Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes, either in person, by phone, email, or post.
Celebration
The actual birthday was on Tuesday, which means I have half a dozen friends over for playing music. So I baked a cake (sourdough rye chocolate cake) and opened a bottle of bubbly stuff.
Then on Saturday when I was at my sister’s, we opened another bottle bubbly stuff and had a flan from Pollo 2go which opened recently around the corner from me.
Unfortunately, we also watched Anora, which we were glad we’d seen when it won the Academy Award, on the grounds that one should be in touch with popular culture, but not something either of us enjoyed watching while it was happening. If you saw the ceremony, one of the clips they used was of the actress screaming, and as I remember it that went on for minutes or tens of minutes at a time. I have no problem with people in a scary situation screaming for a few seconds, but then the plot should move on.
General well-being
I don’t seem to have made one of these posts last year, but looking at the one from two years ago, I’ve come a long way. I am back in my house; I have a dog; the band is meeting regularly with 5-8 people…
The house has been stuck at two rooms with too many boxes for quite a while, but I am now making progress again. This is unfortunately for a sad reason – one of my neighbors owns a house but doesn’t have enough money to fix the roof or the plumbing or (most recently and urgently) the furnace. So I told her she could sleep here, and she has been energetically helping me clear boxes out of the guest room. So soon, the computer room will be the only one with too many boxes.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/PKM62PKcpuaBTud97 
Faramir is two now. He still turns into a marauding little puppy more often than I like, but he is taking me on good walks. Every morning we go to the park across the street and he runs around with his dog friends and I chat with the human friends.
I haven’t managed yet to get back to transcribing music, but we’ve found that the bad works better if we read the same piece of complicated music every week for a while than if we sightread a different piece of complicated music every week.
I don’t have the excuse for not transcribing music of the computer setup being bad – my computer is fine, and even knows how to take books out of the library without booting windows.
LayMusic.org 
