Eanna

I left work today feeling vaguely annoyed. I won't go into the reasons here, because they're vaguely annoying. I just can't see myself doing this work for the next 22 years.

The publicity pamphlets for the upcoming election are arriving fast and furious now. My favorite part of these pamphlets are the "For" and "Against" arguments. For example, Maricopa County Proposition 400, the continuation of the sales tax to fund general transportation projects in the Valley. The vast majority of the "Against" arguments object to the light rail provision. Or as one citizen put it, "Trolley Is Terrorist Target"! OMG! We mustn't build anything, lest the terrorists blow it up! Reminds me of the 60's British film, The Bed Sitting Room, set in a post-atomic-war Britain where all permanent structures had been destroyed, and people were forbidden from settling down or building any shelters because they would provide targets for a new round of bombing. Dudley Moore roamed the countryside in a hot air balloon with a megaphone, yelling "Keep Moving!" This posed a predicament for the title character who, due to atomic radiation, was slowly mutating into a bed sitting room. Eventually Dudley Moore mutated into a dog - a terrier, if I recall correctly.

It was based on a stage play, apparently.

Unlike every other blogger on earth I'm not going to say anything about the Presidential Debate, because I lost interest soon after they announced the rules. No spontaneity, please, we're American.

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Lon finally caught up with me today at work. He and Sandra are in the middle of selling their house so he'd only just found time to listen to the CD I'd sent him, and said he didn't think he could manage the lead on 10:45 Express. Phoo. Phoo and bar. Now I'll have to either totally rethink the arrangement on that song, or else find someone with a similar voice to take over the Conductor's singing parts.

I've just about finished the arrangment of Thunder Grey Horse over the weekend. I just need to put in the dynamics (bleh - my favorite NOT part) for the piano, and maybe some tweaking on the little bit of vocal backup in the middle. Should be off to Jeff by the end of the week, before I head off to Prescott. Jeff and I had a long phone conversation on Saturday, where he introduced me to reality wrt the recording schedule. Yeah, I'm definitely going to make more than one trip out to Nevada City.

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Now is the time of year when the first cool hours begin to spread out from midnight and poke their heads around the corners of twilight and dawn. The days become less scorching. A subtle tension, grown used to since its onset in May, is suddenly gone one morning, drained away during the night. The exile indoors (or to the backyard pool) ends, as people begin once more to appear on their front walks. All summer the streets and the patch of park at the neighborhood's edge were deserted; soon they'll be appropriated for soccer practice. The school buses return. In the mail the election pamphlets arrive atop the first waves in a tide of holiday catalogs. Soon it will be time to pulls the blankets out of storage, and the cats will become more friendly at night. The arts season begins now, and the harvest festivals, and the music festivals, and the State Fair, gathering momentum as they hurtle towards the end of December, pulled by a force like gravity into the Solstice.

Mabon - Autumnal Equinox - is certainly a different animal here in the low desert than it is in more northern climes. It always felt a bit off to be doing a ritual from Crystal Well or some such going on about sorrow at the waning of the summer, when I really wanted to jump in the air and shout yippee! Greater Phoenix has its own unique way of marking the Equinox, suffered by every commuter driving an east-west street - the sun straight through the windshield or right in the rearview mirror to and from work! The egineers who laid out our streets would've done the builders of Stonehenge proud!

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Wholly Freaking Cow!

Early in 2003 I sent a claim form to the TSA for 2 belts that went missing from my TSA-inspected luggage between Ottawa and Phoenix. (I don't think anyone stole them; they probably just fell out and got kicked under a counter.) This was in the early days of the TSA, when they didn't have things quite worked out, and my claim form was about a fifth-generation xerox of a form intended to report damaged luggage. Later that year I read an article saying they would only pay on claims where the traveller could produce the receipt for the missing item (!), so as I'd received to answer I figured that was it.

Out of the blue today I get a letter from the TSA saying they're comping me the full amount on my claim! Yeah, I know, believe it when the check clears. But it's nice to get totally unexpected good news.

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Thunder Alley

A little rain wasn't going to keep me from hiking Siphon Draw Trail this morning, but the whacking great thunderstorm that rolled in before dawn and the lightning strikes off in the direction of the Superstitions convinced me that frolicking about on an exposed hillside wasn't the wisest activity. So instead I stayed at home, working (appropriately enough) on Thunder-Grey Horse and dashing outside to do some yardwork between cloudbursts when the cabin fever got to be too much.

I was feeling pretty good about my progress on the new Stardust County arrangements on Friday - I'd finished up The Glass-Spinners and all of its reprises and permutations in one week - then I sat and wrote down the titles of the songs I have yet to do. Oog.

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Boy, am I stupidly tired. I had to get up early three days in a row, and this morning when I hoped to get an extra half hour's sleep in, the cats came in and stomped on me about 4:00. But there's another vegetarian restaurant going to be opening between work and the gym, so life is good.

The draft schedule for this year's Prescott Folk Festival just came out; Warren's scheduled me for late afternoon both days, meaning that I can sloth around all morning.

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Planning Day

Today I went down to Passport Health to get my Yellow Fever vaccination. I also finally saw a podiatrist, who told me to stop trying to clip my problem toenail and put Vicks vapor rub on it instead.

I put in my ticket orders for the coming arts season. There are a lot of shows I'd like to see, but I kept it to a minimum this year so my schedule would be open for work on the CD. On my list:

• PSO's "New World" concert: Appalacian Spring, Dvorak's New World Symphony, and a newer work I'm unfamiliar with.
• Ensemble Kaboul
• PSO's Carmina Burana
• Arizona Opera:
• Pagliacci / Il Tabarro
• La Cenerentola (which I have to miss because I'll be in Peru)
• Cosi Fan Tutti
• The Consul

Tom came over last night to work on some stuff for our show together in December. I was straight from the gym and in a good mood (the soundtrack from Amelie makes stationary bike-riding fun), and we had a good practice.

