A Week Alone, Almost

Last week was about as February as it could get. It was cold. We had bad weather. And for a large part of it, I was home alone. Well, not really alone, but more about that later. Monday was the only normal day, if such a thing as normal days really exist. Everyone was still home. We ran on our normal schedules. Nothing unusual happened.

Monday morning as I was checking the news, I saw an article about the winners of the Grammy Awards that had taken place the night before. I don't pay attention to the Grammys except to see who won in the classical music categories and then I check out the winners to see if I agree with the awards. I often don't. You have to look far down the list of winners, past all the pop, rock, rap, country, and other categories I don't care about, before you get to the classical categories. I saw that a recording of Bruckner's Symphony No. 3 won Best Engineered Classical Album. I was okay with that. I like Bruckner. The other category winners were too avant-garde and not to my taste. But the Best Classical Instrumental Solo winner seemed promising—Bach's Goldberg Variations played by an artist I'd never heard of, Víkingur Ólaffson. I went straight to YouTube and listened to the performance. Often the Goldberg Variations are performed on the harpsichord, but this one was on the piano and it was very good. Víkingur Ólaffson is an Icelandic pianist, just 40 years old. I'm going to check out some of his other recordings some day soon.

For three weeks now I've been indulging in my alphabetical classical music binge. At this point, you may be wondering if I'll ever run out of composers. There are about three hundred classical composers that are considered significant. I have forty-two composers in my personal music files. If I finally exhaust my files, which I won't try to do now, I could go on for a long time exploring new composers. I imagine many find all this blathering on about music a bit boring. But stuck here in February, with miserable weather and not enough sunshine, this music has filled my days with much needed distraction. My music binging days are numbered, however. As soon as the weather gets even a little bit better, I'll be on to other things like pruning the orchard and starting the first seed trays. In the meantime…

After my brief diversion into the Goldberg Variations Monday morning, I took one more short musical detour. February 3rd was the sixty-sixth anniversary of "The Day the Music Died." On February 3, 1959, a plane crash in a field near Mason City, Iowa, killed musicians Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, the "Big Bopper" J. P. Richardson, and their pilot Roger Peterson. In 1971 singer-songwriter Don McLean released his song American Pie about the day the music died. American Pie went to the top of the charts and stayed there for weeks. Some of my friends and I used to sit in study hall and analyze its highly symbolic lyrics. You can find papers and websites dedicated to figuring them out. So on Monday, after a bit of Bach, I listened to American Pie.

The Day the Music Died.

After two very different musical detours, I continued my alphabetical classical music selection with "S" as my letter of the day. There are a lot of "S" composers: Saint-Saens, Satie, Scarlatti, Schönberg, Schubert, Schumann, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Smetana, Richard Strauss, the Vienna Strauss family (all those Johanns, Josefs, and Eduards), and Stravinsky. I was picky when I set up my music queue. I'm not a big fan of some of them—Schönberg, Schumann, Richard Strauss, and Shostakovich got eliminated right off. I wasn't in the mood for Scarlatti, Schubert, Smetana, or Sibelius, and we just listened to the Vienna Strauss gang at New Year's. So I was left with a nice set of three "S's": Saint-Saens, Satie, and Stravinsky. They are all fairly modern composers—Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921), Erik Satie (1866-1925), and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971).

Saint-Saens, Satie, and Stravinsky.

From Saint-Saens' wide repertoire, I chose his symphonic poem the Danse Macabre and his glorious Symphony No. 3, the "Organ" symphony. Next came Satie. I was introduced to Satie when I took a music history class at Los Angeles Mission College back in the '80s. He was a favorite of my teacher, Dr. Dudley Foster. On Dr. Foster's advice, I delved into the strange world of Erik Satie. Satie was an eccentric man (so was Dr. Foster). Satie never married (also true of Dr. Foster). He lived most of his life in a little room in Montmartre. He was famous for wearing odd outfits, identically colored velvet suits, or sometimes dressing as a priest. He was close friends with Debussy and Ravel. He wrote mostly piano music, some of it very famous and instantly recognizable, like his Gymnopédie No. 1. He gave his piano pieces odd names like Veritable preludes flasques (pour un chien), "True flabby preludes (for a dog)", and Embryons desséchés, "Desiccated embryos." I find his music to be quirky, charming, and very entertaining. I set up a queue of his pieces and listened for two hours. Then I moved on to Stravinsky.

