Author: Laura Conrad

Pain d’épice

I got this recipe from the WildYeast
blog. I baked it yesterday morning, and fed it to dinner
guests last night. We all enjoyed it.

I don’t cook with a scale, so I converted the grams to cups of
flour and water. The dinner guests are vegans, so I converted
the grams of honey to cups of maple syrup. And I used whole
wheat flour instead of all-purpose.

I also threw everything into the bread machine and baked it on
the quick bread cycle instead of
making syrups and adding ingredients a quarter cup at a time.

The result was a pretty thin batter, that baked into a very
moist loaf, not the hard dry one that needs to be dunked in
coffee described in the post.

Another subtle flavor I ended up adding was coffee – I didn’t
have an orange to zest, but I did have some hard-as-rocks
bitter orange peel with my brewing supplies. My little mortar
and pestle wasn’t doing very well turning the rocks into
powder, so I used my coffee mill, so some coffee grounds got
into the recipe along with the anise, mustard, cinnamon, maple
syrup and
orange peel.

In any case, it was a fine combination of subtle flavors. I
was interested in seeing how the mustard went with the other
flavors – I don’t think I could have identified it if I hadn’t
known it was there.

If I weren’t cooking for vegans, I think I’d use the honey
instead of the maple syrup – I think it would go better with
the anise and orange peel.

Opening Day

There are lots of events that can signal the start of
Spring:

Astronomical Spring, or the Vernal Equinox,when the Sun is
overhead at noon on the Equator. The news media tells you about
this, but the actual lengthening of the day has been evident for
some time when it happens. This happened a couple of weeks ago.

Local astronomical, when the sun gets high enough while it’s
still in the east to peep
through my northeast bedroom windows. By the calendar, this has
probably happened, but it’s been cloudy enough, and I’ve been
waking up late enough, that it hasn’t actually bothered me yet.
(This is an unwelcome sign of Spring — I love having sunny rooms
once I’m up and about, but I prefer the bedroom to stay dark until
I’m ready for sunshine.)

Local bureaucratic Spring, when the Cambridge Department of
Public Works starts picking up yard waste in specially marked
bins. This starts this week; tomorrow in my neighborhood.

Religious Spring, Easter in my case. Next Sunday. Less useful
than some of the others for complaining about the weather being
cold this year, since it’s a movable feast.

Athletic Spring, here in Boston Opening Day for the Red Sox, or
in particularly bad years, the Boston Marathon a couple of weeks
later. Yesterday was Opening Day, and it was a good one.

The game was a particularly good one, with the right team
winning, but the other team playing well. All the things you were
hoping for from the Red Sox players happened:

  • Josh Beckett, the ace pitcher, was the dominant force of two
    years ago instead of the experienced but struggling pitcher of
    most of last year.
  • Mike Lowell, whose injured hip made him painful to watch the
    end of last season, hit a standup double and didn’t look
    uncomfortable at all.
  • Jason Varitek, one of the games great pitcher-handling
    catchers, hit a home run. He was struggling offensively all
    last year, and was batting ninth.
  • David Ortiz hit a single and drew a walk, and looked like he
    was having fun hitting again. Most of last year, he was
    struggling with an injury, and didn’t.
  • Dustin Pedroia hit a home run. After being rookie of the
    year two years ago and MVP last year, he still looks like he
    can’t quite believe he’s in the big leagues.
  • Jed Lowrie, the new shortstop, made several good plays.
  • Jonathan Papelbon did his usual thing, getting three outs
    quickly in the ninth inning.

The winning margin would have been even bigger if Tampa Bay
hadn’t made some good plays — I particularly remember one by the
the first baseman, Carlos Pena, stabbing a hard-hit ground ball on
the way by him for an unassisted play at first base.

The ceremonies are always fun — the planes fly by in formation
just at the end of the National Anthem; this year they had Senator
Kennedy throw out the first pitch. He also looked like he
couldn’t quite believe he was in the big leagues.

