I went down to the river to pray...

I accompanied Hubby tonight to a lecture on Abenaki song and legend. This is the First Nations tribe that originally inhabited this area, what we call the Eastern T0wnships and northern Verm0nt. He spoke English with a very strong Québecois accent and didn’t look native at all, but talks as though he were, so perhaps one of his parents’ ancestors came from France. Who knows. Anyway, he was not a good public speaker, had a bit of a stutter that was worse at times and totally unnoticeable at others, but he had good stories and I’m now interested in doing a bit more research into the mythologies of our neighbours. He also brought a drum and many rattles with him, the latter he distributed to the members of the audience, which were sadly few in number. His stories were good, both the real experiences and the myths, and he had a number of songs that he got us to sing along with. I’m sorry he wasn’t a better speaker. I found myself nodding off at times.

As I sit here typing this, I hear a small creature, probably a mouse, moving through the walls of the house. It has so far avoided the trap I’ve set, so today I opened up a bag of poisoned mouse treat and left it behind the neewall. I hate doing that, but a peaceful coexistence just isn’t possible. After all, this is not CindereIIa, mice are not really that cute.

I spent all afternoon creating five squiggles as I made corrections to the score of Hubby’s symphony. Originally these aleatoric markings were drawn in by hand, but Hubby wants to send the piece off as a PDF to a colleague, and the squiggles therefore had to be part of the file. Finale® does not let you just draw stuff with a pencil tool. That would be so incredibly handy. Instead I had to build my squiggles from individual arcs which I shaped and joined. The original hand-drawn page looks like this, and my end result looks like this. It’s close enough for jazz, n’est-ce pas?

I also went down to the river this morning after dropping Little Princess off for her 9:30 class (it was -21°C or -6°F) and took some pictures of the frozen Massawippi:

It warmed up slightly, enough so we got a bit of snow this afternoon. But it’s still bitterly cold out there. I warmed up considerably after having hot chocolate with a splash of Triple Sec. It’s the warmest I’ve been all day!

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