Author: Laura Conrad

What I did on the Pub Crawl

I decided that if you were interested in what I wrote
yesterday, you’d want to know what it was like, so here are some
remarks and some pictures.

We started at the Cambridge
brewing company, which is an American brewpub with a lot of
interesting beers brewed on site. Like most eating places that
used to be factories, it can be pretty loud when it gets full, but
that wasn’t a problem yesterday at lunch time. I had their
imitation Berliner Weisse, straight, although I concluded as I
have the other times I’ve tried it straight that I like it better
with the woodruff syrup. I also had the Mediterranean platter.
I’d been there for lunch on Thursday, so people asked for my
recommendations, and many of them ordered the Hefeweizen, which
I’ve been buying in growlers and drinking at home all summer, and
a Russian Imperial Stout which was a guest beef from the Stone
Brewery in San Diego.

[CBC]

Then we moved to the Elephant and Castle downtown, where
everyone ordered either Fullers London Porter or Fullers London
Pride. They have similar hop profiles; I was glad I had the
porter because I liked the extra taste of the roasted malts.

[Elephant and Castle]

The next stop was Jacob Wirth’s, which is
known for its selection of German beers and food. But they’ve
recently started having a cask ale on tap, and I believe in
encouraging that, so that’s what I ordered. It was something from
Dogfish Head. It’s a nice setting for drinking, with lots of wood
and old posters and signs. I’d planned to have the cherry
strudel, but I wasn’t hungry yet.

[Jacob Wirth]

After that I got tired of taking pictures, although the next
place, The Other Side, is an interesting space that
could have made a good picture. We were upstairs under the
seemingly improvised
vaulted skylight. I had a red beer with a French name, and a
piece of cherry pie.

Everyone else had the same reaction I did to the idea of
Cornwall’s, and nobody was drinking their beers very fast by now
and most people wanted some food, so we decided to skip the
Cornwall’s stop and go straight to The Publicke
House in Brookline. I had something from the Scillie
Brewery in Belgium. When it was time to move on, a few of us
decided we’d be better off having food where we were than at the
next stop, so I had something called The Publicke House Platter,
with bread and cheese and salad and cold cuts, and a Framboise to
go with it.

The food and beer were all good. Of the 10 or 11 people who came, most of them were people I
wanted to talk to. So I enjoyed myself, but it was too bad that
it’s a dwindling institution. We used to get a couple of dozen
people, including people from out of town who liked the idea of
drinking with people who already knew their way around Boston.

Pub Crawl

A short one today, since I’ll be spending all afternoon and
maybe some of the evening at the Boston Wort Processors Pub
Crawl.

I’ve been going on these since 1991, so for me they’re a
recurrent social life, where I see people I might not have seen
since last year, or even for several years.

But if I were moving to a new city, I might try to find an
organization that does pub crawls just to see where people who
drink think the good bars are. Especially for a woman, it’s
easier to check out a new place in the company of other people.

While there’s an occasional disappointment on the list, all the
stops are places where someone has had a good meal or at
least a good pint sometime.

Today I’ll be joining at the beginning, since it’s my local pub a couple of
blocks away. I’ll definitely stay at least through Jacob Wirth’s, which has
really good strudel. I’d like to stay to the end, because I
haven’t yet been to the Roadhouse, which only opened within the
last year, but I may decide that 3 or 4 bars are enough for one
day and check out the Roadhouse some other day.

The 4:30 stop at Cornwall’s is a likely crawl-ender. That was
one of the disappointments I mentioned a few years ago, when
they had some beer of a good brand that was undrinkable because
of improper storage and refused to recognize the fact. People
say they’ve improved since then, but I may remember the taste of
that beer and decide to walk home and take care of the dog.

Dog parks: a compromise

I’ve written about dog parks several times, most recently last month, when
I was thinking about what I was going to do with two dogs of
significantly different activity levels, but most relevantly in 2006 when they
enclosed the Fort Washington Dog Park, and made it less
embarrassing to go there with a dog who completely ignored his
owner to run out on the railway tracks to steal food from the
homeless people.

