Dream journal

Two interesting dreams last night, the first of which I've completely forgotten. In the second, I got a commission to write a verse for the national anthem of a newly-independent African nation, which had the tradition of adding a verse every time a major event happened in its history. (The flag had the entire anthem text painted on it, so the flags too got longer at every major event.) Unfortunately, I didn't speak the local language, and my only source for the local language was the half dozen or so existing verses of the national anthem; I had to piece together the vocabulary and grammar from that. For example, several of the prominent figures in the nation's history been professors, and they were invariably introduced with the line "Akade bo ", so I concluded that "akade" meant professor or academic. (The apparent cognate relationship between "akade" and "academic" didn't occur to me until I woke up.) Anyway, somehow I finished my verse, with very little confidence in its grammatical correctness, and was present at the ceremony where they unveiled it and the new longer flags. And nobody seems to have laughed at my grammar, so I guess I got it adequately right.

Le Weekend

I started a batch of sourdough bread dough Friday evening, and was persuaded Saturday morning to use it for croissants rather than bread, so I worked in a stick of butter that wouldn't normally have been in a bread dough. But the croissant recipe I was using as inspiration has four sticks of butter, rolled into a plate, chilled, and folded repeatedly inside the dough. I wasn't convinced I could do the full rolling-chilling-folding-rolling-folding-rolling-folding thing at this point, and it had leaked a lot of butter out the edges the last time I tried, but I sliced another stick of butter into pats, arranged them in the middle of the rolled-out dough, and folded both ends over it, then rolled it out again, rotated 90 degrees, and folded both ends over the middle again for at least an approximation of how they're supposed to work. The croissant recipe also calls for sugar, and I left that out. Eventually I used half of the dough to make half a dozen croissants, and shaped the rest into a smallish loaf, which will presumably be very buttery bread. We'll see how they turn out.

Spent an hour or two yesterday raking and mowing the front lawn, and moved a couple of potted plants (one Thai-basil, two Thai chili-pepper) from the back yard to the enclosed porch before it gets too cold for them.

shalmestere and I hung up a couple of posters in the recently-renovated office. We still have to triage and re-shelve about a thousand books in the office, and there's some wall space still un-covered with artwork, and we still have to install the wooden blinds in the windows (they're just propped up in place now). And we need to get the radiator fixed or replaced, because when I turned it on after the contractors moved it two inches out from the wall (to clear the new window frames) it leaked water on the floor. And while we're at that, we should get the radiator in our bedroom fixed: for at least the last five years it's been very reluctant to heat up, and only one end at the best of times. I sent out a CFP on Angie's List a few days ago.

And we had an hour and a half music class yesterday afternoon, on "ornamentation for wind players". We didn't get a lot of specific advice we didn't already know, and we already have Ganassi, Ortiz, Conforto, etc. but the teacher had dug up a lot of fascinating textual references -- people in the 16th century advising one another how to or how not to ornament, describing particularly compelling or offensive performances they'd heard, etc.

I spent an hour or so helping with shalmestere's construction of the #capecult Edwardian cape that all the historical-costume-vloggers are doing this year. Having previously gotten at least one piece inserted backwards, she wanted to be reassured that all the pieces were in the correct orientation, and I concluded that the shell pieces were correct (albeit one sleeve two inches longer than the other), but the sleeve pieces of the lining were swapped left-for-right. (This is an easier mistake to make than it sounds, because the sleeve pieces of this cape are basically rounded triangles, almost-but-not-quite equilateral.) Fortunately, they were only pinned in place, not stitched, so I pinned all the lining pieces to their corresponding shell pieces in the ultimate orientations, things matched up pretty well, and she was able to put the thing on with all the pieces as a sanity check. So I think it'll be sewn together by the end of today.

This morning I'm scheduled to pick up a CSA farm share, followed by the usual angst about how to fit it all into the fridge, then to donate blood mid-day, then we have a music class at 3, then another music class at 6. It'll be busy.