Yup, having settled on “Lucky Dip” as a name, and not having heard back from the owners of the Flickr image I wanted to use, I decided to draw my own, using the photo as a rough model. I drew the blackboard outline, a little bit of shadow on the back legs, the fringed border and the board itself in charcoal on half a sheet of A2 paper (I’ve been caught out by A2 paper before – far too big to fit on the scanner!), then pulled the scanned image (after cleaning up in Photoshop) over to the iPad to add colour and text. The final layout I did in Photoshop, after sending the coloured image back to the computer again.

I may tweak it later but as a first draft, I’m pretty pleased and I’ve put it up as the album image on SoundCloud.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve done any drawing, and longer still since I did any with actual paper rather than just the iPad, so this was a really fun project. The whole album’s feeling really real too now – there’s only one more track to come in, with two possible replacement tracks. Guess I should think about what order I want them all to go in too. At the moment they’re just in the order the recordings came in, but I’m thinking that shuffling them around might be more effective.

Today I received Kim Hickey’s recording of her piece, Flit, for flute. I am just amazed at all the great performances I’ve been getting for these pieces – so little time to prepare them and yet everyone’s done a really good job of capturing their piece and getting it recorded. I haven’t had to put on a stern face & tell anybody to try harder, nothing’s turned up sounding like it was recorded underwater in a bathtub in 1902. A couple of pieces have needed a touch of reverb to really bring out the tone of the instrument, and Kim’s recording needed a tiny bit of hiss reduced, but that’s been it, which has been both wondrous and a great relief because I’m no skilled recording engineer.

But I digress, here’s Kim’s piece:

I also posted an update of Alun’s tango – the original for some reason came through very very soft, so he’s adjusted his recording slightly and sent me a slightly louder one, which really makes a difference. It’s still fairly quiet, but there’s a bunch of tiny details in there which eluded me in the previous version.

Sam also sent me copies of some of his rejected takes for I Want It To Kill People. I found it absolutely fascinating to listen to the various approaches. They’re all good, but somehow the final take he settled on just interacts with the tape part a little more effectively than the other versions of the graphic score. What was particularly interesting was to hear the take on which he improvised, without the graphic score – that’s a really interesting piece. It’s not the piece that I Want It To Kill People became, but something else. It’s more enmeshed in the tape part – he’s taken some of the gritty sounds and used them as inspiration for the guitar part – whereas my vision of the piece was that the guitar was this soft and lovely thing with depths of aggression, Sam’s version is more like watching the soft and lovely guitar be corrupted by the aggressive tape part. Really fascinating. He’s also sent me just the guitar recording from the final version and I really think I will have a go at tweaking the tape part – there’s a blob of notes about a third of the way into the piece that really feel like a stumbling block, so I’m going to see if I can make them less intrusive.

So that’s RPM for today. No, the harp piece hasn’t happened yet. Yes, I’m hoping to get to it tomorrow. Today was full of client work and physiotherapist and – at the end – half of a wonderful concert by Joby Burgess at Wigmore Hall and a lovely chat with @stevegisby and his girlfriend. I managed to get there for the end of it (thank you, Central Line – not!) and got to hear Gabriel Prokofiev’s ‘Fanta’ from Import/Export and Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, movements II and III played on a MIDI xylophone, which was interesting, although I think I prefer the electric guitar version I have on CD in Sydney. Very much enjoyed the Prokofiev piece though – inventive, fun and very much a serious piece of music, in spite of the amusement factor of being played on glass bottles of Fanta. I did wonder, though, how long it’ll still be able to be played for – what happens when they no longer manufacture glass bottles of drink??? I guess it’s just a piece that embraces its own ephemerality.

I seem to have come out of the day with a Proper Job too. And the best sort of proper job – mobile web dev, working from home, for about a week, for a client who used to be a colleague when I was at LBi and who has now set up her own UX business for financial services companies. Really looking forward to this one.

One day to go. One recording to come in. This time tomorrow night, RPM 2012 will be complete!

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A quick post from me – I’ll be back on RPM work tomorrow – but today’s seen another two recordings come in, incredibly different from each other, and I’m really very excited by them.

