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

Complicating matters was a whole mess o' styrofoam and packing peanuts without a home. The decision was to break the styrofoam up, hustle it into big lawn bags, and put it in the trash. So for about 45 minutes we had what could only be called a styrofoam stomping party -- we considered inviting Big Mike for the fun, but there just wasn't enough to last long enough to justify the trip. And over the weekend, Beff spent a lot of time by the fireplace while bad TV was showing, burning all those boxes. My part of this job was organizing the saved boxes in the garage. They will be returned to the attic when the rewiring job is done, likely in October, and meanwhile the Corolla butt will be sticking out of the garage by a foot or two.

Meanwhile, as the metaphorical sound of dollars going down the drain was deafening -- as the cost of this rewiring was solidifying -- I listened in the distance with whatever the opposite of glee is as I heard banging and sawing and removal of plaster to get at the old wires. And when I saw the plaster patches afterwards, I had more of that opposite of glee thing. So now it looks like we're saving the painting until the end of the job. By which time we may actually have a clue how to paint. Just kidding.

So the Friday afternoon outdoors scene was a surreal one indeed. Beff was organizing and triaging a big pile of boxes while I finally was able to get to grading the Mus 101 exams, which I did at an Adirondack chair to the tune of rip, rip, squeeeege, rip, kaflump(tm). Grading the tests was very brainrotmachen, so I needed a break after every 4 or 5, during which I either transported boxes that made the cut to the garage, or worked more on the Mus 5 materials. Once or twice the pile had a few blown off it, and I ended up with 3 of the tests in the wrong pile. I finally finished the grading, sent out about 30 or 35 emails with registration codes for them what passed, and realized only on Sunday that 3 had still not been emailed. Big d'oh there, pardner, and I don't rule.

For comical effect, there is Saturday's dinner. When Beff is in town, we have this morning ritual. I ask "what do you want for dinner?" and Beff always replies, "What are my options?" which is ironic, because the options are always actually the same. This time, the choice was made for stir fry. We shopped, got stir fry stuff, I marinated some chicken for stir fry and was about to cut the vegetables when I realized -- the last time we did stir fry the wok looked so digusting that we tossed it. And here we were, planning stir fry without a wok. So. I drove to K-Mart, staying within local speed limits, picked up a Martha Stewart wok (she seems to rule everything at K-Mart), realized that the can opener we have is grody, doesn't work that well, AND dates back to the early 90s, and I got the MOST EXPENSIVE can opener they had -- twenny bucks. I liked it because it is black and matches the juicer on the counter. When I got back, the wok was supposed to be "seasoned", which is odd because I thought it tasted fine (rim shot). Boil water in it, then cook some oil 2 or 3 times. The boiling water thing turned out to be a good idea, because something not too appetizing-looking peeled off the bottom of the wok. And anyway, I made a nice stir fry and we tried the Korean teriyaki sauce for the first time. It was, as they say in Minsk, both appetizing and farty.

Other generic things to report this week are that our yearly BMI royalty checks arrived, and mine was absolutely gigantic -- as "Dream Symphony" brought in a big amount which I didn't have to share with Peters, who is still sitting on it. Of course, hearing from the electricians what the size of the job was kind of deflated that check. Karma, I think they call it. Or amrak, if they are talking backwards. I also finallygot contracts from Peters for the books of etudes (but not one for III?) which I signed, and also sent them recordings of things they didn't have. By the way, I was asked to supply biographical, photographical and other materials for their web page, so it looks like they are finally getting on the promotion bandwagon. I'm going to be famous, and, dear reader, you knew me when. And how. And as.

The andiron, or whatever it is called, in the fireplace has broken -- that's the piece of metal that holds up whatever you are burning -- so we went in search of it yesterday while combining it with a trip to Trader Joe's for some essentials. Nobody had the andiron, so that is prompting a trip to Home Depot tomorrow. While I am there, I am also looking for a tarp to cover the shed in the back yard to delay the rusting of the roof by a few years, bopping over to BJ's for more Inko's -- as I intend to stock my fridge at work with it -- and probably leisurely trips to the mall and Barnes and Noble because I can. Besides, I have to get out of the house early tomorrow morning when the Maids come to clean, and I have to go to town hall for trash stickers for our newly vast amount of it.

