A garden retrospective!

In March, we expanded our garden by about 50%. This picture is from March 19, and you can see the rhubarb poking up!



On April 16, the strawberry plants were clearly returning.



On May 23 (isn't that an important day for some reason? Claire, can you remind me?), the collards and rhubarb appear thrilled to be alive, and there's some beautiful lettuce in the back.



On June 13, we could hardly believe how far the garden had come. Parsnips (close) and tomatoes (far) had added their voices to the fray.



By July 1, the tomatoes had been belatedly staked and corn was coming up in the back.



By July 21, we had a forest. (With a valley in the middle where our piddly peppers took their time....)



On August 7, we found the corn had been taking some sort of growth hormone.



By September 15, we'd taken down the corn, and many of our tomato plants had died of blight. (I guess the darkness of the picture symbolizes this sad news.)



Somehow I seem to have missed taking a picture in October. I guess life must have gotten pretty busy, and I know the garden slowed down, but we were getting a lot of delicious raspberries!

Yesterday--November 17--I took this picture showing the beautiful fallen-leaf mulch our garden has acquired. We've had several hard frosts, so all the tomatoes and the peppers are dead; the raspberries are for some reason still putting out berries, but they're hard and not flavorful; but somehow the seeds of our earlier lettuce plants are still growing, and the leeks and parsnips await further frosts to improve their flavor before harvesting.



And now, the moment I'm sure you've been waiting for! Our official Tomato Tally for the season is... 135! And our Peppers Picked... 38 delicious, delicious peppers. Not bad considering the drought, the blight, etc....

Now, we have to hope that we don't get jobs for next year, because we'd have to move, and learn all our gardening lessons all over again in a new place!

The end of the semester is shaping up to be rather intense, as a number of things are going on simultaneously. I got a steroid shot in my wrist a week ago, and though it's not clear yet if it's helping, I'm going back to the doctor in December to talk it over. I gave a talk at the national theory conference, which was rather exciting. Then, when I had recovered from the conference, a draft of my dissertation proposal came together remarkably quickly, and I've been working on it pretty intensively and corresponding with my committee members so that I can defend the proposal yet this semester. (Assuming all goes well and I do successfully defend it, it'll be a huge load off my mind when I leave for Christmas Break, which would be great!) And finally, I applied for a job and, two days ago, found out they're flying me out for an interview! It's a job that centers around aural skills teaching, so the teaching part of my interview is rather stressful to think about--aural skills teaching is so dependent on the class's abilities and personalities. But it'll be exciting nonetheless.

And perhaps most important of all, yesterday, Sara stumbled across the recipe to the most delicious cheesy breads/rolls I've ever had, which just happen to be naturally gluten-free. Chenette and Bakker families, be forewarned that you will need tapioca starch when we visit next....

For various reasons, I decided to go on a long run today. I've been pretty good about running regularly lately, but my normal route was getting boring and I wanted to see if I could push myself. I plotted out an 8 mile run that would take me to some areas of Bloomington I hadn't seen before, and that wouldn't tempt me to cut my route short—a temptation that almost certainly would have been irresistible. (My previous longest run in the past several months was only about 4 1/2 miles, and my longest ever was around seven.)

Well, unfortunately, I took a wrong turn at about the midpoint of the route. Figuring this out was a little demoralizing, and between that and some particularly brutal hills that decided to intervene around the same time, I realized I had to opt for some walking. I found my way back to my route with the help of a kind high school student, and managed to make it home with only a little bit more walking (again, only on uphill sections).

Imagine my surprise when I plotted out the amended route and found that it was over 10 miles—and that even assuming that I walked more than a mile, I almost certainly ran about 9 miles!

October is here! Sara and I celebrated with some pumpkins, and our friends Kyle and Wan:



Don't worry, only one of the creatures in the photo was a model for a pumpkin design...

The semester is off to a good start! My class is really interested and engaged, so I'm always excited to teach.