The Boston classical music establishment hit what seemed to me
a sour note — Keith Lockhart, in a Red Sox t-shirt, directed
members of the Boston Pops and Tanglewood Festival Chorus in
concert attire. They would have looked more like a team (and like
their audience) if they’d
all been wearing the t-shirts. What I like about Keith Lockhart
is that he does always look like he has the job he always wanted
when he was growing up.

Timeline of Bonnie’s death

One of the things I mean to do at some point during this year
of blogging every day is write a series of posts about what it was
like when a close friend suddenly became ill and died, and I ended
up with her health care proxy, power of attorney, and being the
executrix of her will. I felt unprepared for all these roles, and
maybe writing about how I did them will help someone else who has
to do it.

I’ve mentioned this in a couple of posts, but not started
organizing it in any way. So I thought the first step might be to
write about the timeline in which things happened.

October, 2007
Bonnie mentions that she’s sleeping about 14 hours a
day. I didn’t think anything about this until much later, but
if anyone else ever tells me something like that, I’ll remember
that it was the first sign that something was really wrong with
Bonnie.
November 11, 2007
Bonnie tells me that she’s having trouble breathing, as in
getting out of breath when she walks across a room. I urge her
to go to the doctor and have it checked out.
December 2, 2007
Bonnie arrives at rehearsal at my place, and sits on the top
of the front steps for a while to recover before going up the
flight of stairs to my apartment. If she had been a child, I
would have called an ambulance for her right then, but she not
only rehearsed, but went on to another meeting after the
rehearsal.
December 3, 2007
Bonnie has appointment with doctor, who suspects pulmonary
hypertension and schedules tests for a couple of weeks
later.
December 4, 2007
Bonnie fails to make a rehearsal (very unusual), and at
about midnight calls to say that she fainted in the bathroom,
has called the ambulance, and can I take care of her cats the
next day. She ends the conversation by saying, “If you don’t
hear from me, assume the worst.”
December 5, 2007
What I actually did this day is probably a full post, but
Bonnie called me very early in the morning saying that she was
at the Salem Hospital, had been diagnosed with blood clots in
the lungs, and could I get the cats taken care of and bring her
some stuff from her house.
December 28, 2007
Bonnie released from hospital, with a prescription for a
blood thinner and appointments with oncologists.
January 5, 2008
I had total hip replacement surgery on January 4, and Bonnie
visited me in the hospital on January 5. This is the last time
I saw her when she wasn’t in a hospital. I was getting a blood
transfusion, so I was probably actually in worse shape than she
was, although that’s debatable. She had stopped at my place and
dealt with the stairs, and then dealt with however many hospital
corriders there were to get to my room, so she looked pretty
tired.
January 7, 2008
This date is approximate; I was in the hospital and not on
email, so I don’t have a good record. But it was certainly
within a day or two. Bonnie was bleeding from the GI tract, so
she took the cats to the vet to be boarded and checked herself
into the Lahey Clinic hospital in Burlington.
Some time between the above and January 23
Bonnie was in the hospital without email, and I hadn’t yet
set up the list for regular updates to her friends, so that’s
why this date is so vague. They decided to treat the blood
clots by installing a filter in a major blood vessel so that
clots that formed in the lower half of her body wouldn’t reach
the heart, lungs, and brain. Almost immediately, the filter
clogged up, so the lower half of her body swelled up and it was
impossible to move her. Essentially she never left her bed
after this.
February 9, 2008
Several really upset phone calls from Bonnie. The medical
thing that happened apparently was that the cancer had eaten a
hole in her intestine and stuff was leaking out into the
abdominal cavity and causing infection. So they weren’t letting
her eat or drink, and she was pretty scared about the dying
thing. It is about this time that she rewrites her will and her
health care proxy and power of attorney, naming me, with Phyllis
as an alternate.
February 15, 2008
They tell Bonnie that she’s about to die, if she doesn’t
have risky surgery to fix her leaky intestine. She asks for the
surgery. This is the last time I talk to her on the phone. She
goes in for the surgery at about 3 PM, and at 10:30 the doctor
calls me to tell me that she came through the surgery, and that
they’ve removed some intestine and fixed the leaks, but that
there’s still a lot of cancer in there.
February 19, 2008
The lawyer and I agree that I should take power of
attorney. Bonnie is under heavy sedation and expected to
continue to be unconscious for at least a couple of weeks.
March 5, 2008
Bonnie seems conscious and may be trying to talk, but is
unsuccessful.
March 12, 2008
Phyllis and her husband and I meet with Bonnie’s doctor, who
tells us that she has a small number of months to live, and will
never be able to live independantly again. She is clearly able
ot understand what people say to her, but not to talk, or to
move her left side. The oncologists do not consider her a
candidate for further chemotherapy, but if the motion problems
are due to cancer in the brain, they might be able to do
radiation.
April 1, 2008
Bonnie bleeding from GI tract, needs transfusions. The
doctors want to know whether they should do an endoscopy or just
stop the blood thinning medication and hope that works.
April 4, 2008
Discussion of hospice care with palliative care doctor and
social worker. Several friends visit and play recorder
ensembles; Bonnie clearly enjoys this. The cats are delivered
to their new permanent home.
April 11, 2008
The Cantabile band meets at Bonnie’s room in the Lahey
Clinic and plays for over an hour. Bonnie is clearly enjoying
it, and asks (by gesture) for more several times. This may be
the last time she is really able to react to a group.
April 15, 2008
Bonnie moves to hospice. We have a conversation with the
hospice social worker about what she expects. She is quite
alert, and writing very clearly.
April 19, 2008
Bonnie is no longer strong enough to write legibly.
May 3, 2008
Group of shape note singers come sing for Bonnie. You can
imagine that she’s enjoying it, but she isn’t really responding
much.
May 9, 2008
The hospice nurse and I agree to discontinue the tube
feeding.
May 18, 2008
Bonnie dies.
May 24, 2008
Funeral

