These pictures are a bit belated, holiday-wise, but we only just got the opportunity to take a picture of our black cat next to our orange pumpkin. (Asking for an orange cat, black cat, and pumpkin in one picture would be too much. For the orange cat.)

So despite the incongruous pictures, happy Thanksgiving!




May you have a wonderful time with friends!

We just completed Sara's naturalization application! It was quite easy. All we had to do was fill out forms I-485, I-864, I-693, I-130, G-325A (x2), I-765, and I-131, and make copies of tax records, birth certificates, passports, our marriage license, and Sara's forms I-20 and I-94, and get 4 passport-style photos of Sara and 2 of me, and pay about $1500. Nothing confusing or ridiculous about that, right? Now we just have to wait a few months, probably go to Chicago for some interviews, and wait a few years, and then we can think about applying for citizenship!

I am opposed to strongly-defined gender roles, but somehow at the same time I have been enjoying doing Man things around the house. After 2 hours of tech support calling and 45 minutes of wrestling with interfaces and cables, I put our DSL modem into bridged mode and manually set up our router, which appears to have solved our internet-cutting-out and phone-going-silent problems (fingers crossed here...). Thanks to the internet, I figured out why our dishwasher wasn't effectively using the detergent. And I wired the TV, VCR, digital converter box, and antenna down in the basement and it worked on the first try! It's not actually so gross-looking down there now. It feels good to get these things accomplished, and to have a nicer home as a result!

~~~

Oliver is a charmer, and frustrating, and charming in his frustratingness. He has boundless energy. Unlike Nadia, who pretty much gives up when you yell at her to get down, stop, etc. (at least for five minutes), Oliver generally immediately starts looking for an alternate route. (It's cute, though, because he often starts prancing or leaping when he knows he's doing something wrong.)

One of his most annoying habits is his sudden need to enter the bathroom whenever one of us goes in there. We have an accordion door that doesn't quite line up with its (weak) latch, so he often succeeds (after much rattling of the door). Needless to say, there are times when it is inappropriate for a cat to be walking around you in the bathroom.

Last night we watched TV (in the basement) for the first time in this house. Oliver could usually care less about our computer screens, but he was enthralled by the TV. It didn't hurt that we were watching Nature for a while, and he stood on his hind legs with his paws on the DVD player, occasionally pawing at a fig wasp on the screen. Even when we switched to History Detectives (turns out fig wasps are kinda gross, and we had just eaten) he would occasionally take a break from whirling around the rug chasing his tail to sit and stare at the screen from a safer distance.

Shortly before the move, in Sara's old apartment (thanks to Wan for this picture!):

During the move (note the boxes--still stressful for me to see, even in pictures):

Helping to set up shelves in the living room:

Both cats love the mini-couch, and they're willing to sleep closer than this now:

This is one of my favorite pictures, but there are many because our photographer did such a good job! I'll put a few more down below (spotty internet connection permitting...). Here is a short list of exciting things that happened in the last two weeks:

we (mostly) unpacked
our oven door spontaneously exploded
we hosted four guests in our new house
we cooked for 13 people
Oliver charmed the socks off everybody
Sara's dress got fixed, broken, fixed, broken, and then fixed again
I got a poorly-timed bout of digestive sickness
we got married!
we went on a relaxing honeymoon in Madison, IN!
I was "trained" as an associate instructor for the 9th time (of 10! so close....)
school started.

There was more perfection than we ever could have expected or anticipated during the two days of intense wedding stuff, and we're very happy.

Does normal life begin now? Hard to say--we still have lots of unpacking/repacking/arranging to do in the basement, as well as lots of random odd jobs around the house. And then there are Sara's exams, and all our travel in October.... but these things are normal life, right? I think there was maybe a period of 4-6 months when I felt there weren't any apartment projects hanging over my head in my old place, and I lived there 4 years.

More pictures!

I'm sitting in our new living room with a purring kitten on my lap. There is now (sort of) time to reflect. We went to Canada last weekend for the wedding of Sara's cousin Angie. On Monday we moved, and that day and the next few are kind of a blur of aural skills hearings, final classes, unpacking, continued packing and cleaning of old apartments, and just general insanity. Yesterday I finally had a pretty free day, so Sara and I dug up and (re-)planted the garden in the morning and I baked bread in the afternoon.

I have to admit, when we first moved in, it was a little disappointing to be reminded of the warped floors, poorly laid-out bathroom, and too-small closets. But a day or two ago amidst all the unpacking we finally started catching glimpses of how nice it will be in here once all these boxes are gone. We're still getting there--but it's really nice to have a house, a porch, a garden, a big kitchen! Normal life won't resume for another week and a half, but it'll be nice.

Things are coming together, despite the third defection from our string quartet coming exactly one week before they're supposed to play. In a week I'll be Mr. Sara Bakker!

