Laura Conrad

Getting drugs

I’m having enough trouble filling all my prescriptions this
month that I keep wondering about whether all the people who are less
literate and competent and mobile than I am, and have even more
prescriptions for the system to screw up than I do, ever get what
their doctors think they’re taking.

The short story is that as of yesterday afternoon my doctor claims to have authorized the
refill of my insulin syringes, and the pharmacy claimed
that they’d never gotten the authorization, and the doctor
claimed that there was no way she could talk to the pharmacy
directly.

The status this morning is that they admit to having gotten the
authorization, but won’t have it filled until at least noon. I
started trying to get this routine refill last Thursday, and have
been out of the syringes (and hence not taking the insulin,
although since that got refilled, I have plenty) since Sunday. I
have so far been to the pharmacy twice for this month’s refills,
and will have to go at least once more, and have probably spent at
least 2 hours on the phone trying to get all the refills.

The good news is that my fasting blood sugar this morning was
near the high end of the range it is when I’m taking the insulin,
but not off the charts.

One of the things I didn’t write about as much as I thought I
should last year was the difficulties of dealing with the health
care system. Last year, the difficulties I was thinking of were
largely those of my friend Bonnie, who
was dying of cancer, and presenting difficult problems to the
system. But refilling a prescription every month for a healthy
person who can walk or drive to the pharmacy shouldn’t be a difficult problem.

Report on the March 3 meeting

We played:

Baldwin, A Browning
Isaac, Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen
Farmer, Fair Phyllis
Dowland, Burst forth, my tears
Ravenscroft, Well fare the nightingale
Purcell, Well rung, Tom

Schedule

We’ll be having dropin meetings at least through March, at the usual time (7:45 PM) and place.

Remember that I need to know by the March 30 rehearsal whether you’re
planning to play the Walk
for Hunger on May 3.

Snow Shoveling

I live in an 8-unit condominium building on a fairly major
street in Cambridge Massachusetts. The condo rules state that
each owner is responsible for clearing snow from the area in front
of their door. Cambridge law allows the police to ticket a
homeowner who has not cleared the snow within a day of the
snowfall stopping. This has been on the books for some time, but
this year is the first I’ve heard of anyone actually getting a ticket.

I interpret the condo rule as meaning that everybody is
responsible for getting one eighth of the snow shoveling done.
There are storms big enough that I can’t do that much in one
outing, because it causes the arthritis in my hands to act up.
I’ve told people this, and both the owner downstairs and one of
the ones next door have responded that they don’t mind doing my
share. And in fact, they frequently do do the area in front of my
door as well as the one in front of theirs.

I really can’t figure out how people came to this conclusion
that they should do the area in front of their door, and no more
and no less. Maybe they never walk anywhere, and don’t know that
two well-shoveled doorways separated by an area of unshoveled snow
is just as useless as no snow being shoveled? Maybe all they’re
trying to do is avoid a fine, and they don’t care about making
walking easier for the pedestrians?

At the condo meeting before Christmas where we discussed this
issue, I tried to go on after my speech about not always being
able to do my share of the heavy lifting to explain that therefore
I tried to do more than my share of putting down salt and sweeping
the steps clear. This fell on completely deaf ears. I don’t know
whether it was the idea of doing anything in front of anyone
else’s door, or the idea that the job of dealing with the snow was
more than just the initial shoveling that was too foreign or
complicated for them.

When I’m one of the first people out shoveling, I try to do a
complete one-shovel path across the entire lot before I go on to
clear more of the section in front of my door. Nobody else does
this. If I hadn’t done it yesterday, there would be a section
with no shoveling, because one owner didn’t do any. He may be out
of town; he usually shovels his doorway.

If we were really public-spirited, we would not only all
contribute to clearing the whole of our own sidewalk, but also
assist the people on either side of us in cutting an outlet to the
street at the corner and at the neighbor’s driveway. This is much
harder than just shoveling the sidewalk, because the stuff the
plow leaves at the side of the road is much harder work to move
than the snow that falls on the sidewalk. Also, it has to be well
timed, because if you do it too early, the plows come and plow it
up again, and of course if you leave it too late it turns even
icier and harder to deal with.

I haven’t even tried
explaining the part about helping our neighbors at a condo meeting.

For a while, I was grumbling that it would be easier for the
city to buy little plows for the sidewalks and just do it for
people than to go around ticketing people who don’t do it and
having a complicated system of exemptions for people who shouldn’t
get tickets. But then I had lunch one day in downtown Haverhill,
where they do have the little plows. For some reason the little
plows hadn’t gotten to the block I was on before the snow turned
into ice, and nobody had shoveled or put salt or sand down either.

Snow Shovels at Amazon

Concert yesterday

Here’s the program.
We didn’t take pictures yesterday, but here’s one from last week in Lowell, at the ALL gallery: [Cantabile band]

The Cantabile
Band does a fair amount of performing for a dropin group, but
it’s mostly things like The
Walk for Hunger and background music at Boston Wort Processors picnics.

