Monica

I haven't really prepared a "year in review" post, but here are some random notes and thoughts.

On the job front there have been ups and downs but the year ended on an up. After thrashing about earlier in the year, being moved from one short-term or ill-defined task to another while people juggled charge codes and contracts, I finally got to settle into something (a) interesting and (b) that takes advantage of my particular specialty, and I rocked. I got a new manager mid-year (my first remote one, too; he's in AZ), which always carries some uncertainty, but he and I really click. He specifically appreciates what I do and wants to help me find more opportunities to do it. Excellent!

The cats have settled in well. I was only without cats for about 4.5 months, but they felt really empty. I mean, Dani's and my relationship is strong (no worries there!), but there was still something missing. That Erik, Embla, and Baldur all died within a span of 10 months (and the last on the day I returned from a frustrating trip to Israel) may have had something to do with that.

I continue to really enjoy my job as a moderator on Mi Yodeya, and last winter I was also appointed as a moderator on Writers (both Stack Exchange sites). On both sites I get to work with great teams on interesting content. I'm still trying to figure out how to increase the tech-writing content on Writers. I need to ask and perhaps self-answer some questions to nudge things along, I suspect.

2013 was a terrible year on another Stack Exchange site. What was supposed to be an academic-style biblical-studies site turned into a cesspool of Christian dogma. I know it's possible for people of different religions to have civilized, respectful discussions about the bible (and other religious matters); I've seen it. (I have thoughts on what makes it work when it works, but I'll save that for another time.) This site was supposed to be non-religious (though obviously most of its members are religious), like a secular university. But it didn't work out that way, and the evangelical moderators (there's no diversity on that team) either can't see or don't care about the damage being done. Everything I did to try to help get things back on course was thrown in my face -- with personal attacks, offensive (usually anti-Jewish) posts, and assorted misrepresentation. So I'm done with that; I have better things to do with my energy. There are a few good people there who are trying to turn some things around; I wish them much luck, but personally, I'm done.

I've had ups and downs religiously and congregationally. My rabbi is fantastic and I like my congregation, but there have been changes in how we approach services, and too many weeks I just don't go on Friday night because they're doing something kid-oriented or entitled (sisterhood service, Reform-style bar mitzvah, etc), and that's frustrating. The Shabbat morning minyan continues to be excellent and the spiritual high point of my week, so that's all good. I'm just trying to figure out Friday nights, and some of it is bound up in questions about whether the Reform movement is right for me at all (except I have this fantastic rabbi and he's worth staying for). It's just that sometimes, being rather more observant than those around me and caring about the halachic and other details that most shrug off, I feel like a mutant.

This year was the last Darkover Con, so On the Mark re-assembled to do a concert. That was fun, and it was nice to see friends I haven't seen in a while at the con.

I'm sure there's more, but this is what I've got right now. Happy 2014 all!

Part of this meme:

On the Mark:

So it's like this. I enjoy making music, both singing and playing, and while the SCA was providing opportunities to do that, it couldn't scratch the folk-music part of that itch. Filksings at SF cons, while also enjoyable, couldn't scratch much of the itch either; I don't play guitar and I don't write my own songs, so I felt like my offerings there amounted to "reasonably-well-done a-capella songs we've all heard before". But there was this group playing at cons called Clam Chowder that was doing the kinds of music I wanted to do -- rich arrangements, a variety of instruments, a mix of folk songs and filk and "found filk" and the occasional oddball piece. And I wondered if there was room for more of that kind of thing in fandom and perhaps occasional coffeehouses and stuff, so I asked three musical SCA friends if this sounded interesting to them, and it did, and off we went. (Because we were all in the SCA, we could easily incorporate the renaissance music we were already doing there into other performances -- bonus!)

Now this all worked pretty well when we were in our 20s and didn't have such demanding jobs and I wasn't yet paying attention to Shabbat and the only group members who were married were married to each other. We had a lot of fun for about 15 years and then shut it down on a high note. We didn't want to be one of those groups that slowly degrades while its friends sigh and hope you'll put it out of their misery, y'know?