His name is Oliver!

I can still remember when my family got Al. He had a period of adjustment when he could only mope slowly around the house, mournfully sniffing parts of his new home. Not so Oliver. The whole ~40 minutes home from the farm, he alternated between trying to nurse from Sara's inner elbow and climbing all over. When we got to Sara's place, he was immediately ready to take possession.

Speaking of who owns the house, the cats are making progress. Nadia no longer needs to follow him around at all times, growling and hissing. She now mainly hisses when he starts hanging around her food bowl. They actually chase each other around the house in a friendly-competitive way now, or rather, he chases her around. Nadia loves to run away, and Oliver is more than happy to follow; but when she takes a charge at him from across the room, he is too inexperienced (or courageous, or something) to run away, and she has to veer off with an annoyed look on her face. But then she'll jump up on a chair or something, and suddenly the tables turn, because half the times he jumps on something, he falls off. They're a cute couple.

----

Wedding planning proceeds apace. Yesterday we practiced our Viennese Waltz and I read all the psalms and narrowed them down to two, plus we went to the county clerk and got our marriage license (obviously, unsigned as of yet). They even give you a "keepsake" copy in a padded box! Today we go to Indy to buy all the wine and sparkling juice for the reception, and call the moving truck company. Tomorrow, I don't think we have anything scheduled!

I had mentioned to Sara that we might need to get a second cat someday, since Nadia's pretty cold to me. But I was totally unprepared when we were offered, and accepted, a new kitten at our CSA's open house yesterday! He is the sweetest, cutest thing ever:



So far today he's been alternating between sleeping and being cute on the one hand:




and attacking anything that moves on the other:



He is really beautiful--it's hard to see in these pictures, but the brown hairs mixed with the black on his back are relatively prominent. He's also a nice complement to Nadia--cuddly, personal, and fearless (he didn't need any adjustment time at all!).

Unfortunately, she doesn't agree. She's been in a bad mood ever since he came (about 24 hours ago), and whenever she sees him can't seem to stop growling and hissing. We're desperately hoping that she'll accept him, but worried that she might not. Nadia's a very special cat, especially to Sara, and if this turns her into "the grumpy older cat that's not much fun to be around," we'll feel very bad.

"The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the filly, flat, and dishwatery utterances of a man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States."
-The Chicago Times, on the Gettysburg Address

The Bloomington Farmer's Market isn't really cheap, but it is really fun! A new feature is the B-Line Trail, an old rail line that has been renovated into a bike/walk trail. It's gorgeous: they spent millions of dollars on it, and it doesn't even stretch a mile! It goes from about 3 blocks from my apartment right through the market's plaza. They always have bands playing, including one that always has two ladies clogging next to it, there are lots of people, and you can get tons of different things. There's even a section apparently for people with strong opinions on various issues (the Bah'ai faith, "Obamacare," wetlands, etc.). Today, after picking up our nice CSA shipment, we strolled around for a while and bought a free-range chicken (they showed us pictures of the bucolic field), a goat's milk Italian torta, a raw milk cheddar, a salad mix and some sorrel.

Last Friday was a school holiday, so Sara and I checked out Spring Mill State Park for the first time. It's only an hour away, and pretty neat. You're very seldom out of sight of a sinkhole, many of which open into caves below, such as this one a few feet from one of our hikes:




There are five big cave entrances. Most are now closed because of White Nose Syndrome (a bat disease), but there is one where they still do boat tours. It was pretty neat: we saw blind fish (an endangered species) and cave crayfish, and some decent formations:



But the coolest entrance was of a closed cave:






We also visited their pioneer village, with 20 log cabins built between 1815-1830. Pretty fun. But we closed the day with a visit to the best restaurant in town, Restaurant Tallent. It's really expensive, but I've never been to a restaurant that is so inventive, locally-based (food-wise), and yet so uniformly irresistibly tasty.

In fact, I've begun to appreciate all the creativity at work in Bloomington more all the time, now that our wedding is really coming together. I've been really happy with our meetings with Candace, at our rehearsal dinner restaurant; Nick and Ashley, our caterers; Marc (Mark?), manager of our reception space; Alexis, our photographer; and Charlie, our priest. They all inspire confidence, seem to enjoy what they do, and make us feel like we're going to have a really wonderful time.

It's a beautiful day! Our 90+ degree temperatures finally broke, and it makes all the difference in the world.

