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

While Beff was in Maine -- she left Monday afternoon, got back Wednesday night -- my teaching at Brandeis was exemplary, as was my interviewing of prospective students (I resisted the urge to snarl, pull out phlegm from my eyes and yell "Why Brandeis, mo'fo?"). On Wednesday night I went to the Rivers School to hear four groups/individuals run through the pieces of mine being done on their Contemporary Music for the Young symposium next weekend. I rediscovered "Firecat," which the players like more than I do, and have heard the string quartet version of "Elegy" now for the first time in 23 years. The group doing the commissioned piece was very, very good, and my piece even has cool stuff in it. The clarinetist -- who has a nice sound -- said I had written "quite a piece," which is always a fun expression because it can mean nearly anything (usually used in my corner of the biz to be polite to a composer whose piece you hated). I met, for the first time, Ethel Farny, who coaches that group and who has been in e-mail contact with me for six months. I only bring this up because both of her names have five letters.

On Monday I witnessed the first crocuses of the season in the back yard. They had just popped out, despite the fact that there was still much snow around them, and hadn't opened yet. On Tuesday it was sunny and they were in full bloom -- spring fever! I took pictures, as I do every year. This time I even have them contextualized against a virtual sea of snow viewed in the near distance.

So Thursday morning was YASS! Yet Another Snowstorm. About 3 or 4 inches of very slushy and heavy snow overnight, and everybody is sick of it, of course. I had told Shawna at Brandeis that when I put out the Adirondack chairs that means one more snowstorm and we're done, so this was it -- or so I told myself. I took the yearly shot of snow on the chairs (one is on Beff's webpage from about 4 years ago) after doing the big shovel -- complicated by the fact that the garbage and recycling were also in the driveway. Because it was garbage and recycling day. The walk was sufficiently shoveled that there wasn't any drool or snot on our mail. The snow had high enough water content that a large portion of the yards that were bare on Wednesday are bare again, just wetter and muddier.

Also on the weekend we shopped for a frame for one of Claire Colburn's pictures -- we scanned it and blew up just the Winnie drawing and printed it blow up. Currently, it is resting on the computer table in the dining room, which hasn't held a computer since we got the cats, except for a day or so at a time. We are looking for a more suitable place for Claire's picture, especially given that it has a glass frame. The frame was purchased at the camera shop that shares a door with the Bank of America, and is always deserted. We must have made their day.

With the spring 2006 leave approved, I am now in the process of planning a colony hop, and Beff and I decided we'd like to try to do VCCA together over Christmas 2005-6 (we last did that in 1996-7 while I was writing Attitude Problem and Martler and she was learning how to do full-resolution computer tape pieces), and we discovered that the application is due earlier than we thought. Wow, my first applications in more than two years. I hope I remember how. I will also be trying Yaddo and MacDowell and possibly Ragdale and possibly even Bogliasco. So much stuff, so little time! And while I'm gone I guess Beff will be taking care of the cats in the Maine house -- which will be weird and surreal for them. Anyone who wants to housesit in Maynard ca. Dec. 23 - Jan. 16, make yourself known.

I also got an official invitation for the Yaddo benefit on May 3 which Rick Moody had set up for us. Me 'n' Beff will go as ourselves, and this benefit has a musical theme. In fact, the invitation says that excerpts from the "Yaddo jukebox" will include me, Paul Moravec, Stewart Wallace, and Carolyn Yarnell. Which is cool, because I haven't met half those people and wish to do so. The MC will be Peter Schickele, and it will be weird being introduced by PDQ Bach, in order to introduce Adam Marks playing a piano with his fists. Everyone else will look so refined compared to me, and that will be sweet irony. I only said that because I've never typed that phrase before in my life. I hope I don't get all dweeby and tell Schickele that I've been listening to PDQ Bach since 1974.

And today is Good Friday. Gut Freitag. Bonne vendredi. Buon venerdi. Even Brandeis gets the day off. But Passover isn't for another month yet. Funny that. Four more weeks of classes and we are done. So we plan on being really cool people today. Which means it's just another day.

