Low-achievement day today – I went to the dentist for a check-up and to see what’s going on with this tiny abcess I’ve had on my gum, coming and going in the same spot for about a year and a half. Last time she gave me antibiotics which didn’t really do anything, and this time *sigh* she did a full-mouth x-ray and discovered that a filling my Australian dentist did was drilled too close to the nerve, so it’s irritating the nerve which is causing the abcess. So I need root canal. *waaah!* On the plus side, there’s nothing actually wrong with my teeth, which is kind of comforting. Anyway, the whole experience kind of put me in a little grey hole. So I baked brownies for a lovely friend who my parents are meeting up with while they’re away. Hope they turned out OK. This oven’s really quite insane…

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But also a knitting day, a baking day, a piano-and-flute-playing day, a listening day and a composing day. Quite a productive day, I guess! My great-aunt’s scarf is about 6 rows off being finished. I am determined to complete it tonight – it looks lovely but I’m SO BORED of it. Really just excruciatingly dull. I have a re-moralising hat at the ready as my next knitting project. I baked a new recipe – oat biscuits from Tessa Kiros’s Apples for Jam – very easy, very tasty and while not strictly healthy, there’s a much more sensible fibre/sugar/fat ratio than other biscuits. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

For most of the day though, I’ve been reading and listening. I started out while the mother was practicing in my study by occupying the loungeroom, putting on the Bax Symphony No. 4 and indulging in more of The Rest Is Noise. Then I got a little distracted after which I moved into the study and put on Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass while alternately doing a little knitting and reading some more of the Morton Feldman writings. I was going to dive in to John Cage’s Silence while listening to Strauss’s Salome, but I started taking notes on the Feldman and that ended up taking the whole of the chunk of the opera I was able to listen to before Spotify went mad and then my iPod decided it had had enough and it was time for a nap. I was most delightfully surprised by the Strauss. My mother so dislikes him that I’ve sort of grown up with this ingrained “Strauss bad – Debussy good” approach, but I really liked it – really meaty harmonies. Would be pretty impressive live, I’d imagine. I’d settle for a recording without buffering gaps though…

In the late afternoon I emerged from my burrow to find that parents had vanished, so I took advantage of the silence and did some composing. Nothing fabulous, and nothing string-quintetty, but the notes I had from earlier were so determined to be a piano piece that I figured it would be a good thing to at least start seeing what sort of piano piece they wanted to be. Any composing is definitely better than no composing!

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I don’t seem to have achieved a huge amount today. Between sleeping badly, getting up late, clonking myself on the head with the kitchen cupboard which resulted in intense wooziness, then accompanying my Da to the dentist and a long and lovely walk home, followed by a much needed nap, there wasn’t a lot of time left, but the walk was indeed lovely – the heavens decided to wait to open until we’d decided to hop on the bus for the last bit, the ankle stood up pretty well to it, I did 20 minutes on the Wii Fit in the morning (just the balance games – trying to do a little bit each day to see if it helps to strengthen the ankle), made my Da a chocolate ripple cake and have nearly finished (I’m pretty sure this time) the scarf for my Great-Aunt which now flows down off my lap and keeps my ankles warm while I’m knitting it.

And I’ve had a fresh stab at trying to generate some ideas for this quintet. Not terribly successful, although the opening idea might end up in it, but it’s more of a texture than a melodic germ. I know it’ll come eventually, but it’s just taking its own sweet time which always freaks me out a little. Contemplating heading into town and picking up the score of the Martinu Sextet that I didn’t bring home the other day – possibly a little score-reading will spark some ideas???? Sort of feel I’m clutching at straws though… Must remain calm…

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My Da’s birthday! And the first I’ve got to spend with him in 6 years! He asked to go to the Tate, so we trundled off, late as always, and just sauntered about the hallowed halls. I got my card replaced (seeing as I never got the other one because they’d written down the wrong address for me) so we’ll actually be able to get to the Gaugain sometime soon.

We had lunch at Paul by St Paul’s, sitting outside in the sun.

The Da found a painting by Cy Twombly that I hadn’t seen before, which he didn’t much care for but which kind of blew me away – huge swirls of bright red paint on an oatmeal-coloured background (sort of the colour of our walls – wish Twombly’d come and do something like this on them!). And the paint had been allowed to drip down from the top of each loop, so it was a bit like standing inside a thicket of fiery willows. LOVED it.

And then we got home far too late and I proceeded to cook a roast paprika & lemon chicken (which took far longer than it ought thanks to the vagaries of this oven) with roast potato, sweet potato and garlic, followed by homemade chocolate cake with extra thick double cream. The masses had to wait a long time for their dinner but ultimately they seemed to think it was worth it.

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Sort of a low-key day today. Played the piano a little (very badly), listened to some Shostakovich, baked cinnamon sugar biscuits which turned out rather well with the oven temperature lowered by 10 degrees, and started reading John Adams’ biography, Hallelujah Junction, which is starting out very readable and enjoyable.