And finally. It's been 33 years since I last was in the room while the note names on the staff were taught, and that is soon to become my job. I think All Cows Eat Grass and Every Good Boy Does Fine are in serious need of updating. I posit for the first Reagan's explanation of global warming: All Cows Emit Gas. For the second, just random: Eat Goats But Don't Fart. Bass clef lines? How about Gina Bought Doug Five Ascots? I think F-A-C-E still spells face, right?

The packrattage of the attic included no fewer than 2 cheap stereo systems that no longer worked, 2 broken scanners, and a broken printer (not included on the original list on "Home" here), which for the life of me I don't know why we didn't throw out years ago. Plus, plenty of other things that made no sense to keep. There is photographage below in support of that hypothesis. But first we see the new can opener and its counter context (which makes a kind of counter statement), the new wok in the process of being seasoned, the kitties viewing the mess gathering outside, a bookshelf we have unexplainable held on to for all these years, a spider discovered in a garage window, and Beff in the early stages of organization. The movies (yellow text) are the boxes burning, Cammy going after a little wind-up toy, and a very small portion of the styrofoam stomping party.

Dear readers, as I type this Great Road -- the swatch from Erikson's Dairy to the Mobil station -- is being repaved. The smell is sweetly sickening and the sounds vintage. Classic, even. Maynard Public Works apparently subscribes to the classic method of repaving: rip the road up so that it has the capacity to shred tires, leave it that way for at least a week (two if you play the game right) and start laying pavement down in the middle of rush hour for maximum inconvenience. Repaving is a popular thing in this part of the world this week, as on my drive home yesterday I negotiated not one, but two lengthy detours around parts of Route 117. It only added 5 miles or so to my 14-mile drive, but it doubled the drive time. At least the detours were better marked than the street signs in Boston. So we have been blessed with a few orange signs locally that we don't usually benefit from: Rough Road, Bicyclists Take Note, and E.T. Phone Home. I put that last one in there to see if you were still following along. Oh, and I see there is another step to the paving that I left out: pave one lane, lay out a line of cones unevenly, and take a lengthy break.

Big Mike (kaching!) and Carolyn (kaching!) tell me that they were speaking of the possibility of a kind of performance art wherein you do something suitably distinctive to be mentioned in Davy's blog. Well, the first thing is, I don't think of this thing as a blog but more of a pangistic thing. Beff (kaching!) calls it my update (rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it?), but other times she calls it my blog. But I guess Big Mike (kaching!) and Carolyn (kaching!) can call it whatever they want. Score so far: Big Mike 2, Carolyn 2, Beff 1.

Now that school is in full swing and I have a full Monday teaching schedule, I think I will be doing my updates on Tuesdays. I would have to get up at 4 to continue doing it on Mondays, and that would be bad. I have been introduced to the wonder of TAs, who take two of my classes per week, rescuing me on Monday and Thursday from severe laryngitis and bummerhood. Wednesdays, though, the effect of teaching an overload shines through: an hour lecture at 10, an hour lecture at 11 and an hour lecture at 1 followed by an independent study with Max (kaching!) is pretty taxorific. Compound all that with the suddenly hot weather here and the massive failure of the air conditioning system in the music building and it spells jello. I have, though, very much enjoyed teaching fundamentals, as it is a large and very bright-eyed class, and some newer students have made it decidedly interactive. Meanwhile, Theory 1 is huge this year and we got a second section authorized. Seung-Ah (kaching!) was hired to teach it, and starting tomorrow I have a more manageable class size. And in "Undegraduate Composition" (the "r" is missing in the official course listing) I have asked students to bring in examples of bad prosody. I made this assignment and then realized I hadn't defined prosody, so there was ova sulla mia facie. I myself am bringing in "Gold" by Spandau Ballet, which repeats an execrable scanning of "indestructible" countless times.

