Fiona, shining with an ethereal light

 

Fiona has been here today, sorting me out.  I stayed as far out of her way as possible* all day, and was REWARDED for restraining my natural gibbering trepidation about seeing the first flood of sale/auction orders made manifest** by our going to Greater Footling*** for a folk concert tonight.  Aside from the winter gale blowing on our ankles† throughout the evening it was excellent.††  It was probably my guilty awareness of blowing off Muddlehampton practise that was making me listen with a kind of newly-heightened awareness:  you can get away with more if you just do it boldly.†††  The prelim act may have featured the singer with the more beautiful voice but she was too tentative.‡  The headliner has a voice like anyone might have a voice, but golly she can parlay it.  But she's also busy soaring off into realms that have very little to do with folk music but everything to do with making her audience sit up and go 'oooh'.  I need to get back to composing my weird little pieces in my copious free time.  Perhaps the purchaser of the original McKinley composition in the auction will prove to have a generous and flexible nature. 

PS:  Fiona also brought cookies. 

* * *

* Assisted, as ever, by faithful hellhounds.  Oh, hi, Fiona, I have to take hellhounds out^ . . . . So, Fiona, how's it going? [staring in terror at pile of order print-outs and mountain of padded envelopes].  Right, Fiona, we're on our way down to the mews . . . No, hellhounds and I are just passing through [I DON'T THINK I CAN GET INTO MY OFFICE ANY MORE] you're doing a great job, thanks so much.^^ 

I am now organised.  There are seventy-eight piles, all of them beautifully and precisely labelled.  All I have to do is . . . function.^^^ 

^ The Trauma of Technology, Chapter 4,728,311.  I've finally got to the end of the www.audible.uk DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT [AMERICAN] HISTORY and I've been listening to it for so long+ it's like losing a friend. 

            However, nothing ventured, nothing rattling your cage.  So I downloaded the next book on my list.++  I'd already bought the freller, all I had to do was download it.  I downloaded it.  It appeared in my iTunes library.  I synced it with Pooka, having ticked it to be transferred.  I was watching the little window at the top of the screen—I'm paranoid, you know—and I SAW it slide over the wires into my iPhone.

            Not.  When hellhounds and I went out for our second hurtle, I tried to turn it on.  It wasn't there.  WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S NOT THERE?  I checked on my computer again.  iTunes, sniggering to itself, brought it up on the screen when I asked it about the contents of Robin's iPhone.  I went back to the iTunes library and tried dragging and dropping it, which is a trick Fiona taught me and has worked for other things in the past.  Nope.  Still not there. 

            I will spare you the labyrinthine sequelae.  The point is that I have no idea what I finally did that made the wretched thing appear on Pooka's screen and, wonder of wonders, consent to play.  Since it is not in audible's best interests to alienate eager new members, it's clearly the technology which is amusing itself using my brain for a nice game of pinball.  DON'T KNOW MUCH+++ was my first audible book and the first three of its four parts downloaded beautifully and were simply there when I went to play them.  The fourth one, as regular readers may remember, was a shedload of kryptonite and Pooka is also a native of the planet Krypton.  By that time, however, I'd not only listened to the first three parts but downloaded and listened to several free sample chapters, all of which behaved flawlessly.

            Arrrrrrrgh.  

+ Although I've listened to most of it twice—going back to the beginning of a section and listening to it again before I go on.  As previously observed, 200-plus years of American history in not quite 700 pages is . . . intense.  And that's aside from the head-exploding moments.  It still makes my head explode that it took till 1920 for American women to get the vote.  We've had the vote for LESS THAN a century.  And seven states (all of them, just by the way, southern ex-slave states) still rejected it.  ' . . . While it guaranteed the vote to women, states could enact their own voting requirements. [I'd've liked to hear what some of these were~  Probably that you were an heiress of at least 600 acres—old white men have always worshipped their property—and married—can't have all that land in a woman's hands—and could recite the Bhagavad Gita backwards in the original Sanskrit.  Okay, probably not the Gita, but you know what I mean.]  The amendment also did not require states to allow women to serve on juries or be eligible for public office . . . .' 

~ Yes, I know.  Google.  

