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bunrabSo, let's see.
Wednesday I saw the electrophysiologist my cardiologist had referred me to, the one who's something like head of the entire department at Johns Hopkins, and yes, he did manage to convince me that I should go ahead and get another defibrillator/pacemaker. If they can't get the third lead in, he promises that they won't spend a couple extra hours poking around; instead, they'll close it up as is, and then in December, after all my holiday concert obligations are over, I'll go back in for a separate procedure for a mini-thoracotomy, where they sorta stretch the ribs apart and go plunk the lead down on the outside surface of the heart. But maybe, just maybe, they'll get the third lead in when they put the device in. We'll see. That surgery is September 11. They'll keep me overnight just for observation, although pacemakers can be outpatient surgery; just my history and stuff. So, more news on that as it happens.
Thursday, I took the train up to NY. Takes 2.5 hours for the *local* from Baltimore Penn Station to NY Penn Station, even with all the stops. (I can't imagine why anyone would pay 80% more per ticket for the Acela, just to get there 15 minutes faster.) There are so many people going between Washington and NY that there are trains pretty much every hour all day - including the Regional (local commuter train, stops in Delaware, Philadelphia, and several places in New Jersey, one along about every 2 hours), the Acela, and several of Amtrak's named longer routes. Security on the trains has been beefed up a teensy bit, but is still abyssmal. For example, when I got to Penn (NY) I had to wait for my friend Sally, who came in from LI to meet me there. I wanted to sit while waiting, so I went to the LIRR waiting room, which is supposed to be for ticketed passengers only. They even have a rent-a-cop walk around every 15 minutes, asking to see everybody's tickets. I waved the stub of my Amtrak ticket from Baltimore at him. It's roughly the same size, but not the same color or printing, as the LIRR tickets, and it had the hole punched in it by the Amtrak conductor. However, it was adequate to fool the cop; he didn't even squint at it, and I got to keep sitting there.
When Sally got there, we took the subway up two stops to 50th St., and then walked back to 49th to go to The Colony, one of the largest sheet music stores in NYC (possibly the largest - several stores make the claim). In case you're wondering, I pack really light, so we had no trouble carrying my luggage along with us. Three changes of underwear, socks, and t-shirts, a soprano recorder, a sock I'm in the middle of knitting, and a magazine to read. However, that rapidly became heavier, as I wound up purchasing a pile o' sheet music. I got an arranger's handbook, which I need for the stuff I'm working on and which I didn't want to buy online, because I wanted to leaf through several and see which had writing style and musical examples that most suited my tastes. I chose one; they're all in the price range of textbooks and about the weight range of textbooks, too, so that almost doubled my luggage weight right there. I got several books of jazz duets for trombone. Why trombone, you ask? Because the baritone saxophone has about the same range as a trombone, and even though the bari sax is normally written for in treble clef, there's a cheap trick for playing bass clef parts on the bari and winding up at concert pitch, and then all trombone parts are within the range of the tubs, so: S and I can play duets on the bari sax and tuba, which I think will be a blast. And a couple of books of Jewish songs, so that I can arrange some of those, not just Christmas tunes, because one of the Montgomery Village Community Band's big gigs each year is the Hebrew Home which is an enormous facility - and they pay us to play - so I'd like to have something more than the usual arrangement of "O Chanukah" for band. I won't have time to do that by this November 5, but by next year, I hope to have arrangements of Hava Nagilah and Tsena Tsena underway. Then we ran across the street in the rain - OK, I walked, Sally carried the luggage and ran - and ate supper at Sbarro's, then the subway back to Penn Sta., and then the LIRR out to Wantagh. The subways are cleaner than I remembered from the last time I was in the city. The LIRR cars are still old and a bit grungy but the announcements are much clearer than I remember! Public transportation that works and goes where one needs it to - a great concept.
Friday we hung around Sally's house and played music - her on her fiddle and me on the recorder, but then she let me use one of her violins, and it turns out I can still scratch out a tune. I wouldn't give you five cents for my technique, but the fingers still go pretty much where they're supposed to, and can move along at the pace of a waltz or a reel, though I miss a few notes trying to do something as fast as a jig. Then we went out to Sam Ash, another large music store. Where I bought more jazz duets, more Jewish music, and a book of Bach cello stuff transcribed for saxophone, which I am going to enjoy. Then to supper, and then I spent the rest of the evening starting to clean up and straighten out Sally's computer. She's a bit of a technophobe, and it's an old, cranky computer, a combination guaranteed to cause hellish aggravation to all concerned. Uninstalling some stuff, cleaning up the desktop, running Spybot Search & Destroy, stuff like that. Cranked it up from extremely slow to merely irritatingly slow.
