Small steps

Today’s been a bit of a washout (again) as far as real work is concerned – been too worried about the cyclone in Queensland to really focus properly. Not that I have friends or relations there or anything, but it’s more that friends of mine do – my cousin’s wife is a Townsville girl, to start with. But basically I’ve found sustained thought a little tricky today. I’m sure tomorrow will be better.

I did, however, achieve a couple of small but significant steps: I managed to get in touch with the person running the course at TVU, which ended up with me getting the answers I wanted to hear and finally submitting my application, so YAY! Hopefully next week I’ll have the trial lesson and we’ll see how that goes. I can’t wait, but at the same time I’m a bit nervous – I’m doing this because I want to push myself to learn more, to think outside the box I sometimes feel my musical brain has got a little stuck in, and while that’s exciting, it’s also a little bit scary.

I also (and this is much less impressive) finally called the bank. I’ve been trying to work out the details of my current account for a form I have to fill in and ended up horrifically confused, because the bank assigns so many account and customer numbers it’s hard to know which one is the right one, and on top of that, the account number sometimes appears with an additional digit at the start and sometimes not, and on top of THAT, it seems they changed the sort code for my account when Alliance + Leicester became Santander. Add in my pathological dislike of telephones and horror of automated phone systems, and you get some serious procrastination going on. But that’s over: I bit the bullet this afternoon and rang them up, negotiated my way through the mire of stupid options to find a real person who gave me the info I needed. Which is a HUGE relief. Words cannot express. Now I can proceed with the form and some other stuff that goes with it which will actually bring real live money into said current accout. Whee!

And I stewed some apples. With a little dark muscovado sugar, vanilla extract and cinnamon.

Tagged with: completion, composition, cooking, gtd, learning, music | Add a comment

A sense of achievement

I’ve been a little poorly today – not much, just a bit coldy and urk, but enough to make even small achievements feel big. And it’s been a pretty good day. I actually got some stuff done I’ve been putting off for a bit, so that’s got to be good, right?

First up, I finally read Chris Guillebeau’s A Brief Guide to World Domination which has been on my to-read list for some time. It’s pretty good, but I don’t think it’s really told me anything I didn’t already know, being fairly well-read in the matter of world domination (isn’t everyone?). I’d still quite like to read his book, though. I think I’ve got to a point though where I need to stop faffing about and just be brave and DO stuff. If I want to get alternate revenue streams up and running, then I need to write stuff and send it off – finish my book (for small businesses, on how to build a website that actually works rather than one that just looks pretty), submit some articles, see what I can find out about writing music to order. That sort of stuff.

I also rang Thames Valley University. Again. To try to find out some last-minute information about their individual composition tuition which I’m hoping to do this semester. Their form is ambiguous (and so keenly designed that it’s practically illegible – lime green on lighter lime green? Even 20/20 vision doesn’t help with that one, dears!) and their documentation confusing – the individual tuition is listed in a brochure called “Junior College” which is a programme for kids. Because it’s for kids, the composition tutors are all either BMus(Hons) (like me) or MA, unlike the music-school-proper which has fully fledged composers, which is what I need if I’m to learn anything that will be of use to me in applying for an MMus. But the person I need to speak to never answers her phone, and never calls me back, which is a little on the frustrating side. I’d give up if I weren’t so damn keen about doing it. I’ve sent her an email too, so hoping she at least responds to that before the week is out so I still have time to apply if appropriate. AARGH! Think I need to set up a contingency plan in case I get no response at all or find out it’s only the recent grads who are teaching individuals. Not sure what that might be.

And I’ve got a site for the London Composers Forum up and running – it’s for a super-secret project, so I can’t link to it (and no point anyway as it’s all behind a login) but it’s been great to be using Drupal for a proper site so soon after messing with it. And I’m quite pleased with it – it’s doing everything I want it to do and it’s taken minimal effort to get it to do so. Yay me

And last but definitely not least, I tried a new recipe tonight. I had decided to make the Greek salmon kebabs and was facing an inadvertently small quantity of fish and yet more tedious salad, so I perused the interwebs and found this recipe for garlicky bulgur wheat. I just so happened to have bulgur wheat in the cupboard after the Nigel Slater beetroot lamb burger thingies (MOST excellent), so I gave it a go – and, you know what?, it turned out really really nice! I mixed it in with the salad and it went very well indeed. I am looking forward to attacking the remnants with some leftover chicken for lunch tomorrow.

