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…

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2012: the year of attainable goals?

Well, that’s what I’m hoping. I’m quite pleased with this year’s list. I think that pretty much everything on it actually is attainable over the course of the year, unlike last year’s which was much too ambitious. A lot of what’s on it is stuff that is already in progress, about to be in progress or has a firmish deadline at least, so much of it doesn’t have to be started from scratch but is more about tying up loose ends left over from 2011.

September looms large this year – I am determined to be healthier and more organised before I start my Masters to give me the best possible chance to do well at it – this involves getting a healthy balance between freelance work, composition and rest time really working so I can clear old projects, bring in some money but keep my mental & physical health intact. I am most emphatically planning to not injure myself in any way more serious than perhaps a papercut.

2012 is, most significantly, all about new beginnings and new directions. There’s a lot of change going to be happening – going back to uni, (hopefully) buying our first house & moving out of London, developing my freelance business to be (again, hopefully) able to at least cover my basic expenses.

So without further ado, here is The 2012 List.

Music

• 3 performances in 2012 – one more than I set myself for 2011, getting ambitious here
• Complete all piece requests from 2011 before start of uni term in September – alto flute piece for Carla Rees (due spring), flute piece for Nicole Camacho, recorder quartet for Pink Noise, Pieces of Eight arrangement for Shana Norton
• New score downloads implemented for caitlinrowley.com
• Blog at least once a month on caitlinrowley.com January – check, February – check
• Work out how, and apply for funding with Pink Noise to (hopefully) achieve first paid commission.
• Keep up flute practice
• Start a Masters degree!
• Finish Carrion Comfort for LCCO deadline YESSSSSSS!
• Write at least 1 piece for a call for scores & send it in
• Take 2 pieces along to LCF WiP/WiT sessions for feedback
• Schedule in (and DO) one listening session a week. Take notes to make sure I’m getting the most out of it
• Get back to counterpoint/harmony study – schedule as part of weekly plan. NEED to make some progress on this before September.
• Put at least 2 pieces up on SoundCloud in MIDI versions
• Finish laying out 2×4 & send to Christopher D. Lewis

Home & Travel

• Move out of London
• Set up my own study before the summer
• Try at least 5 recipes from “I Know How to Cook”: 6-Jan-2012: Coq au vin. Have also done the Venison-roast lamb but I can’t remember the date.
• Try at least 3 recipes from new French baking cookbook: 6-Jan-2012: Galette des rois, incl. crème frangipane; 8-Jan-2012: Princesses (chocolate meringues) – not actually a success, but definitely tried. Will try again. 15-Jan-2012: Chaussons au pommes – YUM!
• Travel: EuroDisney, Spain, Australia, weekend trip somewhere?
• Work on creating a good, reliable multigrain loaf, in case of (suspected) bakery dearth in Gravesend: 13-Jan-2012: An excellent start – not fully multigrain because I was just using up leftover flour, but it worked really well. 19-Jan-2012: Tried the same recipe, this time with all wholemeal flour. Worked very well, in spite of forgetting about it a couple of times, leading to overly long rising times. Feeling quite confident about getting this recipe working well.

Health

• Limit sugar & dairy intake.
• Keep up with vitamin supplements to help keep food & energy on track.
• Get back to the morning squirrel-walks once calf is better
• Semi-regular massages to keep stress and tension headaches under control – no more waiting till the pain’s so bad I can’t function
• Work my way up to being able to do a 4-mile walk without pain
• Develop regular schedule so can have relaxation time in the evenings and proper weekends and reduce stress of neglecting one or the other. Key components: Freelance work, composing, listening, training, writing
• Weight: *sigh* Shall we say 76kg by the start of the uni term? Surely that’s doable? *gives self a stern look and a threat to not injure any more parts*

Business

• Schedule training to keep my skills current & keep me employable by others – do some every week. Key areas: JavaScript, design, marketing
• Design business cards & get them made 8-Jan-2012: Order sent! And I just scraped in to get a 15% discount from MOO too!
• Write beginner social media guide to sell on raspberryblue.com
• Start blogging on Raspberry Blue (not going to make this any set schedule – minimum 3 posts in the year though)
• Schedule talk at LCF Open House on some webby topic – social media as a tool for composition perhaps? Or maybe something on how to use the web to promote your composition?