We headed out the door at 8 a.m. Saturday, got to the location for the Long Island Scottish Games, and discovered that they had been cancelled due to the rain. So the concerts Sally was playing in at said games were also cancelled. However, one of her ensemble members then invited everyone in the ensemble over to her place to play what would have been played anyway. We went back by the house, changed clothes, headed west into Queens to that person's condo, and spent several hours there; although I was just tagging along to listen, they wound up forcing me to play recorder along with them. And, though I hate to say it, despite that I was sight-reading the music and they had supposedly rehearsed it and were ready for a concert, I was doing better in several spots than the 2 recorder players they had (along with keyboards, accordion, guitar, and a dozen fiddles); the group was nowhere near what *I* would have considered concert-ready. I guess standards are different than for large concert bands. A couple of the fiddle players were really good, one who apparently is a school music teacher, but most, well, call it the not ready for prime time players. Anyway, pleasant and hospitable people. We headed out late afternoon, in order to get out to Stonybrook - about 65 miles back in the other direction - for a fiddle workshop Sally was attending. I listened to some of that, and knit some more on my sock. Chinese food for supper, and another evening of cranking away at Sally's computer. Example of technophobia: she was not aware of the difference between setting up an email account with her ISP and setting up Outlook Express to check email - she thinks that if you create an identity on OE, you've created the email account. I did my best to explain, but I don't think it got through. Anyway, I went to her ISP's site, and created all the sub-accounts she wanted, and then configured OE (which I hate) to properly retrieve and send through all of them, and gave Sally a system for not losing her passwords quite so often... and then exhausted, fell into bed.
I told Sally, that even though the price of train tickets is a little more than I could afford to do willy-nilly every month (for some odd reason, it's $80 from Balto. to NY, and $93 from NY back to Balto.), if she would please expend $700 bucks on a new computer that would be faster and more powerful than her $3000 old one, I would make the trip up there again, no matter when, to set it up for her from scratch, *before* she had a chance to accidentally do something weird to it. We shall see if she takes me up on that.
Sunday, Sally had to take off early for the LI Fiddle Festival and another workshop; I had my friend Rick, who, like Sally, still lives in the town we all grew up in (Sally lives in the HOUSE she grew up in, but that's another story) pick me up, and we went to brunch. Rick's two daughters - one just graduated college, one has one semester left - and his wife came along, too. Rick is a whole 'nother story too, come to think of it. He and I only go back to junior high, whereas Sally and I go back to second grade. Anyway, we ate, we talked about the girls' new jobs and the decline of genre fiction, and then he dropped me off at the Hicksville train station, since we were slightly closer to that than we were to Wantagh station at that point. Got back into Penn in plenty of time to buy a ticket for the 2:05 back to Balto. - and to discover that it was running late. Not too late, though. Talked to some pleasant people en route, got back into Balto a bit after 5, S picked me up, and I went home and took a looooooong nap.
Well, now back to rehearsing, reading, etc. MVCB has a concert at Leisure World tomorrow.
We didn't get to the State Fair today because one of the lenses popped out of my glasses; I glued it back in, but I also went over to Penney's to see the optometrist and get a new prescription. Which I then had to take elsewhere to get filled, because my right eye has gotten enough worse that it's no longer within the range of prescriptions that Penney's can fill. The right eye used to be -11.00 diopters (that's 20/1100), and the left -9.25 diopters; the left is only up to -9.75, but the right eye is now up to -13.00. Yes, that's coke bottle bottoms. So I took the scrip to a more full-service eyeglass specialty place, and three weeks from now I should have new glasses, and meantime I should be careful. And so we're gonna try and get up to the fair on Thursday. Gotta have my yearly dose of fancy chickens, ridiculous goats, pickle relish and chow-chow judging, quilts, and weird new products in the food pavilion. Then Friday we head up to Pittsburgh. Whee!
Oh, Sam, I figured out what to call that thing we've been calling a closet, which is really too tall to be an armoire or a wardrobe the way that Ikea calls it. The tallness is what suddenly lit up the lightbulb over my head: it's a highboy! (Sort of odd realizing that that and oboe are from exactly the same root.)
