I don't know what happened today. There was some sort of yellow thing up in the sky, with some blue stuff around it, and it was all very shiny. What happened to the grey we've become used to, and the water continuously falling? Surely 9 inches of rain for this month (plus more coming) is not enough?

I completed several important tasks today. One was selling the logic board of my old computer. It's hard to believe, but I've only sold about 2/3 of the parts and already the total income (for a broken, 6-year-old computer!) has been well over $150 (of course, before shipping and ebay fees, the former of which in particular has been expensive).

Second was spending money--on a new bike! The axle on the old one broke, and the people at the bike shop said they just kept finding rusted-out parts and problems, and suggested I get a new one. Here's the sweet new ride (and the other sweet, well, still somewhat new, gas-powered ride):




The third was to complete a draft of my paper for the Music Theory Midwest conference. For once, I'm actually quite happy with the paper in its early stages, but as usual, it's far too long. There's a lot of example-making to do still, which is bad because it's time-consuming but good because I think some of the text will end up in examples, freeing up space. This was actually the second big project for the semester, the first (and more important) being becoming ABD, and the third and yet to come being preparing for teaching this summer. Obviously, I've still got some time on that last one. It'll feel good to get this paper into almost-done shape, which I plan to do by the end of the week--it'll be a big load off.

Okay, the cat who bullies his sister (just look at the difference between their tails!)...



...conks out on the couch...



...always jumps up on the island to help us when we make yogurt...



...and is just so cute and fuzzy...



...needs his food. Time to go!

Happy Easter!

Here's what our garden looked like almost exactly a year ago, April 16, 2010:



And here's what our garden looks like today, April 19, 2011:



(the tarp is holding some mulch that will go around the tiny plants in the back when they're bigger.)

The biggest difference is the strawberries, which are much healthier this year! But even the rhubarb seems larger. I don't know if it's because we had an earlier spring or because they are more established--probably a combination.

Even more exciting is a raspberry comparison. Last year, we had six plants, most of which looked about like this on May 1, 2010:



Today, we have over 20 plants. Here's most of the patch:



Let's get a few more of this year's highlights so far. Here's a close-up of the rhubarb, just because it's so big, beautiful, and green (and potentially tasty):



Some of our lettuce that survived the winter:



Some peas, which are planted all around the garden and in pots such as this one along the fence:



A close-up of a small portion of our large patch of lily-of-the-valleys at the back corner of the house, which are just starting to open with their intoxicating smell:



And the tail end of the tulips in the front:



We hope to plant most of the rest of our seedlings--basil, cilantro, three kinds of tomatoes, and eggplant (only leaving three kinds of peppers, which don't like the cold)--this weekend. That is, of course, if it ever stops raining.

Fortunately, there's always something to do inside when it's raining, like read a good book.



Or, if you prefer, collapse behind one.

It's spring, and things are growing everywhere. A week and a half ago, we transplanted our seedlings of lettuce, arugula, and leek, and planted beet, snap pea, and spinach seeds that have just sprouted in the last day or two. We also took the plants that lived over the winter--a lot of lettuce and parsley, a few cilantro plants, and two oregano plants--and put them in rows, and they are all getting quite big! The rhubarb has exploded, the raspberries are full of leaves and sending up new stalks all over the place, and over half the strawberry plants have flowers already. Our daffodils in the front are already done blooming, and the tulips started taking over a few days ago. The redbuds and magnolias have been in bloom: in fact, we noticed one magnolia yesterday that had already lost almost all of its flowers. It's all so exciting, but at the same time, there's just a little bit of teasing annoyance: when will we finally get to *eat* things from the garden? We're hoping the (overwintered) lettuce and strawberries will be within the next two weeks, but most everything else will be at the end of May or later.

I think (I hope!) that my health problems are improving. There's never really all that much to say on this front, as any improvement usually seems fleeting. But my knees are clearly better (though not yet pain-free), and I'm pretty sure the same is true of my shoulder and stomach. Healing just takes so much time! It seems like it will still be a long time till I can go running and freely drink tea and wine, eat oranges and spicy food, and relax on my left arm. We'll see. Hopefully all these restrictions on what I can do will pay off.

And I've become a computer parts seller! After months of not wanting to deal with it, I finally took apart my old, destroyed computer and listed all the parts on eBay. I looked up what similar parts had sold for, and tried to list for a little under that, since most people with the patience to take apart laptops are certified computer parts dealers with really good methods of testing. Even so, the total list price was unimaginably high. I'm sure not everything will sell at what I have it listed for--some things may not sell at all. But two sold today--my first two--and it's kind of exciting to finally be getting rid of my old computer (and at a profit).

