Category: diary

Arrival

[dorm room]
My dorm room, with pillow raising desk chair to right height for typing.

Saturday

I decided to come on Saturday, and do the concert and party
from the first week. So I did all the packing and unpacking
yesterday, and today I can relax until the orientation this
evening.

An unanticipated side effect was that I didn’t have the help
from the work-study students that the little old ladies who arrive
this afternoon will, so I was actually pretty tired after getting
all my stuff out of the car, up a few steps, and through several
fire doors. No individual item was very heavy, but I kept trying
to carry several at once. I guess when I’ve had more experience
being a little old lady, I’ll stop doing that.

Room

It’s utilitarian. My major problem is that the desk is the
wrong height for typing. I am putting the laptop in the pencil
drawer and adding my pillow to the chair, and it’s almost good
enough, but I should have brought the laptop stand. I should also
have brought an extension cord, as there isn’t a really good
outlet for the window fan, but I’ll manage.

I did manage to practice before supper, and the room is much
more live than what I have at home, so the cornetto sounds
gorgeous.

Evening activities

I was too late to hear the afternoon student concert, so after supper, I
went over to the auditorium for the faculty concert and
all-workshop collegium.

Madrigals

They had an a capella singing program the first week,
so the madrigal singing had a large number of unusually competent
people.

For some reason it wasn’t enough to keep an unfamiliar Dowland
in a recognizable key, but most of the other stuff went pretty
well. We started with “Fair Phyllis”. “Never
weather-beaten saile” must have been from a different source than
the one I transcribed — the alto part had come completely
unfamiliar ornamentation.

Unlike 2010, the person leading it arrived on time and kept
things moving pretty well.

Faculty concert

The major problem was that it was too long. It was over an
hour and a half with no intermission. It’s good to let the
faculty play what they’re excited about doing, but the audience as
a whole got restless, and I got a coughing fit which wouldn’t have
happened if I could have gotten hydrated 10 or 15 minutes
earlier.

A high point was an arrangement by Danny Johnson of a folk song
from Brittany for two flutes, viol, cello and solo voice.

The “Deploration on the death of Johannes Ockeghem” left me
wanting the version the Cantabile Band
does with the serpent on the Tenor line. In spite of having two
good singers on that line, it was inaudible even to someone who
knows it and was listening to it.

Collegium

They’re still calling it “The All-workshop Collegium”, but they
have the viol classes at 415 now, so there were almost no viol
students. And they decided the recorders were at 8-foot pitch, so
no recorder students who couldn’t play tenor or lower were
included. I don’t know if there were other loud wind students
first week — the ones that played the concert were all playing
dulcians, including one whom I know mainly as a sackbut
player. Judging from the narrowly avoided train wreck on the
dulcian group piece, this
group, unlike the strings and recorders, did include some less-experienced players.

The music was all by Obrecht. The concluding 6 part “Salve Regina”
was stunningly beautiful. It was written for Compline, which in
monasteries was the last office of the day. So you had the Salve
Regina echoing in your head as you went off to bed.

First post about the Amherst Early Music Festival in 2014

Why?

You would think that after what happened last
time, I wouldn’t be anxious to go back. I did have a long
conversation with Marilyn before
signing up. It seems that what I want this year is something
they’re probably set up for. I’ve been working hard on the
cornetto, and need a teacher, and one has heard of people who have
learned something about cornetto playing from Doug Kirk,
who will be the cornetto teacher this year. Marilyn thinks the
chorus director will like the idea of a serpent playing with the
chorus, and I think I can probably handle three cornetto classes,
and if not I can sing or dance or something for one of them.

What?

Here’s what I told them on the class selections form:

