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…

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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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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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Still no better – probably overdid it over the weekend and woke up feeling absolutely ghastly. I was home alone, so ended up spending the afternoon on the couch, alternating between watching episodes of Nigel Slater’s Simple Suppers and working on the quintet.

The quintet’s in a frustrating place at the moment. I think I’ve solved a few problems today – pulled the end off and added a new chunk in before it. Had a significant amount of trouble reattaching the end, but I think it works. I’m not sure I’ll be able to go back to the opening material though – not literally at any rate – the slower tempo of the opening just doesn’t really work, I think, coming back at the end but I’ll review it tomorrow. At any rate, it feels very much like it’s wanting to move to the end now – which is a HUGE relief. It spent so long being stalled it’s just wonderful to know that it’s found where it wants to go. I think the new section I added today has helped a lot, so YAY!

I also inadvertently ended up cooking dinner tonight. Parents brought home chicken but then couldn’t decide what to do with it so I took over, and it turned out rather well: I boiled a bunch of Brussels sprouts, till they were only barely done, cut the chicken into small pieces and tossed it in plain flour seasoned with paprika, salt, pepper and a smidgen of saffron, then fried it off in olive oil and a little butter with some little bits of bacon. Once the chicken was cooked, I dropped in the double cream left over from the other night’s trifle, then the sprouts to warm them through, then folded through the cooked pasta. I think everyone went back for seconds, so I think I’d consider doing it again. The sprouts made a nice change

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Well, I don’t know what else it can possibly be. I’ve been SO productive since yesterday’s relaxation session with my physiotherapist. In spite of nasty cold, sore throat, no voice, generally feeling crappy and done in, and in spite of computer being tediously slow, I’ve just been powering through my to-do list and generally Getting Things Done.

• Quintet is now at 2’30″ or thereabouts and has decided to “head for home”, which means working out how to reuse the slow intro and other opening material and is basically (or should be) an easy run down to the end now. Obviously there’s a lot of tweaking still to be done, niceties of notation to sort out and so on, but it’s looking like it’ll be at least 3’30″ when it’s done, and possibly the 4′ I wanted it to be (it has to be under 5′ – the trick is to keep it shortish so as to maximise rehearsal time, but have it long enough to do something interesting).
• Wrote a blog post which will appear on caitlinrowley.com later this week. It’s the first time I’ve tried scheduling future publishing, but it’s something I want to get into the habit of – if I’m to have regular visitors on my site, then I need to be posting (interesting) content regularly. Not sure I’ve quite got the “interesting” down, but I think my online writing is quietly improving.
• Started the rather tedious layout process for a set of songs I wrote about 14 years ago, Remembrances of Half-Forgotten Dead People. They were laid out when I first wrote them, but a. the originals weren’t PDFed and have been lost apart from one hard copy in Australia which my mother scanned for me and b. the layout is seriously dated. very word-processory because that was all I had at the time. So it needs to be updated a bit, notes revised and so on so I can print, bind and send it off to the singer who’s considering performing them in March.
• Set up a new notebook on Evernote to hold bits and pieces for a CD of my piano music which I’m hoping to get off the ground with a friend of mine in Australia. The first step is to get him scores, so I’ve been trawling round to (again) see what’s in a fit state to be played. Finished tweaking Egg the Tenth for this, so I guess that’s ready to go onto caitlinrowley.com too. There’s still quite a bit of work to be done to some of them – lacking dynamics and so on – but it’s not a mammoth task. I just need to keep plugging away at it.
• Cleaned about 700 emails out of my inbox. Because they were depressing me and making me worried. There’s still too much stuff in there – mostly notes I sent myself on my last day of work, which is a bit horrible – but 200-odd is MUCH better than 900-odd.
• Caught up a tiny bit with some of the reading and thinking for the Creative Pathfinder course I signed up for. It’s pretty good content – but there’s just so much of it!!! I’m working through Week 3 at the moment… but my inbox is up to Week 14…

It’s just as well the quintet’s making nice progress again, though – had an email today from the Masterclass organisers with the schedule for the course and notes about what to bring: so far it’s looking like I either need to change the way I write in a hurry or invest in a tiny printer to take with me – no printers available. Otherwise I can see myself spending evenings when I should be at t’ pub frantically copying out parts by hand for the composer’s ensemble – seems we have to write a piece for the ensemble during the few days we have there. Oh, and there aren’t many pianos, so we’re encouraged to bring a little keyboard if we need one. iPad Pianist Pro app FTW! Might try to devote some time to ideas-generation before I go to see if I can get a head-start on what to write for the ensemble… Because I don’t have enough to do!

