Robin McKinley's Blog, page 111

Dire

 

I had my voice lesson today this week, rather than last Monday.  It was my first full-hour-long lesson. 

            And it was dire.  I will be falling on the carefully sharpened points of my music stand shortly.*

            I should have been able to predict the day was going to be bad when I got dressed this morning.  Regular readers will be aware that I like bright colours.  I have a special fondness for pink, but orange, yellow, lime or emerald green, royal or turquoise blue, purple and cherry red are all good.  I bought a turtleneck on sale that has several-shades-of-pink plus red and orange flowers all over it.  So far so excellent.  And I discovered to my delight that the dark pink-red flowers beautifully match a rose-red v-necked pullover on my shelf.  So this morning I fell out of bed, started the Urgent Survival Caffeine, let hellhounds out of crate, dragged on jeans, turtleneck, pullover, drank caffeine, hit myself up longside the head a few times till my eyes started to focus . . . looked at myself in a mirror and sprang back with a cry of alarm.  The only flowers that SHOW in the v-neck are the WRONG COLOUR.**

            So—because at that point I was not going to change***—I have spent the entire day looking like someone who doesn't know how to dress.†  And furthermore NONE of my All Stars went with any of it.  NONE.  Life is bleak and grim.

            It's no wonder I was already disquieted and off balance when I set out for my voice lesson.

            Nadia was going to sit in on one of her teacher's master classes on Monday††, but if I wanted a voice lesson this week, she was going to be teaching from home on Wednesday.  And she was willing to slot me in for my first hour.  I thought I was looking forward to this.  A whole hour!  And furthermore it was going to be an ADVENTURE.  I admit I was a little anxious about finding her house, my navigational gifts being what they are, but . . .

            The only thing that didn't go horribly wrong was finding her house.  Which is a good thing because I used up nearly all the time I'd allowed for getting lost in being stuck in traffic in Mauncester.  I have no clue.  And I had finally escaped the sucking vortex and . . . found myself behind an ambulance going less than 20 mph.  ARRRRRRGH.  At that point of course I didn't know I wasn't still going to need that (lost) time to get lost in. 

            After all of that I arrived a few minutes early and decided to knit a soothing row or two while taking deep breaths and focussing.  I did know I was feeling anxious about Being Worthy of An Entire Hour and about Dove Sei.  But I've put my practise time in, for pity's sake, and the last day or two I've finally started humming it around the house while I do some washing-up or make yet another cup of tea or something, which is usually a good sign that a new song is getting driven into the synapses.

            AND THEN I COULDN'T KNIT.  OR PURL.  I COULDN'T FRELLING KNIT.  I COULDN'T REMEMBER WHICH WAY ANYTHING WENT.  I could make stitches that hung on the needle, and then I could make more stitches that hung on the stitches that hung on the needle . . . but I had no idea what they were, and I was pretty sure they weren't what they were supposed to be because they Looked Funny.  It hadn't frelling occurred to me that I needed to bring my knitting book.†††

            And staring blankly and helplessly at my knitting needles was clearly a prediction because I got indoors to Nadia AND COULDN'T DO ANYTHING.  Like sing.  My best guess, and it's neither a good guess nor an encouraging one, is merely that I was absurdly and humiliatingly discomposed by everything being different.  My worst fear was unrealised—her husband the Really Scary Professional Musician was not there—but Stella's babysitter was another one of Nadia's students, someone who actually can sing, which is almost as bad as the husband.  Nadia teaches in the tiny half-bedroom that has just space for an electric piano and lots and lots of shelves of sheet music . . . and a student standing crouched and hollow-chested, waiting for the ceiling to fall.  Gah.  You are breathing in a very narrow column, said Nadia, and told me to put my hands in front of my face before I began to sing, take a deep breath and spread my hands, like opening the curtains.  Kinaesthetic retraining, said Nadia.  Teacher magic.  I have to do it at home too.  It did help.  I stopped sounding like a drowning rat.

            Dove sei . . . I've somehow managed to give myself a complex about it and after today it's going to be worse.  I don't know why I'm finding it quite so steep a learning curve.‡  But by golly I've decided it's hard and am making it so.   But today I was doing insane things like mispronouncing the Italian in ways I never have mispronounced it—and when Nadia went to correct me I shrieked, I've never done that!  I have no idea why I did that! 

            It was a very long hour.  When I was finally allowed to escape, muttering anguishedly, I have no idea, I have no idea, Nadia said, Robin, don't beat yourself up.  Right.  Next thing, someone is going to start explaining to me why it was inevitable that pigs should have evolved alate. 

            And then I got lost coming home again.  We've already established that 'left' and 'right' are difficult concepts for me, and doing something backwards—turn right going out because you turned left coming in and so on—is not simple and straightforward, I was traumatised, and furthermore by then it was DARK.

            And since we're back on the usual schedule next week, I ONLY HAVE FIVE DAYS TILL MY NEXT LESSON.  Where's that hellhound-sharpening tool . . . .

 * * *

* Wait a minute.  I don't have a music stand.  Peter and I were so demoralised by the immediate failure of the one he bought me after I started with Blondel that we've never replaced it.  I'll have to sharpen a hellhound or something. 

** Stop that laughing.  One of the things that a good or a bad day depends on is being able to look down without flinching. 

*** Although I thought about it.  There are the occasional mornings when my bed is even more extensively covered with discarded clothing than with books.  I wasn't like this when I was a teenager.  I'm like this now.  

† All right, yes, there is the faction who believes that I clearly don't know how to dress, but that's another issue. 

†† She said they were mostly fancy-schmancy Oxbridge students, and that 90% of his teaching is about trying to make them stop thinking and SING.  She looked at me meaningfully as she said this.  I can't imagine why. 

††† Like my knapsack doesn't weigh ENOUGH. 

‡ That naked octave leap in bar 34 is mysteriously one of the things I did less badly.  I spent the first few days of practise at home bottling out every time, and then started doing octave leaps as part of my warm up and eventually stopped panicking.  I even managed the near-octave plunge in bar 22.^  But the twiddly bits do me in.  

^ I'm not sure how many keys Dove Sei may appear in.  My version, the octave jump is G to G and the plunge is E to F#

Frelling knitting

 

Mostly it's been raining today.  Especially when I'm trying to get hounds hurtled.  I was sitting in Wolfgang this afternoon with the windows curled down just a bit so hellhound steam* wouldn't fog up the glass, hoping that it would stop raining long enough to let me do at least an abbreviated hurtle before Tabitha was finished with Peter and ready for me, and knitting.  Arrrrrrrgh.  Remember I said the other night that I'd started a new knitting project while I was waiting for doodle photos to load?  In the first place, I have enough squares at this point for several secret projects, not only the two that . . . are still not finished because the 'sewing up' thing is in the way.**  In the second place . . . there is more to knitting than squares.  So they tell me.

            I decided I wanted to do something else, not only for the sake of my education.  Something that did not involve forty-six gajillion squares that would turn out to be far less square-like in aggregate than they seemed to be individually.***  Something that would be new and amusing.  I also decided I should do something that involved purling.  I have two auction squares† to produce some day when the doodle level has dropped a little farther (for all of which I have already accepted money††) and I need to be able to (a) count††† and (b) purl on command to succeed in this task.

            So I decided to resurrect the leg-warmers.  Remember the leg-warmers?  This whole knitting thing began with leg-warmers . . . almost a YEAR ago.‡  But they're ribbed.  And ribbing looked a bit like . . . hurtling hellhounds in monsoon mud on crutches.  I prefer challenges that involve at least a 1% chance of success.   It was Fiona's brilliant idea that I begin with a hellhound blanket, which would be pretty much hideous-beginner-error-proof because the hellhounds won't mind, and hideous errors in a little 20 x 14 stitch square are, meh, it's just a square, there's always the next square.  And then I got deflected onto several wheelbarrow-loads of squares for my Secret Projects . . .