Finally we get hear Sam’s slide guitar + tape piece, I Want It To Kill People (for the story behind the title, pop over to the SoundCloud page!). I really love what he’s done with it – he’s managed to take my rather brutal tape part and convey what I was hoping for – the idea of something soft and gentle that has great depths of aggression. I’m not so pleased with my own work on the tape part. I think I may go back over this once the project is done and pull back at least the volume in a couple of places, possibly the grittiness too – the solo instrument really needs more room to speak. But while I think *I* could have done better on this one, I’m pleased with the piece as a whole – it was a big experiment for me and I’m really enjoying what Sam’s done with it.

The second piece is Alun’s A Tiny Tango for 6-string bass guitar. I was very worried about this one – I am a complete guitar novice, and writing something for solo guitar which has a couple of different levels of stuff going on did feel rather ambitious and I half-expected Alun to send it back with red corrections all over it! However, he’s been able to play the whole thing, which I’m amazed by, and I’m delighted with the result. I particularly like the percussive sounds + harmonics section about 2/3 of the way through.

And Alun has very kindly offered to write some performance notes – and tablature! – to help guide other bassists through its “Twister-like bits” (Alun’s phrase ), which will be brilliant – and hopefully I can learn from them too.

And now to bed – tomorrow I’ll be hard at work on a piece for lever harp!

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Well, it’s insane o’clock so I must be quick because I have a huge day tomorrow – a lovely friend who I’ve never met (!) is coming to stay for a few days, so I need to up and about fairly early. And in the evening we’re off to the London Composers Forum workshop on writing for guitar, so I’m going to want my wits about me.

But the important stuff: the bass guitar piece is finished and sent. I’m expecting it to be returned with red markings all over it because I really don’t have a clue about writing for guitar (hence workshop attendance!) so I’ve been flying blind a bit. But I’ve tried to set it up so the most prominent possible-issues should be able to be relatively easily resolved. We will see what Alun says is playable and what not. Here’s hoping it’s not the entire piece that isn’t!

And I’ve written a trombone piece for Rob. I do feel a little bit like I’m cheating on this one because it uses the opening of the piece I’m writing for brass quintet at the moment (due to be premiered in April), but it goes in its own direction, so I hope that’s OK. I may actually steal some of it back for the quintet! I’m exploring tone colour in this one, mostly, and have chucked a couple of mute directions in there because I’ve never worked with brass mutes before and I think it might work well and give it a more defined shape than it has on its own. So the form of it is done, and I think it just needs to be slept on, followed by some minor tweaking. I’m hoping to send it off tomorrow, but I suspect that may be a little ambitious, and Friday is more likely.

Which leaves… one. The last one is for Shana’s lever harp, and today she sent me part two of her amazingly useful Tiny Treatise on writing for lever harp. This one details how to set the harp up to use the octatonic scale. How much fun will that be?! I’m not entirely sure when I’m going to get to write this one, I have to confess – it’s going to be a real push to get it done before the end of the month, but after the concussion, the harp piece sort of by default ended up on the end because while I couldn’t really compose during that week, I was able to lay out – and what I laid out was the pedal harp arrangement of my Pieces of Eight, so Shana has that and is planning to record it. If I get the lever harp piece finished, then Pieces of Eight can be a bonus track, otherwise at least I have my ten tracks, even if one of them isn’t strictly new. And I’ll be doing the lever harp piece regardless because, seriously, who could resist an opportunity to write octatonic music for harp?

So close!

In other news, I am now finally a full writer member of PRS for Music. Am I a real composer now?

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Going back a step to very, very late last night, I am delighted to say that SAM’S SLIDE GUITAR PIECE IS FINISHED! It was starting to look like it would be one of the earliest ones I started on and that he wouldn’t actually get it by the deadline. But no. ‘Tis done and sent so now we’ll see what he makes of it when he gets time to look at it later this week…

Today I have gone in a completely different direction and written the outline of a tango for 6-string bass guitar. My challenge now is to mash the multiple lines of ideas I have for it together, and enliven those parts which I feel are a little on the dull side. There are bits I like very much but others which are a bit boring. Interestingly, this has gone in the opposite direction from what my pieces usually do – start out interesting and need perking up towards the end. This one is significantly more interesting at the end than it is at the beginning, so now I need to find a way to brighten the beginning without it then not relating to the stuff at the end which emerged out of the stuff at the beginning. PHEW. So far it’s got some nice syncopation happening, some harmonics and a whiff of percussive effects.

I am, though – and I freely confess this – somewhat clueless about guitars in general, so I’m flying a little blind here. I know from Alun’s recordings that he’s capable of some amazing feats where it sounds like he’s playing 2 lines at once, without overdubbing, but I don’t understand enough about the instrument to be able to confidently write out what I want. So I’m going to be rather dependent on him to help me out with that. But that in itself will be a pretty new experience for me – I’ve rarely been able to work with a performer to develop a piece, so it’s going to be grand to see where it ends up.

