golgicomplex

Well gee dang, I made quite a list for myself. To writ I have gotten, let's see... jack done this week. But! I have been working on something else, that being some of my baking endeavors. I've wanted to be able to make a loaf of bread that doesn't suck for some time now, and I finally did it! Look at me being an industrious househusband. Photos are on Facebook, but here's what I did--it's an Amish recipe that works for Great Lent since there's no dairy:

2 c. tepid water
1.5 tbsp active dry yeast
0.5 c. table sugar
1.5 tsp kosher salt
0.25 c. vegetable oil
6 c. all-purpose unbleached flour

Yield: two 9x5 loaves.

In a large bowl, dissolve the sugar in the tepid water and add the yeast [I accidentally added the salt at this point, too]. Let this proof until it looks like a frothy foam, about 20 minutes. Mix in the salt and oil, then begin folding in the flour one cup at a time until it's all in (there will be a little bit of extra flour, no biggie). Turn it out on a floured surface and knead until it's a smooth ball, then spray some PAM in a bowl, put the dough ball in there and let it rise for an hour under a damp paper towel (or until it's more than doubled in size, whichever happens first... I like it to be huge). Punch the risen dough down (one good press is sufficient), then turn it out onto a floured surface and knead it a bit more, then divide it into two; knead and work each lump into a smooth loaf and put them into 9x5 loaf pans. Cover the pans and let rise for another 30 minutes, then bake for 30 minutes in a 350º oven. Et voila! Fresh baked bread that looks awesome and tastes amazing.

Any suggestions for my next project?

Aw man, spring break is next week! For those unaware, spring is my favorite season: shorts and sandals come out, the lawn gets cut, and I do a ton of crap around the house in a fit of pollen-induced rage. We also just renewed the lease on our house, and I'm bound and determined to make it gorgeous as long as we live here. SO, while this list is probably of little value to any reader, I'm putting it here as a memory jog and preliminary game plan.

PART I. Landscaping
I'm planning to do a number of low-cost, high-return projects with our yard. It's enormous, so there's a lot of potential for food cultivation as well as great aesthetic possibilities. I've been reading up on square foot gardening, and I've devised what I think will be a neat arrangement. We eat a lot of berries, so I'm going to make three long boxes for our back yard: one each for blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries. I'll also do a large box for everbearing strawberries and another box for an herb garden... it'll be pretty cost effective, too.

The side of our shed is a hemlock patch right now, so on Tuesday I'll be mowing that down as low as I can and treating the whole area with weed killer and mulching it. Not sure what I'll do on top of that but the hemlock's gotta go; it's poisonous and it smells bad.

In the front yard I'm going to do a lot of work with a couple of varieties of asclepias (butterfly weed): there are two I've got my eye on, tuberosa and incarnata (need to order those tonight while I'm thinking about it). Those will go along the front of the house since they're one of the few things that will grow well there; low-maintenance hardy perennial wildflowers that attract beneficial insects--can't ask for much else. They'll look nice with the bright orange daylilies that are already part of the deal, too. A butterfly bush will go on the corner of the house, and on the far side I'll probably plant some pampas grass and mulch it on down.

Along the front sidewalk I'm going to plant a couple lavender bushes and mulch it (it's just scraggly lawn right now). I haven't picked the variety yet, but I know I've got my heart set on that... keeping that area mulched will increase our curb appeal, too. Not that it means anything.

Side flowerbed... haven't decided, probably an entire bed of pink and purple impatiens since they fill in gaps so nicely and it's a weird space. We did wildflowers there last year, which was nice for about three weeks then they overgrew the bed and it got full of stuff we didn't plant, including sunflowers and cherry tomatos (durr what).

Alongside the back of the house I'm going to lay down some sand and gravel so there's some semblance of a patio-esque area to keep the grill, trash can, and recycle bin on. Right now it's just a weedy mess. I'll probably do another pot of lavender or impatiens to set back there too with our porch swing.

PART 2: Around the house
Just a couple of things that we've absolutely got to get done around the house:

First, the bedroom. We've never really finished unpacking in there, and because of changing bodies we have a lot of clothes we need to arrange, donate, store, and move back into rotation, etc. I'm going to let Jodie do the decorating in there but I'm going to do hardcore cleaning while she's on her forthcoming Joplin trip (which will be after my spring break, technically).

The office, too: I'm going to put some shelving in the closet, move the catbox to the bottom of the closet and stow some things more efficiently in there, steam the carpet, and do some general organizing. I'm thinking a day will be sufficient for both of these... but they gotta get done or I'm going to lose my mind.

PART 3: Other crap
All my grading will be done by Friday afternoon this week since midterm grades are due at midnight, so that's no big deal... what I want to get done in my nighttime hours, though, is get a head start on all of my papers that will be due at various points in April. First up, I think, is going to be my Sacred Music paper since that will be the easiest to write; I'm finalizing my topic this week. Next in priority will be my counterpoint paper since that's due next, and finally my Proseminar paper (for which I have a really solid topic: the relation of Paul Tillich's theology to Theodor Adorno's musical semiotics). And then I'll be done for the semester! No big deal, if I can get all of these big papers done in March...

Then I'll of course have my little throwaway papers for Church History... but those won't be a big deal since they're both due May 16th.

Lucy's on a breaking stuff streak. Today's victims: one of the plates we got as a wedding gift from a dear friend from our brief stint as Southern Baptists, and Jodie's French press which was her birthday gift last year from me. The latter also involved my poor wife finding our two year old splashing in a puddle of warm coffee and broken glass (unscathed, of course), accompanied by the discovery that our cats like veranda roast Starbucks Blonde coffee.

This stuff never happens when I'm at home.

