How plot works
Dec. 22nd, 2008 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prusik[Ok, the subject line would be less pretentious if I'd sold anything. Take it ironically.]
Due to a combination a slight change in my employer's vacation policy, and an accounting error that needs to rectified, I found my myself on vacation from December 19th to January 2nd. (i.e., I go back to work on the 5th.) Basically, my employer thoughtfully deducted a few days from my vacation time before I'd actually taken them. (Note: real life is actually a bit more complicated than this. They actually had good reason to think that they should deduct those days. There was a slight mix up in the virtual paperwork.) In any case, I'm adding them to the days I get off at the end of December anyway. The net effect is that I haven't had this much time off all at once since college.
Now, this isn't exactly a hardship. This is 2+ weeks paid time off, plus I still have a job. The last time I had this much paid time off, it was because I was being laid off. Go job!
I'd worked out how to appease the gods of HR. Everything should be happy, and everything is, mostly. As soon as I make things right with HR, I discover that I had a task I was supposed to finish by last Friday. This, of course, now meant by last Thursday. After much, suddenly frantic typing, I may have done this. The last thing I did at work on Thursday was submit by changes for regression and commit to the database. I haven't actually checked to see if they got in. I figure I can do this next year.
Simultaneous with this is my choir's Christmas concerts. They were Saturday and Sunday. Why, yes, we had major snow storms on Friday and Sunday. These are the concerts that actually make money. Barring major catastrophe, they were going on. However, we did cancel rehearsal on Friday. This was probably a good thing. I had Friday night and Saturday to shovel snow. However, I don't think things were actually worse on Sunday when we had to go in.
We ended up having an extended rehearsal Saturday before the concert, instead. Did I mention that the soprano soloist hadn't had a chance to work with the orchestra yet? How about that due to crossed wires, she didn't know that we had an earlier call to compensate for the missed rehearsal?
Fortunately, our choir, for whatever reason, has incredibly early calls. We normally show up 1.5 hours before the concert. For Saturday, we showed up 3 hours ahead. We were essentially done and out of the way by the time the soprano soloist showed up. She got along fabulously with the orchestra and totally rocked. I find this devastatingly impressive given that the total rehearsal time she had with the orchestra could be measured in minutes.
So far so good. Where I live, the snow wasn't even that bad on Friday. I spent much of the day waiting for it to snow so that I could clear the drive way. It didn't really get heavy until it started getting dark. My upstairs neighbor and I cleared out the driveway Friday night, then again Saturday morning. We could both drive somewhere if we needed to. (I didn't need to since everywhere I needed to go so far was T accessible. I made a point of running my errands Thursday night after work.)
This takes us to Sunday. Since this was an afternoon concert, it, of course, starts snowing right away. Those that drove later told me that visibility was awful and the roads were really slippery. I walked to the T stop from my house. This is normally a 10 minute work. That no one had plowed the parking lot I cut across slowed me, but no big deal. The red line was fine. The guy sitting next to me was using a sleek, thin e-reader, so I figured it wasn't a Kindle. It would have been blatantly out of character for me to have just asked him. I think it was a Sony though. Either way, as I was reading Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania, I could see his e-reader screen flashing out of the corner of my eye. Note to self: using an e-reader may slowly drive me mad. Consider waiting for e-ink technology to develop a faster refresh rate.
To get to the concert, I need to transfer from the red line to the green line. There are actually 4 different green lines: B, C, D, E. I needed B. I run into several other choir members. One of them has been waiting twenty minutes for a B train. Not good. As I wait, several Cs and Es pass me. Eventually, I see a B going in the other direction. It has to hit the end of the line, turn around and come our way. That's the way things work. And, eventually, one does. (Not sure if it's that one.) I make the call just in time.
The concert itself was surprisingly anti-climactic. Everything more or less happens as it's supposed to. Ok, we were desperately understaffed because not everyone could make it in due to the weather. There was some last minute rearranging of where we stand. This had the nice side effect of moving me from where I couldn't see the choir director to where I could. We ended up starting the concert a little late because we were getting waves of audience timed precisely with every T train that passed by. Soprano soloist was lovely again. The orchestra was superb. I never know how the choir does. I'd decided to shift to singing the tenor line, so I spent much of the concert concentrating on vocal technique. (I can get away with a lot when I'm singing bass because I skip the notes that fall below my voice and everything else is below my passaggio. Obviously, this is not the case with the tenor. One of the reasons I moved to tenor is so that I pay more attention in choir. Now, I'm considering going back to taking voice lessons.)