When I was about nine or ten, while browsing through my parent's record collection, I came across a record album with an intriguing cover, The Snake Charmer by Henri Rousseau. I put the record on not really knowing what to expect and discovered Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, The Rite of Spring. It was thrilling, jarring music. But after that first encounter, I avoided Stravinsky for a long time. I was enthralled with Mozart and Chopin, and Stravinsky sounded too modern to my young ears. That changed later when I encountered his other ballets, The Firebird and Petrushka. My interest was reawakened and I became a big fan. In July 1982, the Hollywood Bowl hosted a Stravinsky Centenary Festival. I bought a ticket and attended all four concerts. It was an amazing experience. On Monday, I listened to the three ballets, the Symphony of Psalms, and some other smaller works. It was a great day.

The album cover that introduced me to Stravinsky.

The concert series I attended.

While listening to the "S" composers on Monday, I began working on my annual Garden Planning Project. I always have garden plans stewing in the back of my mind, but every year in February sometime, I start setting down on paper my plans for the upcoming year. I make maps. I finalize seed and plant purchase lists. It takes me hours, even days to arrive at a semi-permanent plan. It is the perfect mental tactic for surviving February boredom.

My partly finished map of "The Compound."

My map of my small garden area, also incomplete.

On Tuesday morning, everyone left. The Fosters, Stacey, Miriam, and Hannah all went south. Sarah and Tosh flew, and the rest of them drove down to Georgia to attend our nephew Aaron's retirement ceremony from the Army Rangers. I was here by myself to mind the farm. Well, not really by myself. I had Maverick to keep me company. Minding Maverick was interesting. He was usually pretty mellow. He slept a lot. But then he had these spells where he fretted. He ran around the house whining and barking. It was like he was looking for someone, and it wasn't me. He had a bed that the Foster's brought here for him to sleep on, but he preferred the couch or, if I wasn't paying attention, my bed. We got along pretty good. I fed him on schedule and took him out to do his business and run around. But I'm not used to taking care of a dog anymore and it was a bit exhausting to have him underfoot all the time.

Maverick making himself comfortable where he shouldn't.

Meal time for Maverick.

To keep myself occupied on Tuesday, I continued my musical adventure, but I decided to take a break from my classical composers and queue up some other kinds of music. I started with ragtime, and that meant Scott Joplin, the only ragtime composer I'm familiar with. My first encounter with ragtime music was when I went to see The Sting in 1973. I thought it was a great movie and I loved the soundtrack. I bought the sheet music and, like thousands of others at that time, learned to play a simplified version of The Entertainer. So I began with Joplin on Tuesday morning.

Scott Joplin.

After filling the house with ragtime, I turned next to the Beatles. My first exposure to the Beatles came from watching their Saturday morning cartoon that aired from 1965 to 1967. My parents didn't like the Beatles, but somehow the cartoon slipped past their notice. I didn't get caught up in Beatlemania when it was all the rage. Later, as a teenager with a newly acquired stereo system, I made up for my lack of early exposure. I bought their two compilation albums. The official catalog lists 213 Beatles songs, some of them are truly amazing and iconic. I love Yesterday, Hey Jude, Let It Be, Here, There and Everywhere, Eleanor Rigby, In My Life, I Will, and so many others. So for an hour on Tuesday, I listened to my favorite Beatles hits.

The two compilation albums.

After the Beatles, I switched styles completely. I queued up Ella Fitzgerald singing the Cole Porter Songbook and spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying Cole's witty songs and Ella's incomparable voice. Cole Porter (1891-1964) wrote some great songs, the quintessence of 1920's and 30's chic. And although other great singers like Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland recorded Porter's songs, no one ever did them more perfectly than Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996). While listening to all of this, I worked on family history, taking breaks at times to attend to Maverick's needs, do the chores, and eat.

The perfect pairing: Cole Porter and Ella Fitzgerald.

Eating when I'm by myself is a bother. I'm not at all creative when it comes to making food for myself. Because my diet is so restrictive, I mostly eat different combinations of the same ingredients—eggs, cheese, meat of some sort, usually chicken, salad when we have it, and keto tortillas. Dinner usually turns out to be either a cheese omelet or some sort of quesadilla. As a treat, I snack on nuts or a bit of 75% cocoa (or higher) chocolate. I dislike doing dishes, so I keep things simple and wash what I use and use it again—one plate, one pan, one fork, one glass. 