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I’ve been accepted into CoMA’s Midwinter Composers Masterclass!!!! This is both deeply awesome and rather scary. Not having really received any feedback from other composers in about 15 years, it’s a wee bit daunting. As is having to write a string quintet from scratch by the middle of December, but I really feel like this is a big step towards whatever’s next on the agenda for my music. Scared but elated. The Masterclass is organised by CoMA, who are an organisation who promote contemporary (classical) music for amateur musicians, and the composer in charge of us composer-participants is Tansy Davies… who is the same age as me, which could be a little weird, although I’m hoping not. I really liked what I heard of her music on her website and, reading about her approach, she seems to use architecture as a launching-point in a similar way to how I’ve been using modern art, so it could be interesting. There’ll also be a composer ensemble, made up of whatever we selected composers can play. Not sure if/when we’re advised of what that is – the notes sent through recommend flexible instrumentation – who knows, maybe Deconstruct:Point, line, plane could get another outing? SO EXCITED!

Anyway, that was at the end of the day. Haven’t achieved a vast amount otherwise, but I was feeling I needed to get back to composing, but I’ve been finding the prospect a little daunting with so many people in the house, even if it is a large space and we’re not all on top of each other like we used to be in the old place – it’s just not the same as being on your own. Anyway, so I figured I needed to start doing something about it so I pulled out the music for Egg the Tenth, which I wrote earlier this year (it was the original interlude for the Whitman songs, but didn’t really mesh well there, so I put it to one side to be an egg, but never got around to putting the detail in the score) and dropped in appropriate accidentals, hunted out fonts and did a little layout on it, so it’s basically ready to go now. I also did a MIDI export because I was planning on reworking it in ProTools to sound a bit more like a proper performance than Finale can do… and then discovered that I don’t remember how to wire my tracks in ProTools to get it to use proper sounds, at which point I lost heart and had a nap.

And there was a baking experiment too. When I was seeing my nutritionist, she encouraged me to get hold of this natural sugar substitute called xylitol so I could avoid using sugar when I baked (if you’re new here, I have an insulin resistance – it’s not diabetes [yet] but basically the insulin my body produces forgets what it’s supposed to do with sugar it encounters – unless I exercise regularly, but having been crippled for coming up on a year now, this hasn’t really been happening, hence decision to experiment…). I was in the organic shop today picking up some bits and pieces, and thought that maybe I should give it a go, so I decided to make a crumble with the tasty-but-dry remaining nectarine and some lingering apples – I figured that at least if it was only in the crumble topping, then that could be abandoned if it was too awful. Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘awful’. I guess the flavour was kinda OK, but the texture was All Wrong. The crumble didn’t crisp and it certainly didn’t go chewy. But it wasn’t particularly sweet either (that could have been my fault). So basically it ended up like one of those worthy but tedious baked bars they fill with jam. But without the jam. Sort of bland and like eating a high-fibre pillow. There’s a bit left from the rather small packet, so I might have a go at using it up in a cake (possibly cut with some real sugar) and see if that fares any better.

And finally I started work on getting IE6 sorted out with the website layout while I watched Alice in Wonderland – turned out the problem with the fonts wasn’t anything to do with either fonts or code, it was to do with IE6 not applying styles to the new HTML 5 elements which were referenced in the cascade. So that’s sorted out now, which is a bit yay

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Did quite a bit on the site today and had a bit of a breakthrough – I’d been exploring ways to get the latest blog post out of my WordPress blog and onto the homepage (which is a static page, not hosted within the blog) and finally I worked it out, thanks to various posts online, so now I have an auto-updating blog post on the homepage! Whee! Haven’t yet been able to get the Twitter feed working though, so I’ve hidden it for now. And I’ve got the navigation working correctly (highlighting the correct sub-navigation items) across all pages and I’ve added in a home link to the menu for pages which aren’t the homepage.

I also started testing properly in IE6 and I think I’m going to need the JavaScript fix Bruce Lawson talks about in Introducing HTML 5 to get the CSS to apply itself to the new HTML 5 elements that Our Friend doesn’t recognise. I was pretty amazed to see, though, that it’s picked up the fancy font, thanks to Font Squirrel’s easy-peasy generator… although, oddly enough, it has a problem with the blockier font. It’s nothing to do with the position of the definition – it doesn’t make a difference whether I move the blocky font definition to the top of the file, or whether I even remove the fancy font, it doesn’t show up in IE6, so I’m thinking it could be something within the font file itself. Not too disturbed though. After all… IE6 (although obviously I’ll have to see what it does in other versions of IE and that’s likely to do the same thing, I guess). Tossing up whether to put in an IE6 disclaimer. It might be a good idea. Just so that IE users know that what they’re seeing isn’t the actual design. While in general, I feel I should support any browser that is commonly in use, in practice, it’s getting ridiculous to still be fully supporting such ancient technology, when there’s a better, more semantic way to achieve things, so I’m thinking the hybrid approach – ensure all content is accessible, include a note letting IE6 users know that it’d be a better experience if they upgrade – is the best way to go.

