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JULY 1 Breakfast this morning was rice sausages with cheese, orange juice, and coffee. Dinner last night was a Theo's Chicken Skewer from whole foods. Lunch was nothing. TEMPERATURE EXTREMES SINCE LAST UPDATE 45.7 and 83.8. MUSIC GOING THROUGH MY HEAD AS I TYPE THIS the first movement of Stolen Moments. LARGE EXPENSES SINCE LAST UPDATE Whole Foods, $156; PickleLicious, $132; Finale 2010 upgrade $129.90, first car payment on new Corolla, $414. POINTLESS NOSTALGIC REMINISCENCE: We had occasional spelling bees in our eighth grade English class, and I almost always won them -- like Linus in Peanuts, I could have grown up to get a job spelling. There was one spelling bee that essentially nobody won because no one could correctly spell "rhythm" My shot, R-H-Y-T-H-U-M, eliminated me, but the other four left standing also were eliminated, substituting the other available vowels where I had said "U". I remember also choking in another spelling bee on "labyrinth" (gee, that's kinda an advanced word for eighth grade) because the teacher running the spelling bee said it with two syllables. NUMBER OF HAIRCUTS I GOT LAST WEEK: 0. CUTE CAT THINGS TO REPORT: When in Vermont, the cats sometimes look wistfully (or listlessly, or wistwesswy) out the front door at a chipmunk that they will never catch because we dont' let them out. And sometimes their positions on the furniture is cute -- see Cammy the Whale below. UPDATED ON THIS SITE THIS WEEK: This page, Compositions, Reviews 4. THIS WEEK'S MADE-UP WORD: saronnosaric, a Medieval remedy for gas and bloating. It didn't actually work, but it knocked you out long enough to recover, anyway. RECOMMENDATION AND PROFESSIONAL LETTERS WRITTEN THIS LAST TWO WEEKS: 1. FUN DAVY FACT YOU WON'T READ ANYWHERE ELSE I always have about 7 or 8 different kinds of pickles at the ready. WHAT THE NEXT BIG TREND WOULD BE IF I WERE IN CHARGE: As many tickets are issued for driving really slow as for driving really fast. PHOTOS IN MY IPHOTO LIBRARY: 13,585. WHAT I PAID FOR GASOLINE RECENTLY $2.69 in Vermont and $2.59 in Maynard. THE LIST YOU MADE BUT FORGOT WHY my head, ladybugs, a tree trunk, manhole covers, 'Round Midnight.

The palindromes they gave me started to make sense, in that Liliputian way, until I had some tomato sauce on my car for lunch. Could it be that the head of the pin was where they were putting all of our leftover gerunds? I'm not sure they'd fit if we included the cheese as well, but someone in Accounts Invective told me that pine trees rule. To that I say "garoosophone". Slabs of honey found their way into the chocolate sidewalk, and that's where we made the scissors really count.

Dear reader, this is a longer-than-usual time since the last update because I've been out of town, and thankfully, also getting plenty of work done -- even, dare I say, good work. I also went to the bathroom as many times as I wanted, and so did both cats.

There was an update right here a coupla days after the last posting showing a picture of the new blue Corolla "S" in our driveway, and a different one is posted below for this update. We drove in the correct direction to get us to Acton Toyota, got all the paperwork in order, and drove home. We celebrated by having dinner at the accustomed time, and this time I believe it was chicken. The next day, Friday, Beff had to drive to Maine for some sort of Open House thing that she only has to do because she is Chair, so I was grateful to have a car of my own. Now of course a lot of people reading this know that it's been miserably cloudy, foggy, and damp in this part of the country pretty regularly since the first week of June (it is to clear up this Friday in time for the holiday, but what do they know?). So in the misty foggy poopyness (or is it "poopiness"?) in the Friday morning, I up and drove to Brandeis via the far-less-scenic route, involving driving to near BJ's to get on the Mass Pike eastbound. And why? Well, I'm glad I asked me that. I rescued my Fast Lane (like E-Z Pass except it's Massachusetts) from the totalled Corolla's window but had no way to affix it to the new car's window. And there's a Fast Lane service center at the rest area between Framingham and the Brandeis/Waltham exit -- where I also gave them the new car info, and got two cute little "sticky feet" to use to mount my transponder. And mount it I did.