I do find it somewhat ironic though, that my self-imposed deadline (so that all the performers have time to learn their pieces and record them for the RPM Challenge deadline of 29 February) is tomorrow/Thursday morning, when on Thursday night I’ll be starting the London Composers Forum’s Writing for Guitar workshop, which will hopefully teach me how to do what I’m trying to do right now. Looking forward to a few “oh THAT’s what I needed to do” moments.

In other stuff, I have renewed my CV. The employment monster loometh, but I’m actually not as bummed about it as I would have been a couple of months back and I have much higher hopes, after this month, of being able to maintain a decent amount of compositional activity after-hours than I usually do. And I’m rather looking forward to being out of the house for a while and working with other developers. Hoping for a nice juicy mobile project. Cross fingers pls?

And my Da is OK! His tests went off just fine and they couldn’t see anything untoward. Huzzah!

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And another one! Yesterday I was really struggling. I knew Jen was going to be in London with her recorder today and I really wanted to have something for her to play. I wrote something, but I really thought it wasn’t terribly good. I was trying to get the sound of the recorder into my head – so very different than a flute or clarinet or anything I usually write for (coming to the conclusion that writing for recorder is more like writing for really flexible brass than orchestral woodwinds) – but it didn’t seem to be sticking and everything felt wrong and blech. Then I woke up this morning and was completely convinced it was rubbish and I’d have to start again, but as I’d put so many extended techniques into it – flutter-tonguing, multiphonics, singing into the recorder, quarter tones – I figured I might as well see what she made of it and hear what these effects really sounded like.

Well, knock me down with a feather. She started to play, and it all coalesced! We needed to do some tweaking on the third of the group (she gets a tiny triptych) but the first two are pretty much as they were when I first wrote them last night. And while it’s an odd piece, it grew on us as she played through it more and now I think I’m rather fond of it. And that’s number 5!

Right now I’m waiting for Windows to fire up so I can scan the multiphonics fingering page out of Walter van Hauwe’s The Modern Recorder Player (Vol. III) to send to Jen with the score. This has been a really useful book, for the multiphonics in particular – lovely strong, clear sounds. It’s a real joy to use them. There’s loads of composer-friendly info in there, and while it’s aimed at performers who want to play these effects, it’s also really useful for working out what’s possible for writing them. The other resource I found really helpful for getting me started was Australian composer & recorder-player Ben Thorn’s quick introduction on the Orpheus Music site.

I sent a quick update out to the performers today. Seeing as people seem to be enjoying their pieces, even when they’re bewildered by them, I’m going to compile them all into a single volume and send out a hard-copy to the performers to thank them for their hard work. After all, I just have to write the stuff (and, obviously, choose the fonts. Very important, that) – they’re the ones who need to play it and get it to a decent-enough standard to go out into the world with their name on it! So I thought it would be a nice thing to get them properly printed and bound up, all as a group.

And now it’s half-past twelve and I’m not quite ready for sleep. My Da’s gone into hospital in Australia tonight for ‘tests’. God knows what they’ll find. Hopefully something easily fixable, but sleep’s a tricky thing under these circumstances, so it’s back to  more work on the slide guitar piece. Graphic score, I will subdue you!

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Still more downtime, but a definite improvement today – headache diminished, and while I’m still having patches of being dizzy & confused, overall I’m coping better and have only needed one nap today! Woohoo!

Again, real notes were beyond me, but I’ve nearly finished laying out 2×4 for harpsichordist Christopher D. Lewis – hoping I can finish and send that off over the weekend. And I did a couple of tweaks to the brutal soundscape I’m preparing for the slide guitar piece. I discovered that Logic will let me automate not just the usual volume and pan controls, but allow me to automate turning filters on and off. And not just on and off – I can automate all sorts of parameters too! So I’ve been fiddling about with multiple levels of automation for this and experimenting with texture. I’m thinking that there need to be spaces in the soundscape to really let the sound of the slide guitar come through. It’s got such a beautiful tone, and the point of the piece is about extreme contrast. Might have to make the whole thing more like 2 minutes than 1 just to let the two sides of it really have time to speak.

