who only by moving can balance

Exhibit A: How to fix the corks on your mutes

I am over 50, and one thing that might be noted is that “back in my day” as a young person people often had analog hobbies such as building model kits. I did–and I still work with models–and the glue I prefer for mutes is a great contact cement you will find in any hobby shop specializing in model trains, Goo by Walthers. It is a strong and flexible contact cement and has been around for years and years. Follow the directions on the tube, it is great stuff! Easy to buy online too, if there is no model train shop handy.

This is true as far as it goes, but it transpires that Walthers is an American brand. I was unable, via my desultory searching, to find a UK stockist. Ergo...

Exhibit B: the M(odel) R(ailway) H(obbyist) magazine's forums: "I figured out what Whalthers Goo actually is."

Exhibit C: PERMATEX Gasket Sealant Super High Tack Shop Fluid Resistant 80060, on eBay, shipping from Latvia.

Today, 6pm EST/10pm GMT, details -- Facebook Live I'm afraid but I am still 100% here for this.

With thanks to a heads-up elseweb <3

1. For some godsforsaken reason, the horn (and, it transpires, timpani parts) for the edition of Pelleas and Melisande we were playing from... featured bars with things like "15 mal", i.e. "fifteen times", written crammed into the stave under the tempo marking so they were easy to miss the first time until you found yourself wondering how on earth you'd ended up quite so far ahead. I found myself muttering NEVER! IN MY WHOLE CAREER! HAVE I ENCOUNTERED THIS BEFORE! to myself the first rehearsal we came across it.
   
2. Having, for the majority of my existence, been at best indifferent to and at worst actively irritated by Sibelius' music every time it came up as repertoire I was to play (it was all formless mush! what was the POINT of it! why did people CARE!) I am Decidedly Alarmed to discover that I've apparently got old enough to find it... affecting? Moving? Pleasant? My inner fifteen-year-old is screaming.

(I really need to take a suitable photo of my horn and iconify it.)

It occurs to me -- sat in the audience for the final penultimate final[1] Mechanisms gig -- that particularly in light of the Sudden And Inexplicable uptick in kudos left on my Mechs fic various, I'm pretty sure there's at least one of you who'll think it's absolutely hilarious that the thing that made me catch religion again? Was Ulysses Dies At Dawn.

[1] I sit corrected - Jonny informs us that due to what our science officer refers to as a "quantum superposition", only one concert is being played - it's simply being experienced multiple times (across the multiverse).

The official music vid for Hold On When You Get Love is much queerer than I'd realised. Here's a quick bit of context.

Quite possibly the single most noticeable difference widespread smartphone usage has made to my life in the last ten years is the bit where, when in rehearsals you reach a movement where the horns are tacet, instead of each picking up a different book or newspaper... we all just pull out our phones (unison).

If (1) you work at Imperial College London, and (2) you are working medium-late nights, and (3) it is between July and September: do not try to set off home any time between about 10pm and 10.45pm, because the Proms will be kicking out.

This announcement brought to you by having, today, managed to leave at 9.15pm, thereby managing to get on the first relevant bus to go by -- and even it had empty seats instead of being standing room only.

(My arrival home was Somewhat Delayed by Stopping Off At King's Cross To Pick Up A Burrito, and indeed I'm writing this from the Piccadilly line, but I am willing to say - very cautiously, in case I jinx it - that I have had a tentatively good day, and might even get to sleep before midnight.)

Reading. More slow progress on Tales from the Inner City, and dipping in and out of recessional's your blue-eyed boys (because I needed the reminder that it's okay to be me, which ybeb does a really thorough job of).

Film/TV. Dosage V, Rodden and Meltdown: oh no Tommy's little FACE. He so BADLY wants her to DO THIS. Aaaaaaaah. Oh no her face when she sends it. (Gosh it is... a thing, knowing what all else was going on in their lives at the time.)

And we finished Leverage! I... really want to care about them, but it just didn't quite gel for me. (Happy to discuss this in more detail in comments! Do not actually want to squee-harsh, though.)

Music. I got home from Cornwall to discover that Adam had pre-ordered hurts 2b human (P!nk) for me, after we'd spent a little time the week beforehand watching music videos (I particularly love what she's doing with Walk Me Home). I love the way it's a concept album about Being P!nk; I love the way it threads a narrative with references and allusions that don't prevent the tracks standing alone; I really want her to be okay. Happy in particular is written Specifically For Me, obviously.

Which has also brought to mind the part where sciatrix has been talking recently about "ASMR", which is apparently a thing now. Like sciatrix, that sensation (or at least the sensation I think is being described) is one that's absolutely just... been part of my life for as long as I can remember, and that unlike the various videos set up to provoke it is... mostly associated with what I'd loosely classify as religious experiences, which sometimes show up in connection with music, and indeed did with part of this album.

(Relatedly: I love Pink Floyd. I have a... lot of emotional response absolutely hardwired to Pink Floyd, such that I really can't actually usefully listen to it while attempting to do anything else, because it just entirely hijacks my brain. Which means that of all the music I've played to Adam, Floyd isn't yet on the list, because I want to be lying on the ground in the dark and just Having An Experience, where most of the introducing-Adam-to-music I've done has been in the general spirit of putting on background music, or playing him a couple of tracks, and I just can't do that with Floyd: it's got to be the whole album, start to finish, without distractions, or my emotions and thought processes end up upended across the floor and it takes me hours and a sleep reboot to properly recombobulate them.)