I’ll write another timeline about the executrix and POA stuff.
And of course lots of the above could be expanded. But usually
these posts take me less than an hour, and that was over two hours.

Bok Choy recipe that didn’t work

I posted a week ago about my bok choy
with tofu, tomatoes and coconut milk. I didn’t use the whole head
of Bok Choy in that stew, so I found another recipe for the rest
of it.

Most people who write about their cooking concentrate on the
successful recipes. This can be intimidating for the beginning or
otherwise insecure cook. So I decided to tell you about one of my
failures.

I think the basic recipe (Bok Choy tofu goulash from Mark Bittman’s
How to cook everything Vegetarian) is ok, but
some of my improvising didn’t work very well:

  • I didn’t have fermented black beans, so I just left them
    out. This made the broth seriously underflavored. I fixed this
    after my next trip to the grocery store, and it went from
    something I wasn’t sure the dog was going to help me with to
    something I mostly finished myself.
  • I overdid the chile flakes, so in addition to being
    underflavored, the broth was unpleasantly hot. This also got
    better after I added the fermented bean sauce. It also got
    better as the soup cooled, which exacerbated some of the other
    problems, which would have been less bad in a really hot liquid.
  • The worst problem was the tofu. I usually buy firm or
    extra-firm tofu and just cut it up into the right sized pieces
    without further processing. But they claim you should drain or
    press or freeze it, so this time I tried freezing. Then if you
    freeze, you’re supposed to take it out two hours before you use
    it so you can slice, dice, or crumble it. My problem might have
    been that I did this and then decided to eat something else that
    night, so I made the goulash the next day. In any case, the
    frozen, thawed for a day, and then crumbled tofu was an
    unappetizing brown color, a rubbery texture, and as described
    above, didn’t have any very interesting flavor to absorb. I did
    give a bit of the last mug of this stuff to the dog, and he lapped up the
    broth and ate all the bok choy and other vegetables, and waited a while before he helped
    out with the tofu.

