Altivo

Yes, I know, official meteorological spring began a month ago and astronomical spring two weeks ago. But one of our significant measuring points was hit over the weekend: our ducks began laying eggs. The first two are in the fridge along with four more left in the hay storage by the neighbors' wandering hens.

Also, I got some sour jelly beans (Starburst, not the best ever but they'll do) so that annual requirement is met. I think last year I never found any at all.

It has been raining on and off for three days. Coming down fairly hard at the moment. I can hear it on the roof and hitting the skylight in the kitchen as well as dripping into the stovepipe (despite the fancy cap that is supposed to prevent that.)

( Music chunterings )

Other than going out to care for the horses, I spent most of the day editing and arranging tunes for ThingamaJig. Tomorrow we should see a little more of the sun, but then they tell us to expect some actual snow. Had enough of that now, no thanks.

Too much stuff going on.

The most interesting to me, though (I'll avoid political rants for now) has to do with music.

( Current musical developments )

In other news, the neighbors' wandering chickens are back again, as many as a dozen of them meandering around our yards and scratching holes in the ground. Just now we had two roosters in a knock down battle that got our dog Laddie all excited and worried. Gary had to literally kick them apart and chase them back toward home in the end. The way they were going at it, I figured the larger one was going to kill the other if left alone. He had the victim trapped in a fence corner and was stomping, scratching and biting for all he was worth. I'd have turned the hose on them except it hasn't been warm long enough for us to have put it out yet.

A productive weekend, more or less, but not nearly enough done.

We went up to Williams Bay, Wisconsin with friend Carol to hear the opening performance of the season by the Lake Geneva Symphony. There were only two pieces on the program.

The first was Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Major, new to all three of us and (I gather) not often performed. The piece clearly reflects the result of an American visit by the French composer, who used jazz styling and motifs throughout. The timing and nuance are almost Gershwin-like, and reminded all of us of American in Paris and Rhapsody in Blue though there were no obvious quotes from either of Gershwin's masterpieces. Pianist Krassimira Jordan was remarkable, virtuoso even beyond what I expected, and that is certainly needed for this concerto. The style is intricate rather than bombastic, and requires passages where each hand plays in a different key or time signature, as well as a lot of cross-hand work. The overall result was very fine and we enjoyed it greatly.

The second selection was Tchaikovksy Symphony No. 4 in F minor, which was all the better for Conductor and Musical Director David Anderson's advance explanation of major themes and elements of the work. The LGSO has improved a great deal (not that it was bad to begin with) under Anderson's direction, and the performance came across very well. The French horns play a major role in this symphony, and they sounded like the noted horn section of the Chicago Symphony this time.

A predicted heavy frost skipped over our small garden, so we still have green tomatoes that "might" ripen before the vines are killed, but hope is diminishing. The plants are heavily laden, but almost nothing has turned ripe yet. The pumpkins I did NOT plant have produced six usable pumpkins so far after sprouting from seeds that apparently made it through last winter in the compost bin. There are many more immature fruits on the ground, but I'm pretty sure the frost is going to cut them off soon. These are the small and heavy pumpkins that can be used for pies and soup, not the large thin-shelled jack-o-lantern variety. We will put them to good use.



On Sunday I also baked a peach pie, bought groceries, tried to photograph the fall colors though it wasn't really sunny enough, and made a pot of cholent. We haven't had cholent for a couple of years and the cooler weather inspired me to put it together. It's a traditional Jewish stew, created to cook slowly overnight from Friday to Saturday so it would provide a hot meal on the sabbath without requiring anyone to cook or light a fire. The principal ingredients of my Hungarian version include small lima beans, tomatoes, onion, garlic, carrots, turnips or rutabaga, smoked sausage (I use a turkey sausage,) and both hot and sweet Hungarian paprika. I usually bake this in a closed cast iron pot at 250°F for about 8 hours, but this time I opted for a slow cooker set to high temperature. A little red wine added near the end of cooking enriches the blend and enhances the aromas. The smell becomes enticing after about four hours and makes you drool after the sixth. As usual, it turned out well, since it is almost foolproof and requires little attention once assembled.

(As opposed to one-upsmanship, wretched excess, and destructive enhancement? Well, maybe...)