After chores on Tuesday afternoon, I took Maverick on a walk to let him run off some energy. We went out through the orchard. It was a miserable walk. The wind has scoured away a lot of snow, but in parts of the orchard it was knee deep with a crust of ice on top. With every step, I broke through the ice and sank into the snow. Walking was laborious. Maverick didn't have an easy time of it either. We were out for almost a half hour. It was cold and windy. When we came back inside, we settled into an evening of TV. Well, I watched. He dozed. I watched a few episodes of some of my favorite shows, The Repair Shop, Gardener's World, and some Twilight Zone. At bedtime, Maverick had a hard time settling down to sleep. I think he missed being at his own house. He finally went to sleep on the upstairs couch at midnight, long after my bedtime. And so ended our first day alone together.

Wednesday morning I got a call from the butcher saying our cured meat was ready. I drove over and picked up two boxes full of hams, ham steaks, and bacon. It will be divided between the Fosters, the Thayns, and us. I fried up some of the bacon to put in my cheese omelet for my dinner. It was delicious.

I make a pretty good omelet.

I continued working on family history research that day. I began doing family history when I was fourteen years old and even after more than fifty years, I'm still finding new information. While I worked at that, I listened to Bach. Just Bach, all day—the Two and Three Part Inventions, the Well-tempered Clavier, the Brandenburg Concertos, various orchestral suites, the concertos for violin and for harpsichord, and I ended at suppertime with the Mass in B Minor. All day the house was filled with glorious music.

Down in Georgia, Wednesday was a day of celebration. Nephew Aaron retired from the Rangers. There was lots of family there. From the photos they sent, it looks like they had a great time together.

Aaron, with his uncles Kurt and Ted, and aunts Stacey and Roxann.

The weather service issued a warning on Wednesday that we should expect freezing rain that night with an accumulation of ice. Before I went to bed I took the usual precautions. Ice storms often mean power outages and, because our well pump is electric, if that happens it means we have no water. So I filled the downstairs bathtub with water. I filled all the pitchers. I brought in an extra load of firewood. I went to bed half expecting to wake up in a dark and waterless house the next morning.

At 5:45 on Thursday morning, the telephone rang. It was an automated call from the school saying there would be a two hour delay because of ice. We are on their call list because Miriam is a substitute teacher. The ringing phone woke Maverick up and he wanted to go out to do his morning business. When I took him out, I found the world coated in thin ice with a layer of gritty ice that looked like coarse sugar on top of it. We only stayed out as long as was necessary. I felt relieved that the power was still on. We never lost power. Walking down to the barn to do the morning chores was treacherous.  I only went out again to do the afternoon chores. It was a good day for staying indoors.

Stacey, Miriam, and Hannah started their trip back from Georgia that morning. They had planned to do it all in one seventeen hour shot like before, but because of the weather, they changed their plans. They drove as far as Knoxville, Tennessee, when they hit a bad rainstorm, so they stopped and spent the night before heading home.

I took a break altogether from music, books, and the computer on Thursday. Instead, I went upstairs and binge watched Shōgun. Back in 1980, right after I got home from my mission, with Japan still fresh in my mind, I read James Clavell's novel. I finished it just in time to watch the miniseries that ran in five episodes from September 15th to the 19th that year. It was pretty good, the novel and the miniseries. I approached this new Shōgun with a little trepidation. Remaking things these days usually means upping the level of sex, bad language, and violence. There was some of that, but not as much as I expected. This new show has ten episodes. I finished the last one in time for bed. It was pretty good. The majority of the dialog was in Japanese with English subtitles. I understood some of it, but it was 17th century Japanese, the classic samurai language, full of extreme honorifics and archaic verbiage. I was glad for the subtitles. I loved the kimono, the traditional houses, the castles. I've been to Osaka Castle. It was in the first area I served in. I thought the setting seemed very authentic. I read a review that said Japanese audiences thought so too. Ancient Japanese culture is very different from our Western European culture. It was complicated, sophisticated, and unrelated to how we think and how we see life and the world. Much of that attitude still lingers in modern Japanese culture. It is fascinating.

Shōgun, 1980 and 2024.

The wind blew hard during Thursday night and into Friday morning. It was an icy wind gusting up to 20 mph. It made the trees moan and the house groan and the dog restless. I was awakened several times by the combination of the three of them. At 2:30 Maverick woke me, whining to go outside. I put on my robe and slippers and let him out and stood on the porch to watch him. He likes to run off. The wind was cold and it was snowing and I shivered as I stood there. Maverick finished and when we came back into the house, I smelled a delicious scent. The night-blooming jasmine in the front bay window has started to bloom. There was just one small cluster on one little branch, but the scent was powerful. I had to stand there and breathe it in for a few minutes before going back to bed. What a happy gift to give me in the bleakness of February, those flowers and that sweet perfume to help me remember that summer will return someday.

