Burbling on about snow

Well, the weather people predicted there'd be snow yesterday.  There wasn't.  A bit of foul weather, but hardly worse than some other winter days we've had.  Snow is so often predicted for this part of the world that you get blasé about it.  I was glad there wasn't any snow, as I was meeting my son for lunch yesterday as well as playing for four young people who did singing exams.

When we were in Auckland last week, we had to reassure our host, who's only been to the South Island briefly, that it doesn't snow here every other day, as the forecasters tend to indicate. I'm not sure if he believed me.

Back in June this year, the weather people got it right, though here in Dunedin, as is so often the case, it was mostly the upper hills that got the heavy snow.  At the time, the ODT reported that a 'special weather advisory had been slapped on the whole country'.  I like the idea of a weather advisory being slapped on the whole country, though I have no actual idea of what it means.

We were also told that 'emergency refuge centres are being set up, motorists warned off the roads, and shoppers urged to stock up, but to refrain from panic buying.'  Of course, people didn't refrain, and supermarkets actually ran out of some items. But it was a bit of a mixed message: stock up, but don't panic buy. Of course, the supermarkets only have to announce they're going to be closed for one day (like at Christmas, or Easter) and people go crazy.  How did they survive before supermarkets opened on Sundays?  Did they all starve because they couldn't shop?

There was a time when it people just got on with life when it snowed; kids went to school, people went to work. These days it's become a major crisis, in spite of the fact that Dunedin is mostly negotiable in the snow - though you might have to walk rather than drive.  I can remember, as a child, walking to school in the snow, a trip of about three kilometres.  I was quite small, and was frozen by the time I got there, and somewhat later than most of the other boys. I was allowed to warm up in front of a small radiant heater - it might have had two bars rather than one - for a few minutes before getting on with the school work.  We might have had another similar heater down the back of the room. But in general we just froze.

Obviously they made kids a lot tougher in those days!

Now that the exam is over

Over on one of my other blogs, Webitz.net, I've been celebrating the fact that geocities.com, the huge conglomerate of websites put together by enthusiastic amateurs like me, and then dumped from the Internet without much warning by Yahoo, has not only been rescued by reocites.com, but also ASCII and OoCities. Great job, guys!

Now that my exam is over, and the course finished, I can relax a bit and start reading books that aren't related to NZ history again. I've been reading one called Bottled and Sold - the story behind our obsession with bottled water, by Peter Gleick. It's interesting but a bit repetitious, so I may...not...finish...it...yet. On the other hand I finally started reading Half the Sky today, which I bought a month or more ago and couldn't allow myself to get into because of the study. It's an in-your-face look at the way women are treated around the world, not just in terms of forced prostitution, but slavery in general, and abuse of every kinds (and I mean abuse: beatings, eyes gouged out, having acid thrown at them and much more).

I did read some other non-study books over the last few months (impossible for me not to do so). One was a biography of Georgette Heyer, the historical romance novelist. My mother had practically every book she wrote, I think, and I've read some of them in the past myself. She was an excellent writer, a great humorist, and a somewhat indomitable human being. I also started reading the biography of jazz pianist Mike Nock called Serious Fun. It started off very interestingly but has become a bit of a list of who played with whom and who was taking drugs at the time and which album they recorded while they were together for a few months and so on. I'm supposed to review it, so I'll have to give it some more house room yet.

I haven't consciously heard a lot of Nock's music, as it happens. I know his name well, and I've no doubt heard tracks on which he's been playing in passing (usually on one of those jazz programmes on the Concert FM, or whatever it's currently called), but I've never really sat down and listened. Hmm. I got a CD out of the library the other day and was surprised at how dull it was. Nock's left hand went on and on playing the same thing, while his right hand wandered around with no apparent idea where it was going. That was the first two tracks. After that my mind had switched off and I didn't hear what came next. I gave the CD another go a day or so later, and the same thing happened.

I'll have to try a different album. It's unlikely that his reputation stands or falls on that particular CD.