Oh, and I made a cake. Chocolate, with chocolate ganache topping. And came to the conclusion that the oven thermometer my mama brought over with her has serious fail. I’m sure the oven’s running hot – it’s been burning everything at supposedly the correct temperatures. So I tested it out with the cake today – I cooked it at the official temperature on the oven dial, as always (because I know it works at that temperature, although it overcooks if you don’t keep a close eye on it) – 180 C, which the oven thermometer then said was only 160 C. Grrr. Might have to invest in another oven thermometer to see if it can do better.

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Today I baked bread I pulled out my new pain de mie tin and The Bread Bible and baked up some bread. Unfortunately I suspect that not only does the oven have fail, but the oven thermometer my mama brought with her has been so long unused it’s forgotten how to properly thermomet. By the time it read the 425 F the recipe said it should be for baking the bread, the dial on the oven was up to about 225 C (should be about 217 C) and while the bread has turned out delicious and with a great texture, it IS somewhat charred on top. Think I may have to get another oven thermometer and compare and contrast.

Apart from that, I didn’t achieve terribly much. Made Nigel Slater turkey burgers for dinner. Did a little gentle grocery shopping and accidentally bought Calamity Jane on DVD for £3 which we watched over dinner. Which then led us on to That Touch of Mink. Might need to make tonight a Doris-Day-free zone for the sanity of my mama.

Did a little bit more work on the site, but no huge breakthroughs.

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… and that brings to a close the individual composition pages… or at least the ones currently in existence as it seems there’s a couple that haven’t even made it onto the current site. And one (which I’ve just fixed) which was in as one of its movement-titles instead of the work title as a whole. Whoops. And I even found a FONT tag. Ouch. That hurt but glad to see those done (barring the bits that need reviewing, but I’m sure I’ve elaborated those previously and you don’t need to read it again).

So what’s next? The WordPress template for the blog is something I really want to get sorted now, but it’s possibly a bit silly to look at this before I’ve sorted out the PHPing of the navigation and seen if I can reuse anything from the site proper. Which leaves a contact form (will need PHP but I can nick the code I’m using currently so shouldn’t need a book for that), works list page, CV (maybe – a little undecided on that one)… Um… I’m sure there should be something else in there but too sleepy to go and look it up.

Went to a fantastic concert of Hindemith and Dutilleux music for two pianos/one piano, four hands this evening at the Opera Bastille. Really gorgeous music and fantastic playing. But now I’m itching to get back to my harmony/counterpoint studies… except I can’t because I’m in Paris and it’s in London and I won’t be back till Tuesday night and unable to do anything before Wednesday. Really wanting to be writing some music again too now, but as I’m having to stay up to stupid o’clock just to get any alone-time at all and work on my Creative Pact, this is extremely unlikely to happen. Grr.

But the really exciting thing about today was that I completed a quest I’ve been on intermittently for about 10 years – to find and buy a bread tin with a lid – pain de mie in French, a pullman tin in English. Today I both found and bought that tin – gourmet homemade square bread, here I come! Can’t wait to try it out!!!!

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HUGE leaps forward today. Djeli assembled both the CD and DVD mini-bookcases and the full-size Billy bookcase and I populated them with the relevant media, emptying about 5 boxes in the process – YAY! Unfortunately it seems we’re such media junkies that we actually have overflow from all three media types’ bookcases into the not-so-useful bookcase in the loungeroom. And all this in only 5 years… Must… exercise… self-control. He started trying to assemble the bed too, but discovered that one of the sides has been drilled wrong, which is VERY annoying because it means we need to hire a car again tomorrow night to take the offending part back down to Ikea and wait in the returns queue for hours But it will mean that I can hopefully do the remaining errands there while he waits without having to face the horror of buses.

And we ordered the futons to go into the unassembled bedframe so the parents will have something to sleep on.

And we clarified that the poster I’d been thinking of buying (a great one of Battersea power station from Habitat) wouldn’t really go with the new red bookcases, so we saved ourselves £25 on that and will probably get a photo blown up instead.

And I baked. I like to have something to nibble on while I travel and I’m not that fond of commercial treats in general – since going on the deprivation diet a couple of years back I find I can taste the preservatives used in so many commercial biscuits and cakes, which kind of ruins it. BUT I found a fabulous recipe for homemade Oreo cookies and made it up this evening – just the cookies though, because I’ve never been a fan of cream-filled biscuits (although I did fill one pair for Djelibeybi with the leftover Mexican vanilla buttercream from the cake I made for work last week), and WOW. Really brilliant. And SO easy.

Oh, and we washed my teddy bear so he’s ready for my parents’ visit next week and they won’t look at him and go “ewwwww!”

Enough capital letters for one night. Signing off to file biscuits in their tin

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