Poor munchkin. He was supposed to arrive at 9, right? He called me from the airplane at 6, saying that they'd been sitting on the ground almost two hours (bad weather somewhere en route) and weren't sure when the air traffic controllers would let them take off. Okay. Then he called me around 8:30. Still sitting. (Oof. 4 hours sitting on a plane on the ground! No dinner!) Finally he called me at 9:15 (11:15 in NY) -- they'd cancelled the flight. And since it was weather and the air traffic controllers at fault, the airline wasn't putting them up for the night, wasn't giving them some frequent flyers miles, wasn't giving them anything. I suppose they don't have a legal obligation, but when people have been that inconvenienced, it only seems good p.r. to help them out a little.
So now he's arriving on the one flight they can manage today, which leaves NY at 1 and arrives here at 9 (after a very circuitous route). Which means that we have one day (!) to work together to get his apartment cleaned and packed. Umm...Tuesday may be a bit harried.
We might leave Thursday, but the problem is that we *must* be in Chicago by 5 p.m. on Friday, which means that if we leave Thursday we're going to be getting up way early Friday morning for the second leg of the trip. If we leave Wednesday, that gives us some lag time in case the car breaks down or he gets exhausted (I still don't have my license, so he's driving the whole 20 hours) or we get picked up by a freak cyclone...
It's going to be an interesting week, in the curse sense.
And now I really ought to be grading, but I've avoided this batch of grading for so long, surely it can wait a little longer? (No, it really can't. Okay, okay... five minutes).
I did write 2400 words of a new story yesterday. I have four more scenes plotted, but I'm not sure how to end it now. Argh. Oh well. May spend some time working on it this afternoon -- we'll see. For those who are somehow managing to follow along, this one is about Chaya and Shefali's grandfather, when he's 42 and a professor at U Chicago. I had to call up Sherman yesterday and ask him all sorts of odd questions -- the story takes place in 1952, and I needed to know what a young graduate student female would be wearing then (and were there any such at U Chicago at that time?), whether she or he would smoke, would they know the effects of smoking (no, as it turns out -- the Surgeon General's warning wasn't first issued until years later), what movie might be playing then (he couldn't find me one that I recognized, but did tell me that it would be in black and white, and be at a drive-in, and be preceded by a cartoon and a newsreel), etc. That part was kind of fun.
I worked until about 4 on that, and then read Terry Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant (fun as usual), and then headed to Kevin's. There I cleaned and packed in between watching tv; didn't get much done, but it was relaxing. I was mostly waiting for Kev, so it was waiting/packing punctuated by those frustrated phone calls. After the last call saying he wouldn't be arriving 'til the next day, I finished watching Star Trek (re-run) and then walked home. Although the area I leave in is tremendously safe, I was still a little spooked walking home in the dark, so I called David on the cell phone and made him keep me company until I got home. He sounded exhausted but stayed on anyway. :-)
One quick note -- from journal reader
Richard Todd:
"I wanted to mention, in case you don't already know, that in most
classical music and a some jazz the two work together. A composer studying
harmony will learn all kinds of rules (e.g. avoid parallel fifths) that
insure that the horizontal progress of the notes in succeeding chords has
contrapuntal integrity. You can examine the work of any important composer
of the last three hundred years and you'll find, in most cases, that
harmony and counterpoint work in more or less equal partnership.
Interestingly, this is the case even in some pieces where you might not
think either harmony or counterpoint would have a role. In the Bach cello
suites, for example, both are implied rather than enunciated, which
somehow makes them all the stronger."
I didn't know, or at least not in such detail. My music theory is really pretty weak -- thanks, Richard!
Okay, my five minutes are more than up. Later, munchkins.