So not really any music (although I did listen to Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and the Maya Beiser album World to Come which never ceases to be amazing) although I’m still mulling over ideas for the short solo violin piece I’m thinking of writing for an upcoming Fifteen Minutes of Fame call for scores. I need to start somewhere with composing for a single string instrument if I’m ever to get this cello tango written, and this seems as good a place as any, but I’m still at a bit of a loss as to how to tackle it. Guess I should do a bunch of listening…

Tagged with: code, composition, cooking, listening, music, reading, self-promotion, thinking, tools, web | Add a comment

A small improvement

OK, so I’m still labouring under a black cloud – it’s been a pretty crappy day – but I’ve managed to pull off some small achievements – went for a walk and managed to get to Boots in time to buy essentials for Edinburgh (most notably mouthwash – the abscess on my tooth is playing up again – really need to go back to the dentist and get myself referred for that root canal she threatened me with last time. Oddly, am resisting this. How strange). I walked back via the station and picked up my tickets for tomorrow and felt a little better for the exercise. I had a brilliant idea for solving the train-snack issue which Tesco had been unable to provide a non-sugar-or-preservatives-overload answer to – and ended up making a pair of little apple crumbles, one for tonight (YUM!) and one for tomorrow. I finished packing the dishwasher and have actually run it twice AND done two loads of laundry. My bag is about half-packed. And I’ve ruled up the remaining pages needed for me to work on the orchestral arrangement on the train tomorrow – straight lines plus moving train is never a happy combination. Something has to give and it’s usually the straight line.

Oh, and I finished reading The Betrayal of Richard III and have greedily started in on The Daughter of Time again. Betrayal was a really excellent book – easy to read, enough detail to give the author’s arguments weight; not so much as to bog one down. I particularly liked that the final, tiny, chapter was devoted to possible answers to the Princes whereabouts if they weren’t actually murdered at all (which, given the lack of evidence for the murder ever having taken place at all, seems likely) – really quite fascinating. I think I’d recommend it to pretty much anyone as a first step to finding out more about the whole issue – short, detailed, easy to read. And this edition is annotated to bring certain facts up to date with current discoveries without interfering with V.B. Lamb’s excellent writing style. I think this book could be very useful in pulling together the synopsis for the opera, but I’m also looking forward to reading a more detailed volume too. Guess I should order that…

Tagged with: baking, composition, cooking, mentalhealth, music, research, walking | Add a comment

The dayjob takes over

I spent pretty much the whole of today messing about with Drupal and pulling together the quote for the website I’m suggesting it for. Learnt quite a lot. Not least that 4 pages is stupidly long for a quote. Fortunately I managed to cull it a bit and get it down to 3 – two pages of itemised options, as the client requested, plus one explaining things like what Drupal is, about standards-compliant code and why I’m qualified to do the job. Plus: I did get to watch another four episodes of Dollhouse while I tinkered. And I made moussaka for dinner. And went for a walk (in the afternoon). No music whatsoever though

Tagged with: cooking, dayjob, learning, research, tools, video, walking, web | Add a comment

Kinda quiet day

Also kinda not. Started out well! I spent the morning intermittently napping and reading The Betrayal of Richard III, then around midday suddenly realised that the house was an absolute pigsty and Djeli was going to return with dear friends for dinner in a few short hours and that if I didn’t want to totally horrify them I was going to have to sort myself out and do a bunch of housework. So I cleaned the whole bathroom, cleared all the mouldering Christmas food out of the fridge that I’d hoped would vanish while I was in Durham but which didn’t, cleared away the junk in the living room, did 3 loads of laundry which I then hid away in the study and vacuumed. Then I went and did the grocery shopping so there’d be something to feed them.

After all that I was ready to collapse, but no, dinner had to be made then. I did, however, succumb to a between-courses nap before returning to the kitchen to make ebelskivers with lemon curd and cream, all of which seemed to go down well.

Tagged with: composition, cooking, friends, incentives, music, reading, relaxing, tidying | Add a comment

Family seat

HAPPY NEW YEAR! I know I’ve been a bit quiet over Christmas – and it’s certainly not that I haven’t been creative! I’ve baked (cakes & biscuits), cooked (smoked salmon ebelskivers!), I’ve knitted (finished my mother’s chenille scarf!), I’ve been to the movies (Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows, Pt 1) and the panto (Peter Pan, with The Hoff as Captain Hook!) and agreed with Djelibeybi on a new layout for the study that hopefully will work for both of us. In fact I was so busy being creative and looking after guests that I didn’t have time to get anywhere near the computer! Now things are calming down a little though, so back to it…

Today I went to Sussex with my parents to visit the village of Warbleton, where my mother’s ancestors came from. We were hoping to find some of them in the churchyard, but unfortunately, being New Year’s Day, the trains were running to a Sunday timetable, somebody somewhere gave us some wrong information and it ended up taking us FOUR AND A HALF HOURS to get there. When I say that it took a mere two and a half to get home again, I think you’ll see what I mean. At any rate, it was a gloomy day to start with and by the time we got there it was 3pm so we repaired to the local pub for a lovely lunch of sandwiches and salad, but by the time we were done the light was mostly gone. And when we realised there were no ancestors to be found my mama suddenly realised that they were chapel people. I think I saw another graveyard with a building that could have been a chapel beside it, but I think we’ll have to go back in the summer to be sure! Lovely village though, and in spite of the travel dramas, a nice way to spend my last day with the parents.

