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

Stacy called me "Mr. Wordy" after last week's update. I didn't have a similar epithet to hurl back at her, just the satisfaction of an extremely rich life and a whole bunch of time on my hands. Actually, I got a new scrubbing sponge and that got most of the time off of my hands (think about it). Where I could go next with this joke is beyond me.

There is a far smaller variety of things that have happened this week because I spent so much time writing piano trio music. Since Monday last, I finished a first movement and wrote all of a second movement. The third movement is under way, and it is (sigh) blazingly fast. The deadline is ... soon. What I was writing in the first movement seemed largely arbitrary, as it always does, but then when I put it into Finale and look at it laid out neatly on screen, then it seems like actual music. Thoughtful music even, with ... ow, my arm hurts from patting myself on the back. Even II. looks like real music on screen. Must put more music into Finale, and more quickly. For the first time, I am using Finale 2005 to enter a piece (because Finale 2006 arrived after I started inputting it), and for the first time I am putting a multi-movement piece all in one file instead of in two or three or four of them. I am tricky that way.

This is not to say that I didn't do other stuff last week. Hey, I had control of the house (in essence slowly converting it into a bachelor pad) almost the whole week because Beff has been in Vermont, and that meant taking on mundane tasks that Beff usually does that keep the place from becoming a bachelor pad (dishes, cat litter) while blithely ignoring the other things (cleaning, for instance). Beff gave me special instructions on better ways of guiding the litter from the box to the garbage pail so that it doesn't fall onto the floor (as if I were seven, but I showed her -- I acted like I was almost nine), but it still didn't work all the time. Darn that limp-wristed scooping technique, darn it!

A few important other things did happen this week, though. The new Windows computer arrived and I set it up and ran it to see how things were going. Those companies that bundle trial versions of their software are getting WAY more aggressive than three years ago -- I was greeted by a plethora of "your trial version of xxxxx expires in three months, you must register and pay to keep it going, don't you wanna, don't you wanna, DON'T YOU WANNA, HMMMM?" pop-ups, and I authorized my trial versions of Norton stuff, which is itself more aggressive than it was before. Hey, the second time I turned the computer on it was to check the internet connection and view e-mail, but Norton anti-virus started right up and showed me its virus scanning progress right off the bat. NO, NO, NO, I said (not so much said as clicked the Cancel button) and Office 2003 tryout popped up and said hi, and -- every time about a minute after startup is finished I get the dreaded program bomb button "Setconfig encountered an error and had to terminate". At first I just pressed "Cancel", but since it got to be so prevalent, I actually got into the habit of clicking the "Send Error Report" button. Soon when I did that, Explorer shot up and showed me a page saying UNIDENTIFIED ERROR IN THIS PROGRAM CAUSED BY HEWLETT PACKARD DAMNED IF I KNOW WHAT THE PROBLEM IS BUT IT'S NOT MICROSOFT'S FAULT AND EVEN IF IT WHAT COULD YOU DO ABOUT IT ANYWAY? So my ten-year impression of Windows as a rinky-dink operating system has not been moved, even in the slightest.

Though some Windows programs kick ass. Since this sucker comes with a DVD burner, Beff researched software for creating digital media (I know the buzzwords, too), and settled on Roxio Easy Media Creator 7.5, which was selling at Staples with an instant savings AND with a mail-in rebate. More on the rebate later. I installed that program, and then investigated to see if I could make a backup DVD of my US Marine Band Plays The Midwest Clinic (And Davy's On It, Too) DVD. I had considered calling the company who recorded it to buy another copy because the DVD has gotten scratched in its holder (I've since transferred it to a paper sleeve), and parts of it wouldn't play on my office computer because of it. So the program created a digital image of the DVD, and I was able to burn another one, for my own use. Yes, it's legal -- home recording act, and ahem, my publisher owns the copyright on part of the music. Cool. So now Beff's plans are to make a cadre of standard DVDs of her stuff in iDVD 4, make disc images of them on the Windows computer, and burn when needed.

