Beff's semester finishes today, and she is due home after dark tonight. Tomorrow night we take Big Mike out for Chinese buffet
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| And I have to start thinking of a keynote speech to give at the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento, because, you see, I have to give it. I should go to Pennsylvania to write it -- that is, if they re-nickname themselves "The Keynote State". Rim shot. And now that I think of it ... time to book the plane tickets, too.
Today's pictures are exclusively from pot luck day, and are easy to bunch: five shots showing some of the pizzamachen process, and three of the pot luck. Bye. SEPTEMBER 22 Breakfast this morning is microwave French toast from Trader Joe's, orange juice and coffee. Dinner last was half a plain chicken sub from Subway. Lunch was a small turkey sandwich from South Street Cafe. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 38.7 and 77.5. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS First movement of the third Brandenburg. LARGE EXPENSES SINCE LAST UPDATE new dryer $421 with delivery, iPod nano with video and AppleCare $221, bass melodica $215 including shipping, plane tickets to Sacramento $310. COMPANIES THAT HAVE COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY Cast Iron Kitchen, for the free pistachios when we don't order dessert. COMPANIES THAT HAVE NOT COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY Best Buy, whose price on the dryer we purchased doesn't include the power cord, 20 bucks extra. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: Back when we lived in Spencer, we did frequent lake-walking during the winter months. On the lake, that is, after it had frozen. Jeff Nichols visited once and said his lake-walk was extremely relaxing, and I know what he meant. One winter, it got cold very fast, and the lake froze without snow on top, making some cool blackish ice on which to walk -- which led to a nice game of being pulled on the ice by Lucas, the local Chesapeake Bay retriever -- as in, he pulled the stick I was grasping. We haven't lake-walked since about 2001 or early 2002, when Beff and I and David Horne did so on Walden Pond. Yes, THE Walden Pond. But then again, I guess that would be pond-walking. As would our Spencer walking, on Thompson Pond. D'oh. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 1. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: A little bit of projectile shedding from Cammy at his yearly checkup, Sunny's surprisingly frequent vocalisms. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Performances. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: zicht, meaning obscure, but it appears to be a combination of zipper and echt. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 4. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE I obsessively pull grass from sidewalk cracks on occasion. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: free harps and harp lessons for anyone with a double vowel in either name. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 13,928. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE RECENTLY $2.44 in Maynard with Shaw's dime discount. I WOULD NOT SAY SUCH THINGS IF I WERE YOU my head, ladybugs, a tree trunk, manhole covers, 'Round Midnight. Today is Beff's birfday! And the left digit turns over for the first time in ten years (EXACTLY ten years!), making her eligible for what I'm doing Friday. MWA ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. But I digress. True to form, Beff and I spend her birthday 250 miles apart, which means no Buffalo wings, which I wouldn't eat this week anyway. On my own left-digit-turning birfday, my lovely sister sent me a whole bunch of memorabilia "celebrating" the number, including a t-shirt I don't wear and a coffee mug we do occasionally use. In my sister's case, that particular left-digit-turning was quite a few years ago, and now she is closer to another one of those than I am. Does it seem like I'm speaking in code? I probably should, because it's code outside. Which means you need a special key. I'll just sit over here now. The teaching season is in full swing, and I'm finally starting to transcend the stupid textbook for Theory 2 that was thrust upon me (figuratively) -- cool thing being that next Wednesday it's finally away from vocabulary-learning to piece-listening, and that's way more fun. Flat-6 5 1 will be the operating metaphor that day. But I am being opaque -- as opposed to my usual seethroughness. I have finally learned all the names of the students in the course, which for me is an accomplishment given that most of them haven't had a class with me before, and it's a class exactly fifty percent larger than the one I taught last year. And that means the grading part of teaching that class is a significantly larger portion of my non-teaching time. I look forward (or perhaps backward) to when the entire class uses 6/4's correctly. However, yesterday, they