Cat Sitting Still

So you may recall I built a canoe rack a year or two ago. And it has been serving its purpose admirably and I've been pretty happy with it. The main structural elements were pressure treated 4 x 4s (pressure treated wood is the stuff that looks greenish brown) and the bracing and the actual bars that the canoes rested on were plain 2 x 4s (spruce, I think; I don't remember.)

A couple of afternoons ago I was looking thoughtfully out of the kitchen window (my rack is in front of the kitchen window) and saw a large black bee emerge from the bottom of one of the 2 x 4 bars... and fly away.

Shit! Carpenter bees!

I went outside promptly to investigate. Carpenter bees gnaw perfectly round holes in wood -- a bit smaller than a dime. They tunnel into the wood and I think they set up housekeeping in there. Having them in my canoe rack was totally unacceptable because while they hadn't bothered the canoes yet, and probably wouldn't bother the hulls in any case, they might be persistent enough to get through the varnish and into the fittings--the gunwales, the seats. I couldn't have that. Also once they settle in they send out scouts and might start attacking anything else made of wood nearby, which includes parts of the house.

Something Had To Be Done.

I went to the hardware store; they thought they had a bee trap but were still testing it. As an interim measure Kip and I moved the canoes off the rack, moved the rack away from the house, and sprayed it with the wasp poison Kip bought last summer when we had the burrowing wasps in the front yard. (What IS it with Tennessee and horrible insects?)

The bees were utterly unimpressed. The update from the hardware store was that the bee trap did not work. I decided that the thing to do was remove the infested parts, rebuild the rack with clean wood, and paint it. I bought 2 new 2 X 4s and Kip picked up oil-based stain. This morning I took the rack apart (I am SO glad I used screws to put it together) and inspected all the pieces for bee holes. Only two bars had been infected, so I put them in a contractor grade trashbag and wired the top shut. I cut replacements for them, put everything back together again, and put stain all over everything.

Those horrible bees were already sniffing around the new bars when I opened the can of stain.

I finished at pretty near 11 am this morning. I figure that is a good morning's work. I hope it works.

 Okay, so there's the present tense.  Let's use "to see" for this, so it would be "I see."
There's the present perfect (sometimes called the past perfect) "I have seen"  Means an action is completed.  
There's the past.  "I saw."
There's the past perfect (sometimes called "the pluperfect") "I had seen."  Means an action was complete at some point in the past.
There's the future.  "I will see."
There's the future perfect.  Wait for it... I bet you can guess... "I will have seen."
There's the conditional.  "I would see."  Dependent on the truth of another assertion, possibly one that is counterfactual (untrue, or very unlikely.)
There's the ...(drum roll please) the conditional perfect.  The envelope please....  Ladies and gentlemen, I present "I would have seen." !

Those are the tenses Dutch uses, and Dutch constructs them mostly with helper verbs, the way English does.  (Well apparently Dutch has an "I am seeing" (present progressive) equivalent except as far as I can tell it means the same thing as I see and doesn't get used much.)  The helper verbs are kind of irregular, drat them, but I suppose that is par for the course, and they're not all *that* irregular.

I am not getting into pronouns here.  I am still sulking about the pronouns and it wouldn't be pretty.  I will say I spent *hours* trying to figure out the damn pronouns once I realized the Verbix website and the book were different and I couldn't tell which to use.

The mimmoths (de mammoetjes) are really into this for some reason.

 My parents came to the US from Holland (which is technically 2 provinces of the Netherlands) via Canada before I was born.  They spoke English at home so I never learned Dutch, beyond a few words to please grown up relatives who visited on rare occasions.

Now I'm working on learning it.  (Ik werk om het te leren)  My mimmoths are working on learning it too.  (Mijn mammoetjes werken ook om het te leren).  My mimmoths are happy (Mijn mammoetjes zijn blij.)  

I wonder if "to be" is an irregular verb in every language?  Maybe not Esperanto or the constructed languages.... I need to make some flashcards or get a flashcard ap.  An ap might be better as I could (if it's a clever ap) include the pronunciations.

And Eli gave me a pdf of a book that actually *explains* the rules instead of just giving me individual dialogs so I can figure things out ahead of time instead of just memorizing things.  And some rocking songs with Dutch lyrics.  They're kid's songs but that's just fine with me.