After the concert, I go back out into the wind and snow to wait for the T to take me home. And I wait, and wait, and wait. Finally, a train comes going the other direction. The contact where it draws electricity from the overhead power lines arcs, literally lighting up the sky with each spark. No good. As we see that light recede down the line, another set of flashes come towards us. We get on, move about 50 feet, then stop. It can't get enough power to move all of us. After a few minutes, we evacuate the train. The lot of us stand back out in the cold and snow. By now, my feet are soaked and they burn in that way you know is really extremely cold, but they don't feel that way.
We discuss among ourselves what we should do. Some people run off for taxis. Others consider walking to the first underground stop. Since I have no idea of the local geography, I wait for the next train. It lets us on without paying a fare. We trudge underground. (We were stuck behind the train we had to evacuate for a while.)
The rest of the trip was uneventful. I spend my time on the red line reading A Princess of Roumania and figuring out what I needed to do. Basically, given all the now that had fallen between noon (when I had to leave for the concert) and when I got home (which turned out to be ~7pm), I seriously hoped that my upstairs neighbors had done some shoveling. i.e., all I needed to do was some clean up. Get rid of whatever the street plows had plowed into our driveway.
Last year was awful. One set of their elderly parents was around to take care of their new born son. They normally live in Wisconsin so that they know that you can't keep the snow from piling up too high, especially in the midst of a snow storm. They kept coming out to shovel and would not go back into the house when I told them I'd take care of it. There's no nice way getting them back into the house if they insist on stay out in the cold. (Also, I feel guilty about this, but they were really helpful. We have kind of a long driveway. It holds six cars uncomfortably. We've never actually done this though.)
Anyway, elderly parents are back in Wisconsin. Upstairs neighbors apparently decided they'd wait until the storm was over before doing any shoveling. Then, they apparently decided that it was too dark to shovel and would wait until the morning. The problem with this theory is that was it extremely cold last night and the snow was already re-freezing. As crunchy as the snow was last night, it would likely be ice by morning.
Seeing the driveway utterly unshoveled, and the end of the driveway packed with several feet hard snow plowed in by the street plows was disspiriting. However, it'd be worse in the morning. I got out of my wet shoes and socks, changed out of my tux into several thin layers, put on my hiking socks and my light hikers, put on my jacket then plugged myself into my iPod.
The dense pack of street plowed snow actually moved fairly quickly, just under 30 minutes. I know this because I was listening to a podcast of the story "The Crumbs of Midnight." Fun story. Not as clever as it should be. The reader decided to read the whole thing in a stage whisper. There was no volume I could set the iPod such that I could hear it clearly above the sounds of shoveling. I spent half an hour thinking, "Phonate! Phonate, damn you! Phonate!"
I'd long mentally divided our driveway into four sections. Where the snow goes is different for each section. I'd do one section, go inside and have a bit of dinner, then come back out for the next section. Repeat until I'd finished the driveway. The whole process was actually quite relaxing. I mean, it wouldn't have taken until 10:40pm if I'd just done it all the way through, but this was a much better time. (However, this also points out why you want to shovel through the storm. Shoveling is much easier if all you have to do is push the snow where you want to it go. If you actually have to pick it up, that's harder. If the snow is now the hard, dense, icy stuff rather than the soft, powdery fluffy stuff, that's harder yet.)
I'd roasted a chicken Thursday night figuring that between two snow storms and two choir concerts I wouldn't actually have time to cook. Plus, I got some ridiculously expensive premium ice cream, figuring that I'd deserve it at some point this weekend. I'm lactose intolerant. Yes, there are pills and I take them, especially if I'm eating ice cream. However, I don't have ice cream very often. This has the unfortunate side effect of turning it into some sort of rare, exotic treat. In any case, it's just not worth it to have cheap, over-aerated ice cream, so I don't. If I don't have it often, it might as well be the really good stuff. I'd never tried this brand before. Unfortunately, it's really good. Very creamy. Wonderful mouth feel. Not too sweet. Just enough nuts, caramel and sea salt to balance off the cream. (The sad part of lactose intolerant is that I like dairy products. I just can't have them too much.)
Dinner then was a no thought affair of cold roasted chicken, some bagels I'd bought on sale Thursday with the chicken, and some microwave nuked frozen vegetables. I ate them in stages through the night. I didn't let myself have the ice cream until I was done with the driveway. (I'm not a total idiot...)