Today's pictures include Claire's drawing in a frame, Cammy doing a funny expression while wanting to come inside, Beff and Sunny experiencing spring fever on the porch, the ritual first sitting in the Adirondack chair, crocuses on Wednesday, crocuses on Thursday, and this year's ritual shot of Adirondack chairs covered in snow.

APRIL FOOLS DAY. Breakfast this morning was coffee and orange juice. Dinner was soup for Beff and a Trader Joe's pizza for me. Lunch had been tomato sandwiches for both of us. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES THE LAST WEEK 22.3 and 60.4. LARGE EXPENSES this last week are half of the quote for two new storm windows and two new basement windows fully installed, $512. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS "I Love the Night Life" -- thanks to something Beff said as we were airportward. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: I've written in several places about the premiere of my first piece ever, for my high school band, where I mention that all of the third clarinetists were drunk (June 1, 1975) -- some of whom had never played the piece and were sightreading. I don't exactly come out sparkling in this story, either, since I had perfectly good conducting patterns, yet still felt the need to mouth, very prominently, "ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR" every once in a while as I gave cues. There was a bunch of skittery percussion at the beginning with very hard rhythms, and of course none of the percussionists was close to what I wrote -- except Verne Colburn, who sat in and played the woodblock part con fuoco. RECOMMENDATION/ PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS WEEK 0. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK Hammocking is fun. THIS WEEK'S COSMIC QUANDRY: Where is the outrage? RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS: Bartlett pears, blackberries, tomatoes, hamburger dill pickles. BIRDS HEARD OR SEEN THIS WEEK FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A WHILE robin (heard, briefly), song sparrow (heard briefly by the river), Downy woodpecker (heard). FRAGILE THINGS DESTROYED BY THE CATS THIS WEEK 0. FULL NIGHTS OF SLEEP THE LAST WEEK: 4. INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE lactation, direct-to-video, hummingbird feces, a can of spray paint.

As this is being typed, Beff is in the air -- not that she's got such great hang time. She's on her way to San Jose, Costa Rica (do you know the way?) where she will be until the 30th. Her plane was scheduled to leave at 7:30, stop in Miami an hour and a half, and continue right on. So that meant getting her to the airport by 5:30 (American, Terminal B), leaving here by 4:45 to do so, and waking up at 4:00 in order to have enough time to shower, get dressed, and have some decent neckwards gear. It's amazing how alert and active the cats are no matter what time we get up, and they certainly helped keep our attention on our task. I carried Beff's suitcase with a month's worth of STUFF down the stairs and probably nearly collapsed them. I presume she's paying extra for overweight -- what with a hard drive in there and vitamins and books and stuff. So we did leave at 4:45, the roads were a little wet from some overnight sprinkles, and we got there almost exactly at 5:30, where lots of other people had had the same idea. I will, of course, miss her much, and will have to get used to waiting by the answering machine as the caller ID says "out of area" and waiting to see if there's a message, and if it's her leaving it.

On the many flip sides (we live in a multidimensional universe, dontcha know), we had a nice weekend. There has been enough sun to open the porch at a reasonable time, and naps or reading on the porch has been very therapeutic. I have also done therapeutic weeding and gardening in the way back yard, mostly cutting vines and pathetic pieces of forsythia as a way of keeping that area from getting too overgrown, and of course I have marveled at the comeback abilities of the crocuses after the midweek snow of ten days ago. There are more crocuses than ever. And since the weather was so fine, fine, fine on the weekend, we nearly finished the springification of the yard and storage shed. We put up the hammock and I oiled the joints where there was a bit of rust -- the ropes of the hammock were getting a bit green, so Beff sprayed Fantastik on it, too. We took out the picnic table, which looks like wood but is really some sort of resilient plastic or vinyl, along with the four chairs. I also filled in the hole above which it usually sits with expensive topsoil. Yes, I even got fingernail-dirty on the weekend.

So we also took out our regular bikes, I oiled the chains, and I put the wheelbarrow back into its usual on-the-side position by the former and abandoned garden plot by the pines. This involved actually lifting the wheelbarrow up very high and tossing it over the fence. I was a very strong boy to do that. In order to get the bike chains completely lubricated, I had to, of course, ride them in circles in the driveway in every possible gear, and I left some deep ruts in the mud that are still evident in the back yard. Beff tried to smooth them out with her shoes, which led to an episode of spraying her shoes with the hose.