I also got Office academic edition, Norton System works (FREE after TWO mail-in rebates!), and DeLorme mapping stuff -- which, I am sorry to report, kind of sucks. So I sent the rebate stuff in with the usual requirements: receipts, pieces of the boxes, childhood photos, leftover sausages, DNA samples, etc. And since all the notification stuff is done by e-mail nowadays, there's this odd time where you wait to see if your rebate has been, um, "approved." Like waiting for the results of something you applied for ("I'm sorry we can't hire you. The width of your head exceeds our specifications." "We can't offer you the job because our XMG quotient, calculated from the information you provided, is too low",). Both the Norton rebates have generated e-mails to me already, saying Hey Babe, We Got 'Em, Be Cool, Bro. And I got an e-mail from RebatesHQ, a company of mouth-breathers that processes Roxio's rebates, saying click on this link for the status of your rebate! Be cool! So I clicked and got a message saying "we're sorry for the misunderstanding, but the rebate for which you sent in DNA and stool samples has expired." I checked on that rebate, and discovered that the expiration date is March 10, 2006, so I not so calmly pored through the Roxio and RebatesHQ sites for places to ask the question, dripping in as much sarcasm as is possible, of how August 2005 is probably not later than March 2006. The Roxio site does everything it can to make it impossible for you to ask any questions of anyone without paying a $35 fee. It even made me create an account, which it then did not let me log into (it said the account I had just created didn't exist) -- when I tried to create the account again, I was told the username already existed. Ah, plus ca change. I also bent a few rules to query RebatesHQ in order to ask the question about relative places in the time-space continuum of August 2005 and March 2006. It's too bad that bad behavior by companies who should know better can tick me off like this, because I do indignation like nobody's business. Late last night, Roxio e-mailed me to kiss and make up, not matching my level of sarcasm.

By contrast, I also have good stories. Every time I have called Apple Computer with questions, someone answers by the second ring, and knows the answers to my questions. Ditto J&R Music. So I'm not all negatory, smarty pants.

And now obviously Web Easy is back up and running on this new computer, and I have transferred my files. I mean, like, totally, duh. I did receive and start to read several books on Creative Suite 2, but it will be a while before I am competent to transfer this web presence to GoLive. Being a professional program and all that, there was a lot of unfamiliar stuff to wade through, and a ton of unfamiliar concepts -- cascading style sheets, anyone? Reading the book would have reminded me of taking subjects in school that I just didn't get, except that never happened to me (for you see, I was the smart one) -- so in return, I should probably justify my existence and enhance my self-esteem by saying something true that is only for the already initiated. So here it is: Imaginary Dances (1986, revised 1988) was my first piece where I felt comfortable controlling harmony with trichord types (specifically 015, 014 and 013), deriving all-combinatorial hexachords with them and using common trichord types in a way analagous to common tones in tonal music as a way of moving from one hexachord to another -- not to mention briefer sections where non-structural trichords were pulled out of the hexachords and used to derive other hexachords (yeah, like that E-type hexachord in the cadence of the first large section that got derived from 014's, and the 015s that got pulled out of that hexachord to derive a B-type hexachord. Those were the days).

The geekness of this update is breathtaking.

Beff arrived safe and sound in yesterday's many downpours (we had three thunderstorms and then more rain this morning), and there was enough rain for some water to get into the basement -- a rare occurrence indeed. So that means I can put the sprinkler away again, and that the lawn might perk back up. I had, as predicted, found a way down to the dam and brought a pruner and some gloves, and pruned away all the stuff that was covering my usual viewing area. This summer has been so dry that the flow of the Assabet over the dam nearly stopped entirely, but I presume it's back to a normal flow with last night's torrents.

New entries into iTunes: Monkees Headquarters, Mitch Hedberg (comedian), Missy Elliot. I heartily recommend the Hedberg, which is funny in a stoner sort of Steven Wright sort of way ("...to be understood when I was in the South, I started saying 'y'all' and leaving out "o-u" whenever I could. 'May I have a bowl of chicken noodle sp?' 'I think I'll lie down on the cch.' 'I stubbed my toe! Ch!'").

The cats had their checkup and shots, and Cammy's reaction to being in an unfamiliar room with unfamiliar people was to shed violently. There were practically hair projectiles flyin' everywhere! The vet looked at Sunny's scar, and I heard the word "pus" used in a sentence, in a non-derogatory way, for the first time in many a year. And so Sunny got an antibiotic, which is fun to administer: aim an eyedropper at the back of his throat, squeeze.

