tick tock

so for christmas everyone in my family got a lovely little plush toy.

yes, i got a tick.

we all got something equally lovely.

there'a a company called giant microbes.  you're welcome.

roulette

when you live alone, you can play games that would make you an asshole if you lived with someone.

like toilet paper roulette, in which you decided to live dangerously by seeing if you really do have enough for next time.

of course you leave all the spare rolls downstair, because it isn't much sport if you have them handy.

yeah.

if you play that game and you live alone, you are maybe just bored.

or lazy.

it you play it and you live with someone, you're an asshole.

rude awakening

this morning i went down to the kitchem to get my breakfast and found a dead mouse in my oven.

ick.

and then when i went to remove it, it BROKE into two parts of dead mouse. i am not sure why that didn't make me gag. maybe too early in the morning to think about it.

so. on today's list: vacuum out the oven and heat it up real hot.

there are not photos. you're welcome.

aubade

a little while ago i posted a good morning song for one of my little online friends in our slack channel. ze said it was like having a personal good morning, which is sweet. so i have gotten in the habit of uploading a new song from my catalog every day for the morning music.

it's a nice little ritual, and also it's a way for me to look at the body of my work, which i am only just reclaiming.

the one from yesterday is one i'm a little excited to see again. it was the first thing i wrote for my new teacher when i came to study at college. he told me to go away and come back next week with something written for clarinet trio, so i wrote this, a series of short pieces in some different styles.

he was pleased.

and like the phoenix

well, my machine didn't exactly rise from the ashes, but i have a shiny new machine on my desk. i am still figuring out how to get all the things from the old one onto the new one.

most of it seems to be going without argument.

and the processor on the new machine is so lightning fast that i barely know what to do with myself.


in other news, i mailed out some mystery packages, one of which arrived at its destination yesterday.

one will arrive today.

we'll see about the others.

death on a desk

well, i was almost finished editing some video i wanted to show you.

i say "almost", because i got to the end of the project and decided that i wanted to re-shoot all the footage and make it nicer. plus for some reason with all the footage i shot, i was missing an important part, so i was actually just getting ready to scrap the project but then for some reason i decided to go into my files to get a song that i wrote years ago because i want to rework it a little for new purposes and that's when my desktop machine died.

so suckage.

good news: i had good backups, mostly.

and it's not a surprise: for the last week there have been behavioral indications that made me think "is my computer dying?"

yep.

dying.

well, shit.

one song, two versions

what i haven't really told you here is that i lost faith. that may be strange because when i GOT faith, i was not shy to tell you.

it wasn't so much that i lost faith, but given the way i had been thrown out of my church combined with the increasing stress of maintaining all those cognitive dissonances, i walked away from it.

i feel better now, but i also kind of miss it because parts of it were very appealing.

i wrote a lot of church music, though, and even though i feel a vague embarrassment about it now, some of it is still pretty decent work.

the other thing that happened to me is that at about the time i was getting thrown out of my church, i lost my musical voice. my heart was broken and i had devoted the whole of my art to the church and all of a sudden music went right out of my life.

if you are a composer, you think in music. you hear snips and notes and phrases just as you go along in your day. you think in songs. you have a song for unloading the dishwasher, or because it's cold out.

and then one day music was gone from me.

i didn't sing, didn't play, didn't think in music, didn't hear it in my mind, and didn't even care to listen to it.

but recently two things happened. i acquired a young (to me) friend who is a very skilled musician. and you know how you do with new friends: you share the things you have in common.

and i found myself saying "i used to be a musician." and i wanted to share my work, to show who i used to be. and music was less foreign.

but then i fell in love.

and i am still not ready to talk to you about that, but all of a sudden i wanted to bring out all of my work, the good and the bad and say "this is who i was, who i AM", and i wanted suddenly to play music and listen to it and make mixtapes (even though you don't put them on tape any more) because i used to think in music and i used to express love through music and without music i did not have my whole toolset.

so music and i are not quite at home again, but we are having a renewed acquaintance.

and i was looking through my files and i found this song, in two versions. they are strikingly different, i think.

glows in the dark

back in december some of my little internet friends were talking about cool sciencey things and i was also in the middle of a candymaking frenzy and somebody or other came across some recipes for candies that fluoresce under blacklight and i thought i'd try my hand at it.

the key is that quinine fluoresces under blacklight, so tonic water does, too.

and if you make your candy with enough tonic water in it, it will also flouresce.

it's hard to cook it to the point that it will be solid without the sugar caramelizing a little too dark to make the glowy effect dim, but look at these. don't they have the most fantastic golden color?

new shoes

so my stepmother bought these shoes, but they didn't fit her quite right. she's shopped enough for me to know they'd fit me, so she sent them along.

they're like my barn boots, only ankle high.

kind of perfect.

plus spiffy looking.

snohaus, day 4

i'm feeling kind of drug-out and tired today, so i think i will maybe not work snohaus today even thought the conditions are good.

but here's a short video.

thursday morning on cobrass

righty-o.

so check this out: i am posting TWO DAYS IN A ROW.

my life is a little different these days and i am not prepared to talk about it here yet, but someday i'm sure i will.

meantime, i've been taken out of my normal routine and i'm getting used to having a new routine. it's becoming comfortable as i learn it.

last thursday it was fantastic skiing up on the mountain, and i shot some video of some runs. this is the best one.

it's the full run down cobrass, which is a pretty trail and last thrsday it was just about as nice as i've ever seen it.

it is begun.

snohaus 2015 got its official start on saturday.

it's very slow going in the beginning, because base building does not look cool in any way.

but you need a base, you know?

so i keep the gallery here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/50555362@N05/sets/72157650190603039

it will update with construction, and now i'm going to go update the sidebar to link to this year's snohaus.

last year the documentation of the awesome structure was poor on account of the hard drive meltdown, but this year we ought to be OK.