But I think it's about time for a garden update! We have had some successes and some not so great successes in our garden this year: in previous posts, for example, I posted some very nice pictures of homegrown corn, but because of uneven shade, it was rather poorly fertilized, and we left it on the cob a bit too long and it was a bit starchy. Our tomatoes were also hit with blight: we planted about 13 in the garden and five in the front yard, and between the blight and the people who mow our yard we are down to one in the front and three in the back. But the ones in back are about to start giving us tomatoes again, and we found a volunteer in the front that we think is from last year's cherry tomatoes.

Here's the coming tomato in the back:



And here is our volunteer, who has totally engulfed our pretty flowers:



At the same time, we have lots of good things happening now. Our pepper plants have started to yield some beautiful peppers:



And judging from the amount of flowers they have, we're in for a lot more:



Our leeks are very healthy:




Our collard greens seem very happy:



And best of all, one of our new raspberry plants is miraculously overburdened with at least 75 berries. Needless to say, we're very excited about this!



Also, after ripping out the corn, we had lots of room to start some new things for the fall. It's always exciting to see new plants, and I'm having a lot of fun encouraging our new beans and peas:

It's a beautiful morning (10 AM and not even quite 70 degrees!) so I was just outside checking out the garden.

Not everything is going well. The blight has completely killed two of our tomato plants, and is affecting every one. (It looks like, though we got an average of about one a day for the last two months, we won't get any more for a while.) Our greens--broccoli, cabbage, and collards--were all nearly destroyed by those annoying worms, though they've since disappeared (and it looks like the plants are coming back). The corn is affected by both worms and, because we have a small plot with uneven sun, poor fertilization.

Nevertheless, we ate a lot of corn from our garden yesterday:




We have lots of (seemingly blight-unaffected... knock on wood) beautiful peppers, some of which are starting to turn red:



And our leek and parsnip are getting large and delicious-looking:




Raspberries seem to be forming on the plants, and we just started some more salad mix and arugula to carry us through the end of the season. Things just keep growing!

And, because no post is complete without a cat picture, here's one. We let Nadia sleep with us the past two nights, a privilege she hasn't had for months, and she was so happy she actually joined her nemesis on his favorite chair for several hours:

My latest diagnosis (for a swollen arm) is Thoracic Outlet Syndrome.

Sometimes, I feel like a less contented version of Master Yü:

"All at once Master Yü fell ill. Master Ssu went to ask how he was. 'Amazing!' said Master Yü. 'The Creator is making me all crookedy like this! My back sticks up like a hunchback and my vital organs are on top of me. My chin is hidden in my navel, my shoulders are up above my head, and my pigtail points at the sky. It must be some dislocation of the yin and yang!' Yet he seemed calm at heart and unconcerned. Dragging himself haltingly to the well, he looked at his reflection and said, 'My, my! So the Creator is making me all crookedy like this!'
" 'Do you resent it?' asked Master Ssu.
" 'Why no, what would I resent? If the process continues, perhaps in time he'll transform my left arm into a rooster. In that case I'll keep watch on the night. Or perhaps in time he'll transform my right arm into a crossbow pellet and I'll shoot down an owl for roasting. Or perhaps in time he'll transform my buttocks into cartwheels. Then, with my spirit for a horse, I'll climb up and go for a ride. What need will I ever have for a carriage again?
" 'I received life because the time had come; I will lose it because the order of things passes on."
-Zuangzi

"I observed a custome in all those Italian Cities and towns through which I passed, that is not used in any other country that I saw in my travels... The Italian and also most strangers that are commorant in Italy, doe alwaies at their meales use a little forke when they cut their meat. For while with their knife which they hold in one hand they cut the meate out of the dish, they fasten their forke which they hold in their other hand upon the same dish, so that whatsoever he be that sitting in the company of any others at meale, shoulde unadvisedly touch the dishe of meate with his fingers from which all at table doe cut, he will give occasion of offense unto the company... This forme of feediing I understand is generally used in all places of Italy, their forkes being for the most part made of yron or steele, and some of silver... The reason of this their curiosity is, because the Italian cannot by any means indure to have his dish touched with fingers, seeing all men's fingers are not alike cleane."
-Thomas Coryat, 1600s

A year ago today, I became the happiest man in the world.