Finally, I need to write my paper for the conference in May. Somehow, writing conference papers is always agonizing: something about the combination of the spoken format, the limited time period, and the inevitably speculative nature of music theory make putting ideas together difficult. First, I agonize over what exactly the thrust of the paper will be; then, I write (probably the easiest part); then, I spend hours and hours tediously cutting material because inevitably it's too long; and finally, I agonize over it until the last minute, editing right down to the wire. And all for a 20 minute speech to an audience that won't know much about 16th-century music, and a brief line on my resume. Is it really worth it? Who knows.

Off to post my computer parts and write my paper...

Snow White thought for a moment. In protest against agribusiness conglomerates, she had a personal rule against buying food from middlepersons. But her heart went out to the economically marginalized woman, so she said yes. What Snow White didn't know was that this was really the queen in disguise and that the apple had been chemically and genetically altered so that whoever bit it would sleep forever.

When Snow White handed over the money for the apple, you would have expected the queen to be gleeful that her plan for revenge was working. Instead, as she looked at Snow White's fine complexion and slim, taut body, she felt alternating waves of envy and self revulsion. Finally, she burst into tears.

"Why, whatever is the matter?" asked Snow White.

"You're so young and beautiful," sobbed the disguised queen, "and I'm horrible to look at and getting worse."

"You shouldn't say that. After all, beauty comes from inside a person."

"I've been telling myself that for years," said the queen, "and I still don't believe it. How do you stay in such perfect shape?"

"Well, I meditate, work out in step aerobics three hours a day, and eat only half-portions of anything placed in front of me. Would you like me to show you?"

"Oh yes, yes, please," said the queen. So they started out with 30 minutes of simple hatha yoga meditation, then worked out on the step for another hour. As they relaxed afterward, Snow White cut her apple in half and gave a piece to the queen. Without thinking, the queen bit into it, and both of them fell into a deep sleep.

-Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life and Times by James Finn Garner, which I just got at the library booksale for $1

I'm ABD!

I'll admit: I was fooled. We had beautiful weather for so long I thought it was here for good. This happens every year. Two days ago, we had a high of mid-70s. Then all of a sudden, yesterday, we had a high of just over 40, and that will continue for the foreseeable future. We still go on walks, but less than before, and our plans to plant our leek, lettuce, and arugula seedlings out in the garden have been put off a few days until we can acclimatize them to the new normal. The beautiful daffodils out front, and the spring flowers everywhere, now seem a little out of place.

My best guess is that Mother Nature saw I scheduled my oral qualifying exam for Tuesday April 5, and didn't want me to be too distracted before then. Then, as soon as I am done and ABD, she will jack up the temperature again, and I will happily go spend time in the garden...

Actually, gardens! Yesterday we met with a representative of the local neighborhood association, and agreed to take care of 3 (!) (very small) plots at the nearby community garden! It's about 3 blocks away, which will be annoying for watering purposes but not a bad distance in general. We plan to grow some squash over there, and to put in our extra tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants (we always manage to start too many). I'm not sure that will fill 3 plots, but we will be imaginative. And we'll have our work cut out for us.

But that's good, because again, the temperature's going up after I finish the qualifying process. Right?

I passed my major field exam! My committee chair says it was strong, and he'd recommend I schedule my orals very soon. Onward....

Here's what I did on my Spring Break.

We went to visit Sara's family on a whim, without telling them. It was really nice to see them, although I am sad to say they had a lot of snow on the ground. (We hadn't had snow for several weeks.)

Having played a bit of crokinole with the Bakkers, we decided to get out our old carroms/crokinole board and repair it. While we haven't gotten around to the "repair" part yet, we did a bit of research on it. It turns out it was made in 1937--pretty cool!

And I wrote a program to help teach my summer students about pitch-class set labels. The program is here. It's in, let's say, public beta, which means I'm open to comments/suggestions from anyone! I recognize that I made it way too small, but if you download the swf file (right-click/control-click here and download the file) and open it from your computer, your computer will allow you to make the window bigger, which should resize all the elements within.

It's spring break!

Things are really growing around here. As I cleared some of the fall leaves from the garden, I discovered the strange sight of newly-emerged rhubarb.



We have lots of seedlings under our little grow-light: eggplants, tomatoes, peppers; and just today we started hardening off our leek, lettuce, and arugula outside.



Furthest along, of course, are the bulbs. The daffodils Sara painstakingly redistributed last year are going to be beautiful.