A week ago, good friend @RothRWolf and I went up to Organ Piper Pizza in Greenfield, Wisconsin, for a little entertainment and lunch. We've been there before, and will be again I'm sure. The restaurant has a Wurlitzer theatre pipe organ (enhanced with a lot of additional traps and pipe ranks) installed and a regular round of organists who perform daily. This time some questions about the mechanical controls on a theatre organ console came up, and I did my best to answer in simple terms. (Though I'm no virtuoso, I do have some playing experience and a lot of hours of disappointing practice behind me.) Concepts such as "second touch" and "reversible pistons" can be tricky to explain, even to other musicians if they don't play the keyboards or don't have exposure to the way things were done before MIDI came along.

I won't go into the history of the electro-pneumatic action or the tragedy of Robert Hope Jones, its inventor and primary promoter, here. Let's just say that the organ console is a hugely intricate device that rivals a mechanical computer, even to the point of some pretty impressive programmability and non-volatile memory.

Anyway, it's always difficult to point out the details of these functions at a live performance. For one thing, you don't have a close enough view of the performer's hands and feet, or of the controls available to him/her. Even in a venue like the Organ Piper, which is a lot more intimate than the original theatre setting of the instrument and is designed to let the audience see the pipes and mechanics at work, it would be pretty rude to stand next to the console and stare at the performer's hands or feet. I haven't seen anyone, even little kids, doing that and I'm not about to do it either. (Let alone point at things and shout out explanations while they are playing...)

( Critical essay cut for brevity. Caveat lector. )

Thanks for bearing with me while I was being overbearing. I don't mean any disrespect to these performers, all of whom are great virtuosi whose abilities I can only envy and admire. I just think that there's a practical limit beyond which dramatics can overshadow the artistry of a performance.

Here is the first of a series of photos that cover the flax processing yesterday morning.



To view the whole series, click the image above and on the resulting screen use the "next" link to proceed through the entire group of 14 images. Note that they are in no special order. We were doing all the steps at once after thing got started, as individuals rotated from one tool to another.

After that, I went directly to the Illinois Railway Museum for the Rails 'n' Tails picnic. Gary's group, Kishwaukee Ramblers, were providing some music for us and they allowed me to sit in with them for a bit. Here I am (left) with Gary (center) and Neal (right.) Amy was to the right of Neal and didn't fit into the picture.

Today we kept a lazy low profile for the most part, trying to recharge from yesterday. Both of us got some sunburn and have been running on short sleep for several days.

The guitar is a vice that requires constant practice. By neglecting the instrument for years, I have of course lost all the callus on my left hand and consequently I now have sore fingertips. At least it's a familiar condition and I know it will go away.

I think I am at the bottom of the problem with the Literati upgrade. It appears that the firmware update, which is downloaded as a compressed tar archive, does not download correctly if you are using a current version of Firefox. It ends up with many spurious characters (probably carriage returns or linefeeds) inserted into it, corrupting the file. At first I thought this was because I used a Linux system to download rather than Windows. However, repeated tests have now shown that if the file is downloaded by Internet Explorer it is saved correctly and has the expected length and checksum. If downloaded by Firefox the file is longer than expected and has an incorrect checksum. I suspect that the server offering the download is set up improperly as well, so that Firefox doesn't get a correct mime type for the file and tries to handle it as text. IE assumes from the file suffix that it is an unknown binary blob and as a result performs a correct download. In other words, FF follows standard more strictly than IE does, and this server isn't following the standards either, so the results are unpredictable.

I know have what should be correct copies of the update file, and will attempt the upgrade again very soon. But not tonight. I'm too tired and might mess it up.

Got up early, turned out horses and sheep, and went to a practice session for Saturday. Went directly from the practice to work for eight hours. Came home from work, had supper, and I'm more than ready for bed. Tomorrow we do it in a reverse order. I'll go to work first, and we'll practice in the afternoon.

Had an interesting GPS malfunction too. After practicing this morning, Gary and I had lunch on the east side of Woodstock. We debated what the shortest route through town and out the west side would be in order to get onto US14 and head for Harvard. Finally I decided to just let my GPS choose. Very odd. I plugged the Garmin in and turned it on. It acquired satellite fixes. Then I asked it to plot a route to the library in Harvard, an address it has stored in memory. Two attempts produced an error message: "Unable to calculate route." I've never seen that. It's the GPS equivalent of "You can't get there from here," I suppose. The third time it claimed to have a route, but I should have been tipped off by the fact that it was estimating travel time at 2 and 1/4 hours. It should have been closer to 25 minutes.