I also need to get on to some field recording of noises for it. I’ve used one of the Cylinder Preservation & Digitisation Project’s sound files again which I think is adding a good level of interest. It’s a recording from 1902 of someone reading an American preacher’s sermon. I’m distorting it quite heavily, but I like the rhythm of it. There’s something about the rhythm of a good sermon. It’s not like a normal speech.

But back to the field recording. I pottered down to the radio shop today to try to get an adaptor so that I can start using my Rode M3 mic with my iPod Touch – only to be told that it can’t be done. Which turned out to be poppycock because I found one on Amazon. Alas, the adaptor is £30 + £8 or so postage! OUCH! Other alternatives include a £47 Tascam interface module which is getting varied reviews or buying a whole Zoom H1 (£79) which would negate the whole using what I’ve got thing. Or I could sit down with a soldering iron and attempt to make my own. Which scares me beyond belief but may yet be the cheapest and least traumatic solution.

In the interim, I guess I’m back to my tiny Sony stereo mic plugged into my MiniDisc, which is fine in every respect except the one where the MD makes the most horrendous noises at random, which the mic then picks up and faithfully records over the top of whatever lovely sound one was trying to capture. Still, I guess it’s better than nothing. And possibly, for the purposes of this piece, the disc noise might actually work OK. Given that the tape part I’m creating is very much about capturing and tweaking randomness (given my lack of capacity for rational thought ATM) maybe that’s appropriate. Either way, I need to finish it off and move on to the other pieces fairly quickly or I’ll miss my own deadline!

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Busy day! Not a lot on RPM, but enough: I retrieved the MiniDisc player from D, set up the MBox (which hadn’t worked since I reinstalled but neglected to install ProTools – this time round I found just a driver and skipped the ProTools) and recorded the field recordings I made in Zurich (street noises, trams) across into Logic, so I now have them in a usable format for my piece. They were less defined sounds than I’d hoped to capture, and the recording a little noisier (disc noise just as bad in places as I’d feared but it’s only in patches – where it sounds like a quiet coffee grinder – not all the way through) but they should be entirely usable, even though I may combine them with some other recordings or use some sort of processing on some of them to give a bit more shape to the whole. I also found, in addition to the Zurich and Brussels recordings I knew were there, an MD marked “Iraklio” – I’d completely forgotten I made any recordings on the MD in Greece. I thought I only had crappy ones taken with the audio function on my camera because we kept coming across things that required instant reaction (not possible with the MiniDisc) – a teachers’ strike, a children’s band playing enthusiastically but with a delightful disregard of pitch. Looking forward to seeing what’s on there tomorrow!

I hand-delivered the score of Carrion Comfort to Herne Hill (which is lovely, by the way, if you’re thinking of moving to South London) and did the first round of corrections on the parts on the train. Mostly they’re pretty OK, except that Finale’s done some weird thing where the spacing between staves is different on every part – it’s like Finale’s tried to make all the parts fit into one page exactly, so the trombone part has masses of space, while the viola part has markings colliding on every stave as the markings below the stave run into the markings above the stave of the next system! Aargh!

And tonight I trekked off to Nonclassical (trek being the operative word – really wish they’d find a venue that’s actually near a Tube station – then I wouldn’t have to leave quite so early to be sure of catching the last train, and would be more likely to go to more of them!) to hear Consortium 5, a recorder consort. Excellent music – I made some great notes on ideas for Ladders of Escape which I’m writing for the Pink Noise recorder quartet in Bristol. Loads of ideas! And I caved and bought their CD too. I am weak. But happy

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I’ve been battling with the percussion parts on Carrion Comfort for a good couple of months now. First I didn’t know what percussion was available, and then I had to face the fact that very few of the instruments on the list matched up with the soundworld I had in my head and I’ve been wrestling with this disconnect ever since. Finally I decided to just write for the sounds in my head (mostly timpani, which aren’t on the list) and then see if I can convert those to something similar which IS on the list. So now, after much procrastination since making that decision, I have a timpani part, and I think I’m pretty pleased with it. It’s shaping and drawing together the rest of the music in the way I imagined it would (or in Finale it is anyway ) but now there’s a big challenge: how will it work for three tom-toms (high, medium, low) instead of neatly tuned timpani? Will the smaller drums have the resonance I’m after? If not, what’s best to do. These are questions I need to answer in the coming week.