did successfully yell happy birthday at Beff in the general direction of my video-capable iPod nano. Beff's teaching season is pretty full, too -- full enough that I spent 52 hours of this reporting period trippin' it to the place in Maine (including the 8 hours of driving). The point here was, of course, to see her colleagues for that one trip per year I get to do, and to have food that is excessively bad for me. Well, not entirely -- Woodman's wings, they call them, at Woodmans in Orono, and the teri tuna sandwich at the Sea Dog in Bangor. I note here without the slightest irony that said teri tuna sandwich is about 170 percent the cost of the same sandwich about eight years ago. Now I will ponder what it would mean to note that WITH irony. That's long enough. So after my teaching on Thursday of that week, off I drove, there I got, and to Woodmans (not Woodmen, saw Chip, Charlie) we went. On Friday I went into the office to see Bella, Chip's new shy dog, then to Tar-Zhay (which is gigantic in Bangor, and also surrounded by dead stores) for some very important staples -- including, for the first time in two years, a proper nice salt shaker. Yes, on certain days of the week I am easy to please. Then I got some expensive stuff at State Street Wine, pizza at Gambino Pizza (love that name), and went out with Beff to the Sea Dog (Jack, Liz, Denny). And at the crack of dawn (colonoscopy jokes begin HERE) I up and drove back to Maynard. And thankfully, the cats still remembered me. Meanwhile, after reading about the new iPod nano with video, voice recording, and FM radio, I slipped in my own drool. In order to keep that from happening again, I up and got a blue one, which arrived last Wednesday. Every photo in today's update is, indeed, a still capture (or still crazy, after all these years) from an iPod nano movie. In order to get DRAMATIC stills (etcetera), some of my first videos were of the cats jumping onto the bathroom window from outside when I uttered (loudly) the magic word ("treats!"). I was having some problems with it, though -- the FM kept saying there was no reception even though there are plenty of nearby stations, and the sound coming through the headphones sucked and didn't turn off the sound that came from the iPod's internal speaker. Incidentally -- the iPod has an internal speaker. So after some unsuccessful futzing (or is that spelled phutzing?), I called Apple to arrange service or exchange, and they advised I reinstall the iPod system software, and then take it to the Natick Collection Apple Store (say that five times fast. Now stop). So that I did, and somehow -- it seemed either the rebuild worked, or I finally got the headphones in all the way, and -- golden. My iPod works. So there. The only odd thing is that the camera/microphone is right in back of the click wheel, which makes it easy to get my thumb or finger in the movie, which I have done often. Right Reorge. On the melodica front (did you know there was a melodica front?), I was proferred a YouTube link to a crazy-ass movie of the first movement of the Brandenburg 3 played on melodicas, including bass melodicas -- somebody with a proliferation of time to kill. I hadn't yet gotten my impulse instrument(s) for the year, and I've already got a Flex-a-tone and two vibraslaps, and a ratchet, and a bird call, and a train whistle, and a bell tree, etc., so I looked up bass melodicas on line, and there they were -- at melodicas dot com. Yesterday I ordered one. It will be funny. Meanwhile this weekend Beff 'n' Geoff were around (Geoffy is here till Saturday morning), and that included a nice meal at the Cast Iron Kitchen (in addition to our usual Friday lunch there), and hanging much laundry outside to dry. This is because our dryer, which still has hot air, stopped spinning. And besides, it's getting rusty, and we traced its history back to July 2000 when we purchased this house. This precipitated an emergency trip to Best Buy, which is a no-fun drive, and took a walk through the dryer aisle. People can spend $700 on a dryer, peoples, which is just wrong. We selected a Whirlpool, got the sales guy who obviously wanted to be doing anything else but be at work that day, found out that the cost on the tag doesn't include a way to plug the sucker in, and scheduled a delivery. It is scheduled for between 11:30 and 1:30 today, and I disconnected the old one and finally got rid of all the old dryer lint (note to self: don't do again while wearing bathrobe). We will see if drying clothes is back in our retinue. We will see. We will see. We will. We. And now I am eating mostly bland stuff without skins or seeds. For you see, on Friday at 12:15 I submit to the ... tube. I have my first colonoscopy ever (oh for it to be the last), and Beff is my "accompanying adult". I've got a long list of do-eats and don't-eats and I am mostly playing it safe. Onions and peppers -- good. They're all I had for dinner on Sunday. Bread with grain -- bad. Most soups -- uh uh. I look