And the other thing I'm doing, of course, is getting on with writing the music for the musical. The stuff I'd already written has been buzzing around in my brain every time I stopped thinking about anything else, so I need to get on and write some more (or go mad). I've been orchestrating some of the music I wrote a while back and it's been good to hear it - particularly now that I'm actually hearing what it's like rather than what my two dud speakers on the computer claimed it sounded like. A bit of adjustment on the Sibelius program itself, and the use of earphones, made a huge difference.

I've just noticed that there's some way to record music via a microphone using Sibelius. Once it's recorded and Sibelius has transcribed it, you can edit it - make it look like it should! I hope it's better than the scanning program Sibelius uses: I've given up on that because it's more work trying to edit than just transcribing the stuff straight into the computer in the first place. It doesn't seem to work any better with this latest version of Sibelius than it did with the old one. Of course, it possibly doesn't help that most music people want me to transcribe is elderly, often torn, scribbled over and various other things. But even clean copies don't seem to go too well.

It doesn't look as though I installed the microphone (audio score lite) program. Maybe I'll get onto that some time - although the way I write music doesn't really lend itself to that much. Still it may prove more of a bonus than I think!

By the way, the exam went far more smoothly than I expected, I felt pretty good about it, and hopefully the examiner will too. But three hours of typing took a fair amount of concentration (I can't even begin to imagine writing for three hours) and my bum also got tired of sitting in the same spot for so long. There were only two of us disabled people in the room - I don't know what was wrong with the young woman who was also doing an exam (probably a different one to me) - and there were two supervisors! All very friendly. Because there were so few of us we started a quarter of an hour early. Better than sitting around nervously.

Exam, cats and dogs, correct views

Exam at 9.30 this morning. Enough said.

I think my head must be so full of 'stuff' for the exam at the moment that even though it was rather scary, I found I couldn't remember the name of one of my grandchildren this morning when I woke. There was this odd 'hole' in my brain where the name should have been. Having had two blood relatives who had Alzheimer's, it made me a bit uneasy.

I've been reading some of Alister McGrath's Mere Theology. In the book he mentions a writer Leszek Kolakowski, who was a Marxist but now writes from a much more philosophical point of view, as far as I can gather. (I must admit to having read this book with a little less than concentration, but I'll come back to it when I've got more time.)

The title of one of Kolakowski's books appealed to me greatly: My Correct Views on Everything. That's the way to go. It has some connections with the subtitle of this blog....

We now have a cat and a dog in the house, as I've no doubt mentioned before. I think we had that picture of the lion lying down with the lamb. Not quite. At first the cat was very wary of the dog (she'd arrived first as well), and he wanted to play...and chase!

Then there seemed to be a patch of mutual respect (it helped perhaps that the cat had cuffed the dog sharply enough to make him squeal.) They'll kind of circle each other, neither sure who's going to make the first move. And the cat has to be hoisted up and out of the dog's way on more than one occasion in order to 'rescue' her (although we don't use that word; she'd find it insulting). In time they may come to be mates. It isn't looking like it'll happen tomorrow.

Herpes, exams, haircuts

Don't you just love statements like this: A cure for herpes has not yet been developed. Once infected, the virus remains in the body for life.

Doesn't that just make your day? Well, it could be worse. In most people the herpes is at least controllable, and often it becomes asymptomatic - that is, it ceases to show any symptoms, like cold sores. It just hides inside you....for life. It's a bit like Alien.

Herpes isn't exactly the topic I intended discussing, even in the small amount written so far. But the Internet being what it is, and my curiosity being what it is, here I am writing about it and discovering the exciting fact that herpes simplex 1 is a fancy name for cold sores or fever blisters - and also for the nasty herpes associated with the genitals. Incidentally, here's something else that'll impress you: herpes means creeping.

Okay, not impressed? Never mind. Let's consider something else that's not so pleasant: I have to do an exam on Saturday week, the first exam I've done in about a hundred years, and while I'm not exactly quaking in my boots, I can't say I'm looking forward to it much either. Never mind, at least the kindly lecturer has indicated the likely subject matter for the exam, so it's possible to focus revision and further study on certain topics. I'd be much happier writing another couple of essays, though.