After that, the park became much more popular with dog owners,
and so there stopped being any grass to speak of in the summer.
The embankments which were allegedly built by George Washington
during the American Revolution started getting smaller. Some
people blamed this on the dogs digging them up, but I think it was
erosion. I suspect a lot of erosion has happened since the
eighteenth century, and very little of the dirt that’s in those
embankments is the same dirt that Washington’s soldiers
shoveled.

In any case, if I were running parks, I would say, “Good, lots
of people are using this dog park, and we should deal with the
problems they create, and maybe make some more dog parks.”

The Cambridge Department of Public Works did essentially say
this, and they set up a smaller park a couple of blocks away, and
also made plans for a sprinkler system for Fort Washington.

In conjunction with installing the sprinkler system, they had
some archaeologists come do some excavations, so the park was
closed for over a year, and has only reopened this month.

There’s a person who claims to be patriotic, and in fact
dislikes dogs, and he started lobbying for not allowing the dogs
back in the park. The dog owners lobbied back.

The solution the city came up with was to remove the extra fencing that completely
enclosed Fort Washington, which both increased the number of dogs
at the park and also didn’t look anything like an eighteenth
century fence. (Not that there was a fence there before the
twentieth century.)

So now there are two dog parks; one for people whose dogs can
be trusted not to run outside the park (Sunny’s in that class
now), and a smaller, less nice one for dogs who can’t. It’s too
soon to tell whether this is going to mollify anyone, but at least
Sunny and I have our park back.

West Gallery Quire Workshop

This is about the workshop I
attended on Tuesday, August 11, 2009, directed by Francis Roads. Here’s the music we played.
I had intended to write this yesterday, but got lazy, and let
A.A. Milne do the post for me. Now I’m
glad I did because it gave me a chance to talk to one of the other
attendees yesterday afternoon.

First the good things.

  • There were about 40 people, including a
    number who had never played West Gallery music before.
  • There was
    a really good section of bass singers, which is what the serpent
    really likes.
  • The ratio of singers to instruments was higher than
    it usually is at our regular meetings, which is probably both
    better musically and more authentic to the tradition.
  • The tempos Francis Roads picked were much brisker than the
    ones we usually play, and this did give us some better idea of the
    relationship of the music to dance music than we usually get.
  • I brought flyers for both the Cantabile Renaissance
    Band     and the Serpent Publications
    Website    , and lots of them disappeared. In fact, the Serpent
    Publications ones were all gone, and I should have made more than
    I did.

Some things that future workshop organizers might want to think
about:

  • This was the hardest serpent playing I’ve ever done. Some
    of that was because a couple of songs were in really difficult
    keys for a D serpent. Since most serpents in this century are
    in C, that probably wasn’t something Francis Roads would have
    known. Another thing that made it harder was that he spent the
    first 15 minutes we were playing trying to improve the balance,
    by making both the instruments and the basses not stand out as
    much. This meant that I was playing in difficult keys, softer
    and more staccato than I was used to. There was even one piece
    with difficult fingerings that I should have practiced harder.
    This is unusual in vocal music, since most people who play a
    brass instrument at all can play arpeggios faster than most
    singers can sing them.
  • The friend I discussed the workshop with yesterday had been
    in England for the Ironbridge workshop last spring. The pace of
    Tuesday’s workshop seemed quite fast compared with what we’re
    used to, but she said the people in England go even faster.
    They’d have been through all the verses by the time we got
    through with the first verse. I think the level of music
    education in the general population there isn’t much if any
    better than it is here, but the people who’ve been to those
    choir schools are really good choral sightreaders.
  • Logistically, putting the music on the chairs didn’t really
    improve anything, since enough people had printed their own to
    practice from that it kept having to be moved to the floor.
  • It wasn’t possible to organize an optimal seating plan.
    There were three incompatible influences on the seating plan
    that actually happened:

    1. The singers will sometimes stand up, since they sing
      better that way, but some of the instruments can’t be played
      standing up, so in general you want to put the instruments
      in front of the singers.
    2. The people who aren’t good sightreaders should be in
      front of the people who are, so that they can hear them
      better.
    3. People who are doing something new to them that they
      aren’t sure they’re going to be able to handle sometimes
      prefer to hide in the back rows.

