Author: Laura Conrad

I have a cold

It was coming on yesterday, which is why after trying to make a
post come out through the masses of wool in my head all morning, I
gave up and tagged the post
 for the West
Gallery Quire as my post for October 2.

This isn’t quite as much cheating as when I use the posts I do
anyway for the Cantabile Band or
Serpent
Publications, but it’s pretty close, since there wasn’t any
actual writing involved.

I knew I should stop even trying to work later in the
afternoon, when I managed to break both the CSS and the DNS for
this site, and spent a fairly long time before managing to fix
it.

So today I’m going ot take the day off. This means I can’t
write you about how much fun the New England Sacred Harp
Convention was going to be, or about what I cooked to take
there, since I’m not going.

I hope this cold clears up by tomorrow so that I can go and
write about those things then.

Songs for October meeting

We will be having special guest leaders for our meeting on
Sunday, October 11. They have sent 6 songs in advance, and it
would be helpful if people could print them in advance, the way we
did for the August workshop with Francis Roads.

Here’s the PDF
file.

Bruce writes about the leaders:

Edwin and Sheila Macadam, from Oxford, England, are the co-editorial revisers of Praise & Glory, pub. 2000, and have been members of the West Gallery Music Association since 1990.

Edwin founded Sussex Harmony, the Lewes-based West Gallery quire, in 1992 and together with Sheila, founded Warwick’s Immanuel’s Ground quire in 2001.

Between them they run five West Gallery and American shapenote singing events each year in the UK, as well as workshops at both the Sidmouth and Warwick Folk Festivals, and in collaboration with the Royal School of Church Music will be leading SingBirmingham 2009 in November, following the success of SingBirmingham in 2007.

Edwin specialises in the psalmody and anthems of composers from the Midlands and South of England, whilst Sheila is interested in the transmission of New England psalmody to England in the 19th century.

Don’t miss this opportunity to sing West Gallery music with two of the
leaders of its revival!

Housecleaning story

I mentioned in my post about cleaning
out Bonnie’s house that there were more stories than fit
into one post. Here’s one of them.

Part of what I needed help with was just carrying all the old
papers out to the trash. Of course a lot of people who came to
“help” were really more interested in snarfing things, and I
didn’t have a problem with that. But I think most people did
manage to take a couple of bags of trash out along with the
books and CD’s and kitchen equipment they were taking.

However, one day I arrived and there were two bags of wet paper
smack in front of the front door. I moved them enough to open the
door, and later had to stop my 86 year old mother (a dedicated
snarfer of books, objets d’arts, and plants) from trying
to take them all the way to the trash. They were really heavy
enough that my shoulders felt it the next day after moving them 10 feet to
the trash cans.

I wrote the mailing list:

A couple of undesirable things seemed to have happened between when I
was last there on Thursday and when I arrived yesterday afternoon:

For those who have been inhabiting some alternate universe and
have just arrived in this one: the current climate of New England
has a fair amount of rain in the summer months. Therefore, it is
unsuitable to leave paper outside exposed to the elements. Please
put paper trash into plastic bags before taking it out.

One of the points of this exercise is to remove large amounts of
stuff from the house. Therefore, it is counterproductive to leave
things in front of the door.

The culprit replied:

Sorry, that was partly my fault. There was a large pile of paper trash
blocking the door when I tried to leave. I had to put it outside in order to
close the door.;-) I was exhausted by the time I noticed that problem and
didn’t have the energy to try to bag it.

Someone who had been there while she was opined that if there
was trash blocking the front door, she was who had put it there.

So if you’re dealing with this kind of housecleaning problem, be careful who you get
to “help”. If a volunteer has any kind of history of creating
messes and then leaving them for other people to clean up, you
want to direct that person’s energy elsewhere.

Roasting vegetables

A frustrating part of getting a giant box of vegetables every
week at the height of summer is that the easiest thing to do
with lots of vegetables is to roast them in the oven. But when
the temperature and humidity are both high you don’t actually
want to turn the oven on.

I no longer have that excuse, so tomorrow or Friday lots of
things are going in the oven.

I’ll be spending the weekend at the New England Sacred Harp
Convention (5 hours of singing a day, and nobody minds if
you sing loud), which means I’ll have to bring potluck
contributions for lunch on both Saturday and Sunday.

I’ve already written about some of the possibilities:

The announcement of what’s in the share this week suggests
another option, courtesy of another shareholder:

Oven Roasted Kale
the kale last week was the most amazing. I roasted it in the oven at 350 until crisp, with a little olive oil and sea salt–better than potato chips!

