Classical Convert

Crisper Unmolding

OMG. WTF. ETC. When one doesn’t move apartments for five years, one forgets all the crap one has to deal with. Like the horrors lurking within a refrigerator that the ex-residents left closed, with a nutritious pool of liquid food fermenting below the bottom shelf. Nothing a solid dollop of bleach can’t deal with though. Even in our biophysics lab we use regular household bleach to totally wipe out little colonies of beasties before disposing their asses. That makes us pretty confident it can take out whatever is living in the toilet.

Here’s what we were listening to while cleaning:

(the rest of the movements are here)

Which I’ve already been listening to a crapload recently (like on the plane trying to drown out the people in front of me…) but it turned out it was the only piece of music on the laptop after the dramatic hard-drive swapping out.

Still, the Grosse Fugue is pretty invigorating to scrub behind the oven to. I’m pretty sure that’s what Beethoven had in mind when he wrote it.

Right?

Tags: beethoven, bleach, cleaning

Plane Talk

Here I am back around again, without a weekend to seperate me on holiday from me at work. Bugger. The current jetlag status is: PASSABLE. In this direction it’s just like staying up a bit later than usual. Particularly if one manages to grab a bit of on-plane, in-flight, in-seat, shut-eye. As I did, repeatedly, in morsels medianed by that head-snapping-up maneuver. The one that’s obligatory when falling asleep upright.

Usually I find it really hard to fall asleep on planes. Hell, it’s hard enough to fall asleep in bed. I think it helped that the aisle I was plonked at the end of — aisle seats are the way forward for flights longer than an hour, due to toiletery priveleges — had only one other person in it all the way across the breadth of the plane. Initially there was another guy sitting next to me (who began the trip by deftly consuming a bag full of breadcrumbs and mayonnaise) but he resat himself after our frontward neighbours were still (loudly) talking about UK/USA culture clashes after two hours.

But not before making some under his (mayonnaisey) breath comments to me about how he’d never experienced anything like this in all his years of flying.

It didn’t bother me. Actually it was fascinating. Neither of the two knew each other until they became seating partners, and they had a chair between them. After about three seconds of conversation it was clear that the XYish one wanted more than just a bit of chatter, despite wives and boyfriends being brought up. There were some awkward almost hand contacts, and possibly a comment about, errr, how beautiful she looked when asleep, when he had to wake her up to go to the toilet an hour before we landed.

And she was having none of it.

I know, I’m a dirty little eavesdropper. But it was so conveniently right in front of my face.

Tags: eavesdropping, flirting, plane

Intransit

Here I am all atravel. I’m sitting in a hotel bar in Manchester airport, after negotiating the frustration of a one hour, no change train ride turning into two hours with a transfer at Manchester Piccadilly. Lightning got into the signalling system.

Despite the sitting still parts of the trip, it was poetry, partly. The storm set a bit before the sun, and the latter burned the former into mist and rainbows over all the little peak district villages we passed. That is when I miss this country, that view.

But now it is dark, and I am surrounded by Mancunian couples with fake blonde hair, and hoping the two overpriced beers I just had will help me fall asleep so I’m not too shattered for the 6:50am flight to AMS tomorrow morning.

Pretravelling

AAAAAH. Why is there always so much damn stuff to do before leaving? Last week I was SO SURE that I could undergo regular working hours right up until about 3 hours before my spoke flight, at which point I’d get casually whisked off in a car and dumped pleasantly at the airport terminal. As the days of this week have progressed, so has my panic been ramping up. And it’s not purely unreasonable panic — the list of crap to do before leaving has grown exponentially. Yes, exponentially. First there was one thing, then two things and now there are totally about FOUR things on it.

I’m not even away for very much more than one week. And that week is chopped up into little packages of visits, so the entire thing is like a handful of candy, and will have passed before I’ve even really started to appreciate the jetlag. And yet that has just about zero correlation with my level of stress.

I could bitch about specific things (e.g., my supervisor coming back from holiday right after I leave, making it look like I have taken a disproportionately large amount of time off; the weather forecast predicting T storms for Thursday…) but that would be probably be really boring. So I’ll hide them in those parantheses, instead, and try and put on a happy face for another 48 hours.

And if that fails there’s always the airport bar…

Tags: complaining, travel

Getting Dicey

Stuck for compositional inspiration? Is the I Ching not quite up your alley? Want to do some serious Bard roleplaying in D&D? Take a gander at these bad boys:

Available for a bit less than twenty bucks at musiciansdice.com. (via Wired)

Tags: dice, music