I’m glad we had the workshop. West Gallery Music
is a form that should be better known and more widely used and
this workshop contributed to that happening.

PLES RING IF AN RNSER IS REQIRD

Clearly, Owl had been dealing with delivery people. (If you’ve
never read Winnie
the Pooh, you should.)

Monday, as I was thinking about scheduling a run to the store
for paper, I got an email from Staples offering me a case at a
good price. I also had a coupon for $25 off an internet order, so
I ordered paper and some other office supplies, expecting them to
be delivered on Tuesday.

Tuesday, I was printing a copy of the music for the West Gallery
workshop, from time to time, and hoping the paper supply would
hold out until the delivery truck arrived. In the afternoon, the
doorbell rang, and instead of the paper, it was a package from
Amazon with the least useful 4 of the 8 items I’d ordered last
week.

Previously when I’ve ordered from Staples, the truck has
arrived in the morning, so I went online to see what the status of
the delivery was, and it said the truck had left it on my front
porch in the morning.

I went out and looked on all my neighbors’ front porches, and
there was no case of paper. So I called Staples, and they asked
the delivery person, who assured them he had left it on my
front porch, and that he had rung the doorbell.

At about 6 PM, I heard a knock on my door (I was downstairs
packing for the workshop — I can hear a knock when I’m
downstairs, but there’s no chance at all of hearing it when I’m
upstairs).

It was my downstairs neighbor. The packages had been left in
front of his door, and he’d needed to move them in order to get
out. So he hadn’t rung the doorbell (his doesn’t work, so he
assumes that nobody else’s does, either), or called me, or
emailed me.

In addition to the two boxes from Staples, there was another
box delivered by the UPS person, who had also not rung the doorbell.

In the end, it turned out that enough people did print copies
of music for the workshop, so getting the paper earlier would
just have meant I’d have killed more trees than I had to.

But I’m going to make myself WOL-type placards. Here’s the
section from Winnie the Pooh, if you want it in
isolation:

Owl lived at The Chestnuts, an old-world residence of great
charm, which was grander than anybody else’s, or seemed so to
Bear, because it had both a knocker and a bell-pull.
Underneath the knocker there was a notice which said:

PLES RING IF AN RNSER IS REQIRD.

Underneath the bell-pull there was a notice which said:

PLEZ CNOKE IF AN RNSR IS NOT REQID.

These notices had been written by Christopher Robin, who was
the only one in the forest who could spell; for Owl, wise though
he was in many ways, able to read and write and spell his own
name WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words
like MEASLES and BUTTERED TOAST.

Winnie-the-Pooh read the two notices very carefully, first
from left to right, and afterwards, in case he had missed some
of it, from right to left. Then, to make quite sure, he knocked
and pulled the knocker, and he pulled and knocked the bell-rope,
and he called out in a very loud voice, “Owl! I require an
answer! It’s Bear speaking.” And the door opened, and Owl looked
out.

“Hallo, Pooh,” he said. “How’s things?”

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0140361219&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Serpent Publications Changes

I’ve already done a lot of writing this morning, so instead of
writing you a separate post, I’ll just point you at what I’ve
already written:

Taking financial responsibility for the dead or dying

Starting to work on Bonnie’s estate taxes yesterday reminded me
of how difficult it was when she was heavily sedated and I had to
take over the power of attorney so that her bills would get
paid.

I don’t mean the difficulty of feeling bad because your friend
is dying or of visiting someone in the hospital who isn’t able to
respond to you and not knowing what to do about that.

I mean the set of completely pointless obstacles the banks and
other financial institutions put in the way of letting someone
with a valid power of attorney get access to the resources they
need to do their job.