Wednesday I saw the electrophysiologist my cardiologist had referred me to, the one who's something like head of the entire department at Johns Hopkins, and yes, he did manage to convince me that I should go ahead and get another defibrillator/pacemaker. If they can't get the third lead in, he promises that they won't spend a couple extra hours poking around; instead, they'll close it up as is, and then in December, after all my holiday concert obligations are over, I'll go back in for a separate procedure for a mini-thoracotomy, where they sorta stretch the ribs apart and go plunk the lead down on the outside surface of the heart. But maybe, just maybe, they'll get the third lead in when they put the device in. We'll see. That surgery is September 11. They'll keep me overnight just for observation, although pacemakers can be outpatient surgery; just my history and stuff. So, more news on that as it happens.
Thursday, I took the train up to NY. Takes 2.5 hours for the *local* from Baltimore Penn Station to NY Penn Station, even with all the stops. (I can't imagine why anyone would pay 80% more per ticket for the Acela, just to get there 15 minutes faster.) There are so many people going between Washington and NY that there are trains pretty much every hour all day - including the Regional (local commuter train, stops in Delaware, Philadelphia, and several places in New Jersey, one along about every 2 hours), the Acela, and several of Amtrak's named longer routes. Security on the trains has been beefed up a teensy bit, but is still abyssmal. For example, when I got to Penn (NY) I had to wait for my friend Sally, who came in from LI to meet me there. I wanted to sit while waiting, so I went to the LIRR waiting room, which is supposed to be for ticketed passengers only. They even have a rent-a-cop walk around every 15 minutes, asking to see everybody's tickets. I waved the stub of my Amtrak ticket from Baltimore at him. It's roughly the same size, but not the same color or printing, as the LIRR tickets, and it had the hole punched in it by the Amtrak conductor. However, it was adequate to fool the cop; he didn't even squint at it, and I got to keep sitting there.
When Sally got there, we took the subway up two stops to 50th St., and then walked back to 49th to go to The Colony, one of the largest sheet music stores in NYC (possibly the largest - several stores make the claim). In case you're wondering, I pack really light, so we had no trouble carrying my luggage along with us. Three changes of underwear, socks, and t-shirts, a soprano recorder, a sock I'm in the middle of knitting, and a magazine to read. However, that rapidly became heavier, as I wound up purchasing a pile o' sheet music. I got an arranger's handbook, which I need for the stuff I'm working on and which I didn't want to buy online, because I wanted to leaf through several and see which had writing style and musical examples that most suited my tastes. I chose one; they're all in the price range of textbooks and about the weight range of textbooks, too, so that almost doubled my luggage weight right there. I got several books of jazz duets for trombone. Why trombone, you ask? Because the baritone saxophone has about the same range as a trombone, and even though the bari sax is normally written for in treble clef, there's a cheap trick for playing bass clef parts on the bari and winding up at concert pitch, and then all trombone parts are within the range of the tubs, so: S and I can play duets on the bari sax and tuba, which I think will be a blast. And a couple of books of Jewish songs, so that I can arrange some of those, not just Christmas tunes, because one of the Montgomery Village Community Band's big gigs each year is the Hebrew Home which is an enormous facility - and they pay us to play - so I'd like to have something more than the usual arrangement of "O Chanukah" for band. I won't have time to do that by this November 5, but by next year, I hope to have arrangements of Hava Nagilah and Tsena Tsena underway. Then we ran across the street in the rain - OK, I walked, Sally carried the luggage and ran - and ate supper at Sbarro's, then the subway back to Penn Sta., and then the LIRR out to Wantagh. The subways are cleaner than I remembered from the last time I was in the city. The LIRR cars are still old and a bit grungy but the announcements are much clearer than I remember! Public transportation that works and goes where one needs it to - a great concept.
Friday we hung around Sally's house and played music - her on her fiddle and me on the recorder, but then she let me use one of her violins, and it turns out I can still scratch out a tune. I wouldn't give you five cents for my technique, but the fingers still go pretty much where they're supposed to, and can move along at the pace of a waltz or a reel, though I miss a few notes trying to do something as fast as a jig. Then we went out to Sam Ash, another large music store. Where I bought more jazz duets, more Jewish music, and a book of Bach cello stuff transcribed for saxophone, which I am going to enjoy. Then to supper, and then I spent the rest of the evening starting to clean up and straighten out Sally's computer. She's a bit of a technophobe, and it's an old, cranky computer, a combination guaranteed to cause hellish aggravation to all concerned. Uninstalling some stuff, cleaning up the desktop, running Spybot Search & Destroy, stuff like that. Cranked it up from extremely slow to merely irritatingly slow.