Okay, back to geekdom. In the process of entering a lotta notes into Finale, I feel the need to take breaks to do dumb stuff. I discovered that pictures you put in your OS X Address book show up in the headers of e-mails from people whose pictures you have in your address book. So I spent idle hours dragging photos from my collection -- usually going for the cheesiest shot possible -- and even ramped it up to searching Google Images for some of the people I have (such as David Sanford and Sophie Wadsworth). I can't imagine anyone doing this that isn't a total geek. Le Geek, C'est Moi.

I agreed to write an article for New Music Box about titles. I wonder why Frank asked me, other than the obvious part about how I'd be willing to do it for free. What, am I supposed to toss off lots of little asides like, "..and, coming from the composer of 'Absofunkinlutely' or "I should know. I called a piece Plucking A." So if any compositore reading this wants to e-mail me any reflections or commentary about titles of pieces, I would say, Bush-like, bring it on. Really.

I am now a ways into the final movement of a piano trio. And I need a title! The first movement is about my cats (the strings are the cats and the piano is me -- it actually depends on what the meaning of "is" is here), the second is a smushy adagio with lots of counterpoint and in which the strings are muted, and the finale is a superfast scherzo in compound meter. Title, anyone? And before any of you pat yourselves on the back for discovering such things, I'll tell you in advance that the opening music is retrograded at the end of the first movement, the big tune in the second movement is the same pitch sequence as the opening of the first movement, and a Big Ben style chime is hidden in the piano part in the midst of the first movement. And ah! so far the scherzo seems to be about oblique chromatic counterpoint (as in, one note staying the same and another note moving chromatically).

New handles for the burners on the stove! Hallelujah!

The two movies this week (on the left, yellow text) were taken during one of the thunderstorms yesterday afternoon. This week's meager collection of photos include the Address Book entry for one of the regular readers (identity obscured), an extreme closeup of a Pez dispenser on the geegaw window, evidence of Maynard's extreme ambivalence about the naming of its waste, how the dam looked on Wednesday, the cats in the living room window, and a picture of me that Geoffy took at the Quarterdeck with his damn 7 megapixels -- I was drinking some Uel Ms at the time.

AUGUST 22. Today my father would be 83. Breakfast this morning was Morningside Farm veggie breakfast patties with nonfat cheese, orange juice, and coffee. Dinner was salmon burgers with nonfat cheese, and salad. Lunch was sushi from Shaws (California rolls for me, baby!). TEMPERATURE EXTREMES THIS LAST WEEK 53.6 and 88.2. LARGE EXPENSES this last week are USB 2.0 hub $26, bicycle repair $35, anniversary dinner at the Blue Room, $112. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS "My Sunny Girlfriend" from the Monkees Headquarters Album, which I actually hate. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: There was a time -- a much better time, many would say -- when there were no pointless nostalgic reminiscences on this website. I had a little more hair, we had cats that were 19 years old, and nobody cared that we had some old knob and tube wiring in the basement. And gas was $1.27 a gallon. COMPANIES WHO HAVE NOT COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY RECENTLY include HP (for every week until they provide a fix wherein "Setconfig" does not bomb a minute after startup), Radio Shack, Radio Shack again, Finale Music and Axion. COMPANIES WHO HAVE COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY AND THEN SOME is PAC Insurance, who followed up about the wiring thing, and Inko's White Teas (again), 'cause I got a cool t-shirt from them. THIS WEEK'S COSMIC QUANDARY: Why are my experiences with the service industry so universally dismal? (Beff asked this question) THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: inspecular. RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS: Real Pickles, Inko's Peach Tea, olives from the olives station at Shaw's, Oscar Mayer fat free hot dogs. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK Laura Hendrie was at MacDowell with Hayes. My autographed copy of her novel contains the gem "I don't understand your humor"... THIS WEEK'S NUMBER BETWEEN 1 AND 10: 5. CHANGES TO THIS SITE: Kostitsyn link deleted, Haber link added. FRAGILE THINGS DESTROYED BY THE CATS THIS LAST WEEK is nothing, but the canvas cooler on the back porch took a hit from Sunny (chased a dragonfly, jumped up, dragged the whole thing down). BIKE RIDES CONCLUDING BEFORE 9 AM THIS WEEK: 1. DAVY'S BAROMETER FOR THE FUTURE OF MUSIC this week is 12 out of 47. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: moderate Republicans. THIS WEEK'S FEATURED FAKE SENDER NAME IN A SPAM: Pummels H. Nouakchott. SUBJECT OF THAT SPAM: Superman pills pills. INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE leg of lamb, eye of newt, Manos the Hands of Fate, a foot of snow.