Culinary adventures. I went to a knife skills workshop!

Additional notable cooking: baby's first attempt at home-made refried beans, because (1) I had a burrito craving, and (2) I realised that the Instant Pot made this actually fairly trivially achievable. I poked around the internet a bit and found some advice, and also I decided to have a go at sweetcorn salsa.

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In summary, I had a craving for burritos that I didn't have to pay someone for, and now I've got proof-of-concept for at-home burritos, and my only sense of mild impending peril is regarding the risk that I'll start actually making tortillas at home. ("We might need a bigger crêpe pan," I said to Adam, mournfully. sebastienne apparently thinks this is incredibly on-brand for me.

Final culinary-adventure-in-potentia: I'm tentatively considering having a go at panettone, and I tracked down (surprisingly easily) wahaca's black bean soup recipe, which I am excited about because I Particularly Enjoyed That. And, again, Instant Pot = I'm actually willing to cook dried beans.

Notable wildlife. First swallow! Also a splendid red kite at rest on the power lines on the way up to Oxford on Sunday.

Notable Pokémon. My very first Mesprit raid had 100% stats, and I actually caught it, which... WELP. No new shinies this week (!), but A indulged me to the tune of spending a lot of yesterday evening Trading Pokémon, which (1) got me a lot more Pokébox space (I'd been saving a bunch of things for him, either because they were from Far Away or because they were potentially interesting), and (2) several Lucky Pokémon. I am delighted about the Togepi and the Piplup; I'm rather more dubious about the Primeape and the Delcatty.

greenhouse: gutted, flayed, dismembered! to my astonishment we... did not? break any glass? we bent a strut but that! appears to be all! we managed to unload the glass at the other end and it was all still in one piece??? HURRAH for toughened safety glass.

we did not erect it again at the allotment for A Variety Of Reasons, including (1) it was 6.30pm by the time we'd finished unloading and was Getting Dark, but more pertinently (2) there are gale-force winds predicted this week and I need to buy the necessary aluminium brackets (... and some quick-setting concrete...) to actually anchor it to the ground. (... also I need to level the ground a bit more and probably dig up the grape vine, BUT HEY.)

So my allotment is currently... mostly... covered... in dismembered greenhouse but IT'S OKAY I might make people take me to a garden centre tomorrow morning so I can spend the next week stubbornly constructing it solo.

And then I made A dinner, very gratefully, and disappeared off down the hill to listen to the concert I wasn't playing in. There was a new composition by Our Patron including A Paean To Voyager, and the second Mozart horn concerto played by a kiddo from the local borough music service, and the Beethoven Pastoral, and I enjoyed all of it and AS A BONUS my godmother + her children were present (in addition to her husband), so I got to very cheerfully greet all of them and chat a lot and also! my godmother! signed a bunch of paperwork for me! including witnessing me finalising the application paperwork for SMI and also MY IRISH PASSPORT APPLICATION. FINALLY.

SMI paperwork is in the post; passport application I'm gonna finalise tomorrow and then take into the post office on Monday. It is good to feel in motion.

1. On Sunday, A & I went to The Postal Museum, including a ride on the Mail Rail. It was great. It was a SMALL TRAIN that went through POST TUNNELS and I was very excited and flappy. Be warned that it's quite cramped; I sat and watched one of the videos and it included a lot of elderly engineers ergo there followed a nontrivial quantity of inexplicable-to-onlookers weeping; I learned things about how the Royal Mail started out (genuinely just for royalty), the origins of the post horn (I knew perfectly well what it was for on Alpine post buses but hadn't put together how it started), the existence of both air mail pillar boxes and pillar boxes with integrated stamp dispensers (which were really very short lived because they fundamentally didn't work very well), and about Travelling Post Offices a preserved iteration of which we're now planning to make a visit to. I also fell down the rabbit-hole of trying to look up procedural differences in how first- and second-class post are handled; A found me a not-as-informative-as-I'd-hoped Freedom of Information request, and I found a video with obnoxious ableism/ageism and backing music but some interesting if irrelevant stuff (phosphorus detectors!). A+ nerding all round, would visit again.

2. A & I have got started on Leverage courtesy of a loan of the box sets from sebastienne and shortcipher.

3. Early this evening I submitted my first first-author paper. It took me four hours to get from "okay, I'm ready to submit" to actually hitting the submit button on the website. Good grief but the interface is terrible. I am feeling pretty good about this, and especially good that the latest night I've had working on it was Monday, when I was poking at it til shortly before midnight and then went to bed and... my supervisor made functionally 0 corrections to the bit I put together (from scratch) in that session.

4. New horn case is excellent, is indeed encouraging me to practice more, and I am very rapidly observing the benefits... just in time for Saturday's concert, or not, as the case may be. But: hopefully will manage to keep up the momentum.

5. I don't think I mentioned here that I finished the Duolingo Turkish tree last week, but I did and for all there are huge chunks that I am Really Not Very Good At Yet I am fundamentally pretty proud of myself for that one, too.

6. I have been spending more social time with people over the last few weeks than I had prior to that and it's been really good. Thank you, all. <3