A few months ago, in the middle of a large notation-based project, I finally broke down and updated to the most recent version of Finale music notation software. Finale is one of those programs that is updated every year, charges more than $100 to upgrade, and seldom makes improvements designed for me (the academic user and semi-professional typesetter, I guess). And another annoying aspect is perfectly captured by the Finale 2011 brochure/advertisement I just received, which states, among other things,

"And you'll never accidentally lose these edits by changing something else."

Shouldn't this be a bug fix???

I teach my first class as visiting lecturer two weeks from today!

This class, Music Theory and Literature V, has a broad mission: to teach students a core repertoire of 20th- and 21st-century music, to learn techniques of analysis for this repertoire (particularly pitch-class sets and serial techniques), make them aware of major musical, aesthetic, and philosophical trends of this period, and maybe even get them to like some of this music. We meet for almost 4 hours every week for 15 weeks. In short, it's a lot of responsibility, but I also anticipate it'll be really fun. I love the repertoire and really look forward to testing my ideas about teaching it.

In the meantime, I have a few long-term projects that I'm working on. My hourly test-designing job for the school has been extended by the family emergency of one of the professors who I'm consulting with. I have to give a paper at this year's meeting of the Society for Music Theory (really, get to do so, but while I'm writing the paper, it feels like an obligation): they have such an early deadline for proposals (I think it was in January) that I'm quite ready to be done with this particular topic. And I have a year from mid-July to finish all my qualifying exams and my dissertation proposal. Each one of these tasks is relatively long-term and self-directed: theoretical/speculative papers, theoretical/speculative dissertation proposals, tests, and classes are all things on which one could spend an infinite amount of time preparing and never feel quite done. So I'm starting to feel that frustration, and the difficulty of prioritizing between long-term projects. But all of them have some amount of excitement (at least when I don't let them bog me down) and I think it'll all work out well.

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Two and a half weeks ago Sara and I went on a quick tour of some interesting sites in southwestern Indiana. This trip feels like old news by now, but I have to share some pictures:

Vincennes, Indiana, is pretty unknown today, but at one time it was the capital of the large Indiana territory; and from 1804-1805 William Henry Harrison governed all of the Indiana and Louisiana territories (that is, the entire western half of the US) from here. It was also the site of the Battle of Vincennes, the only major Revolutionary War battle west of the 13 colonies and north of the Ohio River that was won by the Americans, and thus the primary reason that the United States acquired all the land between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes (sorry, Canadian friends).

The town is a bit rundown now, but they have a cute downtown, as well as a rather incongruous National Park with a (70 foot tall?) neo-Classical monument:



The monument houses 30-foot-tall murals, including one depicting the settlement of "the West" by, among others, a distant Chenette relative by the name of Boone:



We also toured the mansion of William Henry Harrison, a rather interesting figure and the shortest-serving President in our nation's history:



Then we headed to New Harmony, host of two utopian settlements in the early 1800s. The short version, as told by the interpreters there, goes something like this. A bunch of German immigrants, expecting the coming of Christ in their lifetimes, gave all their money to their leader, George Rapp, and moved here; they were celibate and led lives of austerity, work, and prayer; and their handcrafted goods were so highly prized that they left after ten years to go back to Pennsylvania for access to eastern markets. They sold the town wholesale to Robert Owen, an idealistic British industrialist, who wished to create a utopian society of artists and intellectuals. Unfortunately, no one really knew how to farm very well or how to fix things, and with a bunch of artists and scientists you're bound to get a few big egos, and this community was a flop in about 3 years. However, the Owen family was tightly connected to the town until Jane Owen's death about a month ago (actually, maybe even still).

