One of those days

[pyoor_excuse]

Not, oddly, one of those days where you wonder about whether your continued existence on the planet will ever produce anything tangible and worthwhile, or whether you are instead doomed to spend the entirety of the rest of your life looking at cat pictures on the internet*.

No, one of those super productive days.

I’m wondering if I need to write myself a to-do list for every day when I’m not working because the effect was astonishing.

On my list was the following:

- Clean some house
- Practice Guitar
- Practice Piano
- Order power supply connector
- Bottle cider
- Garden
- ?Print sepsis card

And apart from the sepsis card all of it got done and some other bits and bobs. Also I listened to lots of music, which is a bonus.

I actually managed to spend a good hour practicing music, which is astonishing to me. I have absolutely no commitment to these things, have never been a big one for practicing (or studying) so for me to hit a point where I was actually keeping playing because I damn well wanted to get the piece of music to sound at least roughly right was pretty pleasing.

Also I had a sudden understanding of how awful it must have been for my piano (or paino, which seems a strangely apt typo) to have listened to my terrible, terrible, timing.

* Which for various personal/health reasons was how I spent most of yesterday. Well, not cat-pictures per-se, but they might as well have been.

One of those days was originally published on Mostly lemon based

Originally published at Mostly lemon based. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[shadesofmauve]

Oh, I love those shots of the garden walk! It's so lovely what a nice meandering path does for a garden. :)

I started making a meandering path. It meandered about two meters and then I ran out of gravel, 'cause I hadn't had any brought in, and then I realized I hadn't put down enough cardboard for a weed barrier and now it's a path made entirely of dandelions. So, er, how did YOU construct your lovely path?

Also, confession time: I'm pretty bad at making myself practice. That's what my creativity/productivity spreadsheet is for, really, and it helps a lot.

[pyoor_excuse]

Aye, it makes the whole garden feel much more cared about. Which is nice. It does take an insane amount of gravel though. As in, that's about 850 kilos of gravel there. As for making it, I'm very, very lazy. So that is weed control membrane over the (not even cut) grass, then I've dug in little divots on either side of the path for the bricks to sit in. The membrane runs to underneath the bricks.

It's very cheap membrane though, so I forsee problems in the future.


...It kinda cheers me up that you're not good at making yourself practice and need some kind of motivator, because, well, your playing was just fantastic last time I heard it, and so it gives me vague hope that I might manage to pull mine up to 'adequate'. :)

[shadesofmauve]

I think I'm going to have to remove all the (now compacted and difficult to dig) gravel I've already got, dig the thing deeper, and add four to six layers of cardboard (in place of the weed control membrane). My two layers of cardboard wasn't enough, and cardboard does degrade... but so does every commercial membrane I've seen. And maybe follow your lead w regard to bricks... I wanted to do it without an edging but I think that may be untenable, since the gravel and dirt seem rather fond of each other.

Oof.

As for music stuff, I'm good at it because I've been doing it for over twenty years, and I play with people a few times a week (band practice and at least one session). If I *only* do that, I can coast, but if I want to get better I have to practice, and I really do need extra motivation or self-management to do it, usually. It's especially important now I'm trying to learn both singing and tenor guitar -- it's so long since I've been a beginner!

I've found that it helps to have a goal or project ("I want to get THIS song to passable level"). For reference, my 'okay' level on my little chart is 15 minutes -- in 15 minutes of focused practice, I can either get all the way through my vocal exercises, OR make serious headway on a new fiddle tune, OR get my fingers tired on guitar ('cause I'm still wimpy at that). My 'excellent' time is 45 minutes or higher, which seems to be about the limit of my ability to focus on one instrument. Unless I'm at fiddle camp where there's lots of new exciting stuff to learn, or I'm playing with someone else, I just kinda peter out after 45 minutes no matter what.

I know fancy dedicated musickers will talk about spending four hours a day practicing, but my last three months are living proof that 15 minutes almost every day can give you significant improvement. My guitar and singing (where I'm still in the steep learning curve bit) have improved A LOT since January when I started my chart!

[pyoor_excuse]

Oooh, moving gravel is tedious. We did that in Slough, and it took an awful lot of wor. Aye, the commercial membranes degrade too - and ours is very cheap and thus dreadfully thin. However, it's also quick to lay and thin enough that we don't have to dig it out.

Also, we're not planning to live here for a long time, because we want to live in the Do Not Enter house in Astoria... Well, okay, we just want the land.

As for the music stuff, indeed. I am finding it easier in a way to practice the piano because I can actually play something akin to a tune. The guitar stuff doesn't sound like a tune yet, just assorted notes in a specific order (Which technically, I suppose, is sort of a tune). Anyhow, I have to practice otherwise honestly, what's the point in carrying a piano 100s of miles across the ocean?

Oh, and Units? that's interesting. I don't quite know what a yard of gravel is - is that 1 cubic yard of gravel? In which case I'd say that it's more than that - because the bag of gravel that was lowered into our (front, sadly) garden by crane was more than 1mx1mx1m (which is close enough to a yard as makes no odds).

[shadesofmauve]

a yard of gravel is one cubic yard, yes. And if you had more than a cubic meter at that weight the calculator for gravel weight I found must've been off. Tricksy things.

The Do Not Enter house could be scarier! It could say "Do not enter OR KNOCK DOWN"

[pyoor_excuse]

Unlike a yard of ale, which would be seriously concerning if it was a cubic yard*.

Weight/volume conversions are all challenging. I recall when I discovered that US cooking was mainly done by volume instead of by weight, I found that such an odd concept. I now, incidentally, generally think it works really well - but did have to be convinced by a process of actually cooking.

* My wife informs me that she's never heard of this, which means I suppose that you might not have heard of this, thus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yard_of_ale

[shadesofmauve]

Ah! I am pleased to inform you that the reason your wife had not heard of a yard of ale was that she didn't grow up with my dad (or at least, only for very small stretches, occasionally). Dad made sure I was quite well informed on the beautiful idea of a yard of beer, including the apocryphal origin story about stage coach drivers. :)

I *much* prefer cooking by volume, though I believe that for some higher end, finicky baking weight is better. I was quite flabbergasted when visiting friends in Chester and I learned they never, ever, ever cooked with simple volumetric units (i.e., 3 to 4 or 2 to 3, which I use a lot).

[pyoor_excuse]

Ah, well, that's okay then.

It was baking that gave me pause in the concept of cooking by volume. However, these days I'm happy with either. Most European cookbooks will give you weights not volumes though, so our kitchen is equipped with both scales and cups :)

[shadesofmauve]

Dad was really fond of the idea of that much beer. :D

I've recently been cooking from a set of Chinese cookbooks by a British author, so everything's in weights. It's not a problem at all, because it's not about baking so rough guesses are fine, but now I think about it it's kind of weird -- they changed little bits of Harry Potter for US publication so poor US children wouldn't be confused, but when they publish European cookbooks in the US they never convert 'em to volume measures!

[shadesofmauve]

Oh, and I must shake my fist across the pond at you, because you've once again managed to send me searching for a unit conversion calculator. It's enough to have to convert kilos to pounds, which I at least have an idea of, but here we measure gravel (and dirt and other such building/garden things) by volume -- specifically the cubic yard. So if you've said "X meters of gravel" I would've had a good picture, but now I'm all confused. :P

*messes about with various converters* It looks like it's under a yard of gravel, which actually seems pretty good to me!

Of course, the problem with a quantity like that is you can't get it all at once in most vehicles and it's not enough to get a deal on delivery.