I'm a little surprised how well the advanced planning paid off. I'd even remember to bring a protein bar with me to the concert. I ate it on the trip home so I wasn't starving for the first section of the driveway. (Otherwise, I'd last eaten around 10am.) If something goes horribly wrong in the next week or so, I won't be surprised. (Note: I don't actually want anything to go horrible wrong, thank you.)
At some point, I ran out of podcasts and I started listening to the complete works of Mozart. This is not an exaggeration. Amazon was offering the complete works of Mozart for $70 a few weeks ago. I now have most of them ripped into AAC and onto my iPod. (I still have to rip all of the operas.) I've been slowly working my way through listening to all of them. It's a good feeling to know, BTW, that while there is a high floor on quality, not everything Mozart wrote was a sublime, mind-blowing, transcendent experience. If he's allowed to write music that, while highly skilled, sounds like much of the rest of the Classical period, I figure I'm allowed to suck. Also, the complete works of Mozart times out to 170 CDs. Imagine if he'd lived past 35. Yet another case where the pathway to greatness goes through prolificacy.
Anyway, I still need to get the snow off my car. I'm going to do this now because I need dish detergent. (Annoyingly, I do not live within convenient walking distance of a supermarket.) I'd also promised to help the load out from our Saturday concert. (We still have some risers there.) They haven't told me when to show up yet. That doesn't involve my car though. The concert was metro accessible. Other than that, I plan to spend my vacation reading A Princess of Roumania finishing one story, revising several others, putting together my Clarion and Clarion West applications, and doing some video processing for a friend of mine.
On that last point, to do it right, I need either the full score or piano-vocal score to Cosi Fan Tutte. At first, I thought about buying a copy. It's a classic, and worth studying anyway. However, my second thought was "It's in the public domain, it must be out on the web somewhere." Sure enough, if you google 'cosi', 'fan', 'tutte', and 'score', you get a link to the full score served by the Indiana University library. How did we ever manage in the 20th century?
Anyway, the weekend was actually pretty unremarkable. However, it was filled with low-level obstacles that when resolved naturally led to other low-level obstacles. Had this been an actual story, the obstacles probably would have gotten higher and higher. They would have all reinforced some central point. However, I've long said that I wouldn't want to be a character in one of my stories.
(BTW, lest it sound like I'm dumping on my upstairs neighbors, I want to point out that they're really wonderful neighbors. I like them a lot. Also, at some point during the night, the porch and sidewalk were mysteriously shoveled out. I guess they did this while I was taking a break between sections.)
Due to a combination a slight change in my employer's vacation policy, and an accounting error that needs to rectified, I found my myself on vacation from December 19th to January 2nd. (i.e., I go back to work on the 5th.) Basically, my employer thoughtfully deducted a few days from my vacation time before I'd actually taken them. (Note: real life is actually a bit more complicated than this. They actually had good reason to think that they should deduct those days. There was a slight mix up in the virtual paperwork.) In any case, I'm adding them to the days I get off at the end of December anyway. The net effect is that I haven't had this much time off all at once since college.
Now, this isn't exactly a hardship. This is 2+ weeks paid time off, plus I still have a job. The last time I had this much paid time off, it was because I was being laid off. Go job!
I'd worked out how to appease the gods of HR. Everything should be happy, and everything is, mostly. As soon as I make things right with HR, I discover that I had a task I was supposed to finish by last Friday. This, of course, now meant by last Thursday. After much, suddenly frantic typing, I may have done this. The last thing I did at work on Thursday was submit by changes for regression and commit to the database. I haven't actually checked to see if they got in. I figure I can do this next year.
Simultaneous with this is my choir's Christmas concerts. They were Saturday and Sunday. Why, yes, we had major snow storms on Friday and Sunday. These are the concerts that actually make money. Barring major catastrophe, they were going on. However, we did cancel rehearsal on Friday. This was probably a good thing. I had Friday night and Saturday to shovel snow. However, I don't think things were actually worse on Sunday when we had to go in.
We ended up having an extended rehearsal Saturday before the concert, instead. Did I mention that the soprano soloist hadn't had a chance to work with the orchestra yet? How about that due to crossed wires, she didn't know that we had an earlier call to compensate for the missed rehearsal?
Fortunately, our choir, for whatever reason, has incredibly early calls. We normally show up 1.5 hours before the concert. For Saturday, we showed up 3 hours ahead. We were essentially done and out of the way by the time the soprano soloist showed up. She got along fabulously with the orchestra and totally rocked. I find this devastatingly impressive given that the total rehearsal time she had with the orchestra could be measured in minutes.