In the meantime, however, I was too late to go out to the bakery yesterday and so decided to take the plunge and use up some of the assorted bread flour which has been lurking in the cupboard for far too long. Also to try out the River Cottage Bread Handbook which I bought on a cranky-day a few months ago. Well, gentle reader, if I may say so, it was frickin’ fantastic. Absolutely and by a country mile the best bread I’ve ever cooked. I ended up using 1/3 wholegrain spelt flour, 1/3 normal strong white flour and 1/3 wholemeal strong flour and it’s turned out brilliantly. The recipe freaked me out a bit because unlike every other bread recipe I’ve ever seen, this one has no sugar in it – just flour, yeast, salt, water and a tiny bit of oil – but it rose perfectly, and the quantity was great too. The recipe made three medium-sized loaves, which is perfect for storing spares in the freezer and hopefully will get me through the next week. I can probably make time to bake bread once a week, at least while I’m freelance, but more often than that would be a stretch. Guess I should be glad that D’s really only eating white bread at the moment, although he did taste it when it was fresh out of the oven and pronounced it ‘orgasmic’, which I was rather pleased with.

My only criticism of it is that between the wholegrain spelt and the wholemeal flour, it’s REALLY fibre-packed. I’m glad the white flour was there because I think 70% wholemeal would have been too much. I’m going to test out an assortment of flours and combinations over the next few batches. Ideally I’d like to make a good mixed-wholegrain loaf. I love spotty bread. The other thing is that – probably due to the oven in this flat being rubbish – setting the oven temperature to 250C was a little high and the first loaf browned VERY quickly. I liked how the recipe gave 3 different temperatures to turn down to after the first 10 minutes, depending on how quickly it was browning, but I did dial it down a little for the next two, which made a big difference but they still turned out great.

And it worked well as Vegemite toast this morning, and even better as a slim cheese sandwich for lunch today. Mmmmm. Bread…

Today’s very own achievement was not so grand, but worthwhile. It’s been bugging me for ages that since I moved the featured piece on the caitlinrowley.com homepage into the central section and started using the SoundCloud widget, the blog post has been bumped way down the page and is almost guaranteed to be below the fold on all but the largest (or portrait-oriented) screens. It’s also been bugging me why I’m not getting new signups for that website’s email list, and I came to the conclusion that having the Twitter, etc. links in the same space was distracting, so I’ve moved the social media links to the bottom of the page, cleared them out of the email list box, changed the heading and intro line, and moved the blog post to the right column, under the (shortened) email box. So now at least headlines should be visible above the fold and I think the whole page looks more interesting and magaziney. Now to wait and see what happens with the stats…

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Today was the Trinity Laban Invitation Day. The idea behind it is to give those who have received an invitation the chance to find out a little more about studying at Trinity so they can decide between the various institutions who have offered them a place. In my case, as I only applied for Trinity and have no real doubts about the course, I mostly went along just to get a bit of a taster of what I can look forward to.

And it was a great day. We spent an hour in a composer workshop on writing for ethnic flutes, got to have a good chat with a couple of students over lunch, did a quick tour of the (gorgeous) campus and then had a meeting with the Head of the Composition Department, Dominic Murcott, who answered our questions and showed us some videos of interesting work by past students.

All great stuff and I can’t WAIT to get started. But the big issue of the day is the confirmation that we need to choose our own composition tutor. For me, this is incredibly difficult. In Australia, it probably would have been pretty easy because I’m so familiar with the work and history of so many composers, not just from concertgoing, but from my work at the Australian Music Centre. But here, I’m all at sea. Unlike, I suppose, many prospective students, I didn’t choose Trinity on the basis of a specific person teaching there, but instead on the approach of the college as a whole and the general broad stylistic bent of the teachers as a group.

So I don’t know who I want to study with. Dominic made some suggestions, based on my (rather vague) stated goal of finding someone to push me to try stuff I haven’t done before, but what it’s done is to make me really think about where I want to go with my composition. Sure I want to try new stuff, but I need to consider what sort of new stuff I want to try. Thoughts… thoughts…

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Well, that’s what I’m hoping. I’m quite pleased with this year’s list. I think that pretty much everything on it actually is attainable over the course of the year, unlike last year’s which was much too ambitious. A lot of what’s on it is stuff that is already in progress, about to be in progress or has a firmish deadline at least, so much of it doesn’t have to be started from scratch but is more about tying up loose ends left over from 2011.

September looms large this year – I am determined to be healthier and more organised before I start my Masters to give me the best possible chance to do well at it – this involves getting a healthy balance between freelance work, composition and rest time really working so I can clear old projects, bring in some money but keep my mental & physical health intact. I am most emphatically planning to not injure myself in any way more serious than perhaps a papercut.