Early Morning 1st Choice: Cornetto (Kirk)
Early Morning 1 Comment: I’m at the point in my cornetto playing where a
teacher would be helpful, so this class is one of my reasons for coming.
Early Morning 2nd Choice: Shawm & Dulcian (Stillman, Verschuren)
Early Morning 2 Comment: I suppose if you cancelled cornetto, I could borrow
a shawm and make noises come out of it.
Early Morning 3rd Choice: Brass Tacks (Ramsey)
Early Morning 3 Comment: Again, if you cancelled cornetto and wanted to teach
a sackbut beginner, I could borrow an instrument and make noises.
Late Morning 1st Choice: All-Workshop Collegium for Reeds and Brass: Compere
and Beyond Compere (Eisenstein)
Late Morning 1 Comment: I’m expecting to play serpent here.
Late Morning 2nd Choice: All-Workshop Collegium for Reeds and Brass: Compere
and Beyond Compere (Eisenstein)
Late Morning 2 Comment: I could play cornetto if the faculty were
serpent-hostile.
Early Afternoon 1st Choice: Regensburg Manuscript (Kirk, Stillman)
Early Afternoon 1 Comment:
Early Afternoon 2nd Choice: Bassus (Verschuren)
Early Afternoon 2 Comment: This would require Verschuren to be
non-serpent-hostile, and I expect he’d rather have all dulcians.
Early Afternoon 3rd Choice: Mouton adn Gombert (Boenau)
Early Afternoon 3 Comment: This is third choice only because I work with
Marilyn all the time.
Late Afternoon 1st Choice: The Vermeer Project (Verschuren)
Late Afternoon 1 Comment: This is first choice because it’s probably where
the cool kids will be; I’m not really an advanced cornetto player.
Late Afternoon 2nd Choice: Pevernags (Stillman)
Late Afternoon 2 Comment:
Late Afternoon 3rd Choice: New London Assembly: English Country Dance…
(Marsh)
Late Afternoon 3 Comment:

Since starting to write this, I’ve had a phone conversation
with Marilyn, and it looks like I’ll have my first choices in the
morning, and work with Marilyn and Dan in the afternoon. Marilyn
claims to be happy to have me play serpent some of the time; Dan
would want cornetto.

When?

I’m leaving tomorrow, and will take the laptop so I should be
able to post from my dorm room the way I did last time. I don’t
know how much time I’ll have for writing, with all the playing and
singing and dancing I’ll be doing, but I’ll certainly let you know
how it works out.

Apps I use on my phone

A friend just got a good android phone, and I wrote her advice
about what to put on it. I thought you might like to know, too,
so here it is. The phone is currently a Google Galaxy Nexus,
which I bought in August of 2012. So it’s almost three year old
technology, but it still seems pretty functional.

Apps for using the phone

Call Filter
This one really saves me time. It lets me send all calls
where the number is hidden directly to voice mail. If a real
person I wanted to talk to did ever call from a number like
that, they would presumably leave a message, but it’s mostly
fundraisers or worse.
Dropbox
I thought when I started using this that it would help me
work on something on my laptop as well as my desktop. It does
do that, but even more often useful is that when I take pictures
on my phone, they automatically get uploaded to my
computer.
Prey Anti Theft
Of course, I installed this after I lost a phone. So
far it’s been tested only when I’ve changed SIM cards, which it
sees as a possible loss of the phone. But it does send you an
email and you can see on a map where the phone is.

Apps that let the phone function as lots of other small
electronic gadgets (or not)

Accupedo pedometer
Seems to be fairly accurate. Since losing the dog, I don’t
consistently do 10,000 steps a day, but if the weather ever
improves, I will start.
Accuweather
I never had a small gadget that did this, but it is useful.
This one works better than the other weather apps I’ve tried,
but it is a bit of a nuisance about telling me all the weather
alerts.
Calendar
I find the interface on this painful enough that I usually
wait until I get home to enter appointments, but it is useful to
be able to look at your calendar before you make an appointment.
Camera
I do still have a camera that’s better than this one, but
this is pretty good, and of course, the best camera is the one
you have with you.
FBReader
This is what I use to read books on all my devices. It may
not work better than the competition, but it works the same way
everywhere, so I don’t need to figure out how to find the table
of contents on the new gadget.
Mobile Metronome
Has all the features any other metronome I know about does.
It’s loud enough on the phone speaker for recorder playing, but
needs an external speaker for groups or loud brass
instruments.
On Track
I use this to record my blood sugar readings, but you can
use it to keep track of any number you want. I can show the
graph to my doctor when he asks how my blood sugar is doing.
Smart Voice Recorder
This is one that really doesn’t replace the special purpose
device. This app works better than the built-in one. If you
use high definition sound, your recorder will sound like a
recorder, but it will be much too noisy to listen to for any
length of time. So if you don’t have a special purpose recorder
(mine is a Zoom H2), it’s worth getting, but otherwise don’t
bother.
Spotify.
My latest discovery. I was using the Google Play
Music app for playing my music, but this lets you play other
people’s music, too. After my free trial is up, I may try
whether the Google All Access is as good or better about having
the music I want to listen to — they’re about the same price,
and Google or Spotify has made it impossible to use Spotify on
Google TV, so the Google thing would be easier to play through
my stereo.
Waves
This is tuning software, with all the features of even very
expensive tuners. (I haven’t tried defining my own temperament,
but they have all the temperaments I’ve wanted.)This is a
rewrite of g-strings, which has a free version that works pretty
well for recorders, but Waves isn’t very expensive, and works
better for the serpent. Again, the phone isn’t loud enough to
play a drone, and the speaker doesn’t have enough bass to play a
low drone, but you can put it through better speakers.