            And now it's nearly a year later.  So I got the leg-warmer recipe, I mean pattern, out, and discovered that the Blessed Fiona had written it out for me so I didn't have to translate either Knitting Language or recognise which number series are for grown-up-human-woman size as opposed to dwarf Pekinese.  And I began to knit.  And purl.

            *&^%$^*()__ @~?>J)*££"!!!!!!!@;/#~ =}}][^*_?!

            . . . Okay.  Dissecting my humiliating failure, first, I am a moron, and I can't tell left from right (or clockwise from anti/counterclockwise).  I'm reading it from one of my helpfully illustrated knitting books and it says, wrap wool anticlockwise . . . and I'm cheerfully wrapping it the other way.  ARRRRRRGH.  But the second thing is that the yarn I'd bought, despite the fact that it's exactly what the pattern calls for and is described as 'easy knit' is not easy knit enough.  It's chunky, and made up of a variety of threads, some heavier and some finer, and some gauzy little gossamer ratbags whose ultimate thrill is to get caught invisibly somewhere, tighten, and pull.  I'd forgotten, for example, that when I started out I tended to knit so fixed-and-strainingly I could barely shove the resulting stitches along the needle—I am sorry to have remembered this fact so graphically.  There was language.  There was knotted yarn.  There were rows of lumpy stitches that looked like something out of the Wreck of the Hesperus.  Slightly after I had come to this conclusion myself Fiona suggested by email that I revert to hellhound squares again for basic practise. . . .

            So that's what I was doing, this afternoon in the car, as the rain sluiced down, and hellhounds breathed damply from the back seat.  I'd learnt to purl months ago, via Fiona and Bronwen, but, rather unforesightfully, all I'd done was purl a few entire squares just to get the motions fixed in my mind.  (Which you then flip over, and they look just like your knitted squares.)  I'd never tried swapping, knit and purl and knit and purl, let alone swapping every few stitches, as one must do for ribbing.  After the fourth time I had ripped out the first half-dozen rows of the leg-warmers (and this was not the toughest top-quality yarn to begin with, and it's beginning to look a little haggard), I got out the hellhound yarn.   I'm working down to ribbing.  At the moment I'm knitting two rows and then purling two rows, and back again.  The first row I spend trying to revert to the other stitch.  By the end of the second row I've forgotten the other stitch.

            Sigh.‡‡

            But SHADOWS is still going and going.  ‡‡‡ 

* * *

* I swear there's about 110% more water vapour in dog breath than human breath.  Or maybe more alveoli per square inch in hellhound lungs.  

**  Sewing-up takes space.  You have to keep laying the freller out and sort of dry-blocking it to see if it at all resembles what it is/was supposed to be.  Anguish.  And then trying to decide what to do about the fact that it doesn't.  The individual-square-knitting phase is much to be preferred.  Squares are or at least seem to be much more immediately recognisable as . . . squares.  Not to mention the not-needing-space part.  And the discovery that the squares are not square enough. 

*** And the lack of square-like-ness increases geometrically with every non-square added to the interesting object spread-eagled on the table.  

† Speaking of squares 

†† Yes, this preys on the mind.  Especially in the middle of the night.  The real reason for going to bed at dawn is so I can be awake and glaring back at the demons during the scary hours. 

            Have I told you we're supposed to be able to keep our bells through Christmas, although ringing in a restrained and tactful manner might be a good idea, and then they go off to be gilded and diamond-studded in January? 

††† I am hoping that recent breakthroughs on the subject of higher maths and hard sciences may have a knock-backwards effect on my capacity to do arithmetic.  I can float lightly past my limited comprehension of Professor Stewart's clever tricks while falling asleep in the bath, but it would be very useful to be able to add and subtract reliably.  I'm not even asking for long division.  

‡ How embarrassing.  Well, I've been busy.  Not writing PEG II and now—gasp—writing SHADOWS. 

‡‡‡ Maggie wrote:

Another day passes as a seventeen-year-old named Maggie.

Shadows will be about a seventeen-year-old named Maggie… and will most likely come out when *I* am a seventeen-year-old named Maggie. YAAAY!

Oh . . . golly!  Er . . . how is your relationship with algebra–?

Extreme Brain Death

 

There may be a lot of blog headings like that between now and the end of January.  I have spent all frelling day on SHADOWS.  I'm too old to go on like this, this hour after hour thing, counting the passage of time by how often the hellhounds want something.  What?  You want another hurtle?  Didn't you have one just . . . six hours ago?  And furthermore I didn't go to bell practise again tonight.  This is . . . extreme.* 

             Right.  I have nothing to say . . . so I'll answer some forum comments.

Diane in MN:

Really bad teaching won't only convince the student that she's stupid, it will make the subject seem useless and terminally boring. This takes a long time to get over. But you now get to follow whatever paths interest you and read stuff written by good writers, so it's no wonder it's a lot more fun than sitting in a classroom with a dreary textbook stuck in front of you. Also no one will give you an exam. 

Part of what is so frustrating in hindsight is that even though I've known for years that a lot of my dislike of various subjects was in part due to bad teaching I have felt very little urge to find out how much because the belief that I am stupid lingered, like Greasy Build Up in your kitchen drains.  It didn't matter that I'd been taught badly if I was unengageable on this or that subject anyway, you know?  When I think of everything I managed to be turned off in school I almost wonder what I've spent my life doing.  Well, sneaking around the back entrance, for one.  I thought history in school was pretty much a total snore too, but I did contrive to decide that was because I wasn't interested in kings, politics and wars:  I was interested in what was going on with the little people back home in the villages, trying to raise enough crops and critters to keep eating.  

            I'm still pretty exam phobic, which is still tiresome.  This isn't how it works in the real world, but what exams are supposed to be for is to tell you if you've learnt the material or not.  If you don't do some of the frelling problems how do you know if you can?  I get this just flipping through PROFESSOR STEWART'S HOARD OF MATHEMATICAL TREASURES while falling asleep in the bath.  I rarely do achieve the answer, but I'm a lot more engaged if I've tried.  (He says this himself, gently, in the introduction.)** 

AJLR

And re memory, if Raphael and the Angelic Horde have already stuck in as many extra memory chips as your main laptop has room for, then yes, as you say, the poor thing has come to the end of its evolutionary journey. 

Only this time I'm not going to let them take it away.  Last time I bought a laptop they did take the old one away, with some likely story about a refit for some deserving charity . . . is there anyone who takes elderly, semi-viable computer kit any more?  But as several people (including, I think Diane in MN and Blogmom) have said, with reference to the final straw of the battery on this one going phut, you don't need a battery if you keep it plugged into the wall.  And I have occasionally missed having ready back up.  I'm going to miss having laptop back up at the mews when they take this one away to transfer all its secrets to the new one. 

Of course, the log-jam will partly depend on how many of your mega-programs you have open at any one time. 

No, no!  You misjudge me!  You wound me!  Even I know to turn everything off before I turn Finale on—and I not only turn everything off, I go make a cup of tea when I turn the homeopathic stuff on.  It takes FOREVER to load and then it sort of sits there grumbling to itself and twitching like a sleeping dog till it finally concedes that it might work if I asked it nicely.  I'm hoping this situation may also improve with the new one with the more memory than an entire pantheon of gods (and goddesses). 

britabri

I wanted to clarify that Robin's pendant does not say: Public Restroom This Way or I Am an Apple Dumpling (which may be a very difficult task considering we're only looking at two characters. At the most it could have said 'restroom here' or 'I apple'). 

I had thought some of those wildly complicated characters one sees in Chinese (or Japanese) are wildly complicated because they're saying more than just one simple word.  I feel that either of the characters on my pendant have enough waving fronds to have been quite specific about the apple dumpling.  It could even be the complete recipe.