We've also done some cleaning--the oven, the basement. And I've been spending some time with coding (as in for computers)--creating a website for Trillium Waterworks (an excellent Canadian company that probably doesn't know I'm making a website for them) and writing some pedagogical tools for the class I'll be teaching this summer. It's sure nice to be able to take time for some things that usually get short shrift.

And a whole week of no obligations ahead! With mid-60s projected this week, we may have to go camping....

The following is a reasonably good representation of my mind about 24 hours ago:



These are the notes I took on one of my three copies of this score in the two weeks leading up to my exam yesterday. (Music theory-minded readers may note that this copy of the score was the one on which I worked with transformational approaches such as inversions/transpositions and Klumpenhouwer Networks, neither of which was very persuasive.) I reproduced much of this, in much cleaner form, in the version I handed in. I also made some mildly impressive-looking geometrical representations of pitch-class set relationships:



Again, this technique wasn't the most fruitful analytically, and I wouldn't blame my committee if they wonder, as they grade the test, why I used it. The answer is at least in part that it was described in an article added to my bibliography by one of the committee members, and it's a terribly written article, and I had to read it so many times, and in my determination to learn what was going on, I tried to apply it to this piece, even when it clearly wasn't going to be very helpful. I don't know if they'll be sympathetic to that, but we'll see!

In general, the test went quite well. The first half, in particular, seemed almost easy: I was given four questions on the history of music theory and asked to answer two, and honestly I could have written for a long time on all four. Then the tonal analysis question was exactly what I'd been given two weeks before, and I had (I think) some pretty good insights on the questions asked. So on my lunch break, I felt great.

The afternoon was less good, but still decent. In the first question, on the piece pictured above, as I mentioned, I used some techniques that show my understanding of the material but maybe aren't the most applicable to the piece. And for the second question, I felt my answer wasn't sufficiently in depth. But I anticipate that I will pass, and just have to pursue those matters further for my aural exam--the last stage before I become ABD! I'll hear for sure in about 3 weeks.

History of Music Theory Oscars

In the spirit of the upcoming Oscars and my upcoming exam, here are my nominations for some awards from the history of music theory:

Best name: Rocco Rodio (or, if you restrict it to major theorists, Guido d'Arezzo)

Most famous based on a relative: Vincenzo Galilei

Best footnote: the footnote to Rameau's (inaccurate) claim that he is the first to recognize chordal inversion ("On this point, see all other treatises on music")

...more to come (maybe?)...

Well, it had to come sometime: the end of our birthday celebration(s).  Last weekend we went to Indianapolis to celebrate with Grandma Chenette (whose birthday is the day after mine), then we went out to eat on Wednesday, and then Sara's family came down from Friday till today.  Before today, when I looked at what was going on in our lives, I saw a qualifying exam in the distant future, slightly obscured by a haze of celebrations and partying.  Now, I look ahead, and see quite clearly: on Tuesday, I receive the "prepare-ahead" materials for half of my exam, and then I take the whole exam on March 1.  In between now and then is just normal life: studying and preparing all day, broken up by preparing to teach/teaching/grading and cooking.  (Well, obviously, there will be the occasional get-together with good friends, puzzling with Sara, etc.--I'm not saying it's all bad!)

I'm at the point where it's hard to get really motivated, because I feel like my knowledge is pretty good, and anything studied at this point probably will help me on the exam (filling in gaps), but equally probably will also delete itself from my mind the minute it's over.  Fortunately, I think getting the prepared materials on Tuesday will help motivate me.

So I'm headed into the final stretch!  Well, except for the oral exam, and then, of course, actually writing the dissertation.  I think when I get my degree, my elation at completing this long stage of training will be matched by my bewilderment that such a day would ever arrive.

This has been a bad week. (Mom's birthday excepted of course--yay Mom!) But rather than dwelling on the negative, this post will be dedicated to something I'm always excited about, even months too early--our garden!

Here's what we'll be growing for the first time this year, and the seed company's descriptions. If this is boring to you, just skip it.

Bull's Blood Beets: This beautiful beet has deep reddish-purple leaves! Very sweet and delicious, the baby leaves are a rage in salads. The beets are tasty too, and have pretty pink rings inside.

Ping Tung Eggplants: A wonderful eggplant from Ping Tung, Taiwan. Fruits are purple and up to 18 inches long and 2 inches in diameter. This variety is so sweet and tender, superbly delicious! One of the best Chinese eggplants on the market.

Lipstick Peppers: A delicious pepper with 4-inch long tapered, pimiento type fruit that are super sweet. This fine pepper is early and ripens well in the north. A flavorful favorite with thick, red flesh.