There’s a big difference between that and playing a concert for
a bunch of people who have paid money for the privilege of sitting
and listening to the music.

This difference may be particularly acute in the case of the
Renaissance polyphony that we specialize in. There’s a fairly
long distance between being able to sing it well enough that
everybody in the group enjoys it, or so that people walking by
think it’s pretty, and being able to actually stand in front of an
audience and put together each line in its precise relationship to
all the other lines so that the audience can hear it all.

Five people from the dropin group signed up for this concert.
Three of us don’t treat it as a dropin group, and come every week,
and learn the music we work on as we work on it. Two of them come
much less often, and started rehearsing this playlist in January
with very little acquaintance with any but the more commonly
performed pieces.

In addition, the soprano/harpsichord player fell and broke two
ribs and her left wrist in early February.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached this
concert. I knew it would be a stretch when I signed up to do it.
I think I can report with satisfaction that we did stretch. I can
also report that if you’d been there you could have seen a number
of places where we could have stretched harder or better. But I
think the concert yesterday was what that group can do this week,
and if we turn out to be able to do something better next month or
next year, it will be largely because of the work we did the last
two months.

Things I personally learned include:

Always make anything you’re playing comfortable. If it
isn’t after a couple of weeks of practicing, either change it or
drop it. One of the pieces I got a lot of compliments on after
the concert was the van Eyck variations on Come Again,
which I interspersed with the 6 verses of Dowland’s song as the
ending number on the concert. Since it was interspersed, I had
to play it on the G alto so that it would be in the same key we
were singing in. On that instrument, I can’t reliably hit the
low G, so I was getting tense about it and not hitting other
things which should be easy. So I just rewrote the piece so
that there weren’t any low G’s.
Always make sure that everybody knows where the cadence
points are, and rehearse starting from each of them. This way,
if someone makes a terrible mistake and gets lost, they can get
back again at the next cadence. In the Lowell tryout, it turned
out some people couldn’t do this on The Silver Swan.
We worked hard on that piece on last Tuesday’s rehearsal.

Drop in tomorrow

Thanks to those who played the concert yesterday, and those who came. I
think we all had a lot of fun.

If you’ve gotten out of the habit of thinking about coming over
on Tuesdays, try to get back into it tomorrow. We’ll have new and
different music, and I got lots of food for my birthday, including
a very nice cake.

It will be at the usual time (7:45 PM) and place.

We’ll be dropin at least through March.

I’ll need to know by the March 30 rehearsal whether you’re
planning to play the Walk
for Hunger on May 3. If it’s mostly music that’s familiar to
most of the people playing, we may not have to rehearse the whole
month of April, but if we decide we want to learn some new May
music, or we get lots of people who haven’t played previous Walks
or didn’t play this concert, we’ll need at least the four Tuesdays
in April.

The sedge is still not withered from the backyard

I had a gift certificate to White Flower Farms a couple of years ago.
The thing I wanted to buy most (rhubarb) cost less than the
certificate, so I had to order something else, so I looked at the
ornamental grasses and picked out a sedge. I made the mistake of
planting it behind the mint and the daylilies, which are taller
than it was, so it wasn’t a lot of use in the summertime, but all
through the winter of 2007-2008, it stayed green and nicely
shaped.

That winter was what I think of as normal, and it might have in
fact been on the mild side of normal, but it certainly got lots
colder than it does in any of the places Keats ever hung out, so I
started thinking about what he could possibly have meant in La Belle Dame Sans
Merci when he said:

The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

I discussed this with my
sister, who has a degree in botany, while we were walking by a
lake in early April, and she pulled up a sedge plant to look at it. It was a bit
more withered than the one I got from White Flower Farms, but much
less withered than any of the other grass-like plants growing by
that lake.

So we concluded that when Keats said, “The sedge is wither’d
from the lake,” he meant, “Even the sedge is wither’d
from the lake.” And his audience probably understood that it
meant that it was the end of a really long hard winter, instead
of just getting the generalized picture of bleakness that we
get.

This has been one of those winters here in Southern New
England. As an urban dog-walker, I measure the difficulty of a
winter by how many days there’s ice on the sidewalks, not by
which species of grass-like thing has withered from the lake
shore, but this has been a bad one. And as you can see, the sedge is still nice
and green. Maybe the sedges Keats knew were more
wither-prone than the one White Flower Farms sent me. Or maybe
he was writing science fiction, and imagining that the
knight-at-arms was hanging out somewhere colder than he had ever
experienced.

Today I’m giving a concert, with
lots of practicing and packing beforehand, and celebrating my
birthday afterwards, so there won’t be time for a blog post.
So I’ve scheduled one from the spindle; I hope it works.