It really does say happiness (and good fortune and blessing) and long life (and old age, age, life, birthday…and funerary).

The first character on top is Fu (second tone) and here it is in the simplified: ?. Fu means happiness, etc.

The second character on the bottom is shou (fourth tone) and here it is: ?? Shou means long life, etc.

Happy belated Birthday to Robin, since I've left the ranks of stalker and have now crawled out of my shell to contribute to the conversations. ??  

I had originally planned to ask if anyone had any idea where to find the font support or whatever you call it for the characters, because on my screen, anyway—I don't know if it's WordPress or IE, or what—in the forum they just show up as little blank rectangles.  But I copied and pasted into Word to write the blog post and . . . lo and behold, here they are as beautiful little characters.***  (Presumably they will regress to little blank rectangles once I paste them into the admin window however.)   So anyone else out there frustrated by characterlessness . . . try pasting in Word or equivalent.  I don't suppose WordPress has an add-on gizmo for Chinese/Japanese characters?

            And now, what does the last character say?  Happy belated birthday, shell crawled out of, or conversation contribute to?  It seems to me quite complex enough to say all three, but then I was expecting cinnamon and pastry with the apple dumpling. 

            And . . . thank you!

Aaron

It may be worth noting that in one sense Geometry is the most Mathematical course that most students take in the field. The arithmetic-algebra-trigonometry-calculus sequence is very useful but it is usually taught in a relatively applied way. Geometry is frequently taught from a more theoretical point of view emphasizing why things are true rather than what you can do with them. 

Oh!  Now I was always in the liberal-arts college track in school, so Experience May Vary, but what I had was the algebra-geometry-algebra II-DUCKING THE ISSUE BY TAKING EARTH SCIENCES† sequence.  I was told that liberal-arts wusses like me always liked geometry best because . . . unh . . . it was the most describable in English, that is in language type language rather than maths type language. 

            I wish I could remember my geometry teacher's name, because he was another total sweetie, and I'd (cough cough) immortalise him here too if I could.††   He was another piece of extravagant luck:  Mrs Curry was young and enthusiastic;  he was old and near retirement, and too nice for his own good, and was stuck teaching the really dumb kids.  I was in that class not because they had twigged that I was really dumb, but because of a scheduling conflict caused by being new to that school system.   But I was happy with the dumb kids.

            You'd think that after two years of good maths teaching that my barrier wall might have crumbled a little, but it didn't.  The years from kindergarten through the beginning of eighth grade with Algebra Teacher from Hell were not shed that easily. 

LRK

Is it wrong that I now want to read "Attack of the Zorgs"? It sounds quite… exciting…  

Well, let me see.  Zorgs have rather long, elliptical bodies, with one large eye on a stalk, and three limbs variously used for handling and locomotion, each limb ending with a kind of hand with three grasping talons, and they are very fearsome warriors. . . . 

* * *

 * I wasn't going to be able to hitch a ride with Niall tonight and I thought, no worries, I'll take Wolfgang.  But about half an hour before I was due to leave I thought hmmmmmmm.  Under the current workload I'm only just barely keeping the ME back behind its electric fence^, driving is a weak point even when I'm feeling hearty and fettlesome and it's the first thing to go when I start fading and I'm driving Peter and me to see Tabitha tomorrow . . . can I afford a forty-five minute commute behind the wheel tonight?  Erm.  Maybe not.  So I didn't go.  I stayed at home and flogged myself silly over SHADOWS.  But at least there isn't far to fall from a chair at the kitchen table. 

^ Think 'triffids' here 

** Speaking of user-friendly books . . . I forgot to remind you of ALEX IN NUMBERLAND the other night, which I found very user-friendly.  Oh, and ALICE IN QUANTUMLAND is now on my wish list . . . but it doesn't seem to be available as audio.  Rats.  Speaking of the wrong kind of inoculation:  I was thinking of this after recoiling in horror from the illustrations in BRIEFER HISTORY.  I don't think the photos are really terribly helpful . . .  but part of my 'training' as a maths phobic is to look at equations and go AAAAAAUGH.  Having listened to ALEX before I looked at the pages I'd heard the numbers before I had to face them in a format I remembered from school.  I'm keeping this shocking revelation front and centre as I try to hack through a little of my teach-yourself-hard-stuff books. 

*** Much as it pains me to do so I may have to pause here a moment and praise Word. 

† Going to boarding school for your senior year has its uses.  I don't think we cracked an equation all year, but we had deeply mathematical experiences like going camping in Mt Katahdin State Park.  

†† Note that the reasons for remembering Mrs Curry's are twofold:  first that it's such an intensely romantic name—Penelope Windsor Curry—or I thought it was, and second she went riding at the same stable I did.

* * *

Curiouser and curiouser.  Britabri's characters show up fine here in the editing window . . . but are question marks on the public blog.  What does anyone else see?

It's Sunday, therefore I am short of sleep*

 

But we had eight ringers this morning.  EIGHT.  I'm trying to remember the last time we had eight ringers for our eight bells.  After a howling gale with rain hammering on the windows at 7:45 am when the frelling alarm went off, and me lurching swollen-eyed around the cottage saying, I don't want to go out in this, I don't WANT to go out in this . . . at 8:45 it suddenly cleared off and became blue and dazzling and glorious.  And all the bells rang out. . . .

            Another day passes as a seventeen-year-old named Maggie.**  I envy her the amount she can still eat, but other than that I'm okay to stick with the elderly decrepit me.  She's also a lot better constructed*** to cope with the intrusive magic besieging her landscape than I am.  I was thinking about this again after posting about how unsettling I found Aeon Flux the other night at the cinema:  I'm what you might call professionally off balance, I'd really rather not fall down the rest of the way, I might hurt myself†.  So if a dragon†† flew into the courtyard at the mews††† tomorrow would I be more or less likely than the average bystanding human to say, oh, hey, cool, that's a dragon, or run screaming?

            Blither blither blither blither.  It's been another good day as a seventeen-year-old named Maggie and as a result (a) I have no brain and (b) I'm having some trouble climbing back out of the vocabulary of an alternate-reality teenager.  I was also thinking‡ about the way I think of SHADOWS as my first 'genuine' teenage high school novel, which probably ought to be DRAGONHAVEN.  Except that Jake's a grown up by the end with a kid of his own‡‡ . . . and more crucially, since a lot of my protagonists start out teenagers, he doesn't go to high school.  Maggie goes to high school.  Yeep.  She takes algebra.  Double yeep.  With reference to my saying on these virtual pages some time recently that my hard sciences/maths phobia is probably largely due to very bad teaching . . . it's probably taken me these forty-plus years also to come to a point where I can face going with a character back through the doors of an average suburban high school.  Well, maybe not quite average, but . . . ‡‡‡

            Meanwhile, speaking of hard science, I'm about to download§ James Gleick's CHAOS.  www.Audible.co.uk, that ratbag, is having another 25% off sale for members so I was cruising for more tasty hard(ish) science.  As I've told you before I tend to avoid customer reviews of fiction—what ordinary readers want out of fiction is just too, um, various—but I usually do read reviews of nonfiction because there I am a very ordinary reader and may learn something from the same.  Not infrequently you see some aggrieved and outraged person saying, you're going to have to buy the hard copy too!  You're not going to be able to make sense of the maths from the audio!  Snork.  I wouldn't frelling dream of trying to cope with any of this stuff without having the underlinable-paper copy also at hand.  Self-improvement is expensive.§§

            Having said that, I got out of step with BRIEFER HISTORY OF TIME and, having finished the audiobook a couple of days ago, the paper version finally fell through my door yesterday.  And . . . um . . . well, there are no equations§§§ but the illustrations make it worse.  Electron interference (p 98)?  Feynman diagram of Virtual Particle/Antiparticle Pair (p 123)?  What?  If I'd picked it up in a shop, instead of on Audible, I'd've put it down again.