And I was like

This is the best thing I have seen on SNL since Kristen Wiig's Jamie Lee Curtis.



EDIT: When did the HTML tag for mouseover text become title instead of alt? Geez, W3 standards, you and I are so out of touch.

Okay, so positives and negatives seem to come in fits and starts. It's all good. On Wednesday I had a job interview for a part-time gig at a local Anglican church. It seems like it will be a great fit if I get it; they'll have me leading the contemporary blended service on piano/voice, combining contemporary Christian music with hymns and liturgical music. Good stuff! It's a really warm, welcoming parish, and they have strong ties with the Asbury community. This has the potential to be a really great move for me and my family, so I'm praying hard about it and attempting to prepare the snot out of my audition repertoire (a worship set, a couple of hymns, some liturgy, and some of my own stuff). That'll be in January.

We're going to my parents' house tomorrow after I give my last final. Very much looking forward to seeing them all. We're coming back on the 23rd, sleeping, and continuing on to Joplin on the 24th so Lucy can spend Christmas morning with her cousin Adelaide, which will be cute overload of the century. The whole time we'll be working on getting Jodie to Director-in-Qualifying with Mary Kay. She's been kicking tail like I never knew tail could be kicked. It'll be a good year.

Golly Moses, I made it to the end of Wednesday! If you haven't been following it, I've slowly but surely been striking out the massive task list in my last post. I know I could do the exact same thing with a pen and a sheet of paper but typing in the HTML tags is somehow infinitely more satisfying. Anyway, I now have the major projects of the first semester of my doctoral degree wrapped up. I just need to finish up a pair of bibliographies and I can stick a fork in them. The last things that remain, honestly, are a metric asstonne of grading and a Hebrew exegesis paper, but that last one will be a little bit of linguistic lounging compared to what I've been clawing my way through over the past semester. I've done the impossible.

Time for sleep.

The next couple of weeks are going to be INSANE for me, unlike anything I've done in academics before. This post is really more for my own benefit than to provide you guys with edifying literature, but maybe you can commiserate with me? Your pick.

Tomorrow (12/1):
- 2 Make-up Hebrew vocab quizzes
- Brief presentation on collected works of Giuseppe Verdi and another composer I haven't decided upon yet
- Interviewing my priest friend about cultural and ritual identity in American Orthodoxy for my ethnomusicology final project
- Presenting an article on batá music in my ethnomusicology class
- Dinner meeting with VAUMC Board of Ordained Ministry
- Writing final MUS 100 quiz
Friday 12/2:
- Friday Matins
- One-on-one with VAUMC BOM people
- Giving my final MUS 100 quiz to both classes (20th C.)
- Colloquium and copying stuff for music criticism anthology.
- Finish Christian Discipleship paper.
Saturday 12/3:
- Writing dissertation proposal. Most of it exists in notecards and scraps in Evernote; just needs to be compiled and sources need to be annotated (due Thursday, 20 pages) Body of the text is done, I just need to create the bibliography. HOWEVER, I also discovered that it's only supposed to be 10-12 pages, not 20. Workload thus cut in half [Success Kid goes here].
Sunday 12/4:
- Church (Eucharist!)
- Starting final ethno paper; doing plenary research on American Orthodoxy to fill in gaps from interview and pre-writing. (Due Thursday, 10-12 pages with endnotes)
- Compiling annotated bibliography for discipleship project
- Prepare lesson for Monday
Monday 12/5:
- Doctor's appointment to re-fill anti-depressant
- Teaching: history of pop music 1960-2011
- Work on Music Criticism Anthology (compiling and summary essay, 10 pages); needs to be close to finished by midnight on Monday. [Rescheduled below.]
Tuesday 12/6:
- Prepare for Christian Discipleship presentation
- Write interview write-ups
- Write Music Criticism Paper & compile articles
- Prepare lesson for Wednesday
Wednesday 12/7:
- Christian Discipleship Presentation
- Turn in Christian Discipleship paper
- Teaching (being observed during my 2:00 section): Special Lecture on Holy Minimalism and Russia (i.e., my dissertation topic)
- Criticism anthology presented to the seminar and turned in
- Finish proposal bibliography
- Write Ethnomusicology paper
- Proofread!!
Thursday 12/8:
- Final ethnomusicology paper turned in
- Quiz Grading/Data Entry
Friday 12/9:
- Friday Matins
- Final review with MUS 100 students
- Colloquium (Musicology party!)
Saturday 12/10:
- GRADING
Sunday 12/11:
- GRADING
- Write MUS 100 final
Monday 12/12:
- Start/pre-write final Hebrew paper, translate passage (3500 words)
Tuesday 12/13:
- 1:00 section final
- Turn in/Present dissertation proposal in Research Methodology final period
- ANNIVERSARY
Wednesday 12/14:
- Finish Hebrew paper, grade 1:00 finals and papers
Thursday 12/15:
- Turn in Hebrew paper at Hebrew final period
Friday 12/16:
- 2:00 section final
- Drive to Virginia
Saturday 12/17:
- Grade 2:00 finals and papers in the comfort of my parents' house
- Enter grades
- CHRISTMAS BREAK Y'ALL

[Edits for scheduling :(]

Sometimes when I'm among the stacks (and stacks and stacks and stacks) of books in the Fine Arts library working on a project, I imagine myself as Sephiroth in the basement of the Nibelheim mansion:

"Saint-Saëns--what--the four-hand piano in Carnival of the Animals really was a pastiche of the same technique in his third symphony? That means... that I... NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

I still can't figure out why the original copies of all the JENOVA project literature (and Vincent) were stored there instead of archived on computers or microfiche at Shinra headquarters or Junon or something with some vestige of security--I mean, come on, you can walk right in and read anything you want! Clearly they did NOT have any archivists working on the project.