Achievement and a New World Order

It’s been a big day today. Today I finally finished a task that’s been on my to-do list for about a decade: I have joined PRS for Music! Well, obviously when it went on my to-do list I was in Australia so the task then was actually “Join APRA” but it’s effectively the same thing. I filled out the form online yesterday and paid the fee over the internet, then this morning I printed it out, signed it and made a copy of my passport and then – yes – I PUT IT IN THE POST. YAY! There aren’t words for the triumph I feel over this. I did actually print out the forms about 5 years ago, but there was some confusion over whether I should join as just me or as my and Djeli’s limited company, and then there was confusion about what the status of the company was re: VAT and I just never got it all sorted out. But it is now. Which means I can start receiving a pittance for every performance! True, they won’t actually pay me till it hits £30, but still – prospect of payment! WOOOT!

The thing that set this amazing productivity off was that yesterday I went to the Barbican to a thingy organised by Sound and Music called “Counting In”. It was a panel session on composer careers and was extremely interesting and inspiring. So not only did I join PRS for Music today, but I have decided that a New World Order is in… order. Again. I know I keep doing this but one day it’s going to stick. One of the things really brought home to me yesterday is that I HAVE to get my health sorted out. Quite possibly this is even more important than actually writing music – I have so many ideas and so many things I want to do, but this permanent state of crippledom, criminally low energy, tendency to catch every bug going and my weight spiralling out of control making everything worse has to stop. It really does. My brain is sluggish and tired ALL the time and I never have enough energy, either physical or mental, to just get on and do the stuff I need to – stuff like laying out scores to send to potential performers, having a go at writing a piece in super-quick time for an imminent deadline, actually getting a blog post written for caitlinrowley.com every week as opposed to every now and then. Not to mention having the energy to travel and do fun stuff with Djelibeybi too.

As always, the heart of this New World Order has to be getting my eating right. If I’m not eating right, I don’t stand a chance, but I can’t go back on the deprivation diet as it was originally – that might have resulted in 14 kilos of weight loss in 6 months and huge energy gains, but it was unsustainable simply because it made me miserable, so I need to devote a little time this week to going through my nutritionist’s initial prescription and working out a more even balance. And I need to finish reading the book on stress eating so I can better understand what I’m doing. As a first step I’m going to try to not eat anything once dinner is done. Water is OK. Even a cup of tea is OK. But no actual food – it shouldn’t be necessary and mostly I eat then just because I’m too tired to do anything useful. So instead I should have some water and just head to bed.

So I’ll start small. And hopefully build on that to make a healthy, unstoppable me. Havi Brooks has a great weekly “Very Personal Ads” ritual on her blog, and I think that’s what this is for me this week:

WANTED: Willpower and strength to follow this through and mend my body so it can support all the things my mind wants to do.

Oh and I’ve finished the dynamics for Carrion Comfort and done a first draft for laying out the score. Can’t believe how much work has gone into this darned piece. So many instruments! So many dynamics! It kind of feels like I’ve overdone the dynamics and it should all be a lot simpler, but I’m not sure. I feel as if all the mezzo-fortes and mezzo-pianos are just imposters and should be deleted, but I’m certain I put them there for a reason – will review again later…

Tagged with: completion, composition, editing, gtd, health, ideas, mentalhealth, music | Add a comment

Plodding

And again, it feels like I don’t have much to report on the creative front. I’ve spent most of the day installing and setting up stuff on my shiny-new-innards laptop. The good news is that the reinstall seems to have made a big difference to the general speed problems – even with all the Logic Studio instruments installed. It’s been really worthwhile. Finale is installed and all updated and is opening the files I reimported, and right now I’m re-downloading the installer for Garritan Personal Orchestra 4, without which I can’t play back my piece without buggering up all the settings by making them MIDI, so I’m trying to be patient but can’t wait to see if the reinstall has actually fixed the stuttering sound problem. Wish I’d realised I didn’t have the original GPO installer before dinnertime when our connection always goes slow though…

I’m still hoping I may get to a note or two tonight, but not really holding my breath.

