People

We meet various types of people here and in Tel-Aviv. Some very interesting and beautiful people. Some very lovable and talented people. And people with lots of trials and tragedies in their lives. Also the most miserable of all--those who don't know their misery, an expression we learned from the Dutch. There are multitudes of them in the U.S.
As you can imagine, we also have many interesting discussions with some of them. We see a little progress and we have a lot of hope. And there's a long way to go.

Isaiah 62:6-7 I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, [which] shall never hold their peace day nor night: ye that make mention of the LORD, keep not silence,  And give him no rest, till he establish, and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth.

Glad and Sad

I follow a couple blogs. One is Shevet Achim, an organization that does heart operations on children from countries around Israel. Many of them come from Iraq, where there is a higher than usual number of heart defects due to people marrying their cousins. Sometimes I pick one of the patients to pray for. Recently one of my little friends, Jacoob, who was having a long difficult time recovering from heart surgery, improved to the point where he could walk up and down the hall.

Another blog I have followed is the one for Lucy Jarrett, who died yesterday. I hope they will continue the blog, though I suppose at some point they will rename it.

Muse Score

The handbook says, if I remember right, "To get a courtesy accidental, just drag it from the palette." Easy enough. But it doesn't work. It does nothing at all. So I found at a forum what should have been more clearly explained in the handbook: "To get a courtesy accidental, select the note so that it turns blue, drag the accidental from the palette and hold it over the note (not beside it, where it is supposed to go) so that the note turns red, then release. To add parentheses, do the same." Easy as pie, actually.
Finding the answer took me at least half an hour of reading debates about whether or when to use courtesy accidentals, and other problems with accidentals, and which editions of Muse Score had which problems with them. The solution, when I discovered it, was in something that was mentioned only in passing.
Years ago I used to be a statistical typist. One of my most successful experiences was typing up charts of various kinds with columns of numbers. On an old-fashioned typewriter you had to count, add, subtract and divide to get the spacing of the columns and headers just right and make them look nice. I found it easy and fun. To get spacing right with a computer is not easy and not fun. (That's why I do everything on a spread sheet, rather than setting tabs or using tables or charts.) In this music program I have to figure out all sorts of spacing issues which are affected by one another, which sometimes causes a function to do the opposite of what you think it will. I have to consider staff and system spacing, accolade spacing, measure spacing, headings, line breaks, chords, lyrics, percentage of page fill, and to figure out why page two acts differently from page one, etc. (--and learn the terms in Hebrew, because they kindly gave me a mostly-Hebrew version when I downloaded it, without giving me a language choice.) When the handbook doesn't give sufficient explanation, I go to a forum where the musician-computerists debate what's the correct way to write music, the differences between musician logic and computer logic, and all sorts of issues that are incredibly interesting except that they are over my head and I don't have time for it all. Sometimes I feel like yelling, "I play piano, not computer!"

I waver between wishing it could all be written from top down and wishing it could all be pre-set, when really it does a little of both, which is the only way it can work, at least when you have playback. Without playback (as Crescendo does it) is a different situation entirely. After I get proficient at MuseScore, maybe I'll take another stab at a certain program created by some funny English guys, who have a different approach, which presently looks too complicated to me, but has some interesting aspects, and some different handy keystrokes.

Vegetable Oil

Yesterday I had a good lunch planned for myself--fried zucchini and sweet potatoes. I quickly oiled the pan and put in some zucchini slices. After a minute I thought, "Why does the zucchini smell so pretty? And why is it bubbling?" Oh no, did I put dishwashing liquid in it? Yep, I did. So I quickly rinsed the zucchini as thoroughly as I could and then cooked it in vegetable oil. It still had a faint smell of dishwashing liquid, but it was pretty good.

One Day Gone

Yesterday was one of those days when you wonder why you got out of bed.

I was quite proud of myself, actually, for figuring out, all by myself, lots of things on a music program. But after a while I did some very wrong things, and somehow deleted all my latest music files and their backup copies. But I was determined, and the things I couldn't figure out surely must have an answer, so I got on a forum where I thought I would surely get some help. But then I couldn't reproduce the original problem. So in the process of trying to explain it and another one that came up, I figured part of it out, and the other part I decided was a bug in the program. It seems so clear now. There was a point after which everything went wrong, and in spite of the usually-effective "Undo," I couldn't back out, couldn't cut and paste, couldn't restyle, couldn't anything without increasing the muddle.

So today is back to the drawing board. Ahh, drawing, painting. I dreamed that when I got old I would learn to paint. I never dreamed I would be writing music. Somehow painting sounds more fun right now. But it is more efficient to take something you already know and add to it or branch out from it than to start something completely new.

Psalm Collection Log

My new log is for all the Psalms that I write lead sheets for. These will include tunes I have written myself, and also some that I copy from various sources. This way I feel like I am getting sort of organized. That doesn't mean I am organized, but I feel like I am. Verse numbering is the Hebrew version.

Some Psalm Success

After one year of trying to right Psalm tunes, I have one, yes one, tune I am truly satisfied with. Many others are under way and will soon be put to the test. What I really need is feedback, from someone who knows music, poetry and Hebrew. So many times I just don't know which way to go. A Psalm as it is is perfect poetry, but turning it into a song requires some bending, and there are a million ways of bending it, and I can't decide which way is best.
I have researched several different music notation programs, and have decided to keep using Crescendo but also use Muse Score, which is better for adding lyrics and will do pdf's. Many people like Finale, but I wasn't satisfied with the way it looked or the way it did lyrics. I downloaded a trial version of Sibelius but it crashed my computer, so forget it with Sibelius, which is overkill any. I'm just writing lead sheets, not symphonies. Several others are very awkward to use or hard to figure out, or will not type Hebrew characters, or my computer will not accept them. Anyway, Muse Score is free.
Some of the Psalms I most wanted to write tunes for I haven't been able to do, which is probably just as well; but now that I know a little more what I'm doing, maybe I'll come up with better tunes.