            Meanwhile . . . Hannah is going to read CHAOS too.  We're going to have a book club of two.  And if anyone had told me thirty years ago that Hannah and I were going to agree to read a book describing The Third Great 20th Century Revolution in the Physical Sciences (after relativity and quantum mechanics) at all, let alone over the Christmas holidays for light distraction from the figgy pudding, I'd have probably made myself sick laughing.

            Menopause Brain Rules. 

* * *

 * I was distracted from the passage of time by reading UNDER MILKWOOD.  Haven't read it since college, I think.  Golly.  I may have to blog about this.  I read Dylan Thomas in my teens, of course, As One Does, or at least As One Did if one fancied oneself a sensitive literary intellectual in the 1960s (adolescence, I believe, optional).  But . . . GOLLY.  Also WOW. 

** Over-identification with fictional characters?  What you say?

 *** You should forgive the term 

† Also being elderly, decrepit etc. 

†† Although there aren't any dragons in SHADOWS.  I don't think.  Er. 

††† And good luck to it:  parking is already an ordeal and a torment. 

‡ Which is generally considered to be a function limited to those in possession of brains 

‡‡ This is not my idea of a spoiler, but if it is any of yours, apologies.  

‡‡‡ It's not as if all my teachers were dire.  I had a lovely algebra teacher—I've told you about her.  We left Japan, and the algebra teacher who told me I was the stupidest child she'd ever taught, mid-school-year, and when we got back to America two months later the principal at my new school laughed a lot and tried to put me back a grade.  I could cope with the catch-up everywhere but algebra—and they would have put me back a grade if it hadn't been for Penelope Windsor Curry.  If you're out there anywhere, and have taken to reading fantasy writers' blogs in your retirement, thank you very much. 

§ I hope I'm about to download . . . insert a few practise screams of rage and frustration here.    

§§ And it's not, it seems to me, as if they've got all the bugs out of the electronic delivery system yet either.  An iPhone is a finite entity.^  After I've listened to something I delete it, of course:  if I want to listen to it again I can always re-download it^^ from my Audible 'library'.   But—as the little iPhone warning box tells you—if you delete it you will lose all your notes and bookmarks.  Gee.  Thanks guys.  That's really foresightful programming. 

^ Speaking of finite, as in computer memory, I had an email from Raphael, Computer Archangel, on Friday, and he says what a good thing I went for the ridiculously huge hard drive, that he'd been doing the sums, and . . .

            I should have my new laptop next week. 

^^ . . . theoretically 

§§§ As I recall this was one of the red herrings about the previous one—there were no equations, how hard can it be?  Um. . . .

Brain dead

 

To begin with, I finally did the revised cartoon for the tower—the membership drive* one.  Vicky has asked after its potential existence a few times over the last several months and last night sidled up to me at practise and said that it would be very nice to have it in time for the Christmas concert, when we can expect a pretty fair turnout of the local riffraff, and I winced and said yes, yes, certainly.  I have tended to claim that I've forgotten about it—and with Vicky staring at me I'm quite likely to have a blank about almost anything**—but the truth is that when it has crossed my mind I instantly order it back into its corner.  Later.  I'll do it later.***  It's going to be complicated, it's for a public purpose†, and the reason I was having to do it over in the first place, instead of merely tidying up the original, is because it had to be smaller—A5 rather than A4††.  I don't do smaller.  I especially don't do complicated smaller.  So I've been putting it off.

            BUT I FINALLY DID IT.††† 

 

I know. But I couldn't face long (rope) tail ends. I did fix third dude from the left's missing hand though.

            And then, not content to rest on my laurels, chiefly because resting on laurels doesn't pay very well, I ripped off a good two hundred and thirty-seven thousand words of THE ATTACK OF THE ZORGS—THE SCARLET PANJANDRUM—CHOLMONDELEY AND THE GOBLET OF RUM PUNCH‡—wait—I'll get it in a minute—SHADOWS.  Well, nearly 237,000 words.  What, in my world of writing, where every letter must be chipped out of the granite cliff face with a blunt piton‡‡, counts as 237,000 words.

            So I've earned being brain dead.

            But I still need to sing.  And go to bed early it being Sunday tomorrow and service ring is earlier every week.‡‡‡  Saturday nights tend to be when I hang guest posts, supposing I have any available.  Not that I'm complaining or anything . . . §

 * * *

* Um . . . the membership amble.  The membership blindfold donkey-tail-pinning. 

** Name?  Name?  Do I have a name? 

*** I've had to learn to resist this impulse when I'm doing bell-fund doodles.  I'll pull an order form out and it says 'a Bactrian camel playing pinochle with a white rhinoceros' and I go AAAAAAUGH^ and look for something less challenging.  I'll come back to this one later.^^  As I keep saying, the odd ones are fun—it's that frelling TIME ELEMENT^^^ again.  I don't have to think about fanged muffins. + 

^ ONE hump and ONE horn are ENOUGH 

^^ Speaking of unusual requests, danceswithpahis has posted to the forum where the hellcat with platypus comes from.  And I forgot to mention when I hung the doodle that the hellcat was specified as fuzzy, which is why the hellcat in question is so . . . well, fuzzy. 

HorsehairBraider wrote

. . . Those are just my observations: that goats will pick up and chew on things, even though they don't actually regard it as food. 

I've only known friends' goats, never, unlike you, had any of my own, and what little I used to semi-know is decades old.  Different breeds of goats are—er—more and less robust in their ideas about food, yes?  And with reference to the poor goat you mention who died of eating baling twine, I did wonder about the shingle-eating goats of my acquaintance if they were getting a balanced diet.  Eating non-food makes most critter-owners think 'deficiency'. 

^^^ which does not appear on the periodic table because no one has figured out where it fits.  

+ Please do not read this sentence out of context. 

† I know that doodle-buyers are more or less free to do as they like with their doodles, but I doubt anyone is going to make up several hundred copies and pass them out as flyers.  At least I hope not.  Furthermore, I'm very unlikely to meet any of you on the streets of New Arcadia. 

†† http://www.ukofficedirect.co.uk/iso_paper_size_cp.aspx 

††† Not without language. 

‡ Name, name, does it have a name? 

‡‡ Which process is so laborious it is not unusual to have forgotten what the word is by the time I get to the end of it.  This is one of my better excuses for embarrassing spelling mistakes. 

‡‡‡ I swear.  One of these Sundays soon I'll be able to ring before I go to bed. . . . 

§ I never know, when someone promises a guest post and then I never hear from them again, if they have fled the country, leaving all credit cards, passwords and internet facilities behind, or if they did send it and Outlook ate it.  This is on my mind a little more than usual—not that my email and I are ever on what you would want to call good terms—because a friend and I have just been emailing back and forth:  Did you get mine about —?  No, I didn't, did you get mine about —?  Silence. 

            If we've discussed it and you send me a guest post and I don't answer, SEND IT AGAIN.  I love guest posts.  Even if I don't think I can use it or if I want to ask you to make changes I'm pretty sure you won't want to make, I wouldn't have ignored it, okay?  But since this is my blog and my problem I don't feel I can chase the no-shows.  Very sensible of you, not wanting to write a guest blog, don't blame you at all. . . .

Forum round up, more of

 

Have been trailing around under a cloud all day, a cloud of Handbell Worry.   I have enough worries.*   

            So let's have a little more forum round-up. 

roisindubh211

What anime were you watching? 

The first feature was Aeon Flux.  There's a lot of stuff on the web—including YouTube clips—about it.  I'll just say that it's a lot creepier in the dark of a theatre than it is in snips on your computer screen.  Also, what we saw was silent, which was part of its anti-charm**, and monochrome—all beige and black.  Much more unsettling.***

            The main feature was Akira.  Ugh.  Sorry.  But ugh.†  But I loved Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro, so I am not wholly lost to anime.  