So I started out and it immediately told me to turn away from the direction I knew I had to go. It kept trying to get me to turn around and head for Chicago, preferably by way of the Northwest Tollway. This made no sense at all, so I ignored it and picked my own route. It never quit trying to turn me around. I didn't shut it off because I wanted to look at it and see where it thought I was going.

Once I was parked at the library, I examined the entire plotted route. It was trying to take me to Portage, Indiana to a friend's apartment. How it got that turned around I have no idea. When I left work I let it calculate a route home, and it did that correctly. Or at least as correctly as it ever does. It makes one odd choice that may shave a few feet off the distance covered but just seems illogical. However, it has alwasy done that on this particular route.

The weather was lovely though, if a bit warm.

Topped it all off with a brilliant concert by the Lake Geneva Symphony in which we heard Walton's "Crown Imperial," Elgar's Cello concerto, Arnold's "Four Scottish Dances" and Holst's "Mars, the Bringer of War" and "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity" from The Planets. Excellent stuff, even if Mars is a bit hard on the ears with all those drums.

Today saw the biggest opossum I've ever seen in my life. It must have weighed well over 20 pounds and was poking around behind the arena. We scared it off, hopefully, though it only ran into an old logpile left by the previous owners. I don't care one way or another about opossums except that they're ugly and I don't want them to contaminate my hay. They can carry a parasitic protozoan that causes nasty effects in horses. They've also been known to carry rabies, though the only reported rabies in our county this year was in a bat if I recall correctly what the vet said.

Tomorrow Gary wants to go to an open house of the Kishwaukee Valley & Eakin Creek Model Railroad Club over in Huntley. They have running layouts in four scales: G, O, HO, and N.

Spent a large chunk of the day configuring a new firewall box, since Watchguard dropped support for the one we have been using (only 3 years old.) This wouldn't be so bad if they made it easier to move your setup from one box to another, but... they don't. Which forced me to go through the entire configuration bit by bit, and that's not entirely bad since I decided that about half of it was pointless. Left that half out. We shall see what happens when I test it. Testing has to happen when the library is closed, since it will knock out the internet connection completely a couple of times. That means going in to work on Sunday probably. Ugh.

Because we've suddenly been seized with the idea of performing railroad songs for a picnic at the railroad museum in June, I dug in the music closet (yes, we have a music closet) and retrieved one of my guitars. Which hasn't been played for quite a few years. The strings were hopeless, of course, but there was another set in the case so I changed them out.

While we were watching The Muppets (latest Muppet film) borrowed from the library. Our conclusion: not the best one they ever did, but fun anyway. Or at least funny. Oh Jim Henson how we miss you.

Gary made an Indian dish from cauliflower and potatoes for dinner. It was good, actually, though I think he took the instructions a bit too literally on the serrano peppers. Not into the pain spectrum, but certainly rates a HOT! or so. The rice and chutney work to balance it out in the end. Hopefully it won't come back to haunt my dreams in a little while.

Guitar will need a day or so to settle in pitch so it will hold a tuning, so I haven't found out yet how much I remember about playing it. Not that I was any kind of master, but I used to be tolerable. Keyboards are more my forte (pun intended) or even wind instruments, but keyboards just aren't portable enough for most things outdoors. We shall see.

I've mentioned before that I committed to appear in fursuit at the library booth, Harvard City Expo tomorrow. I agreed to a two hour stint, in the morning, which is fortunate as tomorrow is supposed to get hot and humid by afternoon I guess. Argos the white wolf will be carrying a basket full of library fortune cookies (yes, really) because our summer reading theme this year is food based. The booth is the "Diggins Diner" because our library was founded by Delos F. Diggins in 1909. I thought the book wolf should have a staff ID, so I cooked this one up for him to wear on a badge lanyard tomorrow.



Then in the evening I'll be playing Irish flute with one of Gary's groups as they perform for St. Paddie's at a local bar and eatery. The restaurant is actually Italian, but I guess drinking and eating works in any language. Ran through the music with Gary last night and I don't expect to cause any disasters. Their lead fiddler couldn't make it that night due to an orchestra performance I think, so they asked me to sit in.

So off to bed early and hope I can sleep. I know I'll sleep well once this is over.