Ramblings of a rural(ish) geek

skipped work on Tuesday due to a very cranky back from too much yardwork Sun/Mon followed by moving *all* the chairs on Monday night. (BM is out ill, usual assistants were running late due to family things/traffic; so while there was reasonable help for teardown, I had to do most of the setup.) I woke up Tuesday morning with random spikes of numb down my right leg and a lot of very tight muscles in my back. I decided that the best thing I could do was not go in to the office *or* to LCCB rehearsal, and be very careful with my moving. I should be able to do the errands tomorrow....

There is an FCB concert on Sunday which means another session of moving chairs. And it's an away gig, so there's more gear to be moved. I will attempt to avoid moving percussion. I have no idea how this venue will work -- the last time we played there, the set up was sub-optimal. I hear that they have rearranged the space a little bit, but BM sent a couple of pix, and it doesn't seem that much different. We shall see.

I did go into the office on Thursday, and the laptop on my desk decided that it no longer wanted to work with the external monitor. The screen image would shrink, then expand, then go black; then resync with the external monitor, work for 30 seconds or so, then repeat. I tried reseating both ends of the monitor cable, but it didn't help. So then I unplugged the external monitor, and the display stabilized. I have no idea -- the monitor was plugged directly into the laptop's display port. (The smart guess would be that it's a faulty display port, but that's above my paygrade.) So I rearranged my desk so that I could actually see the laptop screen, and did my work that way. Not preferred, but at least I did get my work done. IT knows that there is an issue, but also that there's a workaround and it's not a "drop everything and fix this now!" issue.

It rained all day yesterday. (over an inch of rain. never very hard, but it rained from about 10am to about 8pm, with bits of drizzle after that.) Today they're telling us that the high temperature will be in the mid 60sF -- Wednesday it was 85F in my yard. I did no yard work on Wednesday, even though I should have finished weeding the E garden -- my back was complaining, a lot, and I have learned that pushing through that level of complaint leads to a week of doing nothing. I'll give the garden a try later this afternoon, because this is as warm as day as they're predicting for the next week.

I expect that the FCB gig on Sunday will be cancelled. (currently, NWS says it will be 51F with 40% chance of showers.) That will make my life more difficult, as all of the things I'd take to the gig need to get to the cider mill on the 15th -- when I have a gig in Howell at the same time. So I'll be hauling all those things up to Farmington on Monday and handing them off to "someone else" to deal with.

Ji (the black cat) is being an obstreperous little beastie. Monday he decided that it'd been too long since he'd seen his preferred human and went on a hunger strike. I was a bit concerned, but he started eating again on Tuesday. I've not been able to get more than four or five of his pills into him - J's been gone since Thursday morning, so Ji is well down on his meds. foo. It's a long-term systemic med, and missing a few days really isn't going to cause any real problems, but still.... (My thumb isn't as long as J's, so I have to get the cat's mouth open farther to get the pill in. the cat doesn't like this.)

Annabelle (the gray cat) has been going outside on her own for most of the summer - she's figured out doors, so we're a little more willing to let her out. She was out yesterday morning when it started to rain. While it didn't rain really hard, it did start with fairly dense big raindrops. She was very confused by the sky throwing things at her. She trotted right in when I opened the door and called her.

Yesterday I ushered at Rackham Auditorium. The Jerusalem String Quartet did Haydn's E-flat Major, a UMS premiere of P. Ben-Haim's Quartet No. 1, and Dvorak's Quintet in A-Major where they were joined by Inon Barnatan on piano. The Quintet was my favorite, but that was mostly because the cellist and the pianist were having so much fun cuing each other. By the third movement of the quintet, the lead violinist was getting in on the fun. The encore (decided that morning, according to the violist) was a Scherzo from a Shostakovich quintet. I liked the Ben-Haim, but there were people in the audience who didn't like it because "it sounds wrong". (there was one old man who wouldn't/couldn't even admit that it was well-played -- I couldn't tell which. He was complaining to me because I was wearing a UMS badge.) Ben-Haim was a German Jew who moved to Palestine in the 1930s, and the quartet uses a lot of non-European folksongs and tonalities. If you want new stuff that's just like the old stuff only different, you're not gonna like this one -- not like the Haydn, which shuffled the "standards" of a string quartet but still kept within the Western musical sound.

The music for the next FCB concert is challenging. Fast 16th note runs with many accidentals, covering the entire range (plus!) of my instrument. Another piece with different 16th note runs. Transposing bassoon parts, because the Harrison barisax players never turned their music in. The Livingston music has different challenges, mostly tempo related - I'm used to playing things faster than they take them, so my timing is off. This is especially evident in Enchanted and the Bernstein medley.

Last weekend's weather system gave us over 3 inches of rain, and then transitioned to freezing rain and then snow. The bucket-on-the-ground precipitation gauge indicated that we'd gotten over 4.5 inches of various precipitation. Then the snow on the ground melted, although the ice in the pond and on the standing puddles did not. Today, we're getting flurries with no accumulation (the snow is mostly blowing into piles at the edges of things), with (currently) 6" predicted for Friday night into Saturday. Then it will all melt as the precipitation changes to rain and temperatures get above 40F. Ji was thinking he wanted to go out until he got a snowflake on his nose.

My back is mostly better, but the damp weather is making it somewhat unhappy. I did usher last Friday evening - as late as Thursday afternoon I was thinking about calling it off, and probably would have if the weather was supposed to be anything worse than damp.

Froggie count is ten, all visuals, plus a possible blorp.

The weeds are still growing, and I've been slowly getting to the flowerbeds I ignored much of the summer (when they weren't too weedy, but now the summer flowers are beginning to fade and the weeds are taking over). Yesterday I "fluffed" the geranium in the front flowerbed -- they're sprawly things anyway, and a couple of wind/rain events had flattened this one out, so I fluffed it. It looks much better now. There's still weeds to pull in that flowerbed, but I disturbed an anthill yesterday. So it will wait until tomorrow when the ants have calmed down and the weather is better.

Today is a football game. Whee? It's predicted to be the hottest day of the year, with the heat breaking "sometime" in the afternoon. With storms, of course. Yesterday's JV game was postponed due to a storm that rolled through in the late afternoon, and I wouldn't be surprised if they did the same thing today. The visiting team isn't coming from that far away, and the weather tomorrow is supposed to be gorgeous.

I have no idea what I did to my back, but I've been having a lot of numbness in the already compromised areas. Do not like, especially with a football game tonight.

The black cat is sleeping on my bed again. So, yes, my bed is still not made.

Into the workroom -- I need to replace my bags for band, and first rehearsal is Monday.

So the weather got decent enough that I could go pull weeds. So I did. So the flowerbeds look much better, although there's still one or two I need to get to.

Unfortunately, it's not gonna happen today. And maybe not tomorrow, either. I hate back spasms. I think I'll settle for getting the laundry done. And making dinner. And going to rehearsal.

The "frogs" are carrying on. At last count (which was yesterday evening) there were 16 in and around the pond. (I say "frogs" because there's treefrogs and toads and proper frogs out there, and they're hard to tell apart when all you can see is eyes (and maybe a nose) or moving blobs as they dive for cover.)