There’s also just plain potato salad, a bunch of leeks staring
at me wanting to be put in a sharp mustard vinaigrette, a
cabbage that wants its leaves to be stuffed with something…

Report on the September 29, 2009 meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will be having our usual dropin meetings on Tuesdays at
7:45 PM at my
place.

We will probably miss the meetings where there are elections,
i.e., November 3, December 8, and January 19, if the Cambridge
Election Committee continues to hire me to serve as an official.

We may also miss one or two more meetings in December. But for
September and October, assume there are regular dropin meetings.

Web page

We had a new member come last night, and when she called me it
was clear that the website had not been as enlightening as I’d
hoped. When I looked at it, it was clear that it was confusing,
erroneous, and outdated in some major respects.

So there’s a new
version. Please look at it and let me know if you can think of
any improvements.

First they came…

I thought everybody knew and had reflected on the famous poem:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
— because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me.

But I had dinner with a friend last night, and was telling her
about my
neighbor being arrested. I said that the fact that they’d
siezed his computer and all the peripherals and his cameras made
me feel I should have off-site backup.

She said, “But why? You don’t grow marijuana.” So I pointed
out all the other stories of people being arrested without having
done anything illegal: Gates,
the
father who took pictures of his kids, and the more recent story
about the grandmother who’s being prosecuted for buying
two bottles of cold medication in one week.

She said, “You’re not black,” and, “You don’t have kids,” and
“You don’t live in Indiana.” (This last one still has me
puzzled.)

About this specific problem, she’s just plain wrong — I’ve
been worrying about the hole in my backup
procedure that it doesn’t produce an off-site backup for some
time, and of course I’m worried more about it because my
next-door neighbor in the same building has been in a situation
where he should have had one. After all,
even if there’s no conceivable situation where the police would
break into my apartment and steal my computer, someone else
certainly could. And there’s the risk of fires and natural
disasters. Having an off-site backup of the things that are
important to you is just a Good Idea.

But I’m concerned that she doesn’t empathize more with all
these people getting arrested. Especially the grandmother in
Indiana. Her grandchildren all live in the same household at the
moment, but if her other son ever gets married and has kids (which
is something she wishes for), I would think it quite likely that
she could buy two bottles of something for the grandchildren in
one week.

Then they came for the people who had two children with
offspring and I did not speak out — because only one of my
children had offspring?

More about converting MIDI to lilypond

I wrote a a
couple of days ago about having tried out a new way of
converting MIDI files to lilypond. I posted the gist of the
idea to the lilypond
users’ mailing list, and got some more suggestions of things
to try.

The idea I liked best was that the MuseScore program has an
experimental Capella import (and
lilypond export),
which would have let me avoid using the MIDI files as an
exchange format at all. Unfortunately, in its current state,
the import crashes on the capella files for Holborne.
(I did report the bug on the MuseScore tracking program.)

So I tried several other programs that import MIDI and export
lilypond, and the one that seems to work best for this
particular purpose was the rosegarden one. I
haven’t finished a whole piece, but from what I’ve done, it
looks like the work I have to do is work I couldn’t reasonably
expect a MIDI reading program to do for me.

The most time-consuming part is that the MIDI files for the Holborne
are what lilypond calls “unfolded” repeats, and I want “volta”
repeats. That is, when something is repeated, these MIDI files
play it twice (which is what you want when you’re using the MIDI
file to practice with), whereas I want to print the music once with repeat
signs around it. But otherwise, I’m just making the changes
which are necessary because I want unbarred parts.

Hobson’s Choice

I watched this
movie last night, and enjoyed it a lot. It’s about a
woman who does all the work for a family with a mostly absent
father and two lazy sisters.

Not that I believe the fairy tale about getting capital for
your business from the first person you ask and paying it off
before it’s due. But the fairy tale about a woman deciding what
she wants and going and getting it is a lot of fun to watch.
And she gets to be the fairy godmother to the bootmaker in the
basement who hasn’t ever thought of getting a better job or a
better place to live.

The key sentence of the plot goes, “This business runs on the shoes you
make which sell themselves and the boots everyone else makes,
which I sell.” So obviously they should go into business for
themselves, and ditch the parasites.

Which they do. Unfortunately, the “happy” ending has them
coming back to the original shop and taking care of the
alcoholic father, but at least the lazy sisters are out of the
picture. The Cinderella ending I always imagined after “and
they lived happily ever after” was better, but the one in
Rossini actually leaves her still dealing with the father and
the stepsisters, so probabably I’m just being too escapist about
my fantasy life.

The cinematography of the alcoholic delirium is a bit dated,
but Charles Laughton’s acting of a man who’s drunk himself into
oblivion and incapacity is really good.

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