The real accomplishment of the week is, I guess, the carrying of 11 lawn bags of styrofoam, an old convertible couch mattress and a big box full of packing peanuts and tent to the street, and sticking 23 $2 trash stickers on them and our usual garbage. It was fun watching the garbage truck linger as it picked everything up. Okay, I made that part up. It wasn't fun. But I watched in case they decided not to take some of it. Another accomplishment, which is a side benefit of the same large drive, was a trip to Home Depot to get a tarp to cover the storage shed, along with rope and pegs to keep it down. We measured the roof and I got a tarp that was billed as 2 inches longer per side than my measurement -- which is not how it worked in real life, of course; like Milton Babbitt, it's a little short. The typical thing was that the tarp was in a box marked "12' by 9' tarp!" and the package listed the measurements as 11'6" by 8'6". I had been sent by Beff (kaching!) in search of a new andiron for the fireplace -- the old one broke and the hardware stores said they don't carry fireplace stuff until the end of September -- and after a 3- or 4-mile trek through the store I got the answer: we don't carry fireplace stuff until the end of September. So Beff (kaching!) and I installed the tarp on Friday, and it was remarkably stress free. And you can hardly tell there is a tarp there at all. Which is why I'm doing the telling.

Ash-Go came and cleaned the chimney on Friday and contracted to put a cover on the chimney later in the month. Two more electrician vi$it$ have been scheduled, the second of which is October 3, for those of you playing along at home. Geoffy (kaching!) will be here to let them in that day, as I leave for work around 6:30. I have been doing whatever the opposite of admiring is to the plaster patches they left where they had to get to the old wires. I was delighted to hear, by the way, from the head electrician that previous electricians had left a pull string in the attic, which will make their jobs easier. I nodded dutifully, not having any idea what he was talking about.

For the first time ever, I received an e-mailed "Response to Blog" from Big Mike (kaching!) and the pressure was on. He did give me some nice new mnemonics for the lines and spaces of the staff (Even God Believes Darwin, Fool), and I noted in Fundamentals that mnemonics is my favorite word that begins with a silent "m". As they said on the Sopranos, mno problem, dude. I believe the equilibrium of the universe is maintained, though, by Eddie Jacobs (kaching!) who adds an un-silent initial "m" to "Bye Bye" at the end of his phone conversations. Yes, he does say "Mbye-bye!" So no m's are out of work, nor have any been harmed in the teaching of musical lines and spaces. Geoffy (kaching!) contributed the bass clef lines: Groovy Bassists Do Funk Albums. The cool thing about that is, it's how he talks.

After a long bike ride with Beff (kaching!) on Friday -- the one by the nature viewing area in Stow -- we did lunch at the Airport Cafe at the Minuteman Air Field, which was totally delish. We continued to obsess on the andiron situation, and we actually asked the waitress for a yellow pages so we could look up fireplace stores. She did the lookin', in fact, but all the stores were rather far away. So instead we had fun. And Beff (kaching!) had to go back early on Saturday for rehearsals for a concert next weekend -- I will go to Maine for that -- and early in the morning we took our old stereos and scanners etc. from the attic to the monthly Bigass Trash day at the Maynard Recycling Center. As usual, the workers scavenged, keeping in this case the old crappoliforic speakers. I winced a little when they tossed the old stereo a not insignificant distance into the shovel part of a big piece of machinery until I remembered -- it was a piece of crap.

After Beff (kaching!) left, I indulged myself in a bit of nostalgia -- I made a font, thereby learning Font Lab. Fontographer was never updated to run in OS X, so I got this one, which has some of the same features, but enough of a different interface to make some of the work maddening -- not unlike the difference between Finale and Sibelius. Or totally unlike it, I forget which. This was a finely detailed font with a lot of fixin' to do, so I had that rare thing where I look up and notice it's 1:20 am without realizing it. Boy, talk about ova sulla facie.