Other stuff

• New laptop. This year for sure. D to get old one.
• Knit something that isn’t a scarf Send both parents’ birthday and Christmas presents ON TIME
• Call parents once a month: January – done.

Tagged with: baking, completion, composition, cooking, creativity, dayjob, health, learning, massage, mentalhealth, music, organisation, relaxing, self-promotion, study, tools, travel, walking, web, writing | 3 comments

Daylight

Today was the first day in weeks and weeks that I haven’t felt like I’ve been stuck at the bottom of a dark, dank well. The sun came out, after an horrendous day with the back yesterday today revealed a marked improvement, and I just felt more alert and healthier than I have in ages. Not sure if that’s a factor of the improved back, the sunshine, the fact that yesterday I embarked upon a new plan to delete cow-products from my diet, or just that I slept better than I have in ages (which could have been some of these combined), but it felt like at last I could see a little bit of daylight. It didn’t last the whole day and I felt entirely unequal to doing anything useful at all, but it’s a start.

Had another osteopath appointment this afternoon. I’m taking it as a good sign that I left his office in more pain than I went in. And that after a relatively mild (but still agonising) session. I’m hopeful that next week’s might be the last. Not sure whether it’ll be soon enough though to give me the all-clear to travel to Australia for my mother’s eye operation on 31 May, but we’ll see.

Nothing musical at all happened today. But I am about to listen to some Satie to redress the balance. Otherwise, did some knitting, listened to a webcast recording on content marketing, read some of Unstuck which continues interesting, although this chapter (on finding guides) I’m finding not quite so interesting as the previous chapter on nutrition and intolerances. I also read a bit more of Made to Stick which is also excellent. I’ve slowed down with this one recently, but very much still enjoying it and feel (or at least hope!) that my writing may be the better for reading it. At any rate, it makes me more aware of what’s going on in other people’s writing which is very interesting indeed!

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Yes, really

Well, I thought I was coming out of the cloud last time, but well, not so much. For a while there was getting a bit more done – and especially getting a bunch of listening done, but as time went on and the teeth were still problematic and the back seemed to actually get a bit worse, the cumulus descended and I got a bit lost. Feeling like I’m on the up just a little now though (or should that be down – the cloud goes up. Hum. Think my metaphor’s a bit mixed here!) and starting to be able to think properly. Last week my dentist put in the proper filling and said that the mini-crown is optional because the tooth still has its structural integrity (thank you, o marvellous Italian-South African root canal specialist!) and that if I want it we’ll look at doing it in 6 months. I think I probably will do it – it will provide more solidity and protection – but we’ll do the x-rays then to see if the root canal’s worked to clear the infection fully and then see what else should be done. And then about 2 days after that, the back started improving again. Can you say “psychosymptomatic”? My bite’s still a bit out, and bending down’s still pretty painful, but it feels good to at least have the start of some closure on the whole hideous episode.

So I’ve not been doing much lately. I have started a new knitting project to teach myself short-row bust darts, which is coming along well – the first actual garment (as opposed to accessories) I’ve knitted since I was about 13! Feels like a big step. I’m pleased with it so far but trying to maintain an experimental approach and accept that things may go wrong (I may have picked the wrong size – it’s hard to tell when you’re as big in front as I am what size you should be making to fit across the bust as well as on the shoulders – or the short-rows may go horribly wrong) and the whole thing may need to be unravelled, but for now it’s a nice gentle knit which is coming along well and is helping to restore some calm to my frazzled brain.

I’ve also been studying for the Life in the UK test which we’re taking next Friday. Gosh it’s dull. And I am absolutely no good at remembering either statistics or random dates or numbers (and why does it even matter that I should know how many constituencies there are??). Anyway, just going to revise and cram and do practice tests now ad nauseum for the next week.

Today I made crumpets.

And the great news is that this time they’ve actually come out properly crumpetty. Unlike the last two times when they lacked holes and ended up heavy and a bit blech. These are light and tasty. And the butter pools correctly. They have the Djelibeybi seal of approval. I also made them in the shape of space shuttles and Gromit.