And I'm feeling distracted from study because I've written the music for the first two scenes of the musical, and have a good deal of the music for the third. And of course, that stuff keeps going around in my head, taking up room that's needed for study.

I'm just reminded by the fact that our dog is running back and forth between my wife and me -we're in separate rooms -he's probably checking to see if we're both behaving ourselves; I'm reminded, I say, that we gave the dog his first hair cut yesterday. Initially we started out at a friend's place; she's cut her own dog's hair frequently, and her parents' dog's hair as well. (Parents' dog's hair? confusing.)

Anyway, she got us started, showing us how to go about it, and we then went to my daughter's (she's done hairdressing) and finished off the job. Now the bundle of fluff, the furball that was running around the place has turned into an elegant looking specimen of caninity. The fur over his paws got shorn, amongst other things, and now he looks as though he has tiddly feet. I used to like the little paw gloves he wore previously. No doubt they'll grow again.

So there, how to get from herpes to hair cuts in three easy steps.

Widening Gyre

I've just started listening to the Concert Programme's podcast for May. It's Anthony Ritchie's The Widening Gyre, performed by the Christchurch Symphony, under Marc Taddei.
Here's a little of what's said about it:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…”

The poem suggests that a gyre (a revolution or rotation) will bring about a ‘second coming’ of an important historical figure, and the dawn of a new millennium (the gyre is represented by a rolling, sliding timpani sound). Yeats’ vision is pessimistic, however: he sees the coming of a ‘rough beast’ who might be equated with certain infamous historical figures from the twentieth century.

I know a small amount of Ritchie's music, and attended the premiere performance of the piece he did in collaboration with George Griffiths, for the Otago 150th Anniversary: From the Southern Marches. I was so impressed with that I bought the CD when it finally came out, something I only rarely do.
I also went to The God Boy. I'd been asked to assist with the rehearsals as a repetiteur, but it would have meant taking two or three weeks off work, which I couldn't really do - and the music looked as though it needed more concentration that my mind was really up to anyway. I don't much enjoy repetiteuring work these days; I've never enjoyed following a conductor at the best of times (!)
Repetiteuring now feels a bit like some kind of exam time, and I've had enough exams for this life. I don't mind coaching a singer, because then you've got some rapport. But conductors always have a good deal on their mind besides the repetiteur and you can't afford too many mistakes. It puts them off. Getting out of sync with them puts them off (you) even more.
Talking of exams, I just remembered, in one of those lateral thinking moments, that yesterday at church, when we were doing the lunches, we didn't wear exam gloves. That's a relief. I always find they smell more than the food!
I meant to say I enjoyed The God Boy, though it takes a fair effort of mind to focus on a modern opera for a couple of hours. Ritchie doesn't eschew melody, which is a relief, but even in spite of his melodic lines, attending an opera for the first time, without any real means of preparing oneself for the music, is quite a task for the brain. There's only so much the brain can take in, and opera's don't give the listener much room for a bit or R & R.

Copying the Answers?

I once did a correspondence course in Retail Management. I passed with flying colours, but I never figured out whether I was allowed to look up things I wasn’t sure about when I was doing the question sheets. There was no exam as such, so the people doing the course must have trusted that I was learning the stuff because of the way I was answering it. I guess it was okay, because some of the questions required me to actually think about the answers, and think about what had been said in the course book. I certainly didn’t answer those ones off my head, as I might have been inclined to do (being a know-all).

I suppose it’s different when you do a distance learning degree. A degree assumes that you’re actually doing some studying, not just going back through the course book checking up whether what you’re writing down is correct or not. It also requires you to produce essays and assignments. And no doubt there is an exam. I haven’t done an exam, I don’t think, for over twenty years, so I’m not sure whether I’d still be able to cope with one. Who knows? Maybe that’s what I should do when we return home to NZ. Become a full-time student doing distance learning. Beats sitting around twiddling your thumbs.