So far so good. Where I live, the snow wasn't even that bad on Friday. I spent much of the day waiting for it to snow so that I could clear the drive way. It didn't really get heavy until it started getting dark. My upstairs neighbor and I cleared out the driveway Friday night, then again Saturday morning. We could both drive somewhere if we needed to. (I didn't need to since everywhere I needed to go so far was T accessible. I made a point of running my errands Thursday night after work.)
This takes us to Sunday. Since this was an afternoon concert, it, of course, starts snowing right away. Those that drove later told me that visibility was awful and the roads were really slippery. I walked to the T stop from my house. This is normally a 10 minute work. That no one had plowed the parking lot I cut across slowed me, but no big deal. The red line was fine. The guy sitting next to me was using a sleek, thin e-reader, so I figured it wasn't a Kindle. It would have been blatantly out of character for me to have just asked him. I think it was a Sony though. Either way, as I was reading Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania, I could see his e-reader screen flashing out of the corner of my eye. Note to self: using an e-reader may slowly drive me mad. Consider waiting for e-ink technology to develop a faster refresh rate.
To get to the concert, I need to transfer from the red line to the green line. There are actually 4 different green lines: B, C, D, E. I needed B. I run into several other choir members. One of them has been waiting twenty minutes for a B train. Not good. As I wait, several Cs and Es pass me. Eventually, I see a B going in the other direction. It has to hit the end of the line, turn around and come our way. That's the way things work. And, eventually, one does. (Not sure if it's that one.) I make the call just in time.
The concert itself was surprisingly anti-climactic. Everything more or less happens as it's supposed to. Ok, we were desperately understaffed because not everyone could make it in due to the weather. There was some last minute rearranging of where we stand. This had the nice side effect of moving me from where I couldn't see the choir director to where I could. We ended up starting the concert a little late because we were getting waves of audience timed precisely with every T train that passed by. Soprano soloist was lovely again. The orchestra was superb. I never know how the choir does. I'd decided to shift to singing the tenor line, so I spent much of the concert concentrating on vocal technique. (I can get away with a lot when I'm singing bass because I skip the notes that fall below my voice and everything else is below my passaggio. Obviously, this is not the case with the tenor. One of the reasons I moved to tenor is so that I pay more attention in choir. Now, I'm considering going back to taking voice lessons.)
After the concert, I go back out into the wind and snow to wait for the T to take me home. And I wait, and wait, and wait. Finally, a train comes going the other direction. The contact where it draws electricity from the overhead power lines arcs, literally lighting up the sky with each spark. No good. As we see that light recede down the line, another set of flashes come towards us. We get on, move about 50 feet, then stop. It can't get enough power to move all of us. After a few minutes, we evacuate the train. The lot of us stand back out in the cold and snow. By now, my feet are soaked and they burn in that way you know is really extremely cold, but they don't feel that way.
We discuss among ourselves what we should do. Some people run off for taxis. Others consider walking to the first underground stop. Since I have no idea of the local geography, I wait for the next train. It lets us on without paying a fare. We trudge underground. (We were stuck behind the train we had to evacuate for a while.)
The rest of the trip was uneventful. I spend my time on the red line reading A Princess of Roumania and figuring out what I needed to do. Basically, given all the now that had fallen between noon (when I had to leave for the concert) and when I got home (which turned out to be ~7pm), I seriously hoped that my upstairs neighbors had done some shoveling. i.e., all I needed to do was some clean up. Get rid of whatever the street plows had plowed into our driveway.
Last year was awful. One set of their elderly parents was around to take care of their new born son. They normally live in Wisconsin so that they know that you can't keep the snow from piling up too high, especially in the midst of a snow storm. They kept coming out to shovel and would not go back into the house when I told them I'd take care of it. There's no nice way getting them back into the house if they insist on stay out in the cold. (Also, I feel guilty about this, but they were really helpful. We have kind of a long driveway. It holds six cars uncomfortably. We've never actually done this though.)
Anyway, elderly parents are back in Wisconsin. Upstairs neighbors apparently decided they'd wait until the storm was over before doing any shoveling. Then, they apparently decided that it was too dark to shovel and would wait until the morning. The problem with this theory is that was it extremely cold last night and the snow was already re-freezing. As crunchy as the snow was last night, it would likely be ice by morning.
Seeing the driveway utterly unshoveled, and the end of the driveway packed with several feet hard snow plowed in by the street plows was disspiriting. However, it'd be worse in the morning. I got out of my wet shoes and socks, changed out of my tux into several thin layers, put on my hiking socks and my light hikers, put on my jacket then plugged myself into my iPod.