I still listen to our CDs (well, mp3s now) sometimes and, well, gosh, we were pretty good. In my biased opinion. :-) I wish we'd done more music that we'd be free and clear to post online; I'd like to be able to share.

I discovered two differently-embarrassing things while processing some old audio cassette tapes today.

Item the first:

I had completely forgotten, until I came across the evidence, that early in On the Mark's existence we had booked a concert hall at CMU to record a demo tape (so we could apply to arts festivals, I believe). I know we used connections and not money but I've forgotten the details. (This wasn't a concert; it was just us, the good acoustics of the hall, recording equipment, and an engineer who knew how to drive it.) The technical quality of the tape is very good (I wonder who the engineer was); the content is, well, what you would expect from a young, not-yet-seasoned amateur group, but some of it is pretty good, good enough that I'm certainly keeping it.

This tape, which has long since become separated from its J-card, contains an instrumental piece, renaissance by the feel of it, that I cannot identify -- even though I performed and recorded it! It is not among the instrumental pieces that we ever published on our CDs, so that's no help. It is not among the pieces that the Debatable Consort published on its CD tracks (from the Tape of Dance project). And at that point in OTM's lifespan I was not keeping historical notes about repertoire, so if we dropped a song I deleted its entry from the master cheat sheet. If the other group members can't identify it I will have to resort to digging through piles of sheet music, no small task. Or settle for "Unknown" as the title among my mp3s. Or post it and ask y'all to take a crack at it. Oops.

Item the second:

I was in a short-lived folk-music group before On the Mark. We performed at exactly one SF con. And in listening to that tape now, it's clear that a polite audience could not possibly have made it any clearer that we should stop singing and just play the instrumentals, but we didn't pick up on that during the concert. We figured we were taking a risk by doing instrumental pieces at a con in the first place -- not only weren't we doing filk but we weren't even doing words? How crazy is that? And in reality, that was our best, and best-received, stuff and we should have done more of it.

The interview meme is making the rounds again. kitanzi asked me some questions:

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Here's the rules:

1. Leave me a comment saying "interview me".
2. I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

This weekend I'm heading down to Timonium, MD (near Baltimore) for Darkover, an SF/music/etc con. This con has the best music programming I've encountered at a con that doesn't officially specialize in music, and On the Mark has been playing there for a while. This year we have two concerts, Friday night at 9 and Saturday afternoon at 2. If you're there, I hope you'll come say hi.

These will be On the Mark's last performances for the forseeable future. We've been doing this for something over 15 years and it's been a lot of fun, but life changes and people get busy and we're moving on to other things. We'd rather go out on a good note than slowly fade away, and I'm pretty happy about the performacnes we have planned for this weekend. Last night at practice we began the process of figuring out who actually owns which instruments and equipment (hey, these things can get fuzzy), which was a little bittersweet.

Flights were exhorbitant (twice as expensive as Boston -- WTF?) and buses and trains have impractical schedules, so I'm driving. Here's hoping the weather in the mountains doesn't suck on Sunday and that visibility is good. It's only 250 miles, which isn't a big deal, but 100 of those miles always seem to be miserable on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. They're worse in the other direction, though; I guess more people head from the coast inland for the holiday than the other way around.

My folk-music group, On the Mark, is performing at The Coffee Den in the South Hills this Saturday from 8 to 10. The place is smoke-free and we're told it has free WiFi (in case you want to parallel-process your entertainment). If you're local and so inclined, please stop by.

This is the first public performance we've done in a while (as opposed to the SCA event and SF con we played at recently). We don't do this all that often, but we have fun when we do.

An SCA friend wrote a poem that I decided to try to set to music, because we'd like to perform it at Darkover at the end of November. My partial draft went over well at the last practice, so I just sent out my first complete draft.

I decided to start by seeing if there was a period-appropriate melody that I could adapt. I went looking for Troubador/Trouvere melodies, but on the way I bumped into a (German) minnesang that worked pretty well as a base. The first section is almost a straight copy of the minnesang -- just a little tweaking to fit the text. The other two sections I wrote in what I hope is a compatable style, and then I wrote a simple bass line (that is, an instrumental line to go under the singer) using contemporary models. The original melody contained no Bs at all, leaving open the question of whether they would have been flat or natural if present. I've had my head in renaissance (and later) music too long; this should be obvious, I suspect, but I haven't been spending many cycles on medieval lately. Drat.

