oncall sex for life: piano

Showing posts with label piano. Show all posts

Music composition and.... decapitation perfume?

Hello, lovelies. How was everyone's weekend?

Patrick and I spent a lot of time these past couple of days trying to write music using our piano, and we got a considerable amount accomplished. It takes a long time to come up with something that sounds right, so we only have a few measures done for each of two songs (harmony is a challenge!), but it's interesting and I'm really enjoying it. For some parts I have a really definite idea what I'm after, and others I'm not clear on how I want the music brought to life. I'm learning a lot, and I'll share when we've finally got something completed.

In other news, I saw this in an advertisement the other day, and it gave me the wiggins:

The Most Hideous Perfume Bottle Ever

Nicki Minaj, the rapper whose name so classily decorates this abomination, has evidently released a perfume (don't feel bad if you don't know who she is; I don't really know anything about her myself other than she's a rapper who wears insane clothes and worse wigs). I don't know about you, but this would scare the daylights out of me if I saw it coldly staring at me in the middle of the night from across the room. Or worse, right next to me. I'm pretty sure this thing would find a way to slowly crawl up next to you while you sleep.

Furthermore, it appears that the spraying part of the perfume bottle is... her neck. So, what, you twist off her head with its creepy plastic hair and spray the mist from her neck stump on your skin?! What psychopath came up with this?

I do not want to know what this smells like, but I'm pretty sure that if it's your cup of tea, the authorities might want to investigate you...

Gnawing on the ivories

I've been practicing piano on and off in the evenings, and Monday I played for about 45 minutes or so, until my fingers were very tired. You know you've played a lot when your finger muscles start burning from use! (Or that your hands are really out of shape, one of the two...)

After about 20 minutes, I got a visitor!

He was pretty snuggly about it, and he didn't hamper my playing too much, except for when my right hand would go down the keys and apparently invade what he considered his personal bubble. Then he'd bite my hand (gently), lick it afterward, and gurgle quietly to himself about his victory.

THERE IS A GOD.

We once again have a functional sewer line! Dear lord was that a nightmare. Our toilet worked for all of like 3 uses before it started not flushing again, but mercifully the landlady was very responsive and authorized payment for it, so I could set up the repairs the company had told us last night were basically necessary unless we wanted to have a few feet of raw sewage in our house or poop in a bucket.

We had to have the poor plumber guys out again this evening (in the pouring rain, I might add) to dig a 3' deep hole and find out where the horrible clog was. This turned out to be a Y bend in the line which had formerly been capped on one outlet with cement. This had broken, and a whole bunch of dirt had gotten into the line, which I'm sure was exacerbated by the near flood-stage rains we've had lately.

They ripped that thing out and put in the part that is supposed to be there, the cleanout (which by the way is required by code and so we were sort of living illegally by not having one), and fixed everything up.

OUR TOILET FLUSHES, Y'ALL! Mere words cannot express how happy I am about this. You do not truly appreciate your toilet until you do not have it. I kind of want to go hug it now but, y'know, ew.

I love you, Puget Sound Plumbing & Heating. If I weren't already married to an awesome dude, I would consider dating your company. I am THAT happy. (I settled for serving the plumbers hot tea, for which they were very grateful. I would be too if I had to dig a hole in the chilly rain.)

Also, thank god we rent this house. If we didn't, we would be out around $2660 by now. This has been a major learning experience. I now know more than I ever thought I'd need to about showers, sinks, toilets, and sewer line snaking.

In other news, I played through Chopin's Prelude in E Minor tonight while waiting for them to finish (playing kind of calms my nerves, a little), and it wasn't terrible. I've never played it before, so I did my usual learning bit of playing the right hand, then the left, and then putting them together. It was slow going, but it sounded nice. Besides, doesn't largo mean slow anyway? That's what I'm telling myself. It's nice to know I haven't lost it all in the decade and a half or so since I quit really playing.

Thank you, darling parents, for giving me all those lessons and forcing my lazy self to practice. I owe you.

Songwriting continues

I've got two so far. I was working on the second one last night before the cold meds really took effect, and managed to revise it a bit. I'm still not any good at rhyming, but I don't think I care... I'll try to figure out some music for this second one. The first one only has a melody, nothing else, and I've got to flesh that out, too. There is so much work involved! Now that our piano is tuned, I can use it to help me decide how the songs should go.