 This time because a five year old boy shot and killed his two year old sister.  Accidentally, though at that age whether he *could* kill on purpose is kind of a philosophical question.

What there is no doubt about is that he did it using a rifle made and marketed for kids his age.  What kind of person gives a five year old a gun?  Well, whatever kind of person it is, they seem to be common enough to support a specialty market.

Also according to the article the community is rallying around the family and appears to believe that this was just a horrible accident that could happen to anyone.  I beg to differ.  It could not happen to people who don't have guns.  It also could not happen to responsible gun owners, because responsible gun owners would have come back from target shooting with their child, and immediately removed the firing pin from the rifle (presumably discovering it was loaded in the process), locked the rifle up in one place, and locked the firing pin up in a different place, preferably offsite.  

It's just that there are people who want to own guns, but think safe storage practices are too much trouble.  They call themselves "responsible" but what they mean is "I haven't had a serious accident yet."

I think it's a lot of trouble to be responsible with a gun too.  It's one of the reasons I don't own one, in spite of having used them on occasion.

If only there was some way to get guns out of the hands of irresponsible people, you know?  Before we have one kid dead and one kid growing up with the knowledge that either he was to blame, or his parents were.

 I try to exercise regularly, and since I never seem to have enough time, this usually involves walking near my house rather than going to the gym, because that way all the time involved can be devoted to exercise rather than wasting some of it driving.

But today the weather was miserable even by my standards; it just would. Not. Quit. Raining and I was feeling very unambitious, so I drove over to the Carson Newman gym and rode the stationary recumbent bike there and read my book.  I haven't biked in quite a long time, and while I didn't set the resistance very high I did pedal for 50 minutes, dripping sweat most of the time, and my knees felt quite funny when I stopped.  Funny enough that walking up the stairs to walk myself cool on the indoor track did not appeal and I walked up and down the hallway a few times instead.

It's good to do different things for exercise I guess, just to keep the muscles up for different activities, but I will probably mostly walk still.  It's just so much more convenient.

I'm working on learning a couple of new pieces on the mandolin.  One is Harvest Home which Tim Walker mentioned at FKO and which I found online.  The other is a piece one of my old boyfriends used to play and I expect the only way to find out its name will be to play it well enough to put up a recording and ask.  I don't know of any way to search on notes, and it has no lyrics.  But I guess I can do that.  

And I've been practicing vocals for my newer songs, since if all goes well I will start recording in a couple of months.  Some of the older newer songs I had kind of set aside by this point, so I hadn't worked on getting all their vowels nice and everything, and it's interesting to hear the changes taking place as I practice the vocals as vocals, instead of singing them while concentrating on the mandolin.  It also gives me a chance to think about which ones are ...not the cleverest or the newest, but the nicest sounding when sung, which is something I ought to be considering as I choose what will go on the next CD

 I got Delta CAD for the Mac yesterday.  It's a 2-D computer aided design program that Terry, the sound engineer who offered to advise me about my recording booth, said was a good one to do plans in, seeing as he was having trouble interpreting my pencil drawings.

I ran through the tutorial yesterday and it's actually quite a clever little program.  You can tell it you want to draw lines, and there are different buttons for horizontal, and vertical lines (as well as a button for lines that go any which way you set.)  This is nice because it makes it easy to draw  lines that are perfectly parallel or perpendicular.  Furthermore you can specify the length of any line you draw--you can even set a scale (1/2 inch = 1 foot to choose a nonrandom example) and then pick one end of the line and type in 5' 8 3/4" and it draws a line representing a 5' 8 3/4" line drawn at that scale.

If you draw a line 31 inches long and you meant it to be 32, you can pick Edit, pick the scale button and type 32/31 and have it redraw itself to be the right length.

You can have the house plan in one layer, the layout of the crawlspace in another (and then scootch the crawlspace layout around so that the place the water-in pipe went in through the wall in the crawlspace lines up with the place the water-in pipe comes out of the wall under the toilet and now you know about where everything is under the floor) and the recording booth in a third.

I have the house plan for the area entered, and also the crawlspace layout (water, sewer, vents, joists) entered and am in the process of drawing the booth.  And the hours have been just melting away.  It's fascinating.  It was 40$ which was a bit daunting, but I think it may be worth it just for the entertainment value.