Maren quotes:

LRK wrote:

. . . the tree was full of peacefully munching, perfectly relaxed, goats! . . .

I don't know the specific documentary, but I think it was probably these guys. It looks like there are lots of pictures and YouTube videos if you Google "goats in trees". 

I want to see a video of them running up the trees in the first place.  I'm not nearly so impressed that they can run down.  

HorsehairBraider

It is a misconception that goats will eat anything. They . . . are pretty much the pickiest animal on the farm. . .  They would certainly never stoop to eating a rope. Now that is not to say they might not pick it up and mouth it a bit, but eat?  Never. 

Well, it depends on your goat, doesn't it?  I actually know the 'fussiest eater' version of goat keeping more than I know the 'eats anything' myth, but friends who've had goats say that it's more that you never know what goats may take into their heads to decide is a delicacy, which may include things like the (human) kids' winter coats and house shingles (which I would have assumed would be full of poisonous wood preservatives, but apparently not in this case).  And rope.  At least one goat couldn't be staked out because she'd eat the rope and trundle off cross country.  And she didn't just gnaw it through.  She ate it.  (Again I'd've thought this would play havoc with her digestion . . . but I guess not.)  But this sort of thing must be where the myth got started . . . ?  And why goat keepers often have grey hair within their first year of goat-keeping, from worrying about what the goats have unexpectedly been eating.  Speaking of worrying.  

Annagail

Youtube is both awesome and really, really annoying for teachers. . . . watching blatantly wrong performances . . . is not an insignificant problem, particularly if students' music-reading skills are sketchy. If you learn by ear, you may not catch a mistake in a recording. And if you learn it wrong, it's a total pain to fix it, both for the teacher and the student.

For the . . . student who will . . . check what the singer sings vs. what's on the music, Youtube (and . . . recordings in general) present a different problem. Your interpretation of a piece is supposed to be yours. What frequently happens is a student falls in love with a particular recording . . .  and then tries to imitate it. Sometimes the imitation is just in phrasing/interpretation . . .  but frequently there can be subconscious attempts to make one's voice do what the recording artist's does, whether or not your voice is made to do that – which is what Nadia was worried about. This is a bigger problem, as voices that are trying to do things they can't (yet) can end up . . . very messed up. . . .  

My teacher's opinion on recordings was always . . . : when you start learning the piece, leave the recordings alone. After you get the notes/rhythms/basic interpretation under your belt, listen to as many recordings as you can. This theoretically gives you oodles of exposure to lots of different interpretations, so you can grab her breathing spot, her phrasing of this particular passage, etc. . . . 

Harrumph.  Well, since Nadia is catching me up about listening to YouTube, I must have to take some of this seriously . . . but basically I'm going to say what I more or less said here on Monday:  I haven't got enough frelling voice (yet) to try and make it do anything except totter anxiously through the notes in more or less the right order, speed, and pitch. Try to sound like Marilyn Horne?  Hahahahahahahahaha.  And I'm going to say this to Nadia next week too††, and see what she says, since I have to assume I'm missing something.  Meanwhile I am trying to learn Dove Sei cold turkey and . . . 

blondviolinist

And then she reminded me that if I'm serious about this better-choir thing I need to start thinking about learning to sight-sing. AAAAAAAAAAUGH.

I admit it. I laughed my evil teacher laugh when I read this. 

Sigh.  And did I tell you on Monday that I took a deep breath and said, okay, when my hour lessons start?  That was before I found out they were starting next week. 

glanalaw

That Marilyn Horne recording is the one I remember from my art song literature class a couple years [ago]. Sooooo lovely. I'm absolutely in awe of her breath support and those long legato lines! 

Yes.  She's a whole book in herself about breath support.  I'd loved her for years before I was lucky enough to hear her in person and . . . I was completely dumfounded.  It's not that I thought there was any hocus-pocus about the recordings, just . . . the human mechanism can't do that.

I usually start with Youtube when I'm learning an unfamiliar song, too.

Oh.  Yaaay.  Whew.  I'm not just lazy and backward. . . . 

I try not to listen to the same performance over and over, though, so that I don't end up singing it exactly like whoever I'm listening to. 

Well, see above.  I can't.  But without thinking about it I automatically prefer to hear different versions because I'm looking for a rough guide not a perfect template.  At my level a perfect template would just be depressing. 

But, though I'm capable of sightreading, I do find it easier to have some idea of what the song is supposed to sound like before I start beating out notes and rhythms! 

Well, this is my excuse—and what I'm going to try on Nadia when I see her again.  My sense of rhythm is a little unpredictable and it's quite a good idea that I check against someone who knows what they're doing occasionally (speaking of having to relearn after mistakes).  And as soon as I get away from the gorgeous professional recording or superlative student recital and back to my piano, my music and my . . . ahem . . . voice, the gorgeous-professional fades rapidly under the onslaught of the real. 

Jeanne Marie

LOVE Marilyn Horne!

And, after listening to Dove Sei, I couldn't resist listening to THIS 

And what a good way to end a blog.  With cookies.††† 

* * *

* Tower Bell Worry, for example.  We had enough of a turnout tonight that I got to ring Cambridge, which of course means I screwed it up:  which is doubly^ annoying because I'm fairly close to being able to ring the wretched thing.  I just never know from one month to the next when I'll get the chance to try.  But the current worry is that we're about to spend fabulous amounts of money on getting our bells all fabuloused up . . . and then won't have anyone to ring them.

            Niall had told Penelope Colin's shocking news and she got me in a corner tonight and started telling me forcefully—as only someone who has taught classrooms full of junior high boys can be forceful—that I would certainly fit into one of Niall's other handbell groups and that it would be fine and that furthermore the energy spike^^ of learning to ring with a new group would have me ringing Doohickey Surprise in no time.  Uh huh.  And I will have SHADOWS finished by the end of January.^^^ 

^ Or, possibly, spliced.  Splicedly?  

^^ What she means is 'adrenaline panic' but she's too nice to say so 

^^^ IF IT WERE DUE IN AUGUST SHADOWS WOULD BE GOING BRILLIANTLY.  Well, it is going pretty well.  It's just not going end-of-January well.  Speaking of worries. 

** And was pretty much the reason for its inclusion, since one of the board of three who are trying to get this show on the road as a regular few-times-a-year feature of Weird Alternative Cinema, is a composer of off the wall electronic music.  He wrote a sound track, and it worked extremely well. 

*** And it was unsettling, although I'm easily unsettled.  I spend too much time officially out of my mind and planet and I don't really need anyone trying to yank my chain.  On the other hand, I'd been warned it was going to be sexually kinky.  Either they'd had to cut the extreme bits to get permission to show it, or I had a more comprehensively experimental youth than I realised.  

† And about the loathly lady story:  there is pretty much a loathly-lady story for all occasions.  It's really only the reverse of Beauty and the Beast, and every human culture we know enough about to know the stories it tells has some version of Beauty and the Beast.   It will not amaze you that I have the McKinley version of the unsatisfactory King Henry in hen-scratches in a paper file folder somewhere, waiting for time to write it up.  

†† Eeeep.  Speaking of worrying.  I am going to be in a complete falling-down-and-biting-the-carpet frenzy of terror by next Wednesday.  The combination of going to her home for the first time, and having the first of my hour-long lessons is rendering me incapable of believing that I am capable of learning anything at all, let alone filling up an hour. 

            I am so frelling hopeless.  Gaaah. 

††† What I missed, having been born too late for Sesame Street.

UnThanksgiving

 

In the first place, I had scrambled eggs, Nina had soy sausage* and Peter had leftover lamb stew.**

            But the real mood of thanklessness and festive unjollity was established earlier in the evening.  Colin is threatening to give up handbells.

