Last night, janeg and I were practicing some songs and I was speculating about the "choreography" for my DucKon set list. Since the plan includes more than just my guitar and voice, it seemed reasonable to consider who would actually be doing what on which song. This discussion got sidetracked onto the question of whether the extra vocals on one particular piece could reasonably be called "backup singing". We decided not to push the definition too far and settled on the compromise, "There's a fine line between counterpoint and heckling."

In gardening news, I have a faint hope that the morning sun will dry out the earth enough that I can get some digging done before the afternoon rain arrives. Early attempts with a shovel were called on account of mud.

My gardening vacation got off to a good start today with about 3.5 hours of outside work, mostly digging vegetable beds. To say that this isn't the kind of exercise my body is used to is a grand understatement. Things like bending or turning suddenly (from the hips) are not on my immediate "to do" list. But it was a good start and counts for maybe 30% of the heavier chores that I have planned.

The vandals we hired to work on the glassed-in room at the back of the house finally finished yesterday. This being the cats' favorite summer place, they spent some time investigating the changes. Willow seems to have accepted it. Ashton was OK until he saw me come in from the yard, at which point he stood, meowed at me a few times, and ran away. The outside door has been moved and apparently it was just wrong for me to be walking through a different part of the wall.

I wrote a song last month and have been resisting playing it because something about the sound of the music was bothering me. I think the melody is OK, but the main chords I was using were D-Gmaj7-Bm-F#m. The problem with these is that the most common shapes on guitar all put an F# note on the highest-pitched string. After about eight bars, all I can hear is that one note, sitting there like a constant ringing in my ears. The solution seems to be a liberal application of the G-chord, in some cases replacing Bm. But mostly as a replacement for Gmaj7...so what if I have trouble singing notes that I don't hear in the chord I'm playing; it's time to get over that.

Funny thing: I've got used to the idea of listening for bass patterns in the chords I use because I often play those notes individually. This is the first time a treble "progression" (or lack thereof) has ever jumped out at me. This is becoming scarily suggestive of people who play two or three independent parts at the same time. I don't think my brain should start channeling Chet Atkins...'cause my fingers sure aren't going to.

Let me write that again: May 26. That's the next day that I'm scheduled to be at work. Yipee!

So, just to get into the right mood, I went shopping on the way home:
- janeg has been wanting a wireless router so that she can make easier connections between her main computer and the laptop, use the laptop at random locations, and so that I don't rewire the house when filkers arrive.
- I've wanted to get a second hard drive for my music computer so that I could physically split media files away from the OS and applications. 320GB was at a good point on the price curve and should keep me in free space for the foreseeable future.
- I replaced the 512MB SD card that came with my Zoom H2 recorder with a 8GB SDHC card. (The brand name is Transcend and it worked on power up without formatting. OK.)

Yes, as you can tell, I took this time off so that I could work on the garden. :-)

So...instead of doing any number of things that I'd planned, I spent the morning playing with the song that I posted here as lyrics a few days ago. I don't have attention deficit problems; I'm quite able to give my full concentration to a project...just as long as something interesting doesn't come along before I finish. :-)

Here's an arrangement of Frozen April as I currently think it should sound. I'm reasonably sure it will never sound like this live, so I still need to work on a guitar part. (Though, any of you who actually play piano, feel free to contradict me.) It's about 3.5MB to download and may not stay around too long since that server doesn't have a great amount of space.

I also need to create sheet music for it. I don't think I've ever taken a song this far before without having a visual aid for the melody!

Well, actually, it could have been told lots of other times, and sometimes was. As secrets go, this one was about as poorly kept as any I've been involved with.

It started late last year when janeg and I were trying to decide which conventions we might go to in 2008. Since Chicago is closer than Georgia or England, DucKon sounded like our best chance to see Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff, and that made it a major contender. At ConFusion in January, we pretty much decided we would go ahead with the idea. janmagic was in the room at the time and started speculating about concerts.

At FKO, I engaged in a number of conversations about it, mostly repeating, "No, I don't feel that I can do a full concert, but if you can swing a half-hour slot, I guess I'm OK with that." So, as she mentions, I'm on the list.

_{(Good grief! The rest of that list is fairly impressive! But as long as I can tell myself I'm not doing a concert -- just a half -- I can prevent panic, right?)}

I mentioned a little while ago that I'd started working on a song with nothing but a title as a starting point. What started as a comment about the weather, turned into a [something] about cryonics.

( Frozen April )

I wandered into a grocery store on the way home and, while standing near the ill-named customer service desk, spotted a sign that was there as an apology for a mistake in their newspaper sales insert. Apparently the 16-roll packages of toilet paper that are supposed to have 198 sheets each only have 150. I'm trying to imagine how they discovered their error. I suppose they could have read the outside of the package, but since they didn't do that before printing a million pages of advertisements, I'm not convinced that's the best guess.

I think someone complained. The only question is, when did they notice.

Customer: "I got to what should have been sheet #163, and began to suspect there was something wrong...."

This is sillier than usual. You've been warned.

I was playing with my new digital recorder when one of our cats decided he had to investigate. Here's the result as an 800kb stereo MP3: http://www.axxent.ca/~pmills/Ashton.mp3 If you decide to listen to this, it sounds pretty good through headphones but note that during the last 10 seconds, he comes very close to the recorder.

Now, the other thing that comes to mind is that I have sampler software that lets me pitch-shift sound clips and map them to MIDI events...and I need background for Universal Follower....

Gray. It started out gray and misty, then advanced to gray and heavily overcast. This progressed to gray with showers and more rain. Not long ago it was gray and pouring noisily, accompanied by moderately-heavy winds. The only thing that wasn't gray was the electrical brown-out.

Oh, and the torrent rushing by on the street outside my front door, carrying away all our two-doors-down neighbor's magnolia petals. That was pink, and startling enough that it almost made up for all the gray.