forward to Saturday's buffalo wings. BOY do I look forward to Saturday's buffalo wings. I also have plenty of Gatorade, recommended for the fasting day. And magnesium citrate is the system restart beverage of choice. I am going to Sacramento in five or six weeks. Woo hoo. I have to write a keynote speech. Woo hoo. I bought my tickets for that trip, and I am flying United. Woo hoo. And Etudes Volume Three is now officially released by Bridge Records. See it on their site, silly. Did you know my musical world was occasionally "loony"? It's official -- it's right there on the interwebs. All of today's pictures are stills from iPod nano videos. The first six are self-explanatory. Then there are some of the taps at the Cast Iron Kitchen, and Beff as viewed on Skype as we sing the second theme of the first movement of the Tchakovsky Sixth together. Bye. OCTOBER 5 Breakfast was a whole wheat bagel with reduced fat cream cheese, orange juice, and coffee. Dinner was a garden burger and salad. Lunch was a whole wheat bagel and some Pickle Guys hot pickles. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 37.6 and 80.8. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS Pat Benatar's "We Belong" LARGE EXPENSES SINCE LAST UPDATE new photocopier all-in-one with wi-fi and duplexing, $526; air mail postage to the UK, $29.68. COMPANIES THAT HAVE NOT COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY Best Buy, for insisting we buy a dryer hookup we knew we didn't need, saying the delivery person would take it back if it wasn't necessary, and that was not true -- thus an otherwise unnecessary half-hour drive to return it. COMPANIES THAT HAVE COVERED THEMSELVES IN GLORY Whole Foods, for giving me a free bowl of edamame beans when the price scanned 2 cents off. PET PEEVE drivers who veer right before turning left, thus making it impossible to go around them. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: I seem to have taught myself ear-training when I was about 15 and at a summer camp. During idle hours I conceptually mapped the notes of the camp songs onto a virtual keyboard, eventually also figuring out what chords would work with the tunes. Several weeks in, I was able to get to a piano and discover I was right. Strangely enough, that's my entire experience with ear training -- when I got to NEC I took the advanced placement exams and was excused from two years of ear training. The advanced placement test even required me to play the bass line of a simple chorale while singing, by arpeggiating, the successive harmonies. Dunno if I could still do that now. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: Now Cammy likes to look outside by the pump organ, and Sunny still likes to hang out by the catnip patch. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Reviews 4, performances. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: triskette, a whole-grain cracker you have to eat thirteen of at a time. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 9. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE I took one organ lesson in high school, for which I even had to buy special shoes. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: Fair and Balanced actually means fair and balanced. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 13,943. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE RECENTLY $2.44 in Maynard. SAY THIS FIVE TIMES FAST. THEN STOP my head, ladybugs, a tree trunk, manhole covers, 'Round Midnight. We used to belong. Now we be short. Without the stunningness of delivery, the refrigeration had to sit by itself and scoff. Toodling became the preferred means of fibrous discharge, and our heads became rounder with each passing quarter note. Stopping to make fudge, I once told myself I would never surround pink lemonade with a prime number, but they told me I had to cut it out. So deliciousness took a back seat to the place I once had tree bark. Then it snowed. This update is one day early because today is a Brandeis holiday -- Sukkot. This year it seems we don't Shmini Atzeret off as well, which would be next Monday, I guess -- which is too bad. It also being Columbus Day and a day on which Beff will be here because SHE has it off, it would have been the second time in fifteen years at Brandeis that we both had Columbus Day off. The other was nearly a decade ago, it was Yom Kippur, and we did a little vacationlet in a very cold part of upstate New York, as well as the Mass Moca. Having a vacationlet means, for all intents and purposes, a five-day weekend for me, and this is its fourth day. I have taken full advantage of the time off to do some writing for the first time since August 17, and it's four-cello music. I am 52 bars into a movement that I thought would be shorter (an ironic turn of phrase based on what's coming up in this update), and it seems to be about fast deedling (what Davy piece isn't?) and agressive staggered unison entrances (what Davy piece ... is?). In any case, it seems