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Coming out of the cloud

I feel like I’m coming out of a cloud a bit. Back’s still messed up and with the osteopath having told me I can’t go to Scotland for Easter, sounds like it’s still got a little way to go. But I’m gradually starting to get things done again and that feels pretty good. I’ve been getting a lot of listening done. Today a friend on Twitter recommended a couple of albums that were a little outside my usual comfort zone – Mono/Poly ‘Manifestations’ and Grouper’s ‘A I A’ – both of which I very much enjoyed.

I also tweaked and posted a blog post on caitlinrowley.com, The wrong teacher, or just the wrong time?. I’m glad I wrote this post. Not only does it seem to be getting a rapid and enthusiastic response, but I think it’s been important for me to realise just how far I’ve come since my first year studying composition, and to acknowledge that I was at fault at least in some measure. I doubt I could have known that back then – I was timid and ignorant and there was no internet to ask questions of even if I’d thought to do so – but I think it’s good to reconsider the situation and what I could have done to improve it. And maybe it’ll be helpful for other new students who feel they’re not doing so well as they hoped they would.

And finally I finished the iPad case! OK, not 100% – I still need to make a loop to hold the stylus securely, but the case itself is finished and ready to travel. YAY! SO glad to be done with the handsewing. Never again…

This isn’t the finished case (still need to take proper photos of it) but it shows pretty much how it’s ended up. I’m rather pleased with it

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Erratic

So I know I need to pull myself together, but somehow it’s not happening. And I suspect things will stay kind of erratic for the next few weeks still – back pain + intense dentistry does not for regular happy blogging make. But rest assured I’m still doing stuff. Just being kind to myself and taking a break. The past week’s activities have included a bunch of listening (including Bax’s Symphony No. 3 and the BBC’s Hear and Now broadcast of the Unsuk Chin Total Immersion concert), knitting and sewing (I’m making a case for the new iPad and then diverged and made a cowl out of the leftover yarn) and yesterday I went to the Trinity Laban Open Day to find out about Masters degrees, which was inspiring and frustrating probably in equal measure (as well as painful – I don’t recommend trekking across London with a messed-up lower back. And probably especially not if you’re still bruised from seeing the osteopath the night before).

Anyway, I’ll be back soon. And then the whole adventure will start all over again

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Refreshing

Crappy-feeling day today which culminated in me deciding to finally take the antibiotics the dentist prescribed for me, just in case. And then realising just afterwards that the timing means that I’ll still be on them when I go to the dentist. Hoping they won’t interfere with the anaesthetic. I can’t imagine they would, but that would just suck.

Yesterday’s browser conference really made me feel how old-fashioned my skills are. Oh I’m grand at the HTML and CSS, but over the course of my last contract I was beginning to feel increasingly like a bit of a dinosaur because my JavaScript skills are such a mess. Basically, I learnt JS way back in 2000, but it’s a completely different beastie and with DOM scripting cobbled on top of my stone-age knowledge, and trying to mash in the whole object-oriented concept, it just hasn’t been working. Couple in the fact that I’ve not had much chance to use my JS in a considerable period of time and what you get is a horrible monster that looks nothing much like JavaScript at all. And there’s soooo much cool stuff you can do with it now! Especially in the realm of mobile apps and creating extensions for browsers and it’s starting to feel like if I don’t do something soon, I’ll be totally left behind and semi-unemployable. I’ll never be a JS ninja, I’m sure, but I can at least take a stab at getting my skills to a level where I can write stuff that ninjas can then optimise without sniggering.

Fortuitously, SitePoint is having a sale. So I’ve signed up for their offer, which is a 3-week online JavaScript course, plus a 3-week online course in PHP/SQL plus 3 books on website hosting in the cloud, PHP/MySQL and SQL, which can’t go astray. And considering the cost of the whole bundle is less than just getting the two courses, I’m pretty happy with that.

So I did lesson one of the JavaScript course today (leaving the PHP for a little – I’ll either do it when I’ve finished the JS, or at least when I’m a little further along so I’m not doing two rounds of beginner stuff at once, even though I’m not an absolute beginner in either) and it’s looking pretty good: HTML5 for the HTML parts and in the course of creating a simple “Hello World!” alert, the tutor managed to slide in a nice point about the difference it can make between putting your script in the head of the document and at the bottom of the body. Smooth

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Another poorly day

Feeling quite a bit better than yesterday, but still a little woozy and wobbly, which has meant that I’ve not got to the Composer Workshop at TVU. Which is annoying. Because term’s been running for a month now – I only found out where and when last week, when I couldn’t go because I had to be in town at the time it ended, and now this week the world’s been too spinny for me to tackle it. Not to mention that I STILL haven’t got my student card. First real composition lesson is tomorrow though, so really looking forward to that and really hoping that I’ll be able to get some momentum going again very soon.