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Rather poorly today. Seems that Djelibeybi has given me his germ and so yesterday and today I’ve been doing battle with inflamed sinuses, earache and general urkness.

So I slept most of this morning and had some very bizarre dreams – very sci-fi/fantasy really. Dramatic but not nasty. This afternoon I was booked in to go to a session with my physio on relaxation – I’m a very stressy person and she thought it might help. And it seemed a useful session. I certainly relaxed *during* the session and will give it a go again over the next few days too, so I hope that’s a good start.

Afterwards I found my mother drifting about the Pitshanger Lane shops, so I treated us to treats from the bakery (I had a raspberry muffin, she had an apricot tart thingy) and we finally found reasonably priced Pedro Ximenes sherry at the cheese and wine shop. Whereupon my brain froze up and I got millilitres mixed with centilitres and brought home 2 bottles when I only needed 175ml it turned out. Um. Not very bright sometimes. But at least the Christmas pudding is finally under way (I have to nip out and buy currants tomorrow morning) with the sultanas (blech!) and prunes busily soaking up sherry.

Haven’t really felt up to doing anything on the quintet today – too achey and miserable. Hoping tomorrow will be better.

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I’ve been in a pretty bad head-place since getting back from Portugal. Not entirely sure if it’s a case of the post-holiday glums or just the dismal snow-ridden weather and being cooped up after all the exercise, fresh air and intermittent sunshine of Lisbon. Possibly I need to tidy up and do some house-brightening. Maybe invest in some daylight bulbs to dispel a little of the gloom occasioned by the appalling lighting setup in this flat. What I wouldn’t give to be able to repaint and move all the lights into the middle of the room and get rid of the landlord’s heavy, big, dark furniture. Feeling a desperate need for COLOUR.

At any rate, today was a bit of a struggle. I had a physio appointment in the morning. She has given me a red theraband which which to work on my resistance exercises, which hopefully will make actually doing them a little easier. The pavements out there are pretty treacherous though – ice all over the place once you’re off the main roads – so after that I just went to the local shops to get some stuff for dinner, and also took advantage of the chance to pick up BBC Music Magazine and Classic FM magazine for their Christmas music cover CDs – both very good this year, although I think (as often happens) the BBC one is the more interesting, so if you’re contemplating them, that’s my recommendation Also treated myself to the Christmas issue of Jamie magazine, which has some yummy-sounding ideas in it.

This afternoon has been primarily spent battling the glums and not really prevailing. We pulled out the Christmas decorations and dressed the (tiny) tree, which was nice, but I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to fill the wide windowsills and our empty walls. Might need to sort out some of our posters which are languishing about the place and get them framed quickly. Our last house was tiny, so the only decoration needed to make the whole place seem Christmassy was the tree, a few wooden stockings along the mantlepiece and my marvellous Nisse in the bookcase.

But now, alas, we have huge spaces to fill, and even the addition of the new crazy robin isn’t enough to fill the void. Or perhaps to overcome the clutter that we haven’t yet found anywhere to store. Maybe bright coloured boxes for the clutter might help???

But I did finally do something constructive:

1. I made raspberry muffins

2. I worked a tiny bit on the quintet until Finale crashed (after a save, thank heavens). I am delighted to be able to report that I’m still working on the additions I made just before we left for Portugal. I haven’t (yet) had to delete all that like I was doing on daily basis before. I think this is progress.

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Didn’t do terribly much today – a little fluting here (Bach and Telemann), a little library trip there, a bit of a wander round in the fog with my mama, an agonising trip to the physio. Quiet, but I think that’s what’s needed today. After the composer forum, my brain seems to be teetering on the brink of an idea for the quintet and I didn’t want to rush it and spoil everything, so it’s had a bit of a mental health day. Tomorrow I’ll get back to the writing and see what happens. Cross fingers, Hold thumbs and send notes to the man upstairs please that it takes off again!