I had a dream that told me if I wanted to write songs, I had to do it while sitting at the piano. Sometimes my brain is very straightforward about stuff. Like when I was little and sucked my thumb. I used to carry around a clean cloth diaper and tickle my nose with it while I sucked my thumb, and that was a lovely combination. My mom wanted me to stop, so she asked me how she could get me to do that, and I told her to take away my diaper. If she did that, I would stop. So she did, I did, and that was it, no fussing or anything. Maybe my brain's got the right idea about songwriting now.

It's hard for me to write songs about happy stuff. Usually I get them coming to me when I'm in the grip of huge emotional waves, and those tend to be negative, so I get writings full of blazing anger and despairing darkness. Maybe if I tried writing while hypomanic I'd end up with more positive stuff? I don't know. Anyway, it's not like anything really tangible has come of this yet. I just thought I'd let y'all know that I'm working on it, and my musical project has not been forgotten.

If only all classical music were as accessible

My mom sent me this video, and I loved it. Patrick and I were speaking the other day about how there is so much beautiful, passionate classical music out there, but people tend to think it's boring and unrelatable. A lot of the wonderful stuff is Russian (see Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, to name just a couple), and I wish symphonies would play more of that, along with pieces like the one shown below, the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

All these pieces give me chills for various reasons when I hear them. Beethoven's Ninth with the glorious chorus at the end, Night on Bald Mountain in the beginning with the creepy violins that build into that demonic brass chord series (Patrick played this gorgeously), and Scheherazade for its arrogant sultan's tones (also played to perfection by my very own spouse a while back).

I wish classical music was portrayed in a better light. Maybe more of these flash mob-type things would help. And if classical stations would quit playing that intensely boring stuff that is like one flute and a couple violins for 30 minutes straight. Give us some meat and brass! I never properly appreciated trombones until I married someone who plays one professionally. Now I do. There is no instrument in the orchestra that can deliver power like a trombone.

In other musical news, we finally got our piano tuned. The process was utterly excruciating, but it's now finished and I can play the damn thing without wanting to stab myself in the eyeball because it's so horrendously out of tune.

Along with people sniffles in our house, we have kitty sniffles. Widget has gotten over her cold, but now Gurgles has it. Sigh. I guess it's that time of year. Hopefully all the illness goes away before the holidays. I hate being sick when I'm supposed to be eating piles of food. Kinda makes Thanksgiving dinner a little pointless if you can't taste any of it.

My furry practicing partner

The Widget has been keeping me company while I practice. She seems to enjoy it. This is the piece I'm working on, Pachelbel's Canon in D. It's very pretty and it has a lot of variations on a single theme (six pages' worth). It's not difficult, and it's a good way for me to remember how to read bass clef and get my fingers slowly stronger again. Patrick gets to hear it over and over! haha Fortunately he's a musician, so he can appreciate the necessity of playing things a million times. I'm very lucky to have him.

Back pain, ad nauseam (plus bonus octopus piano)

Hi, blog readers! I thought I'd let you know what went on with my appointments. At the doctor's office yesterday, he thought it was a rhomboid muscle injury. So he prescribed muscle relaxers, Vicodin with Tylenol added, and physical therapy. I took the meds last night, and they knocked me out.

This morning I went to physical therapy, and it turns out that my right arm isn't working correctly. It has about half the strength of my left, and it fatigues way too quickly. There appears to be something wrong with my tricep.

I'd also been having my hands go numb when sitting up reading, and the last two fingers on my right hand go numb when using a mouse/keyboard for too long, along with nerve shocks up my right arm. I laid off the video games, and the two finger numbness/nerve shock business stopped. The numbness from reading continued.

The therapist thinks it's a pinched nerve. They put electrodes on me and did some electrical muscle stimulation, along with heat, and I'm supposed to rest, take the meds, do stretching, walk a bit to increase blood flow, and have three more physical therapy appointments. She did a bit of massage as well to try and loosen it up.

Afterward, my back was screaming, so I just went home and took more meds. They'll probably knock me out again soon, but I wanted to let you know what was going on. I hope this gets resolved with meds and therapy. I really don't want to have more surgery.

According to the therapist, 90% of nerve pinching cases are resolved without surgery. Watch me be the 10% who needs it... It's the family way! hah

When I feel better, I'll post pictures of this stuffed octopus-covered piano I saw yesterday. It's fascinating.

Update: pain is down enough now for the pictures to be added. This piece was titled Octavia Rises, and the pictures are in pretty high def, so if you can't see them clearly on here, right click and save, then open using your own program. Enjoy!