Quietly productive
Didn’t get as much done today as yesterday – slept in far too late, which was a bit of a whoops – but my parents and I do seem to have settled into a quietly productive sort of a routine – for the mornings anyway, which is working quite well – for me at least, and I hope for them too. It goes something like this: Once I’ve woken up, I sit up in bed and do my morning pages, then I read a bit more of John Adams’ autobiography, Hallelujah Junction, which I’m absolutely loving. Then I drag my sorry carcass out of bed and greet the lovely parents and have breakfast. I then take my coffee back into the bedroom and start work on some of my theory study while the mama inhabits the study and plays the piano for a little. The afternoon is a little more freeform, but at some point I take over the study and do some listening and some work in there.
Today’s theory study was seventh chords exercises. I found these relatively challenging – it’s the diminished intervals I have to fully get my head around, but the exercises are being very useful – not just building a specified seventh chord on a tonic, but also on the third, fifth and seventh as given notes, which I’m finding VERY helpful for working out the intervals because it’s not as simple as just altering the notes above – you need to work out sometimes whether your actual tonic needs to be raised or lowered. Really makes one think, which is exactly what I needed. Think I’ve got them sorted in my brain now. More or less at least 
Did some more work on the site too. Unfortunately, it seems that of the web-fonts-supporting major browsers, only Firefox and Safari understand the text-rendering property, which means that the kerning on the fancy font I’m using in a couple of places is all off in Chrome. I’ve yet to test it on IE in its many flavours. Not sure how/if to hack this one. For Chrome it should be relatively simple – there aren’t too many seriously problematic letters, so one could just surround the tricky sections in <span>s and apply letter-spacing, hopefully, but I’m not sure how IE will react. Yes, I still have to do proper testing in IE. Have been avoiding it. Need to stop that.
Also nearing the end of the scarf I’m knitting for my chilly and very frail great-aunt in Sydney. She’s 94 now and apparently they keep her nursing-home at an Arctic temperature at all times of the year, so I’m knitting her a nice lightweight scarf to keep her warm. I spent a lovely quiet half-hour with my Da this evening in the study, listening to the Mendelssohn string quintets and Schubert’s Moments musicaux, him reading his book and me working on the scarf – happiness! I have lent him Art & Fear which he seems to be finding interesting, as I thought he might.
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