2012 is, most significantly, all about new beginnings and new directions. There’s a lot of change going to be happening – going back to uni, (hopefully) buying our first house & moving out of London, developing my freelance business to be (again, hopefully) able to at least cover my basic expenses.

So without further ado, here is The 2012 List.

Music

• 3 performances in 2012 – one more than I set myself for 2011, getting ambitious here 1. Three Whitman songs performed in Limerick in April
• Complete all piece requests from 2011 before start of uni term in September – alto flute piece for Carla Rees (due spring), flute piece for Nicole Camacho, recorder quartet for Pink Noise, Pieces of Eight arrangement for Shana Norton
• New score downloads implemented for caitlinrowley.com
• Blog at least once a month on caitlinrowley.com January – check, February – check
• Work out how, and apply for funding with Pink Noise to (hopefully) achieve first paid commission.
• Keep up flute practice
• Start a Masters degree!
• Finish Carrion Comfort for LCCO deadline YESSSSSSS!
• Write at least 1 piece for a call for scores & send it in
• Take 2 pieces along to LCF WiP/WiT sessions for feedback
• Schedule in (and DO) one listening session a week. Take notes to make sure I’m getting the most out of it
• Get back to counterpoint/harmony study – schedule as part of weekly plan. NEED to make some progress on this before September.
• Put at least 2 pieces up on SoundCloud in MIDI versions
• Finish laying out 2×4 & send to Christopher D. Lewis

Home & Travel

• Move out of London
• Set up my own study before the summer
• Try at least 5 recipes from “I Know How to Cook”: 6-Jan-2012: Coq au vin. Have also done the Venison-roast lamb but I can’t remember the date.
• Try at least 3 recipes from new French baking cookbook: 6-Jan-2012: Galette des rois, incl. crème frangipane; 8-Jan-2012: Princesses (chocolate meringues) – not actually a success, but definitely tried. Will try again. 15-Jan-2012: Chaussons au pommes – YUM!
• Travel: EuroDisney, Spain, Australia, weekend trip somewhere?
• Work on creating a good, reliable multigrain loaf, in case of (suspected) bakery dearth in Gravesend: 13-Jan-2012: An excellent start – not fully multigrain because I was just using up leftover flour, but it worked really well. 19-Jan-2012: Tried the same recipe, this time with all wholemeal flour. Worked very well, in spite of forgetting about it a couple of times, leading to overly long rising times. Feeling quite confident about getting this recipe working well. 15-Feb-2012: I’m calling it – today’s bread was pretty darned spectacular and I’ve been eating only my own bread for a full month now and not had to throw a single loaf out. I’d say this one’s achieved!

Health

• Limit sugar & dairy intake.
• Keep up with vitamin supplements to help keep food & energy on track.
• Get back to the morning squirrel-walks once calf is better
• Semi-regular massages to keep stress and tension headaches under control – no more waiting till the pain’s so bad I can’t function
• Work my way up to being able to do a 4-mile walk without pain
• Develop regular schedule so can have relaxation time in the evenings and proper weekends and reduce stress of neglecting one or the other. Key components: Freelance work, composing, listening, training, writing
• Weight: *sigh* Shall we say 76kg by the start of the uni term? Surely that’s doable? *gives self a stern look and a threat to not injure any more parts* 15-Feb-2012: Made a start on this at least & joined Weight Watchers tonight after good reports from friends. Hoping it will give me the kick up the too-sizeable behind that I need to achieve this. 1-May-2012: Have actually gone backwards on this – need to pull myself together…
  

Business

• Schedule training to keep my skills current & keep me employable by others – do some every week. Key areas: JavaScript, design, marketing
• Design business cards & get them made 8-Jan-2012: Order sent! And I just scraped in to get a 15% discount from MOO too!
• Write beginner social media guide to sell on raspberryblue.com
• Start blogging on Raspberry Blue (not going to make this any set schedule – minimum 3 posts in the year though)
• Schedule talk at LCF Open House on some webby topic – social media as a tool for composition perhaps? Or maybe something on how to use the web to promote your composition?

Other stuff

• New laptop. This year for sure. D to get old one.
• Knit something that isn’t a scarf Send both parents’ birthday and Christmas presents ON TIME
• Call parents once a month: January – done. February – done, March – done, April – done.

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