Back from FKO.  Wonderful con!  

Stayed with Peter Alway on the way over and back, and playing music with him in the mornings was one of the highlights of the greater FKO metro area, so to speak. :-)  No problems at the border.  I am superstitiously inclined to attribute this to the the Respectable Raincoat I bought for the London trip and will probably wear it for future border crossings.  

Not only did my concert go pretty well, but Kathleen said I was in the best voice she'd ever heard me, which made me feel really good.  I thought the vocal practice was making me sound better but it's nice to have outside confirmation.  Tim and Annie  Walker were a delight, and one of these days we will get to play some session tunes together I hope.  Many wonderful concerts--The Future Of Filk completely blew me away (not a band; theme concert--great performers I'd never heard before).  US filk may or may not be greying but Canadian filk has a bright future.  

Missed the Shallow End Circle I'd promised to co-host because I was feeling rotten (4 hrs sleep the night before will do that) but I'm told it went well.  CD consignment table great idea and the person running it was very kind and helpful.  Left a copy of The King's Lute to be given to the local library.

 Wonderful con!

I wrote a song called Look For The Helpers; it's on my hwaet.org site.  There's an mp3 there (linked from the lyrics) so you can listen if you want.  The tune is less than 24 hours old, so it might still change a bit, but I felt like it would be good to put it up soon.

[later edit] Wednesday afternoon I added a verse and altered the tune somewhat based on helpful suggestions from madfilkentist and Tom Smith.

 Yesterday I finally got started on the taxes (and am about half done, I think.)  This had built up in my head into a big deal, but turned out to be only a modest deal once I actually brought myself to begin.  I used one of the free online tax filing companies last year and once I figured out how to log in, found that they had retained a lot of the info I typed in--which meant I didn't have to re-enter it and saved me a lot of time.  I still have to do the final figures for last year on CD sales--I'm going to take a loss on that, but the question is how big a loss--and aside from that I'm pretty much done.

I also arranged a few details for a couple of trips--going to stay with my friend Professor Pete on the way too and from FKO, so that will be like a few extra hours of convention--yay!  And got my practicing and exercising in.

I also crawled under the house and traced the HVAC vents down there.  My recording booth is going to need to be tied into the HVAC system, since it will be in the garage, which experiences fairly major temperature swings, and it will be very well insulated and nearly airtight.  It turns out there is a vent in the corner of the living room that comes up through the wall, and it looks like if I graft another vent onto it and bring it up one joist over, I can get it in the wall of the bathroom next to the garage without having to mess with the concrete slab the garage, and bathroom, and rumpus room sit on.  So it looks like, with appropriate skilled help, this can be done without breaking into any walls except the one in the bathroom next to the garage.  Since that room is already unlovely, my standards for the level of final finish are modest there, and if that bathroom is out of service for a week or two, no one will miss it.

I'm noticing that come mid-afternoon my tummy starts hurting.  And it hurts unless I have eaten recently pretty much right up to bedtime, which is why I've been eating so much in the evenings.  I need to figure out what is making it hurt and stop that at the source, because eating every ten minutes is not a viable long-term strategy.

 I went to Boston for the weekend, by way of Atlanta, which means I have been in the car 2 1/2 days solid driving up and 2 1/2 days solid driving back and I'm so very glad to be home.

And my friends Alice and Marie got married, in the great liberal state of Massachusetts, where such a thing is possible, and I got to be there.  I paced them through the administrative portion of the process (several forms to get and fill out and such) and everyone involved gave every appearance of wishing them just as well as any other couple.  

Thank you, Massachusetts.  May the sun shine kindly on you and the rains rain gently; may your flocks wax fat and your lands bloom fair.

 I've been meaning to make the Echo's Children CDs available on Bandcamp for a while.  I was putting it off because I had a feeling it would be a pain in the neck, but it turned out to be easier than I thought in some ways.  Though it does take about eight hours to upload an album worth of music--an Echo's Children album, at least, since we tended to put around an hour's worth of songs on a CD.  The Echo's Children bandcamp page is here.   For some reason the main page will only display three albums but if you click on any of them, all four albums will be displayed in the sidebar.