Unfortunately, we didn't get any pictures of the neat old houses, barracks, etc. (children moved out of their parents' homes and into barracks at age 14). But we did get a taste of the old in the labyrinth:




and the new (there's a lot of idealistic modern art and spirituality there now) in this structure, the central focus of the "Roofless church," which houses a Lipchitz sculpture:



We camped that night in Harmonie State Park, which was decent but sadly didn't open their pool for us the next morning; still, we got to see the sun set on the Wabash:



And on the way home we stopped at Hemlock Cliffs, an "area of particular beauty in the Hoosier National Forest," which certainly lived up to its billing:



This (at the time mostly dry) 70-foot waterfall with a walking ledge behind was particularly spectacular (though, sadly, they did not allow rock climbing):



It was a lot of fun!

We arrived home from a great trip to Canada two nights ago, only to find that our corn is about 12 feet tall:



And that we had lots of new tomatoes, bringing our total for the season (we're keeping track, since it's our first garden and we want to impress ourselves) to 31:

I passed!

As you can tell, our corn is in a celebratory mood:


Our tomatoes also seem basically pleased:

We had a great, if warm, visit from Mom and Dad:


And even Oliver managed to have some fun:

On to other projects!

I took my test yesterday!

There were a few things that didn't go so well. In particular, I had intended to use voice dictation software, to take it easy on my wrists--the graduate office had gone to the trouble of borrowing a laptop from the Adaptive Technology center, installing everything, and meeting with me to make sure it worked--and then an important feature that I use at home happened to be turned off! I remembered that this was the default setting, and that you could change it somehow, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was called, so I messed with it for about five wasted minutes, and then just typed the rest.

I also said that Datemi pace by de Rore in 1557--one of my "unprepared score identification" excerpts--was by Willaert in 1550 (oops), and one of my essays was rather bland, unfocused, and (I know from meeting with my test-writer) not what was wanted.

But I think I probably will pass, and I have to keep in mind that with a timed exam, not everything can be perfect.

Regardless, I'm relishing the freedom from studying! It was very satisfying to put away the thousands of pages of notes, scores, and textbooks I've been working with for the past five months.

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In the meantime, here are some edible experiments we've been trying lately. Sara's family gave us a food dehydrator--it's used and may not last long, but made some delicious "sun-dried" tomatoes:



(The tomatoes are sadly not from our garden: our tomato plants are full of tomatoes, but they're all still green, and many of the plants are showing dramatic signs of wilt.)

The tomatoes at work, along with our first batch of pesto from garden basil:



Wood sorrel, which grows all over our yard and which we have been using to make a distinctively lemonade-like sorrel tea:

I have my first qualifying exam in less than 3 days, so that's weighing on my mind lately. But at the same time, I'm getting excited for the course I'll be teaching this fall! It'll be the final course of the required Music Theory curriculum at IU, and covers 20th- and 21st-century music and analytical techniques.

Very often such classes have an element of "look at all the crazy stuff people have done!" to them. This is especially true once you get past about 1970--generally people invoke the idea that "history has not yet made its judgment" about this period, and veer from unique piece to unique piece, talking more about characteristics or generalities than theories, structure, harmony, rhythm...

I can certainly understand this, and there's something to be said about exposing students to a bunch of crazy music. But in my classroom, I want every piece to be taken seriously; I want students to know that there's always something specific, musical, and interesting they can say about a piece of music; and I especially don't want to be lecturing all the time.

I really want students to feel they have to work hard, to get practice writing detailed, analytical prose, and to take ownership of the material.

These are all difficult goals, but ones I'm getting excited thinking about. Clearly, there's no "off" time in academia...

The first parsnips of the season! The smaller ones really aren't worth much, obviously, but they were in with the strawberries, which, frankly, are much more important, so they had to go.

Considering how early it is in the season (hardly July), I think things are looking promising on the parsnip front...