I have, however, been doing a lot of thinking about the massive stress that’s been holding me back and messing up my head so badly over the past few weeks. Thinking of how to deal with it in general, and what I need to do or cancel doing in particular. I think I’ve decided to just put Australia plans on hold for the rest of the year – this has been about the 4th attempt I’ve made to get to Australia and every single time something has gone horribly wrong. This time my teeth are acting up again and I’m very worried the root canal work I had done in March (the slow recovery of which and attendant back pain cancelled the first and second planned Australia trip) may need to be re-excavated. Dentist’s appointment when I get back from Spain. So I’m thinking it will be better for my peace of mind if I just cancel the whole Aus 2011 idea, focus on getting better, both physically and mentally, over the next few months, maybe spend a little money on making my working and living spaces happier and more serene – buy & frame some pictures for the walls, get that Le Creuset frying pan I’ve been wanting for so long to help me cut down the amount of fat I need to cook with, maybe invest in a proper desk rather than what I have right now (a double-gateleg dining table, which is a bit awkward because of the legs getting in the way) – that sort of thing. I had a look at the idea of renting a small office or studio space for a few months this morning, but I think that won’t really work because unless I moved the piano and all my books & stereo into it, it wouldn’t really be productive, and moving that amount of stuff for the short term just isn’t really worthwhile. Heigh ho.

So plodding along. Making progress with getting the technology set up to do the work, but notes are in short supply right now.

Update: GPO is installed! And the file is making the right sounds now, and in spite of having been running hot most of the afternoon installing stuff… NO STUTTERING!

Tagged with: gtd, mentalhealth, organisation, thinking | Add a comment

Aargh

I have spent the entire day attempting to reinstall my computer. What a nightmare. Getting Tiger onto it went fine, then when it became apparent that I couldn’t just skip straight to Snow Leopard, I left the Leopard upgrade running while I went out to walk from Leicester Square to St Paul’s by way of Buckingham Palace and Southbank with Djelibeybi and a visiting friend. Came back and all seemed to have gone well except that it wanted me to register again but then that failed midstream because it lost the network, so I had to crash out of it. It restarted OK and everything seemed hunky-dory and I couldn’t find how to get back into the registration thing, so I went ahead with Snow Leopard – which then failed and then would let me either reinstall Leopard or run the version that was installed. Ended up having to dig out my old Tiger bootable disk and boot from that in order for the DVD drive to be recognised so I could reinstall Leopard (which then didn’t show me the registration screen at all) which allowed me to have a more successful stab at installing Snow Leopard.

But I did get there in the end and the machine seems very much the healthier for it. I downloaded and installed a truckload of stuff that needed to go on, and installed (finally!) the whole of Logic Studio – can’t wait to play around with all of those instruments!

Tagged with: gtd, organisation, tools | Add a comment

Preview day!

Today I have sent the site preview to my client, negotiated a little, created my first 2 training videos and posted them to YouTube (think I’ll probably have to remake them due to screen furriness and general burbling – this video-making thing is hard! – it’s a usable start for this client at any rate, who doesn’t have time for me to train her one-to-one), did some fluting for only the second time since the root canal and took delivery of my very own copy of Structural Functions in Music (very excited about this). I am now repairing my disk permissions and – after a restart because Finale is choking on the sheer number of instruments in Carrion Comfort – am about to do some composition work for my lesson tomorrow.

Achievements? Tick

And just because it totally made my day, here’s my friend Omar from the Durham Midwinter Composers Masterclass proposing to his girl.

Tagged with: completion, composition, dayjob, gtd, learning, music, programming, recording, teaching, tools, video, web | Add a comment

Recovery achievements

Still recovering from the dental work and lower back pain. Honestly, I feel like an old woman! Must sort myself out before I crack up entirely. But it was a good day nevertheless. Small achievements.

