Perhaps that title doesn’t seem so exciting, but when your social circle has reduced to a social line (it was a triangle, but then diminished some more, but I believe the spare point has just returned to the country) then lunch with a (the) friend becomes a very big deal. Especially when it involves lovely lovely intense conversation about things which are important to both of you – the state of the internet, creative projects, juggling work and a real life, that sort of stuff.

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HUGELY productive day. I may have to make a list to save babbling too much:

• Posted the new follow-up blog post I wrote yesterday online and told Twitter about it. I think I’ve decided to try to post once a week to caitlinrowley.com, with an occasional extra post. 2 a week seems like it could get a bit much when I’m working, but 1 should be fine
• Installed Google Analytics on caitlinrowley.com so I can hopefully properly track traffic and get a better idea of what approaches work and where the traffic’s coming from
• Drafted a new blog post for a new series of posts on caitlinrowley.com (part of a plan to have some backup, non-time-specific posts for when things get busy so I can continue the plan I just mentioned to post every week)
• Made Nigel Slater turkey cakes for dinner
• Caught up a bit with the laundry
• Finished reading Art + Money – some good ideas in there. I’m looking forward to listening to the interviews that go with it. Final issues with getting extended content still not sorted, but I’m giving it a few days – plenty to be working on till then
• Did some thinking about the opera and researched books on poetry-writing – it looks like books on lyric-writing are pretty much all geared towards the pop market, which is less useful to me. Might try to get hold of the new Sondheim book and a general book on writing poetry and then see how I go. I also wrote to my Da (who’s a fabulous poet) for suggestions.
• Started the violin piece! This has been kicking about in my head for a considerable period of time now, so I bullied myself into getting something down on paper, and no sooner had I started than it all flowed like water and the whole thing was mapped out in less time than it took Djelibeybi to go to the gym. Next stage is to condense it (I’ve worked it as three separate lines, with a goal of mooshing them together then cleaning up – there’ll probably be a post on this at caitlinrowley.com soonish), make sure the double- and triple-stops are playable and that it all hangs together. Could be finished by early next week though! Woot! (Mustn’t get too cocky)
• Did a little research on Twitter – after reading Art + Money (which is primarily focused on visual art) I thought that the equivalent of an online gallery for composers is audio-sharing sites, so I put the question out to my tribe on Twitter who have basically responded that SoundCloud’s the way to go. It doesn’t have a huge classical community yet, but it sounds like a good place to start, so I’m going to try to work up some of the MIDI performances I have in Pro Tools, make them sound a little more human, and post them up there and see what happens. I have to say: I love my tweeps. They were so helpful with this, and it was lovely to have people saying “add me when you do!” and “make sure you tell us here when you set it up!”. Awesome, awesome people.

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Quietish day at home. Djelibeybi assembled the hutch to go over his desk in the revamped study, so we’ve started painting it now – hopefully we’ll be able to put it in place by the end of tomorrow. We watched the very interesting global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, then followed it up with… (isn’t it obvious?)… Zack and Miri Make A Porno. And I’ve done a bunch more work on the LCF secret site, which is now very nearly ready for launch to members, which may sound low-key but is actually very exciting. There you have it.

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Went out to a small village outside Dundee today for lunch with my friend, her intended and their son at their new, newly renovated home. A lovely afternoon, full of chat and digital artmaking plans – thinking I may come up again in late February for a few day’s solid mobile web app coding with her – should be a blast! Now I’m on the train back to Edinburgh, after a quick panic after seeing huge queues of people waiting for rail buses, but it turned out they were all trying to get to Aberdeen. PHEW! So now I have a good hour and a half (slow Sunday train) on a train, Cheerios for snacks, iPad for Sim City and a good book for when the battery dies. Happy!

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It’s been an arty week! Frantically trying to not miss exhibitions I meant to see ages back. So today Djelibeybi and I went to the Tate Britain to see the Eadweard Muybridge exhibition. Took a bit of an effort to get out of the house but I think it was worth it – the animal-motion stuff was very interesting but it was great too to see the fantastic landscapes he took early in his career at Yosemite and later of San Francisco before the big earthquake. Nice, too, to just spend a quiet day with Djeli – feels like I haven’t been able to do that in quite some time.

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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.

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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.

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Tonight was the Philharmonia Orchestra’s memorial concert for Sir Charles Mackerras. I have to say, I’ve rarely been to such an awesome concert. To start with, it was HUGE. A massive programme – 2 intervals – and everything was just perfect. Add to musical perfection the vast numbers of Mackerras family who turned up – Djelibeybi’s sister worked out that there were representatives from every branch of the family there, which is really saying something, including several who had come over from Australia just for the concert. So lovely to see everyone. And great to see Alex (Briger) conduct in a concert hall again – I’ve only seen him once before (conducting Mahler, and actually making him plausible, which in my book is a vast achievement as usually I’m bored witless 5 minutes in) as mostly we see him conducting opera. And he did a fantastic job of Charlie’s Cunning Little Vixen suite, the final scene of the same opera and then an absolutely sparkling rendition of the overture to Pineapple Poll as an encore. A very fitting memorial. Charlie would have loved it.

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With parents gone to the Isle of Wight and Djeli home with man-flu, I decided to take a mental duvet-day myself. Watched TV (finally saw An American Werewolf in London), tended to Djeli’s needs for lemonade and Lemsip, went to my physio appointment and knitted a bit. The hat’s nearly complete now but, alas, I have run out of yarn with a mere 5 very short rows to go, so it’s on hold now till I can go out and buy a little more.

Oh! And I also made the Buttermilk Oaten Bread out of my new Teatime Baking cookbook. Verdict: Excellent flavour, but oven is totally mad. Before it burnt everything. This time it never even reached the temperature on the dial so the loaves didn’t cook through properly and ended up a little doughy. Flavour really good though, so they’re definitely worth another try.

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Low-achievement day today – I went to the dentist for a check-up and to see what’s going on with this tiny abcess I’ve had on my gum, coming and going in the same spot for about a year and a half. Last time she gave me antibiotics which didn’t really do anything, and this time *sigh* she did a full-mouth x-ray and discovered that a filling my Australian dentist did was drilled too close to the nerve, so it’s irritating the nerve which is causing the abcess. So I need root canal. *waaah!* On the plus side, there’s nothing actually wrong with my teeth, which is kind of comforting. Anyway, the whole experience kind of put me in a little grey hole. So I baked brownies for a lovely friend who my parents are meeting up with while they’re away. Hope they turned out OK. This oven’s really quite insane…

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