Sammy, RIP

[Sammy]
Sammy, the day before he died

Sammy was found in the parking lot of a Texas supermarket in May of 2001. The family who found him thought he was the perfect size, although since he was at that time between 6 and 8 months old, he of course grew quite a bit after that.

When he was about 5, he moved with his family from Texas to Massachusetts. He loved his family, which by now included a little brother, but the cold and snow and ice always seemed completely unnecessary to him.

In 2010, his father (now divorced) moved to an apartment in Waltham where he was assured keeping a dog would be fine. However, Sammy was by now quite arthritic in his hips, and very nervous around jumpy young dogs, and there was some incident with the landlady’s dog which enraged her and she insisted that he leave her house.

This was right after Sunny died, and a mutual fried arranged for us to be introduced, and Sammy came to live with me. He missed having his little brother to play with, but he liked the band soming over on Tuesdays to tell him how handsome he was, and the walks through Cambridge with all the other dogs to sniff. Also the living room window with a panoramic view of a busy street and the park across the street.

Unfortunately, in addition to all the other disadvantages of the New England climate, living with me meant he had to climb long flights of stairs to either go out or go to bed, and in winter weather, all the sidewalks in the park across the street are heavily crusted with salt, which hurts his paws.

Over the last few weeks, even walking on the flat on dry sidewalk has become increasingly difficult, and he’s been regularly having days when his legs collapsed under him whenever he tried to stand up. The last such day was Friday, February 14.

He weighed close to 70 pounds, so getting him up and down stairs when this was happening was difficult for both of us. He decided he didn’t want to go through this again, and stopped eating and drinking. I managed to drag him down the stairs on Saturday morning, and he had a bowel movement and go a passerby to pat him and tell him how handsome he was, but then getting back up the stairs was even harder than down, and I started making plans for getting someone to help me get him to the hospital.

We stayed up most of the night, listening to death music (The Saint Matthew Passion is what I’d want to go out to.) His Daddy came over at lunchtime on Sunday and agreed with me that if he wasn’t eating food with bacon grease in it, he should be able to end it. He carried him out to the car, and I drove him to the Angell Memorial Hospital.

Sammy at the animal hospital. He enjoyed being on the stretcher and having all the pretty technicians tell him how handsome he was.
Sammy at the animal hospital. He enjoyed being on the stretcher and having all the pretty technicians tell him how handsome he was.

He perked up quite a bit when they lifted him out of the car and put him on a four-foot high cart and all the pretty technicians stood around and told him how handsome he was. He even ate some dog biscuits the vet offered him. But we were pretty sure he still didn’t want to go up those stairs ever again, and the vet said sometimes it was better to go out on a relative high note than a low note. So he got the shot and was gone in a couple of minutes.
Sammy, at the animal hospital
Sammy, at the animal hospital

Lighted a cabinet

When I had my kitchen redone in 1996, I put in a cabinet with glass
doors and interior lighting for displaying my glassware. The
problem with the incandescent light bars my contractor used was
that they burned out after a year or two, and I had to go to Home
Depot to replace them, and so it was frequently not lit at
all.

So I decided that in this day and age, one should use LED’s for
that kind of application, and they wouldn’t burn out for a long
time.

After poring over the descriptions I ordered Hitlight
warm white flexible ribbon strip lights and a transformer,
and a portable
mini dimmer. I also had to go to the hardware store and buy
an outlet, since the previous lights had attached with wire nuts,
and the transformer has a regular plug.

It turns out that it was a good thing I took the advice in the
Amazon review and got the dimmer — I don’t think this picture
does justice to the Las Vegas atmosphere of the lights on full
blast.


[cabinet]
Cabinet with led strip lights on full blast.

But I think I’ll like them a bit dimmer, although I wasn’t
expecting the curves of reflected dots.

[cabinet]
KItchen cabinet with LED strip lights dimmed.



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What happened on the pubcrawl

[Sloan, DT, Brandon]
Worts (Sloan, DT and Brandon) drinking beer at The Thirsty Scholar, the fifth stop on the 2013 pubcrawl.