And the rhubarb has just started to emerge, as well -- pictorial evidence below. Some of the hardier grasses are greening up, but maybe about 5% of the back and 50% of the side yards are still snow-covered. Bummer. Nonetheless. We have resumed our 2-mile circular walks that go over the Assabet bridge near the boat landing, and the trail between the bridge and the dumping area is still icy or muddy. More hosing of boots.

The big weather event of the week was a large and long-lasting rainstorm on Monday and Tuesday that combined with snowmelt to make much, much flooding in the area -- the Weather Bug on this computer was going full time as Flood Watches and Warnings kept being confirmed, including our own Assabet, in flood stage from Tuesday to Thursday this week. The pics below, from our Thursday jaunt, show a little of that. What's more, another superstorm of 2-4 inches of rain is predicted beginning tomorrow, so there will be yet more. With this next storm, possibly some of my drive to work will be under a little water, as it was in 2001. We did get some water in the basement, and it would have been sucked out by the sump pump except that the furnace maintenance guys in December seemed to unplug it in order to use their own stuff. It was very satisfying to plug the sucker (literally) in, and hear that giant sucking sound. Okay, that little sucking sound.

At Brandeis this week, there were two important meetings with which I was involved. One was a disaster, one was a resounding success. The new music curriculum is tentatively in place, and we have two new courses for next spring. Faculty are beginning to submit their yearly Activities Reports, and so far mine is the longest (I do my best). And the countdown to nonchairmanship has reached three months exactly -- three quarters of the way there! The Dean has already started to poll the faculty on who should be the next victim.

Beff and I also put together our VCCA applications so that we can both go there during her Christmas vacation (at which time I start being on leave). Anyone out there who wants a nice place for Dec 23- Jan 16 and doesn't mind shoveling and using a snowblower (if appropriate) are invited to make him/herself known. I also applied, for the first time, to the Liguria Center in Bogliasco, which is in Italy. Weird application -- composers don't send scores, just a recording, and no more than 20 minutes of music. The application also instructs the applicant on what to put on a resume -- which leads me to believe they don't get that many quality applications. By mid-summer, I will do Yaddo and MacDowell applications. The cool thing about the prospect of me being away (instead of Beff) and Beff being back at work is that the kitties will become bi-statal. As in, Beff will take them to Bangor during times when I am gone. So the list of things we have two of will expand to litter boxes and cat feeding contraptions.

I got the details of the Atlantic Center Residency and I will be leaving on a Monday instead of on a Sunday. Beff will join me after a week, and the housesitters are Justin and then Hillary and Ken. I have to do two outreach events with the other Master Artists (which is where I show everyone how long my arms are), and they haven't factored Amy D into the mix yet. It was cute to find out that I was going to get my own rental car, but would be driven to the agency by the office, would put it on my own credit card, and be reimbursed. When things get complicated, they get complicated.

The DSL went out last night at about 5:30 says Beff -- as in, that's when the incessant Weather Bug chirping stopped, due to the lack of a network connection. It is still out, and doing e-mail (and this) via dial-up is excruciatingly slow. I think they make the DSL go buggers every once in a while just to make you appreciate how much better it is than dial-up. And I don't even know what "go buggers" means.

I would like to report that I taught swimmingly this week, and orchestration was a real hoot. I spent and hour and a half with harp writing and basic percussion writing. I had passed out Sam Solomon's book on writing for percussion, which made it into Max's hands, and every time I made a point about stick hardness or how the marimba sounds in the low register, Max was ready with a quote from the book that either confirmed or contradicted me. I made sure to put Max on a list. I was kind of tired for my Wednesday teaching (sorry, Charlotte, that my voice was so creaky and I yawned every five seconds), but I rallied by the end of the day.

April is the cruellest month. Lots of performances (see the page), but I'm only going to a few of them -- including the ones at the Rivers School tonight and Sunday afternoon (seeing as they have a reception in my honor...). I'm still looking forward to my Daylong Celebration of Creativity thing, though it will mean this space will be updated a day late (get over it), and I still need to think of something to say. I think in about four weeks I will be pressing the flesh, in NYC, of more Brandeis donors. So I'm back on the Rembrandt teeth-whitening stuff.