This didn’t appear in the first week — I took the copy of the
power of attorney Bonnie had signed to the bank where she had her
checking account and showed it and my driver’s licence to the bank
officer and she told me how to sign the checks and what the
password on her online banking was, and then I was able to use the
checking account. This is the kind of nuisance I had expected it
to be when I signed up for the job.

Unfortunately, the checking account didn’t have very much money
in it, and the next thing I had to do was get money out of her
retirement account.

I had assumed this would be the same kind of nuisance —
Bonnie’s retirement account was at Pioneer Investments
in downtown Boston, where Bonnie had worked as a phone
representative for the last decade or
two of her working career, so I thought I could just go there and
show them the power of attorney and they would give me her
money.

Unfortunately, Pioneer isn’t actually a consumer level
financial services firm — they really expect to sell their
products to you through a broker or your employer. So they don’t
have an office with people like the bank officer who can look at
your power of attorney, and you have to do it through the
mail.

Now of course, the people who talked to me on the phone about
what I needed to send them had several ideas about what I needed
to do. One option would have been to have her sign their
specific power of attorney form. This would have been
possible for a while in March or April, after she woke up from the
surgery, and
before she stopped being able to move a pencil. It’s possible that if you’re thinking about this for
someone before they get into the state where they need you to do
it, you should just have them get the power of attorney from the
institution that holds most of their resources. But really, the
one the lawyer wrote for Bonnie should have been enough, and I
started this while she was unconscious, and didn’t really finish
until she wasn’t able to write any more.

What they eventually decided I needed to do was to send a
certified copy of the POA along with a guaranteed
letter describing what I wanted them to do. This guarantee is
something a bank manager needs to do for you, and he or she is
stamping your letter with something that says he believes you are
who you say you are.

So I assumed Bonnie’s bank, which was convenient to the
hospital I was visiting her at and her house, which I was visiting
from time to time, would do this for me, and I went there to ask
them to do it.

The first person I talked to called the central office, which
said she needed to see one of their statements before she could
guarantee my letter. Finding anything in Bonnie’s house wasn’t
easy, but I eventually managed to find a statement and went back
to the bank. The officer I had talked to was getting out her
seal, when her supervisor got involved in the transation, and gave
it as her opinion that they couldn’t guarantee my signature
because I wasn’t their customer.

She was really unpleasant about this — I even offered to set up a
small account so that I would personally be a customer and she
wouldn’t even listen to me. It was very clearly a “We don’t want
to do business with you,” reaction. It really happened before I’d
done or said anything at all to her, so it couldn’t have been
personal. The only theory I could come up with was that she was
assuming that Bonnie and I were in a lesbian relationship and she
didn’t want to have anything to do with that.

I really meant to write a letter to that bank explaining to
them why Bonnie’s money all disappeared from their bank shortly
after that. That kind of customer service really can’t possible
be the bank policy, and there may be people there who want to know
it’s happening. I haven’t done it yet, but maybe I will. I
didn’t write some of what I thought I should to the doctors, either.

I could of course have gotten the guarantee from my own bank,
but their nearest office is downtown, and I was still using a
crutch after hip surgery. So instead of going there I
decided to try the bank around the corner first. They were very
nice, and were happy to guarantee my signature after I set up an
account for Bonnie with the money from the bank I didn’t like.

So then I had to struggle some more with Pioneer, because I
hadn’t really understood their account numbering system, and I
asked to withdraw $15,000, which was much less than she had in all
her accounts, but more than was in the specific account whose
number I had copied off a statement. I think I had two
conversations with first-line people and it was after some yelling
and screaming at the second one (who was saying something
completely different from the first one) and some “May I speak to
your manager” that they finally sent me the money.

When I had to do roughly the same thing after Bonnie died, of
course I had the tame bank manager around the corner to guarantee
the signature, and I’d figured out what part of the account number
to copy. I’d also decided that mentioning my lawyer couldn’t
possibly hurt. So that went quite smoothly.