As I said, it got better with more bean flavor, but this isn’t
a recipe I’m going to repeat, at least without doing something
very different with the tofu.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0764524836&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Following up

Logitech 550

I said in my first post about my
Logitech Universal Remote that there wasn’t an easy way to program it
under Linux. Further googling revealed that it might not be as
hard as I thought, since the actual interface is actually through
the Logitech web site
and you only need the command line to upload a file to the
remote. I have now tried this out.

I started with these ubuntuforums
instructions for installing concordance and congruity. I haven’t had a lot
of luck getting udev to let me use devices as a user, so I also
used these
instructions
 for running the programs as root.

The upshot is that it didn’t work. The web interface for telling Logitech what you want your
remote to do is the same as what you get running the program on
Windows, but on my system, running congruity on the file the web
program gives you to download doesn’t seem to change what the
remote does at all. YMMV.

But the good news is that the Logitech website does save
everything you did, and when you run their program on Windows, you
get the work you did on the website. So you can
do your programming at the logitech
site, and then run the windows program to update the
remote.

So I have now fixed some of the problems I reported in my last
post, about the volume control on the DVD and the aspect ratio
on the TV set.

Scores

The advantage of posting emails
to lists is that you do get comments on what you said. A couple
of people pointed out that you can get good scores out of
lilypond; it just takes some tweaking. I replied that I had
assumed that (and in fact I do it sometimes for non-renaissance
stuff), but that for me the badness of Lily’s scores is a feature,
since I don’t believe people should play from them.

You can read the whole thread (quite rambling) in the
lilypond-users archives for yesterday, starting at the
contribution before mine in the thread titled “Re: Review of
Valentin’s opera”.

Transcription of Weelkes

I have uploaded the transcription I talked
about on Tuesday.

Taxes

I made a quick post yesterday on the
grounds that I had to go do my taxes. I spent about 4 hours, and got the essential work done. There
will be another session for filing when I get an answer to a
question from my financial advisor, but the fiddly stuff about
finding all the records and adding up all the little pieces is all
done.

The Amazon Download seemed complicated
compared to putting a CD into a drive, but maybe it’s because I’m
not really used to doing much on Windows. Once you got the tax
program downloaded (which required installing the Amazon download
program), you had to find the setup program, which they gave you
the filename of in a text document, so you couldn’t just follow
the link.

TaxCut made one fairly major blunder
which if I hadn’t caught it would have cost me several hundred
dollars in taxes and penalties. It didn’t ask me if the money I was withdrawing
from the Roth IRA was taxable or not, and just assumed it was.
I’m sure this is a bug. It took a bit of clicking to find the
place where I could enter the basis of the IRA, but I think I have
a reasonable number for the taxes now.

MLB TV

I implied a couple of weeks ago that I
didn’t think the MLB TV worked
very well. One of the things I had on while doing my taxes was
the Spring training game between the Red Sox and the Mets, and the
quality on my Mythbuntu box with the DVI
connection to the TV was quite acceptable.

Taxes

It’s time to get started on the taxes, so I’ll just describe my
method and then go do it.

As things labeled “Important Tax Document” come in the mail, I
put them in an envelope. That’s sitting on a lower shelf of my
coffee table.

I’ve printed off the Merrill Lynch tax reporting statement.
I’m also printing my spreadsheet where I keep track of income
and donations, although I think I wasn’t very good at doing that
this year, so I’ll have to go through the statement with colored highlighters.

I’m going to go downstairs and boot the laptop into Windows,
where I’ve run TaxCut for the last few years.

Then I’m going to go to the Amazon
Tax Software Downloads page and buy this year’s software for
downloading.

Then I start plugging numbers in. I’ll let you know how bad it
was after I’m through.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=21&l=ur1&category=software&banner=0EKB16H43VSXSREGP002&f=ifr

Two Weeks of Life

I was up far too late last night finishing this
book.

Eleanor Clift, the author, is a reporter whose husband was
dying at home under hospice care during the same two weeks that
Teri Schiavo’s feeding tube had been disconnected.