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Wasn't going to blog today, but the Toronto Globe and Mail online ticked me off with an article quoting an "expert" who said that in troubled times people turn from Science Fiction to Fantasy, because Fantasies are black and white stories of Good vs. Evil. WTF? There's nothing inherent to the definition of Fantasy that requires the story to be Good vs. Evil - Sir Apropos of Nothing sure as hell wasn't, and I could cite rafts of Fantasy works that are morally ambiguous (or at least nuanced in their conflicts): Steven Brust's Dragaera series, for example, or Terry Pratchet's Diskworld novels. And gee, wasn't 1984, a Science Fiction classic, a pretty clearcut story about Good and Evil? What about The War of the Worlds, the book I mean? True, H.G. Wells never explicitly calls the Martians Evil, but they do go about destroying Western Civilization, which is pretty antisocial if you ask me.

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Election Day

They moved my polling place again. Last time the polls for my district was Fountain of Life Church. For today's primaries they moved it to Stapley Drive and a little further away, to St. Luke's Lutheran Church. Unfortunately, this was right next door to Mesa Southern Baptist Church, where the polls for another district were. Naturally people were hitting the wrong church as often as not; this puzzled the people at MSBC, who were apparently unaware that the "other" polls was right next door. Yes, elections here in the East Valley almost always take place in church buildings. Why? Probably because there are a lot of 'em - more so than there are other public buildings - and they're generally not otherwise in use on Tuesdays. It certainly clashes with my early memories of Election Day, when the voting booths would be set up in the front hallway of DeLong Elementary School, and you might see your parents or the parents of a friend coming in to vote as you were lining up for the cafeteria. It gave the kids an early exposure to voting, and made it seem part of everyday life. I think that's why I prefer going down to the polls over voting by mail, even though it involves getting up early and running the gauntlet of the last-minute campaigners in the parking lot. For one thing, going to the polls in person and seeing some of the other people who've turned out to vote can convince you of your need to continue voting. For example, I spotted a truck in the parking lot with a Boycott France bumpersticker. Did these people know what a boycott was? I wondered. What products had they previously been buying from France that they were now doing without, in order to use their economic clout to convince France to stop.... doing something. Being French, I suppose.

I'm a registered Independant; we've been allowed to vote in the primaries in Arizona since 2000. We do, however, have to pick one party's ballot - we can't vote willy-nilly across the boundaries. This is somewhat controversial, but in my district the winner of the Republican primary usually runs unopposed in the secondary election, meaning that without a vote in the primaries I'd have no voice in who represents me. OTOH, I don't want to join the Arizona Republican party just to vote in the primaries, because as a single female professional and a pagan, I don't feel my liberties and interests are high on their list of priorities. Yes, flawed though the two-party system may be, a one-party system sucks rocks.

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This morning I drove out to Peralta Trail for a hike. This was a kind of litmus test of my fitness; the last time I hiked Peralta I had recently come back from a hiking tour of New Zealand and practically flew up the trail. I actually did much better today than I'd anticipated, this being only my second hike of the season. After snacking on half a sandwich at Fremont Saddle, I decided to keep on going on the less-travelled leg of the trail north of the Saddle. There the trail goes down a gentle grade towards Weaver's Needle and into a canyon area with lots of quail. I went as far as the fire circle and came back, maybe about 45 min. each way. From the Saddle back to the parking lot seemed to take for bloody ever, possibly because I was getting tired and the temperature was inching up. (Only 94, though, according to my car's gague when I got back to the trailhead at noon - not bad at all.) The only hitch is that my hat somehow made it out of my pack since last weekend, and I now have a mild sunburn where my hair parts.

Well, tomorrow is the day for our local primary elections; I got an absolutely hilarious flyer in the mail yesterday, from three incumbents whingeing about negative campaigning by "the Liberals". Funny, the only attack ad that's wound up in my mailbox was from Karen Johnson - one of these people now claiming to be victims - and she was bashing one of her fellow Republicans! Oh well, what can you say about a candidate who appears to be courting both the Libertarian and (Christian) Fundamentalist vote?

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Yow!

Tom, if you thought adding links to your page was a hassle, don't even try adding a photo to your blogger profile! It involves downloading two pieces of client software, one of which has already gone south on me, then digging through the help topics to find the kludgey hack required to fill out the form, which will then inform you that the image file has to be smaller than 50 K. Talk about beta testing - is there a letter before alpha?

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Thunderstorm

There were a few spatters of rain on my windshield as I drove home today. I was just pulling into the neighborhood when the severe thunderstorm watch came over the radio. Tempe, Chandler.... but they didn't mention Mesa. The first clap of thunder came as I was getting the mail, then the torrential downpour, then a terrific wind, the worst I've seen here in the daytime (the storm that tore shingles off the roof some years back happened at night), whipping around the trees. The neighbor's eucalyptus was churning so violently I was sure that one of the branches was going to snap off. In about fifteen minutes the storm was over, and the trellises next to my front walkway were facedown on top of the front walkway - the wires holding them to the wall had snapped or come loose. After getting myself drenching wet, I concluded that there was no way I'd get them propped back up without cutting the coral vine all the way back. Oh well, it was overdue for cutting anyway, and with this rain it'll come right back. By the time I'd finished the clouds had cleared enough to let the sun through, and the brief cool period was over.

All this for a quarter-inch of rain.

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