I am hoping to make this little update a little shorter than has been the case recently. I am very close to finishing my piano trio, which will be finished either today or tomorrow -- I hope. I am a little ways into what I like to call, modestly, the "recapitulative coda," and there are still a few relationships that have to be worked out. As is so often the case with what I like to call, modestly, "me", I used first movement music in the second movement (snaky hocketed line becomes big tune in piano solo, unison outburst reinterpreted as slow music), and both first and second movement music in third movement. While I'm writing that music, it seems like I'm getting free stuff -- or at least a 2-for-1 deal I didn't earn -- but I'm confident that when I see it in the printed Finale version it will look more like organic development than self-plagiarism. At least that's what I'm telling the cats. The other reason, of course, that, spending 6-8 hours a day writing and 1-2 hours in Finale leaves not much time for things that are equally boring to report here.

But report I will. Beff and I did our anniversary dinner in Cambridge last Monday night at the Blue Room near Kendall Square in Cambridge. We arrived early, got some hefeweizen and "tiger bite" ale at Cambridge Brewery which is next door, did our very nice dinner at the blue room, and then drove back via Alewife. Tiger Bite Ale has lemongrass in it, among other things, and was very pungent and nice, but the hefeweizen was worth the stop. I followed that with a Bloody Mary at the Blue Room that had a salt-and-pepper concoction lining the rim of the glass. Beff got the wabbit, I got the salmon, and the twain never met.

Then Beff spent the middle part of the week in Maine doing Beff stuff while I did that boring thing of creating a set of instructions destined to produce highly organized sound waves. And on Thursday I rested. Well, mostly. Hayes finished a successful stint at what I like to call, modestly, The MacDowell Colony, and he stopped by here on his way home to return the printer that I'd lent him for his stay. I offered to do a touristy drive, which turned out more functional for me than touristy, but we did check out the old cemetary in Concord, the Alcott House, Trader Joe's, Staples (the USB hub, dude) and BJ's -- where Hayes got himself 3 USB cables for the unheard-of price of 8 bucks (we laughed, both inwardly and outwardly, when we saw ONE USB cable offered for the price of $15 at Staples). Regular readers will be pleased to know that I got two more 12-packs of Inko's teas there and a bigass package of Campari tomatoes. Hayes delighted at lying in the hammock for some time, while listening to the Monkees Headquarters on the iPod and iPod speakers. Then we walked to the Quarterdeck and ordered more food than we could eat: steamers and vegetable stuff, and (for me) Scottish style fish and chips and (for Hayes) the Cajun chunks of seafood. On Friday, Hayes went back to New York, minus his cooler and wheat germ. But I made sure he had his two jars of Arthur Marc's hot sauce. And he brought some cheap potato chips from Job Lots in Peterborough.

Saturday night included a large multipurpose trip to Peterborough (we missed Hayes by a mere 60 hours) for a Monadnock Music concert (Soozie and Curt and Alan Feinberg and Greg Hesselink, etc.), and our friend Hilda -- the real estate agent who sold us this house -- invited us to dinner, as she now lives in the area. So I drove to the pound of my own drummer (to mix metaphors rather violently), took an unknown shortcut and missed a turnoff, but made it to Hilda's place on time anyway -- lovely salmon, Fat Weasel Ale from Trader Joes, and salad. And then was the concert, a mere 8 miles distant. Which we all went to.

The concert started with the Brahms horn trio, which, as Beff noted, the acoustic made sound far less heroic than on the recordings you grew up with, and ended with the Schubert E-flat piano trio (a long and rather dreary affair with a finale that had a set of variations that tried to titillate you by bringing in the funeral march music from the second music, as if it were either profound or guffaw-funny). In between were songiepoos: my own Violin Songs, and two sets of songs by the festival director, James Bolle (five letters in each name). The performances were all inspecular, and it was nice to see Greg -- whom I've only heard play modern music in New York, including three pieces of mine -- playing music with tonal centers. I did not reveal my absence of affinity for Schubert's chamber music to any of those involved. Judy Sherman was there (big hugs), and there was a man sitting in front of us that looked so familiar, but I could not place him -- was he an agent in New York? Did I know him from the MacDowell Colony (but a mile distant)? Does he serve the ice cream at the diner? After my piece he came up to me for congratulations, and I realized he was the Dean from UMass Dartmouth -- Ken's boss. I also apparently reverted to that panic that bestrides my face when I meet someone familiar but whose name I don't remember right away, as both he and Laura Gilbert (went to undergrad together, both taught at Bowdoin same summer) kindly introduced themselves to me. After the show we all went out for a beer (iced tea for me) at Harlowes, where we all caught up, and I laid the guilt on Soozie. ("So what have you been doing this summer?" "Sitting by the phone waiting for your call and checking my e-mail every three minutes to see if you've written back yet.") Which I then simplified to: procrastination. Which works fine as a lyric replacing "infatuation" in the Rod Stewart crapfest of a song from the 1980s.