++   http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/17/alex-bellos-adventures-numberland-maths 

+++ . . . how very prescient 

^^ Whose stupid idea was this again?  Can't we just tie the bells up with string or something? 

^^^ HorsehairBraider:  . . . look what awesome taste the squid has – not only chocolate, but champagne! With lots of glasses for friends! It would be wonderful to be a squid and have all those arms. 

Stephanie:  You're not making the process of picking a doodle subject any easier, you know. 

A doodle-orderer could specify what her (or his) medium-large friendly squid was carrying in all those arms.  If a doodle-orderer were thus inclined.  Default, I admit, would likely be champagne and chocolate. 

Aaron 

Quote:

^ using the second sides of paper that has story drafts on the other side.

I trust that you realize that even a rumour to the effect that the pre-existing doodles in the auction might fall into this category could cause a riot.

Oh.  Well, maybe we can save that for the next doodle-aganza.  

** Despite my printer being possessed by increasing numbers of highly inventive demons.  Fiona got out her vorpal blade and cut a few mystic runes in the atmosphere around said printer.  You are so no fun, it said, and printed.  

*** Which involved only six Sherpas and a musk ox. 

† Getting old is a ratbag.  By the time the concert was over all the free-floating rheumatism within a ten-mile radius had glommed onto me and I nearly needed a forklift to get me out of my chair, let alone up the six hundred and twelve stairs to the frelling car park.  I comfort myself with the fact that Fiona was limping too, and she's a good quarter century younger than I am.  But after equatorial jungle weather^ all week it's suddenly turned to winter and all our atomic densities are realigning themselves in a singularly thoughtless way.  Ouch.

 ^ I'm sure I heard monkeys and parrots. 

†† Diane in MN

I was made to sit in a small room . . . all right, a large room . . . with a piano, a computer, a lot of paper of various types, several handsful of pens and pencils, hellhounds, an electric kettle, a teapot^ . . . and told to get on with it.

Hey, you forgot the YARN.

Oh, how could I forget the yarn?  Fiona and I were Comparing Projects tonight during the intervals.  I'm . . . still knitting squares.^  Fiona is doing this way cool thing where you change yarns/colours by simply knitting on to your previous, uh, polygon.  No sewing up.  I like this.  Unfortunately what she's doing involves going around corners.  I'm not sure I like it well enough to risk learning to go around corners.  Mind you I've already self-taught the knitting-on of edges which prove too short when clapped together with other, cough cough, squares of peculiarly unpolygonal shape and angular relationship.^^  But corners . . . I foresee dodecahedrons of potential errors in the concept of knitting corners. 

 ^ I meant to get Fiona to check me over for counting stitches and purling competence.  I have two large, patterned squares to get going on.  A rose.  And a paw print.  

^^ It's not the sewing-up so much as the addenda to sewing up. 

††† EMoon:  I have the same thing about not wanting to be heard. I've been trying to think where it came from…but there was a lot of silencing going on when and where I grew up. Girls, in particular, were supposed to be quiet. . . . Yet I went on being outgoing and outspoken until…when? I can't remember the specific incidents when suddenly I froze if asked to sing. 

. . . Have just wasted some more time trying to track down a reference (not assisted by the fact that Wiki has been violently unstable the last couple of days and my less than sainted Internet Explorer keeps opening and shutting Wiki pages like a nutcracker smashing walnuts.  CRUNCH).  Who was it that thought girls suddenly shut down at around age eleven?  I was thinking it was Carol Gilligan but I'm not finding a suitable quote.  I also think it's probably changed in the generation(s) since ours, but I sure remember finding out that I was going to have to stop being a kid and grow up to be a . . . girl.  My freezing was general though:  singing was a mere aspect.  It was a severe aspect of this paralysis, however, and is still alive and well almost half a century later.

I can't make myself sing as loud in the house as I can at lessons. I don't even want to hear myself. . . . 

Yep.  I'm there too.  Although I know one sort of sub-reason for this:  Nadia is a whole lot nicer about my voice than I am.  But that's part of this vicious circle.  And I'm not going to get caught in it tonight.

‡ I can hear Oisin saying, Give it more wellie.