Writing/adapting this felt good! I wonder if it has broken the block that I've had for a long time with another text I've been wanting to set. For the longest time I just could not come up with a melody that fit both the period and mood of the text, but it's been a couple years since I tried so it's time to pull it out again. (No, author who might be reading this, I haven't forgotten.)

Hey, LJ finally fixed the bug with ordering of memories. Memories are useful to me again!

Lately, a larger proportion of my spam is about enhancing body parts (primarily one I do not possess). The hot stock tips seem to be on the decline, though the various flavors of the Nigeria spam continue. I guess spammers weren't getting a lot of hits for investments in a shaky economy. I remain glad that I do not use a browser (or equivalent, like Outlook) to read my non-work email; spam is bad enough without flashing "porn porn porn!" in 72-point red letters while playing supposedly-appropriate background music. :-)

On Sunday Dani was arguing that we will have a mild winter because "tomorrow's weather will be basically like today's", iterate until done, and it was about 70 degrees on Sunday. I took the opportunity to mock him for this on Monday, when the temperature dropped nearly 30 degrees in three hours (and the day ultimately ended with snow). He's just got to learn the limits of simplistic logic. :-)

On the Mark is going to sound great at Darkover this weekend. Sunday's practice went very well. We have two surprises for our fans at the con, one positive. (The other is that we'll be taking a year off -- but we'll be back, so I don't want to call that "negative". It's just reality; people get busy and groups need downtime.)

Monday's choir practice was more focused than other recent ones. The director was keeping things on track, and a habitual "problem child" wasn't there (which I'm sure helped the director). I'm skipping the next several practices because I won't be at the next two performances (one in a week and a half and one in mid-January).

We went into last night's D&D game with a disagreement on the table about what to do next. I think one player is still convinced that we can do what three of us think is currently very foolish. The question was deferred last night, though, because one player couldn't make it, and we were not about to do something high-risk without everyone there to steer his own fate. So we got the outcome that I wanted, but not through the means I wanted. Once that was settled the game was a lot of fun. (My fun in the game is augmented by extra-game character-development activities, mostly achieved via email, private geeking with the GM, and the game journal.)

Conversation snippet:
Me: Does tartar-control mouthwash actually do anything useful, or is it just a marketing scam?
My dentist: It makes the tartar softer, which makes [hygenist]'s job easier.
Me: Hey, that's worth something. If [hygenist] is going to poke sharp objects at me, I'd like her to not be frustrated.

The salad bar has returned to the Giant Eagle across the street from where I work. And there was much rejoicing. :-) (Well, some rejoicing. In order to rate full-scale rejoicing they have to restore the yellow hot peppers.)

I almost had a chance to meet sanpaku, before he suffered car failure. Eventually I'd like to meet more of the people whose journals I read.

Welcome to LJ to zachkessin, an SCA friend who moved to Israel this summer. There is now a new SCA group in Jerusalem (he and kmelion are the people I know), and they're having their first feast tomorrow (Thursday). Good luck, guys! The parts of the menu I've seen look great. (No, no turkey, for anyone who was wondering.)

We all know that, in order to get a driver's license, you have to pass a written test and a road test. It appears that in order to renew a license, you have to pass a navigation test. PennDOT will not, as a matter of policy, share the phone numbers of the testing centers -- you only get a street address. So if you need clarification on some aspect of the directions, you have to work it out yourself. This might be funny if they didn't technically work for me.

But does this perhaps signal a new trend in local law? Will the licensing test be enhanced for both giving and following directions? Will Pittsburghers learn which way is north? Will the age-old question of whether alleys count when counting blocks be answered? Will people flunk the test if they give directions that include the phrase "where [something] used to be" or use the local (non-mapped) name of a road (e.g. "the parkway")?