This means that Under The Gripping Beast, which had gone out of print, is now available again, if only as downloads.  I'm glad about that.  

Still need to finish designing my recording booth and start actually building, though.  Sigh.  I'm going to try to figure out the ceiling today.  A staggered stud wall is well understood; a staggered joist ceiling, less so, but I think it should work on the same principles.  Plus I'd better make a setlist for FKO and start practicing those particular songs!  This is a good problem to have, but I'd better start working on it; I wouldn't want to disappoint anyone.

HabitRPG is a sort of mix of gaming and a to-do list.  There are three categories you can add things to.  "Habits" are things you may want to do several times a day, "dailies" are once-a-day things and "to-dos" are one-time things.  You type them in yourself, and you can add or subtract new ones all along, as far as I can tell.

"Good" actions (as you define them--but doing the good side of a habit, or checking off a daily, or checking off a to-do) gain you experience and gold.  "Bad" actions (again as you define them--but doing a bad habit, or not checking off a daily) cost you hit points.  You can specify "rewards" (and are encouraged to) and can spend your gold on them (and then presumably go claim them in real life, if that's something you can do.  So you could specify that a new fantasy book is 20 gold, and when you earn that much, you check off the reward and then go to the store and buy your new fantasy book to reward yourself.)

So I thought of a clever new habit "clean kitchen while heating drinks in the microwave."  If I remember to do it, I click the plus side, if I forget, the minus side (but I hardly forget at all now.)  And another new habit "work on new song" and another "meditate."  My dailies are things like "practice mandolin"  "practice octave mandolin" "practice vocals" "exercise"  "three helpings veggies" and stuff like that.  Recent to-dos were "Put Under The Gripping Beast on Bandcamp", and "make playlist of my favorites of Peter's songs"

So far, so good.  The kitchen is, if not quite "sparkling," as Kip claimed this morning, still clean enough that I wouldn't be embarrassed to have a stranger drop in.  I've worked on songs the past three days, and have a couple new ones well on the way to being finished.  Two Echo's Children CDs are up on Bandcamp now, and the third and fourth are in the queue.  I'm doing a lot better than I have been the past couple of months, when it was all I could do to get my practicing done.  I think I like this game.

Okay, so I tried a game called "HabitRPG" because I saw someone mention it was getting them motivated to do stuff. And so far it has gotten me motivated to do stuff, which is pretty impressive. For example I realized that when I heat up a cup of tea or something in the microwave I could clean the kitchen for that minute and twenty seconds instead of just pace around--and now the kitchen is *much* cleaner, and that section of my HabitRPG page has turned blue (indicating I'm making this a habit.)

And someone e-mailed me to ask about getting hold of Under The Gripping Beast--Echo's Children's first CD, which is out of print. Apparently it's offered for sale (a used copy, I suppose) on Amazon for $75 (boggle.) I put it as a "to do" on HabitRPG and managed to get it all uploaded in one day yesterday. For those who are interested, it's at the Echo's Children's bandcamp page, available for $10 for high-quality (CD quality anyway) downloads.

Now the other three CDs are "to dos" on HabitRPG, and we will see--I'm hoping to get one up today, and one up Friday...tomorrow will be a loss, since I'm working at the clinic again which will eat half the day.

And I notice there's more talk about Rape Culture.  Good.  I look forward to the day--which I may not live to see--that people stop assuming other people are meat who exist for their pleasure.  I look forward to the day when people blame rapists for raping, not rape victims for not being able to stop rapists.  I look forward to the day when the only imaginable sex involves a partner or partners who are enthusiastic and enjoying themselves.

Someone unfriended me. For choosing to remain a feminist. If anyone else has a problem with that, now's the time. I'm not about to stop.

[later edit]FWIW I intend to resist the obvious resulting urge to make this journal all-feminism-all-the-time. A) Just because I'm suddenly more interested doesn't mean anyone else will be, and B) I don't like being pushed around like that. [/later edit]

( Possibly triggeryCollapse )

 So It is now about a year since I began daily instrumental practice--going beyond just "play a lot of things once through until you reach half an hour" to "play one thing over and over for five minutes, trying to improve the way I play it; when the timer goes off reset it and move to the next thing; repeat five times."  Along the way I discovered that practicing on the mando was improving my octave mando playing, but only about half as much, and hit on the idea of doing twenty minutes on each instead of half an hour on one.