The night-blooming jasmine in flower right now.

Inspired by the flowers, I spent Friday morning working on seed and plant orders and making a list of projects to begin in the spring. First I opened my seed boxes and did one more inventory of my seed supply. I'd already done one a few months ago, but I just wanted to look at all those packets and feel their potential again. Then I listed the seeds I need to buy to keep my supply fresh. I also listed the trees and other plants I want to add to the garden and orchard along with the prices for all of it. I'm always overly ambitious and unrealistically optimistic with my first draft. I will have to pare it back a bit, I know, but it looked good for the moment.

My Friday morning project.

My projects list is long. I have plans to undertake some big changes. I'm adding more raised beds to the vegetable garden by the house. I'm going to plant a new raspberry bed out in the big garden. One of the biggest projects is down at the barn. I've decided to convert the chicken coop from a straw floor, to a sand floor. I've read lots of articles about the benefits of doing that. Keeping sand clean is much easier than hauling out and replacing mucky straw twice a year. But digging out the deep manure and straw will be a nasty job. And I'll have to calculate how much sand I'll need. It will all have to wait until late spring, but thinking about it was exciting.

Desolate February landscape.

Stacey, Miriam, and Hannah were due to arrive home on Friday night, so I spent some time tidying the house. It wasn't really untidy, but with Maverick here, I needed to sweep and mop floors and straighten up the things he drags around like blankets, rugs, and boots. I did some laundry. I cleaned the kitchen. It helped build my sense of anticipation. It seemed like they'd been gone a month, not a few days. I wanted the house to look good when they walked in.

I was in an odd musical mood that morning. On a whim, I put on a queue of klezmer music. I hadn't listened to klezmers in a long time and I'd forgotten how much I like them. Klezmer is traditional instrumental music of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. A klezmer band usually consists of four or five musicians playing woodwind and string instruments. It's pretty amazing music. I love the clarinet playing especially. It was a fun accompaniment for all my activities that morning.

After 2,350 miles and 35 hours in the car (round trip), the travelers finally arrived home at 10:00 p.m. on Friday. I was so glad to see them. Maverick was so glad to see them too. Sarah and Tosh did not come straight home from Georgia. Instead, they went down to Florida for a few days. Their photos and reports of being on a gulf beach in 70° weather have made me very envious. We've gone down to Florida twice, once in 2020 and again in 2022. I loved it. I would spend every winter there if I could, the further south the better, and on the gulf side of the state. So we are still watching Maverick for a few more days, but Miriam has taken him back to his house and is staying with him there. Do I miss having him underfoot? No. He's a good dog, but I prefer shorter visits with him.

The weather service issued another winter storm advisory for Saturday night and Sunday morning. We were expected to get freezing rain, sleet, and snow, again. I was worried about members of the branch traveling to church in all of that, so on Saturday afternoon, I preemptively canceled church. I sent out an email to all the members, posted the cancellation on the branch Facebook page, and made a few phone calls. I did the usual household preparations again. Filled the bathtub. Filled up pitchers. Brought in more firewood. The storm was supposed to arrive around 3:00 p.m., so I did the afternoon chores early. And then we waited. This is how things go in February. If ever we feel like we are at the mercy of the weather, it is in February. An ice storm is the worst weather threat we face here. Summer thunderstorms can be bad. Tornados are very rare here. But an ice storm wreaks havoc, knocking down tree branches, causing power outages at the worst possible time when it is cold and we are most helpless.

This morning, I heard the snow plows out early. When I looked out, I saw that the storm turned out to be not as bad as predicted. We got three new inches of gritty snow on top of the sheet of ice we already had. No new ice. No sleet. No power outage. I was glad for that, and a little sorry that I'd canceled church. A Sunday without church never feels right. But I guess it was better to err on the side of caution than risk having people have problems trying to get to church. So we spent a leisurely Sabbath morning. When I went down to do the morning chores, it was still pretty treacherous walking between the house and the barn.

This morning.

The week ahead looks like more typical February nastiness, snow, ice, and cold. I will find ways to endure it, resorting to my usual comforts. And every day of February gone means spring is a little closer. Good Sabbath.