            He's been ringing handbells about two and a half years.  He'd had minor surgery that was going to keep him out of bell towers for a while and the idea of no method ringing at all was making him twitchy.  And I think he'd had it in the back of his mind that he was going to give handbells a go some time. 

            He picked it up instantly, of course.  That's the result of forty years and four hundred million peals and keeping everybody else straight in the tower.  We—Niall, Colin and I—were ringing touches of bob minor by the end of his first evening on handbells.  They were a little ragged, but they were nonetheless genuine touches of bob minor.  It took me years to get to the ragged touches of bob minor stage. 

            The thing is, he's never gotten a lot better.  He's got some better, and he can bodge through anything on handbells because he can ring anything in the tower***—but he has never morphed into the fabulous handbell ringer that I had confidently† predicted he would be at the end of his first six months.  He still trips and hesitates—even on bob minor.

            But Colin with a pair of handbells in his hands does mean that Niall and I can ring handbells on Thursday evenings in New Arcadia.  Gemma?  Gemma—who was not there again tonight—is not going to make a handbell ringer.  She's a doctor, she has a life and a family, she has too much else going on.  She doesn't have the time—or, I imagine, the brain energy—to learn handbells.  Handbells are a difficult skill.  If Colin goes, that'll be the end of Thursday evening handbells at Rose Cottage. 

            And tonight—okay, after derailing an attempt at a Thanksgiving quarter peal—out of the blue Colin said that he'd decided he was going to give handbells a final, make or break, shot—he's going to try to ring a full peal on handbells with a couple or three tower-bell friends of his who are also demon handbell ringers.  I am a sort of bottom-level soggy-porridge handbell ringer, and even Niall is only demon third class, although he's getting there.  Colin seems to think that his stratospheric friends will either shock him into precision, or confirm his decision that he is not a handbell ringer.†† 

            If we fold, it won't be a disaster for Niall:  he already rings handbells three other nights a week, and is perfectly happy to drive to Vientiane for a full peal of quadruply spliced Doohickey Splendour Royal, and then drive home again.  I don't have time either to drive to Vientiane, even if I'm hitching a ride with Niall, and I sure as frell don't have the time to learn Doohickey Splendour.  Niall will doubtless—because he can't bear the idea of even a soggy-porridge††† handbell ringer going to waste—try to find other opportunities to foist me on . . . I mean, to find another band for me to ring with.  But it's going to take alchemy and transmogrification.

            And I'm already (justifiably) pessimistic about the tower bell situation in this area.

            Maybe Colin's handbell peal will be a dazzling, exhilarating success, and he'll come back to his next Thursday night with us on fire to ring . . . uh, Doohickey Splendour.  In which case as an offering to the Gods of Handbells I will learn it.  And maybe he was having a gloomy night tonight and he's not quite as near the end of his tether as he says.‡ 

            But I do know what he's talking about, about his handbell ringing.  I'd MUCH rather he rang than stopped—there's also the little matter of him being a nice guy and easy to have around—and he only winds me up when he's trying.‡‡  An awful lot of the good handbell ringers are very intense and just being in the same room with them makes me green and queasy—or they're like the Mean Man the other week who wants perfection or he's going to drop-kick you into the next county.  I'd rather ring with Colin.  And knowing he's a bit erratic helps keep me in line. 

            But I understand how a hot shot tower ringer might not want to hang around indefinitely doing ringing that he's not really good at.  It would be like me writing Sudoku or travel guides to Papua New Guinea or economics textbooks—I'm not built for it and I would not be good at it.  And it wouldn't take me two and a half years to bail.

            But . . .

            Whimper.‡‡‡ 

* * *

* She's a vegetarian.  But they smelled really good and I'll have the rest of them on Saturday when she and Peter are playing bridge.  

** Peter and I talked about Thanksgiving.  But . . . neither of us really eats all that much any more, it happens right after my birthday^, Peter's birthday is in three weeks and then it's Christmas.  And yes, there's a turkey for Christmas.^^  So we talked about Thanksgiving and . . . 

^ Which when I was younger and on better terms with more calories just made it value-added:  coming to the end of the birthday cake was made much less tragic by the immediate prospect of pumpkin, mince and apple pies.  

^^ I have retained a few of my American standards, and a turkey at some late-year holiday is necessary.  

*** This is, you can believe, a source of deepest and wildest frustration to me.  I can only ring on handbells what I have spent hours and hours and HOURS learning^—since the advent of the bell-ringing programme on Pooka, I can at least put in my hours and hours and HOURS privately, without ruining anybody else's day(s).  It's still hours and hours and HOURS. 

^ Methods on handbells are harder than on tower bells.  Don't let anyone+ tell you different. 

+ Niall, for example. 

† And despairingly 

†† The point about a full peal, for those who ring them, which would not include me, is that there is, or should be, in a peal that goes well, a long stretch after everyone has settled down when the band fuses into a single many-roped monster and the ringing really flows along.  You do get this effect to a much lesser degree in a good quarter peal—which I have rung on occasion—but it is (I'm told) more dramatic in a full peal because a full peal goes on so much longer.  It's this stage that Colin wants to find out if he can reach on handbells.  If he does, then our Thursday nights probably have a future.  If he doesn't . . . 

††† I am at least a soggy-porridge first class handbell ringer.  But the sort of thing Niall rings the other three nights of his handbell week are the equivalent of the Grand National when Pony Club gymkhanas still scare you to death. 

‡ Although he didn't give the impression of being gloomy.  There are . . . perhaps more than the usual number of All Stars just inside the front door at the cottage at present, and I was doing my coming-back-ten-seconds-before-the-others-arrive^ trick tonight and didn't have a chance to shovel them out of the way.  I was pulling harnesses off hellhounds when I heard Colin's voice behind me saying, Robin, how many feet do you have? 

^ Which is still much better than the five minutes after they arrive trick. 

‡‡ See previous footnote. 

‡‡‡ Colin doesn't have a date yet for Peal of Destiny.  I'll let you know.

Some Forum round up

 

Stardancer

The bottom pendant does in fact date from my childhood in Japan. The characters are supposed to say something like happiness† and long life but I always wonder if really they say something like Public Restroom This Way or I Am an Apple Dumpling.

I once saw a picture of a girl's side, upon which she'd had several large Chinese characters tattooed–I believe she said they were some sort of blessing for happiness/nirvana/etc. Except then someone commented, "Um, actually, that says 'I am a picnic table.'" 

Well . . . one does want to know the attitude of the person who did the translating toward the person with the tattoos. . . .

            Now this is also a true story, because I was there.  I was helping an older adult friend go back to college—she was attending summer school to get her MA.  We'd unloaded her into her dorm room and had gone to the cafeteria for food.  She was wearing a brown and white dress with big shiny gold characters all over it.  They were stylised but they were still clearly characters and therefore presumably readable.   Some years before my friend had spent several weeks in Hong Kong, where she had bought the fabric for this dress and had it made up for her.  (This is DECADES ago, when much of the Far East was a cheap option even for non-wealthy people.)  She was very fond of it and wore it a lot.  We were behind two Oriental women who were talking to each other in what I assume was some kind of Chinese (Japanese is the only Eastern language I ever recognise).   One of them glanced casually at us . . . and then did a double-take and started staring at my friend's dress.  She nudged her friend, and her friend looked.  They gave the impression of two people trying to keep a grip for a few seconds and then went off into whoops of laugher.  Apparently the big gold characters were fertility symbols—and not particularly tactful ones at that.

            My friend was horrified.  She was a proper old-fashioned lady and the idea that she had unknowingly . . . !!!!! made her want the earth to open and swallow her up.  The thing that she kept getting stuck on was that not only had whoever it was sold her the fabric (and she wouldn't have been going anywhere that hadn't been extensively vetted by the local Western proper-lady mafia) but that the extremely proper tailor had accepted it and made it up without the faintest flicker of an eyelash. 

roisindubh211

I must say, that is an excellent Secret Agent Pose photo with your coat. 