• Had a letter from ING Direct offering me a fancy rate on a cash ISA for next year if I pre-ordered. And for once I actually just filled out the form and sent it straight away. So that’s good. Don’t need to think about savings for another year (apart from actually putting money in the thing).
• The bonus from my last employer for referring a new staff member to them came through. This is very exciting. £1000! Half of it is going to a friend because the girl I recommended is a friend of my friend. I’ve actually never met her, so it seemed only fair to share the loot. His half is going on a tax bill. My half is going on dentistry. Woah. Stop this crazy fun-filled ride?
• Wrote a blog post! For the first time in a couple of weeks my head was actually clear enough to think about and then write stuff. I think it might be mildly interesting to some folk. Maybe. Hope so. The hardest part about blogging is actually thinking up stuff that others might find interesting to read, but I guess that’s all part of finding your “Right People” – if it’s something you find interesting, then hopefully someone out there will find it interesting too. Time will tell. Traffic on caitlinrowley.com had a mysterious spike last Tuesday. No reason for it. I haven’t created much new content – posted a couple of files to SoundCloud (the Three Whitman Songs, if you missed it ), but that doesn’t usually generate backlink traffic because most people just play them and don’t read the blurb or go hunting for more info. And the promotion I did for those was directly to SoundCloud so no clue what’s happening there.
• And we watched A Single Man, which was amazing. Colin Firth is just incredible. So glad Djeli picked it. And he made me soup because I still can’t eat anything much that’s not squishy. What a darling. (Djelibeybi, not Colin Firth.)

Tagged with: blogging, film, gtd, writing | Add a comment

Hibernation

Feeling – if possible – even worse today than yesterday, so I’ve spent a lot of time in snooze-mode, which seems to be helping. Glad I started the antibiotics now. Not helped though by intense lower-back pain which I think has been caused by the landlord’s crapulous couch. Ow.

Day 2 of the JavaScript course today. Lots of reading. LOTS of reading. But it was really quite well done – digestible chunks. And I think I’m finally starting to see where Objects fit in. I understand why they’re a good thing, but I’ve never really got how they connect with other elements of the language and I think that’s starting to become clearer. Anyway, I guess I’ll find out when I start using them.

Amazon delivery arrived today: The ABRSM Grade 5 theory books, which I need for my teaching. Plus a book called Made to Stick, which sounds like it might be good for the eBook writing that I’ll get around to sometime.. very… soon.

Ploughing through my to-do list now, in spite of fuzzy, limited-capability brain. The new GTD system I’ve implemented seems to be working well. YAY. Next I have to find some time to revamp my paper files and do a TON of scanning. That will be less fun. Maybe in front of the TV sometime.

Tagged with: code, gtd, learning, programming, reading, shopping, study, teaching, tools, web | Add a comment

Composition lesson no. 2!

It feels somewhat miraculous to have achieved a second composition lesson, given the stops and starts there’ve been. But yes, it happened this evening. And it was good. Simon brought along the scores of Paganini’s Caprices and Bach’s Partita and we looked at violin writing and what else might be done with the (ostensibly completed) Diabolus. Still some good ideas coming through – some of which I think I might touch on in the blog post when I (hopefully) get around to writing it on Sunday. In particular I liked his idea of making a bunch of versions and sending a different one to various violinists I might know, asking them each to make a recording, then listening to them all and seeing what works. Might actually follow through on this – might be a really good way to see how various things sound rather than just guessing what sounds right. Guess I’ll need to make a list of violinists now…

The rest of the day was pretty tame, but quite nice. A troubled night due to the troublesome dentals (6 days to root canal) and woke up with a crashing headache – haven’t had one of those in months, so I didn’t push myself too much but mostly tinkered around with fixing up my GTD implementation – my to-do lists in Remember the Milk had become insanely unweildy and totally unusable, so I deleted everything except my Tickler list and am starting again with a new approach. Ended up shunting about 15 projects into Someday/Maybe which had crept into Current, but just weren’t being dealt with and weren’t about to be. Someday/Maybe now lives in Evernote, which I think will help keep RTM much cleaner and entirely about the “what am I doing now” rather than the “hmm, what to play with next?”. I also went to Ryman’s and bought a stack of manila folders because my filing system’s no longer a system and needs help. Feels really, REALLY good to be getting organised again and feeling more confident that I know what needs to be done and what should be done nowish.