I had ordered the book when I read the review
in the New York Times,
because one of the things I wanted to use this daily blog to
write about was my experiences last year with the death of my
friend Bonnie.

I had expected to be more interested in the account of the
husband’s death than in the interviews with all the participants
in the Teri Schiavo frenzy. I was, but the Schiavo stuff was
better than I expected, especially the stuff about the role of
the Catholic Church.

For instance,
a small number of weeks before he died, Pope John Paul II had read
a pronouncement that getting food and water through a tube was not
an “extraordinary means” of prolonging life, which was interpreted by
some people to mean that Catholics were prohibited from ordering
the removal of feeding tubes. However, in his own end of life
care, a feeding tube was inserted and removed twice.

One of the links between the two stories is that Clift feels the
hospice movement didn’t do a good job of getting the message out
about what its aims were, when hospice caregivers were being attacked as
murderers by the Right to Life people.

My own experience with the hospice facility where Bonnie spent
her last month was very different from the one described in this
book, probably mostly because I wasn’t being a caregiver, so I
wasn’t getting all the training and support I would have needed
to do that. My difficulties communicating with Bonnie’s
caregivers are another post, but I was certainly glad to have
the internet to look up vocabulary like “active phase of dying”,
because I wasn’t getting good explanations of it from the
caregivers.

One of the points of this book is one I have been trying to make
since last year: that we spend too little time thinking
and talking about dying, which makes it much more difficult for
us to get through it when we finally have to.

Anyway, if you’re interested in any of these issues, this is a
well-written book. It could have used a bit tighter editing:
there are places where the same anecdote is repeated in
different chapters, But on the whole, it’s really well-written
and if you want to think about how to communicate with the
medical profession and how to make decisions about how to die
and what the religious contribution to the politics of all these
decisions is, you should read this book.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=046500251X&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Scores are now in PDF’s

It’s lunchtime and I still haven’t posted, so I’m putting up
something I wrote in email to the lilypond
users list:

I mostly use lilypond for Renaissance polyphony, where the
original performers didn’t have access to scores, and I feel strongly
that modern performers can play better from parts, so that they have
to learn how their part fits with the others by ear instead of by
eye.

But having access to the score does help modern performers analyze,
and that analysis can certainly speed up rehearsals and maybe even
improve the performance. And I do produce a score in the
process of getting the parts typeset and proofread. And of course,
anyone who installs [the right version of] lilypond can print the
score as well as the parts.

For quite a while, I wasn’t putting the score PDF’s up on my site
at all, but now I’ve decided that the scores
Lily makes are so bad that nobody would be tempted to perform from
them if they had access to a nice part with good spacing and *a lot*
fewer page turns. So I have recently modified my scripts so that the
score appears at the end of the parts.

You can see an example in the PDF of Baldwin’s
A Browning.

Walk for Hunger Program

The Cantabile
Band plays every year on the first Sunday in May at the Walk for Hunger, at a
beautiful spot on the banks of the Charles River, near the
Cambridge-Watertown line.

Some years we’ve had as many as 11 people (which is a mistake
because the right half doesn’t have any idea what the left half
is doing). The last two years we’ve been down to 4, and had to
recruit people from the guest group that gives us a couple of
breaks in order to do Now is the Month of Maying,
which has 5 parts.

This year, I thought we had four poeple, but one of them has
been falling down and getting herself injured, so she’s decided
she doesn’t want to make the commitment. So we’ll be a
trio.

It’s the right three people — if you were going to pick three
people from the people who come at all often, these are the
three you’d want. There are some problems because the best
singer doesn’t play an instrument, so it won’t be as easy to
intersperse instrumental versions of the things we sing to give
voices and audience a break, or to just play three part dance
tune arrangements instead of learning songs.

So here’s what we’re going to be drawing from for the
program:

There should be enough there to put together a sprightly,
upbeat program, of the kind that if you’d just walked 15 or 20
miles and needed a break would encourage you to have a pleasant
rest, but not make you feel like you never wanted to get up
again.