Even with the busy summer-session schedule and relatively large teaching load (they make you meet the same number of hours as during the year, but pay you less?!), I've been enjoying a lot more relaxation than during most normal semesters. Saturday was especially nice: Sara and I went on a 20 mile bike ride out to Leonard Springs park. 20 miles isn't all that much on a bike, but there were some huge hills! I had to walk several of them, though Sara did better than me. The park itself is really cool--it's a city park, but densely wooded, with a nice 1-mile hike that takes you past a spring, many caves, and a marsh (the remains of Bloomington's first reservoir). We'll definitely be going there again. It's amazing how many beautiful public outdoors places are in this area, and we just keep discovering more!

Nate's blog has been making me jealous lately. But after reading about his adventures and seeing such gorgeous pictures, I can't help but wonder: what are you going to do for your honeymoon (whenever that might be) that can possibly top this? Good luck....

Well, if I seemed to be declaring victory over disease in my last post, it was premature. I won't go into all the details, but while most of my symptoms got a lot better, I developed a stiff neck, and the doctors decided I might maybe have meningitis and should have a spinal tap to see. (As you might expect, googling "spinal tap" gives you a lot more about the fun band/movie than about the less fun procedure; even "is a spinal tap painful" doesn't quite purify the results.)

I was pretty freaked out about the spinal tap, but the procedure itself wasn't really so bad; like a lot of surgery under local anesthetic, the initial needle hurts a lot but most of the rest is just conceptually freaky. The worst part was actually that I had a "spinal headache" for the next day--absolutely excruciating (though it went away entirely on sitting down, so I was horizontal a lot of the time). I'm taking fluids, of course, but also caffeine at ridiculously high (doctor-recommended) doses to keep the spinal headache getting better, and so now I'm having occasional caffeine-induced heart palpitations. I guess you could call these palpitations a side-effect of treating a side-effect of a procedure to diagnose a disease I don't have, and then it starts to sound a bit ridiculous.... And for good measure I have an unrelated eye infection, which happily is almost gone.

So after all that sad, here are more pictures from our trip to Poughkeepsie. First, Claire at the gardens of the Samuel Morse Home right outside of town:



Sara and the Lordly Hudson:



Life imitating art at the Storm King outdoor art center:



And Claire interacting artistically with an Andy Goldsworthy piece:

It's been a crazy summer so far. First, Sara and I did a lot of traveling, to Canada, to Minnesota, to Poughkeepsie, and to Indianapolis. Here are some unfortunates who capsized their canoe on Wappinger Creek, near Poughkeepsie:



Then, this past week, I've had the flu, which makes life very strange and not very enjoyable. Of course, at the same time, we've had extremely high humidity pretty much all day every day, so it's sometimes hard to know if grossness is due to the weather or the sickness. Still, I have had the time to do some good things. I've started the Lincoln biography that Grandma and Grandpa Chenette gave me for my birthday, and I've worked on the course packet for the class I'll be teaching in the fall. (There's a *lot* of work left to do on that. Too bad I don't get royalties.) And I tried out my second recipe from the bread cookbook I bought at the Culinary Institute of America, Old Milwaukee Rye:




Yes, Claire, the baguette-style loaf is the product of your birthday gift to me--thank you!

It's a beautiful loaf, and has a really rich, dark flavor. I prepared the sponge a few days ago, and it's a good thing it keeps developing flavor for three days, because I really didn't feel like doing anything with it the past couple of days. But I'm feeling a lot more normal now, and enjoying some good bread!

The semester is over, and there's finally time to reflect! Kind of. There's still a lot to do. Wedding planning proceeds apace. And I was recently hired into a performance of the Vespers for Nuestra Señora Del Pilar by Joseph Ruiz Samaniego, which is rehearsing several hours a day. And it's also beautiful outside! Highs around 80, dry, sunny... We're on our fourth stunningly gorgeous day in a row--every once in a while I even forget that we live in rainy, overcast, humid southern Indiana.

But I have been reflecting a bit on the semester. I got my evaluations back, and I think they were my best ever. I had the students grade me on a number of different propositions, and nobody (not a single one!) gave me less than an A on Instructor is enthusiastic about teaching, Instructor teaches students with respect, Instructor seems genuinely interested in my progress, or Instructor is fair and impartial in dealing with students. That's something to be proud of!

Everyone also seemed to particularly love the last unit, which confirmed something I had felt myself: that this unit was where I finally hit the right balance of systematic theory and analytical discussion. This is a problem I had all first semester: I wanted to get away from focusing on theory for its own sake, so we talked a lot about individual pieces of music, style, and interpretation. I was baffled when the most constant complaint seemed to be that we weren't focusing enough on the rules of counterpoint! But I think having some kind of system helps structure a class and make students more confident about their own learning. So that's a lesson to take into the future.

I ran almost 7 miles today! That's definitely a new record for me, by about 2 miles. Not bad.


