February 2018

It rained today. Flood warnings. I guess there are places in Israel where an inch of rain can cause major flooding. But I've never seen a flood here.

I'm about burnt out with sitting at the computer. But over the last several months, and especially the last three weeks, I got all my music notes in order. About 1500 pages' worth. Each page has a few scribbles on it, sometimes the first line of a tune, sometimes the whole thing. But most of them are worthless, and some unreadable. Eventually I narrowed it down to about 300 that are worth looking at again, and most of those I have put on MuseScore. Of those, about 80 are looking promising. Occasionally we try singing one, and the moment we do, I find errors. In spite of all my careful proof-reading, there are still errors. A "ka" instead of a "ke" in the transliteration. A "ba" instead of a "va." Too many beats in the last measure. Wrong chords. Sometimes wrong words. Wrong verse numbers. Wrong formattting. Formatting is what takes the most time. And it's addicting.

I haven't yet found the perfect font. Some fonts are good in the lower case letters, but the capital letters and numbers look funny. I finally decided on Cambria for my English lyrics, only to find that the "f" always looks funny. Before that I used Free Serif, which looks nice, but on MuseScore it has some difficulties.

Something has happened to my taste buds. I now drink my de-caf double strength. Sometimes I even add milk and sugar. My eggs now taste best with garlic and black pepper. But I still eat the same old bread, something like Borozinski. It makes great toast. And it's habit-forming.

Apartment life is a drag. But we have a nice apartment for getting work done in. Annoying, though, is the variety of weird smells. This morning I smelled a very strong chlorine smell in the bedroom. Car exhaust, cigarette smoke, sewer smells and cooking make their way into my apartment. The cooking smells can be really good--sometimes brownies, garlic chicken, almost-burnt toast, and barbecue. But freezer-burn chicken is not so nice.