Sorry about that.  I was trying to get a black coat to stand out against a muddled and badly lit background.

            And apologies for BELATED thanks for all the forum Happy Birthdays.*  I've just been answering rather too many not-yet-answered cards and well-wishings and emails and things because . . . my sense of time is BENT, you know?  I totally believe in the space-time continuum and the way that everybody's sense of time is individual.**  Some are more individual than others.  I also received an email today whose subject line was 'belated happy birthday'.  Belated?  What?  Belated doesn't even start till about January . . . which I wish I could belate a little more.  Fiona gave me the album from the concert I kept missing*** for my birthday . . . and one of the tracks on it is called Too Late for Shadows.  Nooooooooooo. . . . .†

HorsehairBraider

. . .  it makes me feel somehow slightly better to know that other people forget things occasionally… My defense is that my mind is all filled up with how to do my profession, and there is no room left over for anything else. It's probably not true but it sounds good. 

Snicker snicker snicker snicker.  My mind is definitely filled up with how to do my profession . . . but people tend to back away slowly when I say this, at least as soon as they find out what my profession is.††  

cmarschner

Also, I wanted to mention how much I've appreciated the recent running commentary on math and popular science books; I know I have a huge blind spot in math particularly, and I want to appreciate it better. Perhaps one of these pre-vetted books will help. 

I'm a little startled at how much I'm suddenly enjoying my recent clodhopping collisions with maths and science.  It's like now over forty years after I graduated from high school the scars of the experience have finally faded.  I know that what appeals to me is the sense of another language, of another world—although speaking of clodhopping, the best bit about modern physics is that so much of it is about not having a clue†††—but this begs the question of why I'm suddenly engaging with this now when this was true over forty years ago too‡ and I'm afraid the chief answer is that I was mostly very very badly taught.  When you're naturally reasonably good at something—as I was at reading and writing‡‡—you can probably figure out how to teach yourself.  I could, and can, not teach myself maths and science.

            Because I remember only too acutely being a maths and hard science phobic, I have to say that none of the books I've mentioned here are going to convert you unless you're ready to be converted.  But I would say the friendliest are the Bryson SHORT HISTORY and the two Ian Stewart oddity-collections, CABINET OF MATHEMATICAL CURIOSITIES and HOARD OF MATHEMATICAL TREASURES.  The latter are (diabolically) real maths all right, but they're light-hearted even when there's serious purpose folded into them—and you don't have to be able to do any of the problems, the answers are all at the back!  And they're all SHORT!  You can read one before bed and it doesn't hurt at all!‡‡‡ And how can you resist a book that begins with a retread of the old I-always-lie conundrum concerning the starship Indefensible and Captain Quirk and Mr Crock?

            The 'easier' Hawking, BRIEFER HISTORY, is, in fact, comprehensible, which was not an issue I had with the first one§, but it's pretty dense.  Fascinating, occasionally infuriating§§, but I don't recommend it for bathtub reading.  And Devlin's THE LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS is very appealing for his enthusiasm for his subject, but I need to put my head in a bucket of ice water about once every fifteen minutes to keep my brain from overheating.  I'm still not good at ANY of this.

Ajlr

The problem is that Blah Blah Blah has a smaller frelling hard drive. I want more memory than god. That's the plan.

Er…do you mean memory or do you mean storage? I'm assuming that you mean storage, if you're talking about the hard drive. And what Ownedbycats says . . .  is what I also wondered if it would be worth your considering, ie having an external plug-in hard drive . . .  as well as a bigger internal one. OK, you would have to remember to take it with you and they're usually about the size of a trade paperback, but it could be useful and a less-expensive way of increasing your filing space? Or maybe I'm just going over something Raphael has already equipped you with. 

I tend to depend blindly on what Raphael and Gabriel tell me, and they do not seem to me to want to sell me stuff I don't need.  But I think I mean memory.  I have several fairly gigantic programmes on my computer(s)—the whacking gigantic-est of which is this monster professional homeopathic thingummy plus the several million book library that goes with it.  Plus Finale, the music composing software, which is a whole lot bigger than I need because it's full of midi file stuff that I don't want and won't use but which I can't bin, plus frelling Microsoft Office, of course—and the OED—and some more reference stuff that is probably by now available on line for a subscription, but given my broadband I'd rather have them on the computer.  And a few bell ringing programmes and . . .

            Raphael told me a while ago—I think when Finale went on—that the laptop was beginning to have moving-around-and-doing-things problems.  That's when he stuffed in what more memory it would hold.  Which is now also full.  I've already got my photos on too many bits of external memory—I do still need a better answer for storage, presumably some kind of external hard drive.  This has been on the list for a while.  But it's not going to happen now until I get SHADOWS turned in. . . . 

* * *

 * Most of which, strangely, were pink.  

** It has to be true.  I read it in Stephen Hawking.  Of course he was kind of talking about event horizons where your feet would have a different sense of time than your head, and you'd blow up anyway, but never mind. 

*** Whimper. 

† And a pair of PINK hand knit socks.  I don't understand why you people are all so obsessed with pink. 

†† Or it may have something to do with the way my eyeballs turn red and my teeth grow long and pointy when they say oh?, and ask if I've ever written a real book. 

††† And how about that faster-than-light neutrino then. 

‡ Even if physics didn't have different clues forty years ago 

‡‡ Although I could tell you stories about this too.  My eighth grade English teacher wanted to fail me to make my writing 'freer'.  Um.  This would not have had this effect.^ 

^ Eighth grade was not a good year.  That was also the year of my first algebra teacher, whom I've already told you about, who said that I was the dumbest child she'd ever taught and I'd never get it. 

‡‡‡ They are also in nice lightweight trade-paper editions so you can read them in the bath. 

§ But I was also still in my phobic phase when it was published. 

§§ Humour does not seem to come easily to Mr Hawking, or Mr Mlodinaw in this company.

Another Fiona Day

 

And yes, ENORMOUS QUANTITIES of sale/auction stuff was parcelled up and hauled off to the post office by the gallant Fiona.  Or rather . . . toward the post office.  Fiona was here nearly eight hours–and so far as I can tell she never bothers with the frivolities lesser humans enjoy, like tea breaks and food–and was STILL stuffing things in envelopes and justifying my untidy heaps when I took her by the hair* and ordered her to go home.  So she's actually bundled up the bundles and is going to take them–in batches, she says, so they don't lock the door the next time they see her coming–to her post office.

             But I'm still not done.  I'm nothing like done.  Fiona comes again on the 9th** and then we'll see where we are.   Meanwhile I'm so frelling tired I'm having trouble finding the keyboard.***  Okay, it's a funny flat thing with bobbles . . . I know it's around here somewhere. . . .

              And I was PLANNING on doing a doodle blog . . . and then discovered that I'd USED the last of my extra-special Blogmom Photo Templates and, you know, she might have been taking her evening off . . . fortunately she was still reading her emails and Took Pity.   But it's a lot later than I meant it to be either. 

               So anyway.  Here are a few more recent highlights.

There are a lot of Mystery Doodle Requests.  Why does anyone want a velociraptor on PEGASUS?

Dragon. My dragons, I find, vary, but they all have arrowhead tails.

Griffin

Another Mystery Request: a hellcat cuddling a platypus. WHAT?

Rosebush. No, definitely not botanically correct.

Terrier. Well, the fabulous doodle-buying person didn't stipulate what KIND of terrier.

Nothing like leaving ENOUGH ROOM ON THE TITLE PAGE to autograph, let alone doodle.

Tsornin and Narknon. Sorry about the shadow (where I've blocked out the dedicatee's name, having forgotten to take the photo first.) I was getting pretty punchy by then.