Lovely too, to come home to hot takeaway pizza and Mary Poppins and I made lemon-curd-filled ebelskivers for pudding – most excellent!

Tagged with: cooking, research, travel | Add a comment

Ongoing quintet saga

Still exhausted, but at least today I managed to choof everyone out of the house and get some solid work done. I haven’t finished yet (taking a 1am break as I type this) but the score I think is essentially done in Finale and I’ve adapted the second cello part for the double bass. The parts still need work. Potentially a LOT of work. Which really has to be done tonight. The good news is that in the few days since I finished the piece, I’ve come to really really love it. I think it might be one of my favourites (shh! don’t tell the other pieces!). And now I’m really looking forward to Durham and the chance to see what it sounds like for real. Just hoping that the interlocking rhythms won’t be too hard for the performers – once it’s all sent off I might have a think about possible alternatives if it proves just too difficult.

Oh, and I baked a mushroom pie for dinner, which seemed to go down well with the ravening hordes.

OK. Time to put the nose back to the grindstone. Wishing I’d bought those chocolate teacakes at M&S now…

Tagged with: baking, composition, cooking, music | Add a comment

Snow day!

Still exhausted, and with the heavy snowfall and the arrival of Djelibeybi’s sister to stay for the weekend, most of the day got wasted in frantic house-cleaning, then photographing the snow. I never did quite wake up and though I tried very hard in the afternoon to progress the layout stuff for the quintet, nothing really got done, so in the end I gave up and made a chicken and leek pie instead. I fell asleep in front of the telly in the evening, which is a measure of how exhausted I was – I NEVER do that. I absolutely loathe it. Heigh ho.

And, in the interests of Christmas culinary experimentation, we made our first-ever batch of ebelskivers. Just plain ones, with the vanilla sugar we brought back from Copenhagen several Christmases ago sprinkled over them. They turned out fabulously – I was worried about turning them over, to start with (you need to turn them with 2 skewers which looked harder than it turned out to be) and whether they’d be cooked in the middle. But both worries turned out to be without cause. They went down very well – and very fast, so it now looks like we’ll have a go at making a version with dill in the batter and a smoked salmon and cream cheese filling (out of our ebelskiver cookbook) for Boxing Day breakfast.

Tagged with: composition, cooking, friends, music, organisation, tidying | Add a comment

An end!

OMG! All of a sudden this afternoon the quintet just went there and there and took a little turn there and all of a sudden it just rushed off and finished itself!!! I can’t quite believe we made it, but I let it settle for a little, while I prepared the dry ingredients for the Pudding Mark II, and yes, it’s really found it’s finishing point. I still have a truckload of work to do with tweaks and layout and so on, but at least the music’s found where it’s going so it really is tweaking and adjusting rather than actual pull-notes-out-of-thin-air composition.

And, of course, I made more Christmas puddings – this time a 1-pound and a 2-pound pudding, the 2-pounder in one of the gorgeous traditional enamelled metal pudding basins that my friend sent me for Christmas.

Tagged with: christmas, completion, composition, cooking, music | Add a comment

The magic of beetroot

Totally messed-up day. Didn’t even get to look at the score of the quintet, far less finish it off like I’d hoped to today. Grr. Frustrating! But less of that and more of what I did achieve.

What I achieved was a whole lot of cooking. Thanks to the magic of beetroot and some new recipes, I provided a very pink dinner. First up were Nigel Slater’s lamb and beetroot patties, served up with tzatziki, which were fiddly but delicious. I’d definitely make them again, but probably not as a last-minute dinner. And I also made Nigella Lawson’s beetroot and cranberry cake from Nigella Christmas, which turned out well, and was nice and a bit different, but not hugely memorable, as far as I’m concerned – but that could just be that I’m not wild about any sort of fruit in cake even if it is cranberries. And not being a fan of the carrot cake either, perhaps that’s what did for me. It was a very pretty coloured mixture though! Cooked it wasn’t so pink, but still quite pretty.

Tagged with: baking, cooking | Add a comment