I'm at a seam in the music, hence my pause today instead of tomorrow for said update. Fascinating. Unsurprisingly, and accurately predicted in the last update, I had a colonoscopy. My first ever. It's really a quick procedure, but with an extended dominant pedal that reminds me of the eight years it took me to get my dissertation done compared to the hour and forty-five minute defense in front of people who mostly hadn't read the paper and who blithely advertised their burning desire to be elsewhere. So the dominant pedal was initiated with dietary strictures at the five-, three- and one-day marks. Five days of not having any soups except broths, of not having raw vegetables or any vegetables with skins or seeds (such as tomatoes), of not having any citrus, of not having orange juice with pulp, and of not having any bread with grain in it. At the three-day mark, painkillers were restricted to Tylenol-type stuff. And the one-day mark was a fast with only clear liquids allowed -- though "Gatorade preferred" was marked. Thus I went and got Gatorade at Shaws, and they only had orange or yellow-green. Geoffy, meanwhile, clued me into the fact that clear Gatorade existed, and on the fast day I got some at the Hannaford in Waltham. And boy does clear Gatorade suck big ones. Geoffy was around for Musica Viva, so we did a couple of meals -- including one at the Blue Coyote where I had a bland chicken sandwich on white bread, and fries -- though I ate around anything that looked like skin. And that dinner marked my last real food of the week. Then after my Thursday teaching and department meeting, I got home and drank 15 ounces of magnesium citrate, designed to facilitate, nay, necessitate, bowel movements of unusual frequency (BMOUF) -- in preparation for the insertion of a tube with a camera on it. The next morning, six hours before the appointment, I drank 15 ounces more. And, me being me, I counted the magnesium citrate's efficacy, and it was 26 trips. And at an appointed time, Beff and I drove to the Harvard Vanguard spettacolo near Kenmore Square and waited to be, um, served. At my time, I was called, given a nurse who re-asked all the questions on a form I had already signed and submitted, and she wrote them onto yet another different form (I guess they wanted to see if my answers matched) -- and made sure I knew that I could possibly die or get brain damage (while oddly developing a more palpable appreciation of the visual arts), gave me a robe, botched the IV insertion into my wrist so that she had to put the IV on the bend in my elbow instead, and wheeled me into the procedure room. Now the nurse and the doctor-types both had what would be weird questions in polite company, but expected, given that they were going to be tubing my butt. My answer to the question of the color of my last "discharge" was met with enthusiasm not unlike a small child jumping up and down and clapping, and I suppose I was supposed to feel proud. As in, my "discharge" is clearer-than-thou. Whatever sedative I was given for the procedure was very mild, and I was awake the whole time. Indeed, if I were so inclined, I could have watched the show on the monitor right in front of me, but I decided not to. The nurse let me know that air is blown into the colon to expand it to get a better view of the inside, and of course it would be coming out the way it came in -- in her parlance, "you'll be tooting." So yes, while the procedure was going on, the feeling was of strange tooty indigestion, and after it was done, it took another 15 or 20 minutes of tooting to be finished. One toot that happened while I was being wheeled into the recovery area also prompted the jumping up and down and clapping kind of response (tootier than thou) I hadn't expected. And of course, the recovery room had six people in it whose colonoscopies were all finished around the same time. So in unison, insert joke about durn tootin' here. O frabjous day! I was given voluminous paperwork with advice, etc. -- no bedside manner here, no sir, just read the paperwork. Of course there had been a degree of difficulty added to my particular procedure due to the necessary negotiations around the still-inserted buttstix. But the tube is both a camera and a snipper, so three small polyps were removed, and my paperwork included a note that, depending on the biopsies, my next such procedure would be in 5 years or in 10. I can hardly wait. The directives were classic: no alcohol the rest of the day though normal eating can resume; do not make important decisions, and do not sign any contracts. And no painkillers except Tylenol for 10 days. Today is that tenth day. I wonder how I'll celebrate. Oh yes, and because of the diverticulitis I have (read this space about a year ago), a higher fiber diet is strongly recommended. I bought Citrucel. And apples. And rejoiced at the fiber amount of the edamame beans already in the house. So, having had nothing but bland food for five days, I immediately made myself a plate