AND I'M SUPPOSED TO DO ANYTHING AT ALL WHERE ON EITHER OF THESE PAGES?

So bag the title page. Keep turning. To find Greatheart.

 And you know what I've been DOING while all these photos load?  Starting a new knitting project.

* * *

* Having slacked off for several hours to work on SHADOWS.

** Steeleye Span concert.  Ahem.  –Fiona was playing Steeleye today and Cold Haily came on.  QUIET!  I said (I believe we were discussing bubblewrap for the illustrated ROSE DAUGHTERs^).  I have to LISTEN!  They make it sound so easy.

^ One of the insane people who has spent excessive amounts of money for her very own personalised copy of this huge glamorous art book illustrated by a genuine fine artist WANTED A DOODLE.  (*&^%$£"!!!!!!!!!   I also nearly had a heart attack from nerves.  What if I BOTCHED IT?  I would have to fall on my (sharpened) drawing pencil. 

*** Oh gods, I haven't sung yet.  Speaking of keyboards.

Not Dove Sei

 

She made me sing Dove Sei.  I went in there saying, I've only just started on Dove Sei.  I'm not ready to sing it.  That's fine, she said.  We'll sing just a little of it.

            And here I thought she was a nice voice teacher.  I also went in there with that first exercise in the Vaccai book with the consonant clumps and said, I can't read this at all, so I've been singing 'aaaah eeee' and she looked at me and said, that's fascinating.  I've never heard that before.

            I have almost no voice and I'm a moron.

            And I go up to my full hour lesson next week.*

            Whimper.**

            I also said that I had wasted a disquieting*** amount of time trying to get the flipping lyrics to fit the flipping tune on Cold Haily and she grinned an evil teacher grin and said that's folk music.  I hadn't really thought about this in a coherent manner† but she was saying you have a poem or a story, and you slap it on an extant folk melody and—good luck.  So the good news is that I'm allowed to mess around and make it fit the way I sing it.††  Also, bless her, she reiterated that my voice lessons are for my personal pleasure††† and if I want to learn folk songs to have more to sing while I'm out hurtling that's fine with her. 

            Meanwhile, back at the Handel. . . . I told her about the first two bars of Marilyn Horne and the rich furry mezzo student recital and she started getting that Teacher Gleam again and said, why were you looking it up on YouTube?  I blinked—because I'm used to YouTube as a crib—and said, chiefly for the rhythm.  I realised after I'd stumbled through a few bars of it on the piano that I didn't know this one—since I know the title and Rodelinda‡ I'd assumed I did, and was embarrassed to discover that it's just something I might hear on Radio 3 occasionally.  My ability to count beats is rudimentary at best and when I start sticking individual bars together into phrases it can get ugly.  So I check with YouTube.‡‡ 

            My alarm bells go off when you talk about rich furry mezzo voices, said Nadia, because you seem to like singing high, and have put yourself in the first sopranos at the Muddlehamptons.  If you listen to rich furry mezzos you are at risk of trying to sound like that yourself, which will make it much harder to free up the top end of your range.

            Gleep.  The things I have no idea about.  I do acknowledge the point about unconsciously having a specific performance of a song playing in the back of my mind . . . and I suppose as I may slowly be emerging from the totally hopeless to the may-yet-make-a-good-choir-member, which as of last week I have begun officially to hope for‡‡‡, I need to take this on more fully.  I will be arriving at a point where it's not just struggling through the dratted melody and quadruply-dratted meter, but will involve performance . . . and furthermore my individual interpretation, which of course she's already on about.§  But at the moment . . . the idea of trying to sound like anyone is a joke.  I'm still at the stage where just hitting the notes in more or less the right order at (more or less) the right speed is tightrope-walking-over-Niagara thrilling. 

            Meanwhile . . . I didn't go bell ringing tonight so I could get on with SHADOWS.  I hope you're impressed.  

* * *

* Well, maybe.  She's going to a voice-teacher master class next Monday so she's teaching from home on Wednesday for those of us so devoted to her art that we can't bear to miss a week.  I'm hoping her husband won't be there.  He's a frelling serious frelling musician and I'm entirely terrified of him.^  But he's also disturbingly free-lance and might conceivably be home looking after Stella.^^  I've had enough trouble adjusting to the presence of Nadia's mum on Mondays—it's Nadia's mum's house, and she takes care of Stella while Nadia teaches.  Nadia's mum is also a professional musician . . . but (mostly) retired, and I didn't know any of this when I began with Nadia, so it was a little late to have the nervous breakdown after I found out. 

            . . . However.  I nearly never got started with Nadia when I couldn't find the address.  Long time readers may remember this story.  I drove to the end of their village not having seen the road sign, turned around at the pub, asked at the pub, and the man behind the counter there said dubiously, I know all the roads around here and I don't know that one.  Great.  Wonderful.  Turns out the road DOES NOT HAVE a road sign.  Which Nadia had forgotten to mention.

            So now I have to try to find her house?  I wonder what she's forgotten to tell me this time?  It's in Rumbelow, so I know how to get that far—over the last hill behind Mauncester and straight on till morning—except that you have to plunge into the maze off the main road before you get to any of the landmarks I know.  You turn right at the aspidistra, left in front of the Horror at Red Hook, right again at the Sign of the Boiling Marmalade, and then look for a clear space among the trees, stop, fetch your sextant, and look for a star.  Any star.  

^ No, I've never met him.  Why would I need to meet him?  

** I've just had a bracing email from Hannah, who both reads the blog and receives supernumerary moaning when we talk on the phone.   She wanted to tell me about taking her daughter for her riding lessons this week.  Ruby takes both dressage and jumping lessons, one right after the other^, and she told Hannah afterward that the jumping had gone well but the dressage had gone badly.  But, says Hannah, from her perspective looking on, the dressage had been the 'better' lesson because Ruby had so clearly learnt something whereas she had pretty much smoothly done what she was supposed to during the jumping, and was riding much the same at the end of the lesson as she had been at the beginning.  So maybe my madly frustrating and head-banging singing lessons are really good.  Yes.  And too much of this goodness will drive me to commit hideous perversions like eating Twinkies and wearing beige saddle shoes. 

^ What it is to be young and stretchy  

*** Singing is disquieting!^  HAHAHAHAHA.  I'm so funny.  Sorry.  I didn't mean to do it, but then I couldn't not leave it in, could I? 

^ Especially mine. 

† Although I should have, since I was just complaining about the muddle of the long version of She's like the swallow that some helpful forum member found a few weeks back when I was complaining about wanting to know the rest of the story.   Some of those verses were obviously imported—they don't fit with either the meter or the melody of the version I'm singing. 

†† This is also good because I would so lose a competition with Maddy Prior. 

††† Even if occasional nightmares of beige saddle shoes do interrupt the flow. 

‡ Renee Fleming the 3 of December.  I'd better make it to this one.  Handel is also long . . . but not as long as Wagner. 

‡‡ I also said that it was mostly countertenors and I wanted a mezzo—that while I like good countertenors, and I'm a big fan of Andreas Scholl, for example—that the countertenors just didn't connect with what I wanted when I was looking for a crib, and Nadia said, that's probably because the physical mechanism for a man singing countertenor is nothing like how you are producing your voice.  I get along fine with tenors and—even better—baritones, I said.  She grinned the evil teacher grin again:  baritones are probably closer to how you sing. 

            Oh.  Golly.

‡‡‡ I had last week's voice again this week.  Yaaay.  And Nadia remarked again on the fact that all that work we did when I was buried under the Persistent Throat Gloop has paid off.  Then she licked her finger and drew a line in the air.

            And then she reminded me that if I'm serious about this better-choir thing I need to start thinking about learning to sight-sing.   AAAAAAAAAAUGH.

§ And stuff like thinking of the phrases of Caro Mio Ben as sighs was very helpful as a way in to thinking of performing rather than surviving