Then at Brandeis I up and got me a new parking sticker. There they asked me what color I had had before, and I could have said anything -- ooh, if I'd said GOLD, I could park anywhere on campus without penalty. But really, Gold parking stickers are only given for 25 years of service, and I don't teach that fast. So I got me a red one, which was correct. Numbered 1008, for those playing along at home. I then drove home and tried to figure out what to do next in my so-called microconcerto thing. Not much, as it turned out, though I did decide to follow through on my quasi-recap, which has an ironic twist: it's a half-step higher than before, and eventually through the magic of Davyness(tm), a whole-step higher than before. And then the ending has a bunch of tremolos, because it is what I decided to do. PLUS, there's a dissolution that slows the notes down and introduces the ostinato that is going to dominant the movement to follow. I rule. Ruling is done by me. Ruler, c'est moi.

The next thing of dire importance was Yehudi's usurpative birthday concert on Saturday night, which was on my birthday. I had gotten several birthday greetings from people who look at that section of newmusicbox, and His Rossness sent me a nice Pat Metheny Trio CD which I like. But I spent the evening portion of being newly evenly divisible by 17 hearing some Yehudi pieces I knew and some I didn't. In particular, the violin and piano duo that is reputed to have made his first big splash was done by Danst Epner and Yehudi, and it was a real gas -- not sounding at all like something from the mid '50s. A.Y., I spent the rest of my birthday at home.

Beff got back Monday, and we spent time packing for Vermont, where we were to spend two weeks or perhaps more. Preparing the new 88-key keyboard for transport along with the keyboard stand was among the stuff, plus going through lists of stuff mentally that we wanted to make sure not to forget. Then on Wednesday the 17th (I believe that may be Dennis Slavin's birthday) in the morning, we packed up the kitties, the keyboard, and our stuff, and off we went. It was a fairly eventless drive except for the many, many one-lane diversions made possible by the federal stimulus, and I made it in 3 hours 20 minutes. We had to uncover stuff and I had to find the old cat litter box and leave some food out, and Beff did the majority of the setting up when she got in. She had the keyboard, of course, since she's got a hatchback, and since I had the cats. And we stayed in Vermont until June 29, since Beff's sister requested some time this week, plus we both finished big projects on Monday. More on that later.

Of course we had to do a big shop, and Hannaford's is a mere four minute drive, so we got ourselves situated to be self-sufficient. It was still kind of cool and misty and pooplike, and since the place faces the lake, it is often considerably colder than even a hundred feet further from the lake. So hunker down we did, and setup was achieved, and we relaxed.

On our first full day we did our official celebration of my birthday. In olden times (when I had hair), we made a point of going to the Ground Round and getting Buffalo wings. This time we drove into downtown Burlington, went to the Burlington Brew Pub, got some of their internal specialties (Irish red, bitter, IPA, etc.) and I got their wings. The wings themselves are not great, but I love the sauce, and I even dipped the lettuce from my salad in it. Because it is what I do. Then we tooled around downtown a little, even getting some grapefruit-eating paraphernalia at a store called Kiss The Cook, and noticed that the recession shonuff hasn't hit Burlington very hard. It was jam-packed, and all the restaurants had lines waiting to be seated. Wow.

With the coolish and dreary weather keeping us in, mostly, we had plenty of time to work -- though we took bike rides whenever the weather allowed, which I think was 7 out of 11 days there. I finished my microconcerto first movement, and then followed through on Beff's comment when I first mentioned that I was making it a chamber concerto for not only the likes of Geoffy, but for Geoffy himself, his bad self! And that comment was, "ooh, and you can write a funk movement." Given that I'd also decided to make Geoffy AND Bob (ze percussionist guy) play melodicas -- Bob's melodica made a cameo appearance in the first movement -- another dimension (if you want to call it that) to the movement would be a dueling melodicas passage. So I wrote an opening passage for piano alone that's reminiscent of Absofunkinlutely, with the instruments sneaking in eventually, and it's fun. I followed that with music that uses the same licks but sounds suspiciously like cafe music, for all but the piano, got to a place where the clarinet played a big scale lick, and brought Geoffy in on the melodica near the top of the instrument -- and for several bars before that, Bob's been playing the same licks over and over.