And the cats love to go outside -- for about five minutes at a time. There were several times on the weekend and in the late afternoons when Beff and I did the Adirondack chairs when they would be more adventurous -- but they will have to work up to the outdoor thing, I guess. They can't go under the porch any more, thanks to our trip to Home Depot in February (pics below).

And of course while Beff is gone there will be little cleaning of the house and little effort put into Davycuisine. I think I'm well-stocked with microwave meals and canned soups.

Today's pictures (uploaded at excruciatingly slow speeds) are: Sunny enjoying the hammock closeup and contextually, the blocking off under the porch, the embryonic rhubarb close up, Beff filming some water, a flooded out dock on the Assabet, the Ben Smith Dam with lots of water, and a slightly flooded yard on the Assabet, where the water is usually 2 or 3 feet lower.

APRIL 8. Breakfast this morning was coffee, pineapple-orange juice and Boca meatless breakfast sausages. Dinner was 95% lean hamburgers and salad. Lunch was gazpacho. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES THE LAST WEEK 33.1 and (woo hoo!) 72.9. LARGE EXPENSES this last week are two trips to BJs for staples, $163 and $93. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS "I'd Like to Know Where You Got the Notion". POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: When teaching first year composition at Columbia, there were readings of solo flute pieces I'd assigned (dangling modifier, but who cares?). One student had written "con fuoco" on his score, and I took it as a learning opportunity: I wrote "con fuoco" on the board, and one student asked what that meant. Without thinking (obviously), I said, "it's the power company for Fire Island." I then proceeded to break my arm patting myself on the back. RECOMMENDATION/ PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS WEEK 1. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK When the snow slides off the slate roof, very occasionally it brings a slate tile with it. THIS WEEK'S COSMIC QUANDRY: Where were all these bugs during the winter? RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS: Hamburger dill pickles, sugar free popsicles, olives, grapes. BIRDS HEARD OR SEEN THIS WEEK FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A WHILE common yellowthroat (heard), Downy woodpecker (heard and seen), mockingbird (heard on Brandeis campuse), house wren (heard). FRAGILE THINGS DESTROYED BY THE CATS THIS WEEK 0. FULL NIGHTS OF SLEEP THE LAST WEEK: 7. INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE a piece of snot, a moral compass, a pair of tweezers, six pairs of boxer shorts.

This update gets typed in rather early. The cats were rambunctious this morning, and at about 5:30 my vertigo -- long nascent and threatening -- came back when I laid on my left side. The room spun for a while, and I had two dry heaves. Then I calmed down. So now until this stupid thing goes away, Alka Seltzer Plus is on my list of things I will be taking. Currently, I seem to dizzify when I look up or look down while bending over. What fun.

Beff is still in Costa Rica, where she will be until the 30th. She has called 3 times and e-mailed 3 times, and I was there to pick up one of the calls. She describes great heat, loud insects at night, occasional very gusty winds, and a steep hill to go into town, which gives great exercise, I would guess. And she is making excellent progress on a voice and video piece for Soozie. I just hope that "Just Filmin' The Fish" from the fish market makes it into the final cut. The inhabitants of the colony are now negotiating where the colony field trip will be -- possibly to a volcano, possibly to some national forest type thing. In any case, there will tend to be much wind, warmth, and steepness with which to contend.

The baseball season is back under way, and news of the Red Sox dominates the airwaves, even more than the death of the Pope. The Sox were underwhelming against the Yankees, but the Yankees closer blew two saves, so there were big articles about that. If that don't beat all.

The weekend was completely taken up by the Rivers Music School Symposium on Contemporary Music for the Young. A bigass rainstorm was forecast to send downpours here all weekend, but that forecast made Them What Make look bad -- it rained Saturday morning, and then it pretty much stopped. And by the way, at 8 am on Saturday, I took our dead TV and a dead computer monitor to the first-Saturday-of-the-month opportunity at the Maynard Recycling Center. Cost to me: $20. Newly available space on the porch: priceless.