So today’s been another stay-at-home day. More productive than yesterday though, although not in directly creative ways, but it’s been good. I discovered how to get Google Analytics to ignore my own visits to my sites without needing to keep track of my IP address (I’m beginning to suspect, because we have 2 networks sort of chained together that my IP address may change depending on which end of the house I’m at, so that wasn’t working very well). And I downloaded and installed GIMP, which has done a far, far better job of my caitlinrowley.com favicon that the conglomeration of tools I used before. The conglomeration resulted in a 25Kb file – GIMP has given me one which looks better but only weighs something like 800bytes. Add that to the optimising and compressing work I did yesterday, and my whole homepage now weighs in at just over 40K, as it should do. Still got a bit more work to do, but overall I’m pretty pleased with the speed of it now, and really quite ecstatic at getting it to compress anything at all – something I couldn’t manage to get working at all while I was doing the W3C mobile web best practice course.

I’ve been thinking about my homepage too and thinking I need to make some changes to that – the work I did last week which saw it jump to second position for a search on my name (where it should be), has apparently been negated with the complete change in homepage content which occurs every week when I update the blog. So I’m thinking that instead I may need to drop in a brief para about me at the top of the page and just include a teaser paragraph for the article. Might also give a truer view of who’s reading what on the site if they need to click through to read the whole thing.

Music stuff? Not so much. Diabolus (the violin piece) is still near completion but I haven’t done anything on it in a couple of days. I was hoping to go inspiration-hunting at the Tate Modern after Wednesday’s lesson, but as I had to cancel the lesson, that didn’t happen, so I’m still no closer to knowing what I want to work on next.

But the continuing rest and recuperation with tiny bits of interspersed laundry and tidying are, I think, doing me good. Time for another episode of Buffy…

Tagged with: blogging, experimenting, health, learning, music, research, self-promotion, thinking, tools, web | Add a comment

Meh x 2

This week has been getting progressively worse and worse. Today I struggled in the morning, went out for a meeting which my meetee had forgotten all about, so I bought myself a muffin and came home. I did get to the post office in the afternoon to post a friend’s birthday & Christmas presents which I should have sent back in September. I think that’s a win even while being a massive fail. And then I came back, found something on the internet which made me massively angry and wrote a huge ranty blog post about it (not posted, unlikely to be, on reflection) which then made me late for the evening appointment for which TFL made me even later and the bus driver not knowing if he went anywhere near Putney Railway Station made me even later than that. Dinner was nice. Nice friends, nice food. Overly long walk at speed to pub not so nice resulting in achey unhappy ankle and achey unhappy insides. Gig was not to my taste and resulted in extreme boredom (but thought up some ways to improve the beginning of the violin piece).

But, like I say, I got to the post office.

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Push that dynamic, prod that bar number

Today has been a day of pushing and prodding bits and pieces, slowly coercing the quintet’s parts to be respectable and intelligible. Some of it has been successful; some less so (most notably the issue of key signature – I habitually write without key signatures, using a mixture of sharps and flats as required, but this piece is particularly tricky to work out what key signature it should use because it’s continually contradicting itself), but progress has been made and I do believe that at this stage (2.30am) the score is essentially done and the parts are well on their way.

I also went and saw the dental hygienist (what an exciting life I lead) and was told that I have neither plaque nor calculus so yay for the new electric toothbrush. I got snowed on twice. Djeli’s Christmas present turned up, turned out to be larger than expected and has necessitated the participation of parents to hide it until I can get enough wrapping paper to cover the box. And I accompanied my mama to a lovely concert at Wigmore Hall of Debussy, Bax, Vaughan Williams, Puccini and Piazzolla chamber works – really gorgeous, just a shame my brain was whirring away desperately trying to work out the key signature issue so I didn’t really take in as much as I might have, but it made for a nice interlude in what otherwise would have been a dull and stressful evening.

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