Mostly, we drank beer. Here’s what I had:

Cambridge Brewing Company
They had just run out of the first thing I picked off of
their list (this time of year it’s really heavy on pumpkin
beers, which I don’t see any need for), so I had the cask. It
was their ESB, which is a good session beer, dry-hopped with
Chinook, and the people sitting next to me recommended it
highly, and after I recommended it highly one of the other worts
had one and also really liked it. I had joined earlier than I
said I would because it felt like lunch time, so I also had the
biscuits and gravy. They’ve changed it since the last time I
had it — it used to be two large biscuits and an enormous
amount of gravy on a plate, and I ended up taking about half of
both the biscuits and the gravy home. Now they give you a board with
three smaller biscuits and a bowl of gravy. So I ate all the
biscuits and ended up taking about half the gravy home. I also
bought two growlers. I live pretty close to between here and
the next stop, so I dropped them off at home. I joined 4 people
who had already had lunch at Meadhall.
Lord Hobo
I had the Trillium Valley buckwheat. At first I thought it
was a little sweet, but I got used to it pretty fast and really
enjoyed it. Several people ordered food, so I
took a donut someone offered me. I was also offered fritters
and corn cakes, but didn’t have anywhere to put them after the
biscuits and gravy and the donut and the beer.
Atwood’s
I had the Milk Stout Nitro. People had had it at both Lord
Hobo and the Meadhall, and enjoyed it a lot, so I ordered one
here. Again, I had to get used to how sweet it was, but once I
was, I was sorry to see the end of it.
Bukowsky’s
The Jack’s Abbey Kiwi Rising Double IPL. A nice dose (some
would say overdose) of hops to cut the sweetness of the last two
beers. We lost a several people after this stop, but were
joined by a new person.
Thirsty Scholar
The beer list here was a lot less stellar than the other
places. I had a Leffe Brown Ale. The new person from the last
stop was joined by his wife here.
R.F. O’Sullivan
I came here because they promised me good onion rings. I
had a Sierra Nevada Torpedo and a Black and Blue Burger with
onion rings. The onion rings were OK, but I like the ones at
Doyles better. The burger was outstanding, but I had to take
almost half of it home. Sammy agrees that it was good, but he
doesn’t seem to like blue cheese.

Apologies to Sloan for cutting some of his head off. The
camera on my phone is much better than the display, so I really
couldn’t see the composition of the picture at all when I took it.

Pub Crawl

I’ll be going on this Pub Crawl on Saturday. You can come too.

25th Annual Boston Wort Processors Pub Crawl

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Closest start T-stop = Kendall/MIT Station

Meadhall
4 Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142
11:30 – 12:50 (Lunch)
Cambridge Brewing Co.
1 Kendall Square #100
Cambridge, MA 02139
1:00 – 1:50
Lord Hobo
92 Hampshire St
Cambridge, MA 02139
2:00 – 2:50
Trina’s Starlite Lounge
3 Beacon St
Somerville, MA 02143
3:00 – 3:50
Thirsty Scholar Pub
70 Beacon St
Somerville, MA 02143
4:00 – 4:50
The Kirkland Tap & Trotter
425 Washington St
Somerville, MA 02143
5:00 – 5:50 (edit: the website says they don’t open until 5:30, so assume a half hour slippage will happen at some earlier site.)
R.F. O’Sullivan & Son
282 Beacon St
Somerville, MA 02143
6:00 – ? (Dinner)

Closest finish T-stop = Porter Square Station

I’ll probably join at Lord Hobo or so, and leave when I’ve had
enough beer.

Before Midnight

One of my reactions to this
movie was, “They’re 41 and they think that’s
midnight?” But maybe there will be another one, when
they’re really old, like 61, that will be After Midnight.

If you liked Before
Sunset and Before
Sunrise, you’ll like this one, too. It might even be a little
bit better than the others, as the actors and maybe other crew
members have learned things.

They’re all the story of a couple who meet on a train when
they’re in their early twenties in the first movie, meet again in
their thirties in the second movie, and have an emotional day
together as a married couple in their forties. They’re all very
conversational, like some of the Eric Rohmer ones from the 60’s.
(Ma nuit chez Maude was the one I discovered.)

There are three major scenes — one between Ethan Hawkes and
his son by his first marriage, whom he’s putting on a plane to
go back to his mother; one at the dinner table among the writers
and their wives and children who’ve been spending the summer
together in Greece; and a very long one between the couple, who
have been given a night together in a hotel without the
children, and with a bottle of good wine. They’re all really
pretty interesting, and the couple manage to be both very angry
and very attractive in the way we want romantic movies to show us.


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