Actually, the first bit of business after Beff's (kaching!) departure was lunch in Hudson at the Horseshoe Pub with Big Mike (kaching!) just as a way to get my Buffalo wing fix. We sat in the patio outdoors, I also had some wheat beer, and we had a waitress with a voice not unlike that of the prostitute in "The Man With Two Brains" who keeps saying "I Don' Mind!". And pencil-thin, sculpted eyebrows that looked like runes. I don't think we talked about work very much, but who can know? Later I checked on the big bridge for the bike path going over the Assabet, and it's still not back up yet. Then I took a catnap, which turned into a 2-hour affair.

It has been dry again, and the water level of the Assabet is back down, thereby once again revealing the face of the Ben Smith dam. On my way to view the dam, I met the new owner of the house once occupied by the dog Samson, and his dog Molly, a large orange retriever-type mutt. When I was doing yard work (mostly pulling out vines), Molly approached me as if I had a whole bunch of bones formerly reserved for Samson but now available for any dog. And she was right. So with the new ownership of this house, that means all four houses abutting us to the east have changed owners since we moved in. And that makes us the Senior Landowners on this part of the block. I may have to have a ribbon made up that says that. And wear it ostentatiously as I parade by all of their front porches. Okay, I'll stop now.

This weekend I was struck by a cleaning and tidying up frenzy. I rearranged the bookshelf of scores and filed about 4-1/2 years of sketches into one pile. They are on 11x17 paper, two systems of 4 on each page, and the pile measures 2-5/8 inches thick. Which is impressive. I then finally got to the 4 years of junk that has accumulated in my car, discovered that I have 5 road atlases in it, and a pile of CDs (kaching! -- Carolyn's initials get credit here) that was most impressive. I had TWO of "Tower of Power compilation 2", thinking I had lost the first one obviously. And about 8 CDs without cases and, coincidentally, about 8 empty CD cases. So dear readers, it is no longer disgusting for you to drive in the back seat of my car.

And alas, some leaves are starting to turn. Mostly on the Route 117 detours, but they are turning nonetheless. Yesterday, by the way, was a hot one and the first time in a month I had to turn the air conditioner on. My exercise ride was the West Concord ride, which was multifaceted: BofA ATM to transfer funds, CVS to renew a prescription, Dunn Oil to prepay for our oil, the ride to West Concord, the purchase of 3 jars of Real Pickles, the ride back, to CVS to pick up the prescription (Lisinopril), and back. The weather was so nice I spent some time on the hammock instead of writing this thing. And the rest is his story.

Pro View monitors -- the company that handles Sylvania monitors -- finally came through with the missing screw. I had wanted to embarrass them into sending it the fastest and most expensive way possible (don't get mad -- get irrational), and what they did was stick it in a regular envelope with 37 cents of postage. Of course, the screw being a screw, the envelope ripped and the Postal Service had to stick the whole thing in one of their rescue envelopes. It was hilarious, when you come right down to it.

Today's movie (yellow text on the left) is the long downhill portion of the Nature viewing area bike ride, sped up greatly for your convenience. The pictures are of the CDs (kaching!) rescued from my car, the screw from Pro View as it got to me, the Ben Smith dam, the newly installed tarp (see yellow pegs?), Big Mike (kaching!) at lunch, and the top of our sickly front yard maple tree, already turning.

Final score: Beff 7, Big Mike 5, Carolyn 4, Geoffy 2, Max 1, Eddie 1, Seung-Ah 1. Amy D and Adam M (from credits) 1 each.