of strong-flavor pickles, made some Buffalo wing sauce, and dipped some bread in it. And we ordered pizza delivery. The next morning, Beff was off before lunch, after a little bike ride. Meanwhile, the teaching has gotten to the let's-look-at-some-actual-music point, and I got to deliver my classic lecture -- that is, my SOON TO BE CLASSIC lecture -- on songs 1 & 12 of Dichterliebe, accompanied by the customary looks of abject horror on the students' faces when I told them they'd be writing papers on this music. There will still be some trips to the textbook for lectures on the weird chords, which are all that's left (dominant ninths, added sixths, augmented sixths that resolve differently, etc.), but mostly it's about the music now. And of course, we will chop up the textbook at the end of the term. And the private students -- Monday people meet on Wednesday, and Wednesday people get nothing, nothing, nothing. This weekend was Maynardfest or Maynard Octoberfest or something like that, though with the torrential rains on Saturday, most of the downtown activities on Saturday were cancelled. On the other hand, yesterday was beautifully sunny and warm in the afternoon, so the thing where they block off a portion of the parking lot at Clock Tower Place, have beer and food stands, and have a lame-ass band playing happened on schedule. See the pinkish "Maynardfest" link up there for a brief bit of the Fumo Sull'Acqua (Fuoco nel cielo) performance by said band. It was at the very beginning of the festivities, hence the sparse attendance. Later, in the dark, there were fireworks (fuochi d'artifici), the sound of which scared the cats. And on Friday, after I had done my writing for the day, Rick Beaudoin came over for a late lunch (2:45), and of course we went to the Cast Iron Kitchen. He had said he would bring a gift of beer, but instead he brought a book by Frank Zappa, probably because both names have five letters. Rick had the ziti, which amazed and delighted. We took a peek into the River Rock Grill, which has taken over the space formerly known as the Sit 'n' Bull, and so far it looks as Beff has described it -- upscale sports bar. No menu is online or on the restaurant door, so no report yet. But you will, Oscar, you will. Among other non-interesting things, I now mow smaller and smaller lawn portions as the leaf-falling season begins. Plus, plenty of yard-mushrooms are taking up their customary space. When I'm doing the outdoor stuff, I occasionally see the little terrier from next door named Lily, who is scared of people but who craves the dog bones she knows I have access to. While snipping branches and clearing up various space for the future fallen leaves, I managed to bring some bees inside on my shirt, but all was resolved to my satisfaction. ... The people in Sacramento in charge of the festival where I am to speechify seem not to communicate much with each other, since I got several separate requests for headshots and the title of my speech (currently "Plus ca change", with the cedilla where it belongs), but there is as yet no speech. And in sad news, the dog at Maynard Door and Window was run over. I also spent some time collecting sour candy to send to Martler in England. The last piece of the puzzle was "Shockers", formerly known as Shock Tarts, which I had not seen anywhere around here. So Beff suggested I just get them on amazon. So I did. 24 rolls, just to send 2 to Martler. I'll be disposing of the others in original and thought-provoking ways. The box of sour candy went out for $29.68 on Monday, and was delivered to Martler on Saturday. So there. Meanwhile, our 5-year-old photocopier has been sucking. The regular paper feed no longer works, and the platen is scratched. Beff authorized the purchase of a new one as an early Christmas present -- to both of us and from both of us -- and soon I'll be offering the old one to whomever wants it. Not yet, though. So two more days of four-cello writing, plus grading a bunch of theory papers, and back to the grind. As to Beff, she was in North Carolina for a music chairs' kind of pow-wow (spelled upside down is mom-mod), so I was on my own this weekend. This coming weekend, she'll be here an extra day thanks to Columbus Day. And starting this week, the roof on the Bangor house gets replaced. Which means a big dumpster in the driveway until further notice. This week's pictures begin with the only picture I took on the grounds from the Tanglewood trip in August, about which I had forgotten. Because it was on my cell phone -- it's Gusty with 2 people from the Philadelphia Experience near Ozawa Hall, with Sam Solomon and Judd Greenstein off in the distance. Then we have Rick B at the Cast Iron Kitchen (taken from iPod), cat picture, cat picture, cat picture, Cammy's tail as a design element, and two pics of Lily, the local terrier, taking a dog bone and then zipping right away with it. Bye. Download 2.79 Mb. Share with your friends:
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