Bloomsdale Long-Standing Spinach: The old standard since 1925, does better in hot weather than most. Glossy, deep green, delicious leaves.

Pineapple Tomatoes (our favorite from the farmer's market): Very large, up to 2 lbs. each. The yellow fruit has red marbling through the flesh and is one of the most beautiful tomatoes we sell. The flavor is very sweet and fruity; good yields!

Japanese Black Trifele Tomatoes: Attractive tomatoes are the shape and size of a Bartlett pear with a beautiful purplish-brick color; the fruit are perfect and smooth with no cracks. The flavor is absolutely sublime, having all the richness of fine chocolate. This was our heaviest producer for 2004. The plants produced loads of fruit all summer long.

Exciting!

Here's a quick update on my Baking Odyssey!

Here's what I used up today:

All-purpose flour
Whole-wheat flour
Rye flour
Soy flour (contaminated)
Wheat germ
Wheat bran
Powdered sugar (contaminated)
Buckwheat flour (contaminated)
Vegetable shortening (contaminated)

Believe it or not, all of these went into a batch of english muffins that is rising right now. I'm hoping it's not a problem for their texture that most of these items don't have significant gluten content--we'll see!

And now, here's what I have left:

Some contaminated tapioca balls
A bag of contaminated poppy seeds
Some contaminated sesame seeds (these are easy to use up)
A package of straight-up breadcrumbs (I guess I'll give these away)
Lots and lots of oats (breakfast for the next few months)
A package of contaminated quinoa.

I can hardly believe that I've accomplished my goal of finishing up all the flours. A few months ago--even just a few weeks ago!--that seemed like an impossible task. So now I can soak and wash my rolling pin and the beautiful apron Claire gave me last Christmas, and finally dedicate them to gluten-free lives!

I was thinking of giving you the updated list of items in the freezer, but that's kind of boring. Suffice to say that it's like the list in my previous post, but longer.

I'll still be eating glutenous things at home for a few months, but no more baking and throwing flour around the kitchen. That's exciting.

I've gone crazy baking.

The back-story is that I was never really excited about baking with gluten when Sara is so sensitive to it--not only did ambient gluten seem like a problem, but it meant that anytime I ate something with wheat, rye, barley, or contaminated oats in it, I felt like I was rubbing poison over my hands and face and had to be very careful around Sara. So we decided two months ago that I'd go gluten-free too (at least at home). (Actually, it wasn't all saintly motives--I also dislike the kind of meticulous, multi-stage cleanup that has to follow every glutenous baking binge.)

The problem was that we've always both been into baking. So we had a few issues: 2 partially-full 25-lb bags of white flour, 1 of whole-wheat flour, and various amounts of wheat bran and germ, oat bran, rye flour, contaminated cornmeal, contaminated cocoa, contaminated sugar (brown and white), etc. I couldn't let this all go to waste! Especially since gluten-free food is often a little more expensive than its glutenous alternatives (oats, for example, charge a premium for the guarantee of purity), I felt I had to wring some value out of these remnants of our former lives!

So I've been baking like mad. I just bake much more than I could possibly eat in the short term, and throw most of it in the freezer. Now that we have a deep-freezer, that's no problem. So right now, our freezers together contain (all made by me in the past month or two):

1 bag of flour tortillas
2 bags of rye buns with cheese in the middle
1 bag of bagels
1 loaf rye bread
1 loaf bran bread
1 loaf Nova Scotia brown bread
1 container rye cookies
1 bag of whole-wheat biscuits
1 container of sesame crackers

There may be more that I'm not remembering. I still have the following to get through:

rye flour (a few cups)
cornmeal (a few cups)
all-purpose flour (about 1 cup)
whole-wheat flour (about 3 cups)
wheat bran (about 3 cups)
wheat germ (about 3 cups)
contaminated soy flour (way too much)
contaminated cocoa (about 1.5 cups)
wheat gluten (about half a cup)
and a few other things.

My goal was to get through it all by Christmas, and then be mostly gluten-free (but with the occasional treat from the freezer) next semester. I may not quite make that goal (darn soy flour), but I'll be baking a lot more before we leave to visit our families, I'm sure!

Here's how I know Oliver missed me when I was on my interview. Sara said that at night, after scaring Nadia off the bed, he left and slept in his box (and he always sleeps with me, either between my legs or to the side). And when I came in, he was squeaking at me and following me, then when I sat down he leapt up for 30 seconds, got down and nuzzled/attacked my feet for a minute or two, then got back up and started getting settled to go to sleep.

What a sweetie...

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!