In the meantime, I'm pretty ready for the semester to be over. There's really not much left, big project-wise, but there's no getting past those two weeks of class that still remain. (And teaching will continue to be a daily challenge--mainly because I'm really learning new repertoire as we go.) I'm anticipating a really nice May, with visits to Minneapolis for a conference ($180 nonstop flight! Prices have seriously come down), Poughkeepsie, and potentially Rodney, Ontario, but also time in between with no obligations aside from long-range planning for moving and marrying. (Boxes will start getting filled the minute I have the time.)

Speaking of getting married, Sara and I had our first Viennese Waltz lesson the other day! It was fun--we're being taught by a former student of mine--but we felt like we were more "frog-hopping" than anything. Which, as you can see, is not what you're supposed to do:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEdJ6pQXmoU
But imagining being able to whirl that fast and effortlessly! Well, we have a few months...

Three days ago, it was bright and beautiful outside; I went on a hike and got sunburned.

Two days ago, it snowed most of the day.

??

------

Teaching has been rather fun lately. I've been sensing that many of my students would like a greater challenge, so I've been trying to oblige them. Last unit we did a lot of structural reduction of pieces, that interpretive act that is essentially the gateway into Schenkerian analysis. I think they enjoyed it in class, though from the assignment I asked them to do and their informal out-of-class work I don't think they were very good at the interpretation on their own (it takes time).

This unit, we started by learning the modern modes, along with lots of non-diatonic scales (octatonic, various pentatonics, whole-tone, "Gypsy," etc.), which is pretty typical. But that same week, we started on pitch class set analysis; then this week we started transformational analysis. Both facilitate a rather mathematical view of music, which of course was very exciting for certain students. But in addition they allow me to talk about lots of advanced topics, like properties of triads and the diatonic set (maximal evenness, minimal perturbations of maximally even structures, axes of inversion, inversional and transpositional symmetry, etc.). A lot of what I'm teaching them right now doesn't have much "practical" application in music, but they seem to be very excited to learn for the sake of learning. Even more fun, some seem surprised and perhaps liberated to realize that that's okay. It may seem obvious that honors students would love learning for their own sake, but I will say that back at the beginning of the year, when I taught them a lot about early music and its theory, they were not so excited. I'm not sure if it's the time that's made the difference, the trust I've built up meeting with them 5 days a week for 25 weeks now (! that's a lot!), or their excitement for relatively modern music.

It's the time of year for many things!

First, for Bloomington to really live up to its name: the magnolias that dot my area of town are in full flower, as well as all the tulips, hyacinths, forsythia, those trees with the stinky white flowers, and the redbuds. I've been really appreciating these this year.

But also for guys in baseball caps and girls in short shorts to play cornhole (if you don't live in Indiana, Michigan, or Ohio, you may have to look this one up) in their front yards, beer in hand, music loud in the background; as well as for all guys (and girls, though I haven't seen any yet) who think they're awesome at playing the guitar to sit outside with self-absorbed looks on their faces and generously share their music with all nearby.

And also for tons of concerts at the music school. Today there are only 15, and several weekdays this week only have 3, but next Saturday and Sunday have 21 and 18, respectively.

And it's time to look forward to the end of the semester!

It's been a while, but I thought I'd share some pictures. First, from our rare snow day earlier this semester:



Then from my first experiment with pasta-making (using my present from Mom and Dad!):


Good stuff. On Tuesday I go to Indianapolis to get a bone scan done on my wrist; hopefully that will contribute to some sort of diagnosis. And Spring Break is just a week away...

This is an extremely busy and stressful week, so just a quick note. On my way home kinda late from school, I craved sesame chicken, so I stopped by the grocery store and grabbed some chicken. (I haven't had much non-seafood meat in quite a while.) I found a recipe on the internet and quickly put it together. Problem was, the sauce fizzed a lot, and didn't thicken well. In fact, it fizzed so much that it almost boiled over. I took it off the heat and let it cool off, and that's when I realized my mistake: absentmindedly, I'd replaced the corn starch with baking powder! I can tell this recipe *would* probably be good...

The moral of the story is, don't improvise too much with important things like food when you're tired!

The hot fudge on ice cream, however, more than made up for it.

It's beautiful outside!

Beautiful to look at, anyway. Everything's pretty and white, so I didn't mind so much that my bike was slipping all over on my inexplicably unplowed road. Actually, it reminded me of mountain biking with Nate in the LA area a few years ago: on steep hills I often stand up to get more power, but that reduces the weight on the back tire and you slip and slide and go nowhere... But honestly, I'm happy to have a "real" winter for once in southern Indiana, cold, snow, and all.

Things are going well for me right now: a week and a half ago I gave my first ever conference presentation, in Florida, and it went well; classes are generally going well, though I'm too busy (I don't think I can keep the second job next year), almost every day Barack Obama does something that impresses me, plus I'm getting married (eventually). Let's hope this continues!