I also tried playing with a metronome, which was incredibly frustrating at first.  This was because the metronome had never played with me before, poor thing--as I was patient with it and gave it more opportunities, it was remarkable how much better it got.  I won't say it was ever really *good* but it got better.  I was also forced to do without any instrument at all for a week, and went to purely vocal practice instead.  In the process I discovered that the vocals, which I had been thinking of as a "gimme" were in fact improving with practice, which suggested I should be practicing vocals also.

And finally, recently it occurred to me that in addtion to practicing pure instrumentals on my instruments, it would be smart to do the same sort of practice on my countermelodies (melodies I play while singing a different melody against them in performance.).  I had been doing this anyway for "Mayday" but I have started alternating instrumental practice with countermelody practice that includes other countermelodies.

Today I noticed that 1) I'm a lot better at picking out a tune-I-know-but-have-never-played-on-the-mando on the mandolin and 2) I'm a lot better at playing a tune-I-just-learned-out-of-a-book-this-morning.  Not perfect on either one, but *way* better than I would have been last year.

So that is the State Of The Practice, or at least the State Of The Learning That Suggests What The Practice Should Be And Why.  

 So, a guy in Arizona shot himself someplace delicate with a gun he had tucked in his pants.  The full story is here, if you want to see it.

I don't blame guns.  I don't even blame him.  I blame how he was taught to think about guns.

One way to think of them, is the NRA way.  Guns are amulets to defend against ever-present crime; peope who think that is perhaps not a good idea are irrationally prejudiced.  Put this way, shoving a gun down your pants is a good idea: you will be able to fight crime if a criminal mistakes you for a sheep, but irrationally prejudiced people won't hassle you for having it.  I suspect this was his line of thought.

Another way to think of them (I don't pretend there are only two, but for purposes of this post I am only dealing with two)  is the one I brought up before.  Guns are power tools.  They make holes in things, as many hand tools can, but they do it very quickly.  The very thing that makes power tools attractive--their speed--means people should only use them when they are in full command of their good judgement, and can pay complete attention to the power tool from start to finish.  Then the tool should be turned off, disabled (by unplugging it, or removing the battery, or the firing pin) and locked away in the workshop where it can't hurt anyone.

Shoving an amulet that fights crime down your pants is a reasonable thing to do.  Shoving a power tool down your pants is obviously risky.  It's all in how you think about it.  Or fail to think as the case may be.

 I found something kind of cool; a prototype (I think) of a cargo zeppelin.  

http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-aeros-airship-tustin-20130104,0,799208.story

I have been kind of jet-lagged after getting home from England.  It's only been the last few days that I started actually doing things.  I finally 1) figured out how to get the Focusrite box I got for Christmas hooked up to the computer, 2) correctly hooked my mic up to the Focusrite box, 3) got sound running to the Focusrite box and from there to the headphones, and 4) got sound running from the mic through the Focusrite box to the computer, and recorded my not-so-new song, _Today Is The Day_.  

It is now up at my hwaet.org website. Today Is The Day  I hope you like it.

Today I have actually gotten my new printer that prints to CDs (among other things) hooked up to the wifi, so great on that, PLUS I found the mp3s from ConFluence, PhilCon, and OVFF which I had put on a different computer than I thought when clearing everything off my SD cards to have room for QuarterTone.  I'm so impressed with myself that I am dillydallying before getting back to work, which I should probably quit doing.

Have a picture. Wifi is very iffy here (can get it, but only if I stand right next to the door of the room) so I won't be posting much.

Yesterday was the National Waterways Museum and Cathedral in Gloucester. With Mike and Alison, who are excellent hosts. I also got my first chance to really practice properly in England, and was very much reassured to learn I had not forgotten how to play over the last two or three days.

Have a picture.  If you click on it you will go to its flicker page--click on my name on the right and you'll get to my main page, with a sampling of what I'm up to.  Believe me, I don't have time to upload all my pics :-)

I am in England. I enclose a picture as proof.  Clicking on it will take you to my flickr account--clicking on my name, on the right side of the page will take you to my main flickr page where other pictures from England can be seen.