided a visual clue as to which was going to be the most direct path to the other side of the park.

Thursday morning we went first to M2M, a market on Broadway, to look for Mongolian Fire Oil -- I haven't been able to find it around here -- and we got two containers of something that looks similar. Hey, I like it in my stir fry and hot & sour soup, okay? Then we did the Hungarian Pastry shop -- it's a miracle it's still there -- and I retrieved messages and found that Jonathan's office wanted us to show up a half hour early. So we did -- his Manhattan office is on Seventh Ave and 29th -- he ordered out for us, and we bore down on the taxes. Good old Stoeger Prize puts a major wrench in the works, of course -- instead of giant refunds, the first run through the taxes had us owing Uncle Sam and Maine, getting a little back from Massachusetts. More massaging must be done with the numbers. He actually told us to call him back around midnight on Monday for an update. Vot a guy.

After finishing our appointment, we took the subway up to 66th to -- get this -- look at our own composer bins at Tower Records (the fact that we took pictures that you can see below makes us even dweebier -- "like Googling yourself", as someone put it). Beff was also looking for the new Adam Guettel on CD, which seems not yet to exist. Then we called up our friend Valerie Guy at the Chamber Music Society, she happened to be in her office, and we hung out for a while, having a great time. After that, we zipped up to 112th Street to get the car, and made the drive home. There was some urgency, as everyone in New York was talking about a six inch snowstorm on the way that would begin in the afternoon -- we made it! We spoke to Sooooozie from the car, but of course at the Connecticut line we got cut off by lack of service.

When we got home there was the business of taking care of the cats -- as before, we'd left two kinds of dry food out and one bowl was empty while the other was not touched -- and getting sushi for the next day's lunch. Suddenly we brought up the cool humidity/temp thing that Marilyn had for her piano (she got it at Brookstone), so I hopped over to Radio Shack. All they had with the humidity thing was the deluxe model with a remote one for outside, so we set it up with a station by the Klavinova and the main station on the piano downstairs. I resisted the urge to put a picture below. Our humidity is 34 percent downstairs, 31 percent upstairs. At the moment.

Which reminds me. Today our piano gets its yearly tuning. Hopefully Steve Chrzan (the tuner) will be able to get the keys to stop sticking so I don't have to punch the piano any more. My knuckle actually still hurts, two weeks later. Hence the pills.

And then we got home. Other things to report this week are writing the program notes for the Rivers School festival upcoming, finding out that someone in the midwest is writing about the Rakowski etudes for her thesis, and finding out from Marilyn that Brad Gowen -- who wrote about Trillage in Piano & Keyboard Magazine in 1996, prompting 120 copies to be sold -- digs my etudes but thought there were like eight of them. Must follow up. Yaddo put streaming audio of etude #41 on their site, see link above. Other stuff chugs along.

This week's pictures begin with four of The Gates as Davy experienced them. Followed by our bins at Tower Records, the temp and precipitation of the last month as reported in The Globe today (the fifth biggest snowstorm of all time is already pushed out), and a cup that Beff got at the Cooper-Hewitt museum (you can probably not tell in the picture that it is a ceramic cup, but it is).

MARCH 4. Breakfast this morning was coffee, some blueberries, some blackberries, and a Hebrew National Pickle in a Pouch (Beff out of town, dontcha know). Dinner was a frozen pizza heated up. Lunch was a chicken pesto sammich from Shapiro with some leftover Fruit2O that was in the Chairman's Fridge. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES THE LAST WEEK 6.6 and 37.9 (spring, where the hell are you?). LARGE EXPENSES this last week is the other half of the expense for two new storm windows and the new lock/knob combo on the front door. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS Whatever that thing is called that Pee-Wee dances to in big shoes in Pee Wee's Big Adventure. Tequila? POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: Our eighth grade basketball coach, Mr. Pequignot ("Mr. P" to the kids) had a college roommate named John Rakowski, whom they called "Rake." Guess what his nickname for me was? When I got into high school he was hired at the high school and became my freshman basketball coach. Guess what my nickname was then? Guess how quickly I quit basketball and did drama instead? Incidentally, somebody from my own team stole my special $13 green sneakers from my locker. RECOMMENDATION/ PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS WEEK 7(!). DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK Lots of people like to use the term "black box." THIS WEEK'S COSMIC QUANDRY: Am I still cool? RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS: jalapeno stuffed olives, sugar free popsicles (even in this cold weather), limeade. NUMBER OF FRAGILE THINGS DESTROYED BY THE CATS IN THE PREVIOUS WEEK none. FULL NIGHTS OF SLEEP THE LAST WEEK: 3. INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE correctness, aptitude, discarded copies of Yertle the Turtle, a dead bug.