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I don’t seem to have achieved a huge amount today. Between sleeping badly, getting up late, clonking myself on the head with the kitchen cupboard which resulted in intense wooziness, then accompanying my Da to the dentist and a long and lovely walk home, followed by a much needed nap, there wasn’t a lot of time left, but the walk was indeed lovely – the heavens decided to wait to open until we’d decided to hop on the bus for the last bit, the ankle stood up pretty well to it, I did 20 minutes on the Wii Fit in the morning (just the balance games – trying to do a little bit each day to see if it helps to strengthen the ankle), made my Da a chocolate ripple cake and have nearly finished (I’m pretty sure this time) the scarf for my Great-Aunt which now flows down off my lap and keeps my ankles warm while I’m knitting it.

And I’ve had a fresh stab at trying to generate some ideas for this quintet. Not terribly successful, although the opening idea might end up in it, but it’s more of a texture than a melodic germ. I know it’ll come eventually, but it’s just taking its own sweet time which always freaks me out a little. Contemplating heading into town and picking up the score of the Martinu Sextet that I didn’t bring home the other day – possibly a little score-reading will spark some ideas???? Sort of feel I’m clutching at straws though… Must remain calm…

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I’ve been accepted into CoMA’s Midwinter Composers Masterclass!!!! This is both deeply awesome and rather scary. Not having really received any feedback from other composers in about 15 years, it’s a wee bit daunting. As is having to write a string quintet from scratch by the middle of December, but I really feel like this is a big step towards whatever’s next on the agenda for my music. Scared but elated. The Masterclass is organised by CoMA, who are an organisation who promote contemporary (classical) music for amateur musicians, and the composer in charge of us composer-participants is Tansy Davies… who is the same age as me, which could be a little weird, although I’m hoping not. I really liked what I heard of her music on her website and, reading about her approach, she seems to use architecture as a launching-point in a similar way to how I’ve been using modern art, so it could be interesting. There’ll also be a composer ensemble, made up of whatever we selected composers can play. Not sure if/when we’re advised of what that is – the notes sent through recommend flexible instrumentation – who knows, maybe Deconstruct:Point, line, plane could get another outing? SO EXCITED!

Anyway, that was at the end of the day. Haven’t achieved a vast amount otherwise, but I was feeling I needed to get back to composing, but I’ve been finding the prospect a little daunting with so many people in the house, even if it is a large space and we’re not all on top of each other like we used to be in the old place – it’s just not the same as being on your own. Anyway, so I figured I needed to start doing something about it so I pulled out the music for Egg the Tenth, which I wrote earlier this year (it was the original interlude for the Whitman songs, but didn’t really mesh well there, so I put it to one side to be an egg, but never got around to putting the detail in the score) and dropped in appropriate accidentals, hunted out fonts and did a little layout on it, so it’s basically ready to go now. I also did a MIDI export because I was planning on reworking it in ProTools to sound a bit more like a proper performance than Finale can do… and then discovered that I don’t remember how to wire my tracks in ProTools to get it to use proper sounds, at which point I lost heart and had a nap.

And there was a baking experiment too. When I was seeing my nutritionist, she encouraged me to get hold of this natural sugar substitute called xylitol so I could avoid using sugar when I baked (if you’re new here, I have an insulin resistance – it’s not diabetes [yet] but basically the insulin my body produces forgets what it’s supposed to do with sugar it encounters – unless I exercise regularly, but having been crippled for coming up on a year now, this hasn’t really been happening, hence decision to experiment…). I was in the organic shop today picking up some bits and pieces, and thought that maybe I should give it a go, so I decided to make a crumble with the tasty-but-dry remaining nectarine and some lingering apples – I figured that at least if it was only in the crumble topping, then that could be abandoned if it was too awful. Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘awful’. I guess the flavour was kinda OK, but the texture was All Wrong. The crumble didn’t crisp and it certainly didn’t go chewy. But it wasn’t particularly sweet either (that could have been my fault). So basically it ended up like one of those worthy but tedious baked bars they fill with jam. But without the jam. Sort of bland and like eating a high-fibre pillow. There’s a bit left from the rather small packet, so I might have a go at using it up in a cake (possibly cut with some real sugar) and see if that fares any better.

And finally I started work on getting IE6 sorted out with the website layout while I watched Alice in Wonderland – turned out the problem with the fonts wasn’t anything to do with either fonts or code, it was to do with IE6 not applying styles to the new HTML 5 elements which were referenced in the cascade. So that’s sorted out now, which is a bit yay

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