The sedge is not withered from my backyard

Pruning roses

This was the first day the ice has been melted enough from our
back yard that I wanted to get back to my plot and prune the
roses. The buds are already swelling, so it should have been done
a week or two ago, but the dog-walking already gets me more
walking on ice than I want, so the roses have had to wait.

The actual pruning isn’t that much fun, but you get to see all
the leaves that have already struggled through the still mostly
frozen ground.

woodruff and wild onions struggle through frozen ground

New Tuner

My old Korg MT-120 tuner, which allows tuning multiple
temperaments, has gotten really flaky. Last Sunday, when we were
trying to use it to tune a harpsichord for a performance, we had
to give up and use a cheaper tuner that only does equal
temperament. So I decided it was time to buy a new tuner.

A builder on the harp list had recommended a strobe tuner, the
Sonic Research Turboo Tuner
ST-122.

So I ordered it Sunday night, and it arrived yesterday at lunch
time.

I immediately tuned up both harps in equal temperament. It did
go faster watching the lights than it does with a needle, but I’m
not sure whether it’s because I’m not obsessing about getting
lights to stand still the way I was about getting the
needle on 0. In any case, it sounded like a pretty good
tuning.

So far, I’ve been having trouble using the strobe for telling
whether my recorder playing is in tune, but it could be that I’ll
get used to it.

This morning, I entered quarter-comma and fifth-comma meantone
temperaments, and will go downstairs and try them on the harps and the
recorders.

I was worried about whether it would be possible to enter
something as complicated as a temperament on a box with only 8 buttons,
and it was a bit slow at first, but I picked up speed as I got
used to it. And it isn’t something you’re going to do every day.
It does seem like a lot of data to enter on a device that can’t be
backed up, though.

Links

For those who have no idea what a temperament is, try the

wikipedia article.

For those who wondered why I wanted fifth-comma as well as
quarter-comma, read Why
I hate Vallotti… by Ross Duffin.

The way I translate the name of a tuning into the numbers to
enter into the tuner is via a program called scala.
It comes with almost 4000 tunings defined, and you can load them
and look at all kinds of data about them, or export them so that
MIDI players can use them.

Of the two Ross Duffin books below, I haven’t read the one on
temperaments but based on the article pointed to above, I would
expect it to be much more readable than most of the stuff written
about such things. Shakespeare’s Songbook is an
indispensible reference if you’re going to do anything at all with
music in that period.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0393334201&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0393058891&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Squash Pudding

I’ve been cooking something easy to eat and share at the end of the Cantabile Band
rehearsals. It started when I got the farm share last fall,
and had lots more vegetables than one person could possibly eat,
so I started making them into soup. Now I do it even when there
isn’t something that needs to be used up, because chopping
vegetables at 6 PM to eat soup at 10 seems less rushed than
trying to throw together a dinner and eat it before people start
arriving at 7:30.

Last Tuesday, the thing I had that should be used up was two
butternut squash from last fall’s farm share. The squash soup
that I’d made one week hadn’t been a great success, and I was
too lazy to make piecrust for squash pie, so I decided to make a
squash pudding instead.

googling turned up a recipe
that looked doable, with some modifications:

I couldn’t figure out what the baking powder could possibly be
doing there, so I left it out.
I usually reduce the sugar, so I
used just a half cup instead of three quarters. Next time I may try substituting maple
syrup.
I was too lazy to get out the blender, so I just mashed
the squash with a fork.One really nice feature of this way of doing it that way was that I just
baked it in the same pyrex bowl I mixed it in, so no extra
cleanup.
The recipe called for 2 medium butternut
squash, and I had a medium and a large, so I left half of the
large one out.
It’s winter, so running the oven is essentially
free, so I baked it instead of microwaving it. One really nice feature of this way of doing it was that I just
baked it in the same pyrex bowl I mixed it in, so no extra
cleanup.

I liked it; most people had seconds; one person asked for the
recipe. The quarter or so left was a good sized breakfast the
next morning.

Blogging in my 59’th year

Today’s my 58th birthday. I’ve been reading Lorelle
on WordPress since I started having my own wordpress blog.
Last year, I got hooked on Mike Cane’s blog
where he posted (almost) every day in 2008. I was mostly
interested in his take on the ebook industry, and found his rants
on the economic downturn much less interesting, but the idea of
just writing every day is a good one, and I decided to try it.
The New Year was a pretty busy time for me, so I missed starting
then, so I decided to start on my birthday.

Some of the things I do, and therefore expect to write about
are:

Directing the Cantabile
Renaissance Band.
Publishing music.
Playing with various technologies, including those for
running websites, reading books, playing music…
Living with a dog.
Living in a condo. I’m currently president of the condo
association. I have a small garden plot in the back, that I may
share pictures of.

Anyway, one of the reasons writing on the computer has taught
me more about
writing than writing classes in school did is that you get
feedback from people who wanted to read what you wrote. So
please comment or email me when I say something you’re
interested in.