We have now listened to the entire Mitch Hedberg comedy ouevre from the CD and DVD we got, and I suspect a lot of the punch lines are going to enter our daily routine. "Dude, you have to wait", recontextualized, provides the necessary bisociation, in our case, to be funny once in a while. Beff prefers "I bought Ritz because I wanted a cracker, not because it's an edible plate." Maybe I'll start a feature in the first paragraph.

There is much new space on the Windows station table, as the big, big CRT monitor has now been replaced by a flat screen. But getting it here led to this week's cosmic question, and my usual fun with what Beff calls "the service industry." So here we go. Under-17 may want to shield their eyes, or read only every other letter. Last weekend was tax-free weekend, and I got a few medium-ticket items that were already on special in order to save a few bucks (I spent it on pickles, but that's a story for another day -- hey, how come there are nickels and nickle, but not pickels and pickle, except for Pickel as a last name, as in David Pickel, a composer who graduated from Columbia? Are you still with me?). The Maxtor drive I got at Staples voiks like a charm. 60 gigs worth of files backed up in less than an hour. Meanwhile, Beff suggested we get a flat-screen monitor for the Windows computer, as the CRT 17-inch monitor was about 3 or 4 feet deep. I exaggerate, as usual, but what can you do? I didn't feel like making a longish trip to an actual technology place (as that's where everyone else was headed on this tax-free day), so I went to the local Radio Shack, browsed the catalog, and settled on a Sylvania 17-inch monitor that was on special AND included a mail-in rebate (my FAVORITE!). Since this piddle of a store didn't have the monitor in stock, I did the thing where you buy it and they promise delivery within a few days. I also noted a teeny DVD player on sale, and ordered that, too.

A story that spills into a second paragraph! So I opted for the Deliver To My House option and not the Pick It Up at This Store option and was promised delivery Tuesday or Wednesday. On Friday, monitorless and little DVD playerless, I brought my receipt to Radio Shack to ask when I should expect delivery. Panic on the manager's face. He said I shoulda had it days ago, and worse, he COULDN'T check on the status of the item there because he did not order it there -- on Monday he had submitted the order from the Radio Shack his brother manages in Worcester, and that info wasn't available to him, or to him by phone because that Radio Shack branch was now closed while it was being moved. Long story short (too late), it took till late afternoon for me to find out that the merchandise had been shipped from Radio Shack Worcester and was already delivered to .... Radio Shack Worcester. And of course, as there was now no store there, there were no alarm bells a-ringin' anywhere. Manager guy physically brought the monitor to the local store for me to pick up on Saturday, and when I did, he said -- sorry, the DVD player is coming from another guy who gets here at noon.

Third paragraph! So I asked Beff to get the new Sylvania flat monitor up while I moved the old and very heavy one to the attic. After getting down from the attic, Beff said, "where's the screw?" In the manual, lots of shiny happy people were gingerly attaching the monitor itself to the base, without any language mentioning a "screw", but there was a drawing of a hand making a radial motion. So, sighing, I brought the monitor and stand BACK to Radio Shack, who looked for a screw but had none, but promised me they'd reimburse me for a screw if I went to Ace Hardware and bought one. Sigh. While it was downpouring outside, I tramped to Ace, asked for screw assistance, and held the gfornafratz thing while 8 different screws were tried. It's a metric size, oh joy, and it cost me 63 cents. I tramped back to Radio Shack, got my 63 cents, went home, and Beff got the sucker up and working. Yes, we do have more space. After lunch, I went back to get my little DVD player, set it up to charge 8 hours (as it says in the manual), wrote music, went to Monadnock, etc. Oh yeah, and I fired off an e-mail to the Sylvania monitors site, asking for them to send me a screw in the fastest and most expensive manner possible. So far there is no response.