I wouldn't hold my breath.

---

In other news, tonight was the night of cooking quantities of meat in freezable ways. I had rescued most of the meat from the freezer last night (except for some dubious chicken that I tossed), which meant I had to cook it today. Cue the crock pot of BBQ chicken, the meatloaf, and the sauteed ground turkey with cranberries and apples. (This last was what we ate tonight, and was improvised around the theme of "what usually goes on or in turkey". It needed gravy, I think.)

I am told that our fridge was a very good one -- in 1965. Time to start paying attention to sales, I think. It's functional for now, though.

We also had an On the Mark practice tonight. I think the three of us are going to sound good at Darkover. It won't be as rich a mix as we're used to (with only three people), but there's a lot to be said for working with the same people for twelve years. I can say things like "do something frilly with the flute here" and get exactly what I was looking for out the other end. :-)

(OTM would normally have been tomorrow night, but got pushed by a D&D game which in turn was pushed by Thursday's board meeting on a non-standard night. If I had remembered that choir would be cancelled last night, I might have been able to jiggle things to not miss tonight's dance workshop. Oops.)

( 5 good questions )

The Rules:

1. Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2. I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3. You'll update your journal with my five questions and your five answers.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

According to the ad, next week's episode of "Mister Sterling" is the season finale. Who ever heard of a nine-episode season? I thought shows that started mid-year ran 11-13 episodes, not 9. I wonder what the prospects for renewal are. It's got some rough edges, certainly, but I enjoy the show.

And speaking of short seasons, I do wish they would get around to releasing "Wizards and Warriors" on DVD before my Nth-generation videotapes rot. It was only 8 episodes, and it was some of the funniest fluff fantasy I've seen. It aired long before most of us had VCRs (back when tapes were $8-10 apiece), and I still remember chipping in with some fellow college students to pay for tapes and shipping to get copies from a friend. (Hi Lee, if you're reading this.)

Mystery food of the week: I've encountered "buffalo mozzerella" several times in the last few years, and not at all before that. I was wondering today about the definition -- is it made from buffalo milk? Did it gain popularity in Buffalo NY? Does it have nothing whatsoever to do with bison? A google search suggests that it's made with buffalo milk; I didn't know anybody milked buffalo. This, in turn, led me to wonder if buffalo is kosher, as milk from a non-kosher animal is also non-kosher. (Remember, I'm a city kid who doesn't tend to know much about exotic species.) I gather from a second google search that buffalo is kosher but controversial for some reason; I didn't investigate. I would expect buffalo that has been slaughtered in accordance with kosher laws to be rare, but that's not an issue for milk. So ok, I can eat buffalo mozzerella. I'm glad to know that after the fact. :-)

Mystery food runner-up: today we encountered "Pittsburgh spots" on a menu. We had to ask which branch of the animal kingdom that relates to. It's a whitefish. The waitress said it was kind of like "Virginia spots", as if that would tell us anything. I assume they do not actually catch "Pittsburgh spots" in Pittsburgh; I'd be reluctant to eat anything that came out of our rivers. She didn't know why it's called that, though.

Last night at the shiva a member of Esther's congregation, who was also my calculus professor during my freshman year (he remembered me, scarily enough -- we'd run into each other a year or two ago), walked up to Dani and said something to him in Hebrew. The exchange (a few sentences) was going by too quickly for me to parse, though I did catch the word "Ivrit" (which means "Hebrew"). It turns out that Victor was asking Dani if he correctly remembered that Dani spoke Hebrew.

I think I know how to say "I don't speak Hebrew" in Hebrew, though I've probably got the verb conjugation or binyan wrong. (I don't think "binyan" has an English equivalent. Imagine that there's one verb that can mean either "tell" or "command" or "speak", depending on a grammatical tweak. A binyan is one of these forms.)

We had an On the Mark practice this afternoon, the first one post-kid (that would be lrstrobel and fiannaharpar's kid, not mine :-) ). Jenn didn't come because they couldn't get a babysitter, so we did some shuffling of stuff and pulled off a reasonable practice. Scheduling for the next little while is going to be tricky.