But I digressed horribly, yet again. The Rivers Seminar involved no fewer than 10 events from Friday night to Sunday evening, and I went to 7 of them as the distinguished commissioned composer. In fact, at the beginning of each event (probably including the 3 I missed) I was singled out and introduced, as if it were an invitation to ask me for autographs. Friday night was the "faculty concert" which included performances by faculty of 5- to 10-minute pieces followed by a 45-minute jazz set that seemed much longer, since everyone presumed it would end after 20. "My" contribution, which kicked off the symposium, was choreography by Anne Edgerton (faculty) with two professional dancers of the first two movements of "Dances in the Dark" played in recording of the October, 2000 performance by New York New Music Ensemble. It was good choreography -- Anne obviously noticed that there was a "bass clarinet" character and a "piccolo" character in the second movement -- and it's always nice seeing professionals slither. My contribution was a slight six minutes, and all the other pieces were short, too. Until the jazz set, which I have to admit was very well done -- kudos especially to the bass player and drummer -- who looked like Anthony Gatto when the groove really got going.

I skipped the first two events of Saturday -- a composer workshop with composers who are not me, and a "new sounds" concert -- but caught the next two concerts, bridged by a reception. Kurt Coble did some violin pyrotechnics, and a lot seemed familiar about him -- when he reminded me that I interviewed him for Columbia way back when. We went through all the old times we might have had, and then there was the brie at the reception. I skipped the 6:00 jazz concert that night in order to come back home and worry about the roof, etc. (more on that later). Perhaps the highlight of that day was hearing a Lowell Liebermann piece about a rhinoceros fervently performed by a kid whose legs were at least a foot short of being able to reach the pedals. It'll be a few years before this kid can do my pedaling etude.

Sunday's events were a "literary reference" concert, a reception in honor of ME, and a final gala concert on which I had four pieces, including the one that Rivers commissioned. And true to form, I kept being introduced at the start of each program. Marti Epstein had one "American etude" on almost every concert, and each one was invidividual and well-placed for the kids that played them. Why can't I write simple pieces like that? The second movement of my flute and piano piece "Firecat" was on the "literary" concert -- as the word firecat came from a Wallace Stevens poem -- and the players did quite a good job with a piece that bored the heck out of me (mine).

Then there was the reception in honor of me, but hardly anyone had anything to ask me. Which suited me. The strawberries were very good. As were the chocolate chip cookies.

And really hard pieces of mine were on the finale -- my old Elegy for string quartet, taken out of mothballs for its first performance in 23 years, Corrente (etude 10), E-Machines, and the new piece. All of them went surprisingly well, even the Elegy, which is a bear (the Atlantic Quartet had said, tongue-in-cheek, when they played it in 1982 that they'd have to take out tendinitis insurance to play my piece), especially when it steals the Adagio for Strings thing of getting really, really high at the climax. Corrente and E-Machines went well (E-Machines was occasionally mind-bogglingly fast), and then there was "Four Rivers" for flute, clarinet, horn and marimba. Now every composer to whom I have said what ensemble I was writing for has done an immediate "Mr Yuck" about the combination, but I was determined to make it work. So listening to the 11 minutes of my piece I kept mentally kicking myself for choices that didn't seem to work. But I had the good sense to end with a perpetual motion scherzo kind of thing with chords that kept building up around repeated notes in the marimba, and for some reason people seemed to think I had discovered great colors in the ensemble. It was actually a good performance -- and I noted a place in the last movement where I had written a gap in the perpetual motion in the marimba in order to facilitate a page turn (I'm practical that way) and noted that the marimbist didn't have to turn a page. But he did get a different set of sticks. When he came back in, he had the chord that was being sustained by the other instruments, so maybe that's the color thing that people were talking about.

Afterwards, there were autographs to sign, little CDs and DVDs to give to the faculty I'd met at Rivers, and a party with dinner and beer. It was a nice thing to have, and after a whole weekend of reception food, the pork and chicken and vegetarian stuff was a welcome gastronomic relief. The Director David Tierney gave a nice little speech, people made their retorts, and I think I agreed to do a blurb about the Seminar for their newsletter or something.