Oh, you know, the usual…
So today I finished the patio landscaping with the paving stones for the back gate:
Still a tiny bit of mulching to do, but otherwise, the patio is done.
On to the firepit:
That’s a little over 500 pounds of flagstone there, and it looks as if it’s going to take another 1,000 pounds to lay out that area. Excelsior!
OK, I confess: I have developed an obsession with my new friend kaolin.
The discovery that I can have all the white body paint I want for practically nothing has me dazzled. Yesterday I realized that instead of dipping chunks of the stuff in water, I could go ahead and dissolve all of my holdings into an earthenware bowl. Even when it dries, it becomes like my own personal bowl of pancake makeup. Woot!
Of course, the dissolving itself was fascinating:
Isn’t that just grotesque? I love it!
Soon, of course, I will need to test it out to see how much it takes to cover my person so that I can make plans to create enough paint for our venture at Alchemy. That’s where I will draw a discreet curtain over the process.
I spent the morning attempting to discover a way to make Finale do a very simple thing: using the ScoreMerger option in the program, take the soloists/chorus/piano staves and append them to an orchestral template. In other words, take the music I’ve already written and copy it over to a file with all those extra instruments in it.
It would not. It would append, but then it also copied over the page setup, so that I’d have two pages of 11×17 orchestral score followed by x number of 8-1/2×11 pages of piano score, along with all the title page stuff of the piano score.
I could go in and tell it to forget all page formatting, but then the 11 staves of the piano score would end up in weird places: the sopranos above the soloists, or the piano staves distributed amongst the vocals.
And under no circumstances was it bringing over dynamics or tempos.
Blergh.
I posted on the Finale online forum, but so far no one’s answered, except one person who has had the same issues. Their solution was the same as mine: re-order the orchestral score so that the piano part is below the vocals (normally it’s above them), then copy and paste the piano staves into the orchestral score. Not difficult but hardly elegant.
That took all morning, so no actual orchestration got done. But the template is set up now, and I should be accomplishing something tomorrow.
And I finally got that little wall on the back end of the patio done:
When autumn ferns come back on the market, I’ll plant one there.
Soon, but not tomorrow, I will revisit the stone store and drag home some medium-thickness flagstone for the gate entrance, and for the area around the firepit.
I took yesterday off because it was such a gorgeous day, but I was back at it today. When last we left the remaining bit at the far end of the patio, it looked like this:
After a little work today, using some paving/wall stones I had lying about and the remaining flagstone, it looks like this:
On Monday, I’ll go fetch some more flagstone and finish this part up. Finally, I’ll get some medium-thickness flagstone for the gate area, and the patio area is largely done. (This will include some fern plantings in the new wall part, plus cypress mulch EVERYWHERE YOU GUYS.
No work on Seven Dreams today, because—in case you didn’t notice—I finished Dream One yesterday.
Not that it’s done by any means. We’ll talk about that tomorrow.
Today, I ran all kind of errands and ended up back in the patio, finishing the little wall on the far end:
Little bit by little bit, sweat drop by sweat drop (it’s humid out there), it becomes reality.
Unless you count getting all sweaty and gross out in the yard. But progress on the opera? None.
As promised, I fixed the curve on the walkway:
I started the stone wall on the far end of the patio and got it about two-thirds done:
The ferns are Silver Lady Palm Ferns—from our very own Coweta Greenhouses—and they’re just placed there to show the final effect. I have to go get another load of stone and then put in another couple of layers on the left-hand side. This will happen Monday, since tomorrow I get back to the labyrinth.
After I finish the stone wall, there’s one more area to deal with:
It’s ugly. I think what I shall do is use some large pavers and the little pavers (shown here) to build a kind of raised bed and then just plant Autumn Ferns there. Maybe Dixie Wood Ferns. Maybe both. Something simple.
And now… MargaritaFest!
You know how on TV shows a crew will sweep in to a person’s back yard and move mountains of stuff and then by the end of the day there’s this gorgeous retreat where before there had been nothing but sand and crabgrass?
It might not work that way in real life.
Sure, that looks fine from a distance, but this is after I sweated my way through yesterday afternoon digging and mulching and tearing down old bamboo fencing.
Notice the five stepping stones. I ran out of materials to reset the last three. Back to the store. And it still has to have landscape fabric and mulch.