We headed out the door at 8 a.m. Saturday, got to the location for the Long Island Scottish Games, and discovered that they had been cancelled due to the rain. So the concerts Sally was playing in at said games were also cancelled. However, one of her ensemble members then invited everyone in the ensemble over to her place to play what would have been played anyway. We went back by the house, changed clothes, headed west into Queens to that person's condo, and spent several hours there; although I was just tagging along to listen, they wound up forcing me to play recorder along with them. And, though I hate to say it, despite that I was sight-reading the music and they had supposedly rehearsed it and were ready for a concert, I was doing better in several spots than the 2 recorder players they had (along with keyboards, accordion, guitar, and a dozen fiddles); the group was nowhere near what *I* would have considered concert-ready. I guess standards are different than for large concert bands. A couple of the fiddle players were really good, one who apparently is a school music teacher, but most, well, call it the not ready for prime time players. Anyway, pleasant and hospitable people. We headed out late afternoon, in order to get out to Stonybrook - about 65 miles back in the other direction - for a fiddle workshop Sally was attending. I listened to some of that, and knit some more on my sock. Chinese food for supper, and another evening of cranking away at Sally's computer. Example of technophobia: she was not aware of the difference between setting up an email account with her ISP and setting up Outlook Express to check email - she thinks that if you create an identity on OE, you've created the email account. I did my best to explain, but I don't think it got through. Anyway, I went to her ISP's site, and created all the sub-accounts she wanted, and then configured OE (which I hate) to properly retrieve and send through all of them, and gave Sally a system for not losing her passwords quite so often... and then exhausted, fell into bed.
I told Sally, that even though the price of train tickets is a little more than I could afford to do willy-nilly every month (for some odd reason, it's $80 from Balto. to NY, and $93 from NY back to Balto.), if she would please expend $700 bucks on a new computer that would be faster and more powerful than her $3000 old one, I would make the trip up there again, no matter when, to set it up for her from scratch, *before* she had a chance to accidentally do something weird to it. We shall see if she takes me up on that.
Sunday, Sally had to take off early for the LI Fiddle Festival and another workshop; I had my friend Rick, who, like Sally, still lives in the town we all grew up in (Sally lives in the HOUSE she grew up in, but that's another story) pick me up, and we went to brunch. Rick's two daughters - one just graduated college, one has one semester left - and his wife came along, too. Rick is a whole 'nother story too, come to think of it. He and I only go back to junior high, whereas Sally and I go back to second grade. Anyway, we ate, we talked about the girls' new jobs and the decline of genre fiction, and then he dropped me off at the Hicksville train station, since we were slightly closer to that than we were to Wantagh station at that point. Got back into Penn in plenty of time to buy a ticket for the 2:05 back to Balto. - and to discover that it was running late. Not too late, though. Talked to some pleasant people en route, got back into Balto a bit after 5, S picked me up, and I went home and took a looooooong nap.
Well, now back to rehearsing, reading, etc. MVCB has a concert at Leisure World tomorrow.
We didn't get to the State Fair today because one of the lenses popped out of my glasses; I glued it back in, but I also went over to Penney's to see the optometrist and get a new prescription. Which I then had to take elsewhere to get filled, because my right eye has gotten enough worse that it's no longer within the range of prescriptions that Penney's can fill. The right eye used to be -11.00 diopters (that's 20/1100), and the left -9.25 diopters; the left is only up to -9.75, but the right eye is now up to -13.00. Yes, that's coke bottle bottoms. So I took the scrip to a more full-service eyeglass specialty place, and three weeks from now I should have new glasses, and meantime I should be careful. And so we're gonna try and get up to the fair on Thursday. Gotta have my yearly dose of fancy chickens, ridiculous goats, pickle relish and chow-chow judging, quilts, and weird new products in the food pavilion. Then Friday we head up to Pittsburgh. Whee!
Oh, Sam, I figured out what to call that thing we've been calling a closet, which is really too tall to be an armoire or a wardrobe the way that Ikea calls it. The tallness is what suddenly lit up the lightbulb over my head: it's a highboy! (Sort of odd realizing that that and oboe are from exactly the same root.)
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Date: 2006-08-30 05:00 am (UTC)Much love!
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Date: 2006-08-30 06:09 am (UTC)There you are
Date: 2006-08-30 11:14 pm (UTC)