In case you have to do this, here’s the letter that worked:

I am enclosing certified copies of the Death Certificate and my
Decree of Temporary Executor in the estate of
Bonnie J. Rogers, one of your shareholders.

I would like to close out all the Pioneer funds she owned, which
are under the account number xxxxxxxx.

Please do not deduct taxes from this money. The TIN for the estate is
xx-xxx-xxxx.

Please send the check to me at:
xxx Xxxxxx
Cambridge, MA 02139

If you have a problem with this request,
please send a copy of your response to my lawyer, *redacted*, at:
xx X St.
Rockport, MA 01966

Thank you for your assistance,

Tufte-inspired LaTeX class

One of the things I do when I’m putting off doing a piece of writing
because I won’t enjoy it is figure out a new way to publish it
so that it will at least look good.

I ran across the Tufte LaTex
package on the comp.text.tex newsgroup yesterday and
downloaded it. It really does look nice, so I’m writing the
summary of income, deductions, and expenses for the Estate of
Bonnie Rogers using it.

It’s inspired by the books of <a href="Edward Tufte,
whose design lots of people, including me, admire.

I think the package may be a work in progress, but so far the
quick outline I threw up of my document does compile and look
pretty good. I base my judgement about the work in progress on
both the question on the newsgroup and the fact that the
sample-book gives me errors instead of a PDF file on my
machine.

There probably isn’t much point using the Tufte style
if you aren’t going to have marginal notes and figures, but for
this purpose there won’t be any trouble writing marginal notes
like “Ted, you have the paperwork for the sale of the house, so
your guess about which items are expenses is better than
mine.”

Another piece of distraction I found was downloading the free

Bergamo Std font from fontsite.com. So then I
had to google things about how to use open type fonts. The
magic word for Ubuntu is that after you’ve unzipped the fonts
into a suitable directory, such as /usr/local/share/fonts, you
say:

fc-cache -f -v

Then if you want to look at them on the screen, Abiword seems
to
support open type fonts better than openoffice. I had to change
permissions on both the directory and the fonts before I could
use them.

Giant social networking sites

I keep being surprised by how many people want their online
presence mediated by a corporation.

I have a friend I’ve been carrying on an email correspondence
with for 15 years or so, and she had taken some pictures of her
flower garden that she wanted me to see, but she put them on her
facebook page and couldn’t figure out how to let me see them if I
didn’t send her my facebook ID. I think she’s wrong — I’ve
seen other things on people’s facebook pages without registering
and logging in, so it must be possible to let non-facebook users
see things if you want to. But in any case, I told her I wasn’t
getting a facebook page because I have two websites that I
attempt vainly to keep up to date, and their URL’s are in all my
email messages and they both have RSS feeds. So I don’t want to
also have a facebook page to get out of date.

Her response was that several non-technical people she wanted
to stay in touch with now had facebook pages, and weren’t going
ot read a blog or follow a flickr url. If I know people like
that, they haven’t told me about their facebook pages.

I was surprised again yesterday morning yesterday morning when
one of the mailing lists I’m on had a discussion about how
disconnected they felt with twitter being down. (This turns out
to be a side effect of the Russia/Georgia conflict, according to
this
New York Times article. So don’t say Americans are totally
insulated from the effects of war.)

Unlike facebook, twitter
does seem to have things to offer even the technically ept who
are capable of setting up a blog or uploading pictures to Flickr. But I have yet to
sign up to take advantage of them.

Between email and websites and blogs, I really don’t see why I
need to sign up for a mass-produced page. And I don’t see why
my friend wouldn’t be better off getting a flickr account or a
blog on wordpress.com if
she wants to share stories or pictures with the world.

I like to think I’m not quite as bullheaded about adopting
popular technologies as the rest of my family (who don’t have
cell phones or cable TV, and got broadband internet only because I
forced them to and paid for it). But I really do think people
should think about “What will this do for me?” before blindly
following all the other sheep to sign up for it.