And over by that fence? I still have to move all the old pavers, clip the wisteria, install a little stone wall on the upper half, lay out pavers along the fence for an eventual wooden creation, plant, mulch, etc.
Then I have to trim the cherry laurel and install pretty little lights in it because lovely first wife.
And that’s not even getting the herb garden/side of house weeded…
What I’m trying to say is that I will not be attempting to solve Theseus’s aria problem today.
Update:
Here’s all I got done today, between all the errands necessary to get ready and an afternoon jaunt to invest in Apple stock. Plus rain.
Yes, I will smooth out the curve. Tomorrow, the far fence.
You may recall that my plans to celebrate turning 60 by going to live in an alkali desert for a week were scotched by the inability of my partner in crime to travel with me.
We have regrouped. There are more than a couple of regional Burns, and we have decided to go ahead and establish our 3 Old Men ritual performance group and start with Alchemy, taking place here in Georgia Oct. 2-5. We have tickets (more than we need, actually) and are putting together our team.
We are also beginning to move forward with all the practical matters that we would be in the middle of anyway were we still heading to Nevada in 10 weeks, i.e., the labyrinth, staves, and skirts. We met a couple of weeks ago to discuss these things, and now that I’m not having rotator cuff surgery, I’m ready to get started.
This weekend my lovely first wife and I have been in Raleigh, NC, for a family wedding, and while here we needed to visit some kind of “largest” fabric store for private upholstery reasons. I’ve already bought muslin to mock up the 3 Old Men skirts cheaply, and I’ve pretty much decided to make them of monks cloth because of its hand and drape, but since I was bored, I messaged the following photos to my fellows:
The fake fur is a Burning Man joke, of course. I don’t see how people wear anything out there other than loincloths, frankly. The G.I. Joe fleece was likewise a joke.
The psychedelic fabric, though… There is some part of me that can see us standing in the woods of north Georgia, waiting at the entrances of the four-path labyrinth, clad in some pretty freaky skirts. It doesn’t take it a lot of imagination to assign earth, fire, air, and water to them, either.
Also, I found as I wandered aimlessly around this largest fabric store that there could be many different interesting ways to build these skirts: brocades, sheers, etc. I finally decided that I needed to get home and actually build the thing first, study how the skirt will move and flow, and then powwow with my fellows on what ritual aspect we want to present.
At any rate, we will now resume updates on the progress towards Alchemy/Burning Man.
Here’s a quick update for you:
We’re heading to North Carolina for a family wedding, so blogging—and composing—is going to be sparse.
Also, not to get too personal, but this is the week that everyone gathers in Valdosta to get GHP up and running—the students will arrive on Sunday. As you might imagine, I may or may not be having a little trouble focusing on this version of reality.
But first, a wonderful comment that my spam filter forwarded to me for evaluation:
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Fastidious, that’s me all over.
I’m guessing that many people know that although the labyrinth occupies the majority of our back yard, there is a small portion on an upper level that does not belong to the labyrinth. Nor does it “belong” to me. It belongs to my lovely first wife, who has long desired a party patio.
The very nice stone wall that I built last September in the first burst of retirement was part of that effort, and in fact we had the sod laid in and some other little plantings done, but on the whole the result on the other side of the walkway—the patio itself—was unsatisfactory.
The LFW does not easily settle, her 36-year marriage to me (as of this Tuesday) notwithstanding, and so now we are embarked on getting exactly what she wants.
Here’s what our back yard looks like at the moment:
You will remark, no doubt, on the festive colors you are seeing.
Good shot of the successive approximation of the layout of the pavers by our team (Cow-Tip, Squirrel, and John—let me repeat that: Cow-Tip, Squirrel, and John), who have never in their careers been called upon to do anything of this nature but who are attacking the æsthetics of it all with great gusto.
Spoiler alert: this patchwork regularity is not what the LFW wants, but I am given to understand after a discussion on Friday afternoon that Cow-Tip, Squirrel, and John are now in complete alignment with her desires. Also, it should be noted that the plastic sheet in the background is the actual location of the patio. The foreground is just the team’s staging area, guaranteed to kill off the sod we installed last year.
Stay tuned for further developments in The Patio, Part II: The Harlequinading.