SEPTEMBER 20. Breakfast this morning is coffee and orange juice. Dinner was a Smart Ones Creamy Tuscan Chicken microwave meal, and real lemonade. Lunch was a big salad with European salad lettuce, campari tomatoes, and Trader Joe's balsamic vinaigrette dressing. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES THIS LAST WEEK 53.6 and 85.8. LARGE EXPENSES this last week are none! POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: I had a $100 stereo cassette player in my bedroom when I was in high school -- before the days of boom boxes -- and I separated the speakers so that they were as far across the room from each other as possible. I delighted at the cheesy stereo demonstration cassette from Radio Shack, and when friends were over, delighted even more at playing Jesus Christ Superstar -- as mean ol' Caiaphas monopolized the left speaker AND had a really low voice. COMPANIES WHO HAVE NOT COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY THIS WEEK are none. COMPANIES WHO HAVE COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY are none. THIS WEEK'S COSMIC QUANDARY: Where's the beef? THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: cridden. RECENT GASTRONOMIC OBSESSIONS: none! DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK Gasoline in Maine is 30 cents cheaper. THIS WEEK'S NUMBER BETWEEN 1 AND 10: 9. REVISIONS TO THIS SITE: Broken links on teaching page fixed, new names on home page. FRAGILE THINGS DESTROYED BY THE CATS THIS LAST WEEK is nothing. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS WEEK: 8. DAVY'S BAROMETER FOR THE FUTURE OF MUSIC this week is 21 out of 47. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: rationing of the octatonic scale. THIS WEEK'S FEATURED FAKE SENDER NAME IN A SPAM: Art Butts. SUBJECT OF THAT SPAM: fw. FEATURED FIONA APPLE LYRIC: I wanna make a mistake. OTHER INANIMATE OBJECTS THAT WOULD BE A BETTER PRESIDENT THAN THE CURRENT ONE last week's homework, a microphone cable, that thing you do, twelve of them.

Dear readers, the romance of returning to teaching is over, as this is the week that more time is spent outside the classroom correcting and grading homework than in the classroom actually teaching. Finding the same old mistakes (such as writing the leading tone to D# as D instead of C double sharp, or equating an augmented fourth and a diminished fifth) is not so nostalgic as it is frustrating. Alas, I'm the sort of guy who feels the need to give a mini-lecture in red pen on the page to mistakes of this nature. At this rate, homework may soon be returned with discs containing Power Point presentations about concepts not yet osmosed. But then again, I may be exaggerating. In any case, the real challenge of teaching this week was presenting, in both first year theory and fundamentals, the real difference between enharmonically equivalent notes. I dropped the name Mariah Carey, and I'll leave the reader's imagination for how that happened.

There was actually a bit of traveling this last weekend, as I drove to Bangor (and back) for Beff's faculty group concert at U Maine opening this year's concert season. I had planned on driving up Saturday and back on Sunday, but them what make predicted the former Ophelia to be having her way with the state of Maine on Saturday, so I drove up a day early. While there, there was no want of things to do, but I did seem to spend far too much time asleep. Perhaps it was the humidity in the air, perhaps it was the lack of my usual gastronomic obsessions in the refrigerator (I had gone to a convenience store for pickles, which basically got inhaled), or perhaps it was the wait time as I did auxiliary e-mail by dial-up. I am STILL weaning myself off of chairman-grade e-mail needs, and felt proud at restricting myself to three logons per day -- which, given that it was dial-up, was like about ten or something.

I had come a little earlier than expected, and so I took a roundabout way in, passing through Brewer and stopping at Marden's -- a fell-off-the-truck kind of surplus store -- where I hoped to find gastronomic obsessions. My original primal cravings for stuffed olives came from jalapeno-stuffed olives I got there maybe eight years ago. All that was available were sugary cookie substances, but I did find a jar of vitamins and a 16-pack of alkaline batteries, the latter of which was to come in handy. And to Birch Street I came, admiring the tastefulness of decorating in a house where my preferences carry no weight. Beff was at work taking a student to buy a clarinet mouthpiece, so I took a walk in the neighborhood, encountering again the Hose Fire something museum (nobody ever seems to go in there) and the massive headquarters (probably a room) of Coffee News -- who make the placemats with little tidbits of local gossip that you get at local diners and other fine dining establishments. Meantime, Beff and I lounged in the afternoon, she had to do a 7pm rehearsal, and after that we drove to Old Town to go to the Chocolate Grill. I like the place because of the deep fried pickles, so we had those (they were greasier this time than they have been before), shared a blackened tuna salad, and had some soup.