Tagged with: composition, conversation, gtd, ideas, music, organisation, thinking, tidying, tools | Add a comment

Completion and small fame

Yes! It’s finished! Diabolus is all done and sent off to Conway Kuo. Hope he likes it. I like it. I guess that’s the first step

And I have a student card! And library access! And BOOKS and SCORES! WOOT!

I also have peach nectar, which should make anyone happy.

And Nonclassical tweeted a link to this blog for my post about Tansy’s CD launch, which was a trifle surreal, considering pretty much nobody reads this. Seems it came up on a Google search. Guess I’m doing something right then…

Tagged with: composition, gtd, library, music, self-promotion, tools, web | Add a comment

Backup extravaganza

So, after the disaster the other week with my last scores backup (still waiting to get the final files list from the restoration guys for the second disk so I can give the go-ahead for the retrieval of both disks but the file list from the scores disk looks pretty healthy), I’ve decided to just throw myself at this backup concept and get things working properly for once in my life. It was on last year’s new year’s creative goals list so I guess this year isn’t too far off the mark to be actually sorting it out.

But it wasn’t really straightforward. First I wanted to make sure the laptop was as clean as could be, so ran Verify Disk (no problems) and the Repair Permissions (a bit messy). Plugged in the new drive, which was happily recognised straight away, set it to be the backup drive and set the first run going. 2 hours later it had obviously got stuck at 5GB. So I tried again… same thing. Ran Verify Disk on the new disk to discover it had a minor header error, so I ran Repair Disk, then erased the whole thing, reformatted, partitioned the new drive (because a 250GB hard disk definitely doesn’t need 2TB of backup space, I think)… whereupon the computer promptly crashed. Rebooted, reverified all disks, repaired permissions everywhere and finally got the backup running and working. PHEW! Who’d have guessed it would be so complicated?

Feeling a lot happier now it’s in place though. Once I get the other drive back though, I’ll probably completely reformat this new drive and the 1GB and the old one too and work out a new arrangement, but for now at least stuff’s being backed up against the increasingly frequent problems I’ve been having with this laptop. Glad a new computer’s only a couple of months away…

And I baked a cake.

Tagged with: baking, gtd, incentives, organisation, tools | Add a comment

Hiding in a cave

I think everyone has days where they just want to hide in a cave from all the world. Some of us more than others. Today was just such a day. Last night the horrible nightmares returned. While this in itself isn’t a good thing, it’s a sign that my creative brain is up and running, which is a good thing and better than it being in a slump. But the nightmares totally wreck me for anything creative the next day, which of course is not a good thing, and as the only way to make the nightmares go away is to be creative and work through stuff, I think you begin to see my dilemma. Anyway, today was worse than usual and resulted in a more-than-usually strong cave-dwelling desire, but my to-do list wagged its finger and said ‘no cave for you’ so I had to find something to do that I could face…

Finances! This may seem a strange thing to do in the face of cave-dwelling, but in fact it makes perfect sense – my brain didn’t want to think about new stuff, didn’t want to be strained in any way, and finances is primarily putting numbers in boxes, so it fitted really well. And when I discovered that I hadn’t caught up on them since October, I was very glad I had. Things are clearer now. And I moved some money about so it will make me more interest, which has to be a good thing, eh?

I also faced down one of the to-dos on my list that I’ve been dodging since… erm… September, which was to wrap up a friend’s birthday and Christmas presents ready to send them to Australia. I have drawn her a Mr Pickleberry in compensation for their excessive lateness, so I hope she forgives me.

Tagged with: drawing, gtd, mentalhealth | Add a comment