And I sent the score up to that point to Geoffy and told him I'd do whatever he suggested I do next. And I did! Rich harmonies between the two melodicas, then a badass lick for Geoffy, and ... well, you can see for yourself. I finished the piece on Monday and was already to call it "Microconcerto", but during a restaurant lunch with Beff (where we'd gone so I could do more wings), she reached all the way back to ARMY OF DARKNESS and pulled out the title Micronomicon. And since it's to be pronounced Mick-ronomicon rather than Mike-ronomicon, I used a K, in deference (?) to Bartok. And then I saw the evil version of the main character declaring, "You'll NEVER get the Mikronomicon!" followed by a different reference: Good, bad. I'm the one with the gun.

So dear reader, you may view a complete score at the blue link to the left, as well as MIDI of the outer movements in the yellow numeric links. For you see, it is what I did.

In the midst of all that working -- Beff was writing songs plus doing a big academic promotion document, and watching the three color movies Red, White, and Blue at night -- we had a nice visit from my colleague Yu-Hui and her husband Bill, her daughter Emmaline, and her future offspring trapped inside. We did a nice time at the beach on Saturday afternoon, we did a grilled salmon and corn and vegetables and salad dinner, saw the Burlington waterfront on Sunday morning, and off they went back to Boston. They had visited Taiwan just previously, so there were pictures to share there. And we shared our France pictures.

And there was one night that the usual party by a local family was given, at which I remember having baked beans, and the stereo playing the same six Beach Boys tunes over and over (California Girls, Surfin' USA, you know the drill). We decided to have an ironclad excuse to be out of town, and it was the night that a concentrated bunch of strong thunderstorms was passing through. In any case, Beff had been reading the local artsy rag, where she found an ad for a high class (or so it implied) in my own hometown of St. Albans -- Chow Bella. She made a reservation online, and we drove there, encountering a downpour only in the last few minutes of the drive -- a severe thunderstorm watch for St. A was to expire just before we got there. This restaurant is an interesting oasis in a sea of dullness (the town itself -- remember, I grew up there, so I'm entitled), and is in the place where Doolin's was when I was growing up (they sold chick stuff). It had the exposed brick thing, and an expensive menu, and even a cocktail pianist, and we got pork medallions and stuff. After we ordered our drinks (local beer on tap), I noticed that the pianist was my high school music teacher, Verne Colburn -- also the father of the Marine Band director, Michael. So we talked, caught up, and left a nice tip. We knew all the tunes he played except one, and he actually used the canned groove tracks on his keyboard. Which was always a trip when he finished a tune and was going through the Fake Book for the next one, since you'd hear just the groove and maybe a bass line doing 1-5-1-5 ... and then we drove back to find that there had been a lot of wind and rain while we were gone, and some of our stuff was wet. The water that blew in came periously close to the surge protector into which our keyboard was plugged, and my computer bag was moist, and so was my suitcase -- but I guess you gotta get used to this in rural living. We celebrated by doing what the locals call "drying off" our stuff.

And so yesterday morning we collected the kitties and most of our stuff, except for the keyboard stand, and at 7:15 am I set off, with Beff about an hour behind. The kitties were very glad to be back home, especially the part about getting to go outside. And as usual, they spent much of their time sitting in windows. Of course, since there was little of value to eat in the fridge, we shopped -- and did so separately. Beff did staples at Shaw's Market nearby and I went to Whole Foods for more exotic stuff. To wit -- they're usually out of the Manga Acai white tea half-gallons, and since they had it, I got six of them. And since they are usually out of the masaman curry soup -- I bought them out. Plus, it's skewer season at Whole Foods, so I got chicken of various stripes, etc., plus some -- you guessed it -- gourmet pickles. This morning, since we are nearly out of coffee beans I also made a run to Trader Joes, got stuff at Staples with a rewards coupon, and got cat treats at K-Mart.

And I hardly mentioned that I had to mow lawns. The grass was long and wet, so it was a bit more labor intensive than usual, and I still have to do the front and west side. But it looks nice in the back, and the newly sculpted area where the ice storm hit looks good. Indeed, that grass was very long, and very thick. And the mint and catnip we planted are doing very well, thank you.

So now with Mikronomicon in the "I exist" pile, next up is piano four hands for students -- the one that comes with a trip to LA next July and a guaranteed number of copies purchased from Peters. There's also the trip to Utah next month, and an appearance at Tanglewood to meet a (hopefully not scared doodyless) etude-playing pianist. Meanwhile, Vermont was great and I got good work done. But here I've got spicy pickles from PickleLicious. And you, dear reader, probably don't.

Today's pictures include the new Corolla, three kitty pix from Vermont, the Bill and Yu-Hui experience (big log version), two shots of my working area, and three sunset-related shots. Bye.