The dense pack of street plowed snow actually moved fairly quickly, just under 30 minutes. I know this because I was listening to a podcast of the story "The Crumbs of Midnight." Fun story. Not as clever as it should be. The reader decided to read the whole thing in a stage whisper. There was no volume I could set the iPod such that I could hear it clearly above the sounds of shoveling. I spent half an hour thinking, "Phonate! Phonate, damn you! Phonate!"
I'd long mentally divided our driveway into four sections. Where the snow goes is different for each section. I'd do one section, go inside and have a bit of dinner, then come back out for the next section. Repeat until I'd finished the driveway. The whole process was actually quite relaxing. I mean, it wouldn't have taken until 10:40pm if I'd just done it all the way through, but this was a much better time. (However, this also points out why you want to shovel through the storm. Shoveling is much easier if all you have to do is push the snow where you want to it go. If you actually have to pick it up, that's harder. If the snow is now the hard, dense, icy stuff rather than the soft, powdery fluffy stuff, that's harder yet.)
I'd roasted a chicken Thursday night figuring that between two snow storms and two choir concerts I wouldn't actually have time to cook. Plus, I got some ridiculously expensive premium ice cream, figuring that I'd deserve it at some point this weekend. I'm lactose intolerant. Yes, there are pills and I take them, especially if I'm eating ice cream. However, I don't have ice cream very often. This has the unfortunate side effect of turning it into some sort of rare, exotic treat. In any case, it's just not worth it to have cheap, over-aerated ice cream, so I don't. If I don't have it often, it might as well be the really good stuff. I'd never tried this brand before. Unfortunately, it's really good. Very creamy. Wonderful mouth feel. Not too sweet. Just enough nuts, caramel and sea salt to balance off the cream. (The sad part of lactose intolerant is that I like dairy products. I just can't have them too much.)
Dinner then was a no thought affair of cold roasted chicken, some bagels I'd bought on sale Thursday with the chicken, and some microwave nuked frozen vegetables. I ate them in stages through the night. I didn't let myself have the ice cream until I was done with the driveway. (I'm not a total idiot...)
I'm a little surprised how well the advanced planning paid off. I'd even remember to bring a protein bar with me to the concert. I ate it on the trip home so I wasn't starving for the first section of the driveway. (Otherwise, I'd last eaten around 10am.) If something goes horribly wrong in the next week or so, I won't be surprised. (Note: I don't actually want anything to go horrible wrong, thank you.)
At some point, I ran out of podcasts and I started listening to the complete works of Mozart. This is not an exaggeration. Amazon was offering the complete works of Mozart for $70 a few weeks ago. I now have most of them ripped into AAC and onto my iPod. (I still have to rip all of the operas.) I've been slowly working my way through listening to all of them. It's a good feeling to know, BTW, that while there is a high floor on quality, not everything Mozart wrote was a sublime, mind-blowing, transcendent experience. If he's allowed to write music that, while highly skilled, sounds like much of the rest of the Classical period, I figure I'm allowed to suck. Also, the complete works of Mozart times out to 170 CDs. Imagine if he'd lived past 35. Yet another case where the pathway to greatness goes through prolificacy.
Anyway, I still need to get the snow off my car. I'm going to do this now because I need dish detergent. (Annoyingly, I do not live within convenient walking distance of a supermarket.) I'd also promised to help the load out from our Saturday concert. (We still have some risers there.) They haven't told me when to show up yet. That doesn't involve my car though. The concert was metro accessible. Other than that, I plan to spend my vacation reading A Princess of Roumania finishing one story, revising several others, putting together my Clarion and Clarion West applications, and doing some video processing for a friend of mine.
On that last point, to do it right, I need either the full score or piano-vocal score to Cosi Fan Tutte. At first, I thought about buying a copy. It's a classic, and worth studying anyway. However, my second thought was "It's in the public domain, it must be out on the web somewhere." Sure enough, if you google 'cosi', 'fan', 'tutte', and 'score', you get a link to the full score served by the Indiana University library. How did we ever manage in the 20th century?
Anyway, the weekend was actually pretty unremarkable. However, it was filled with low-level obstacles that when resolved naturally led to other low-level obstacles. Had this been an actual story, the obstacles probably would have gotten higher and higher. They would have all reinforced some central point. However, I've long said that I wouldn't want to be a character in one of my stories.
(BTW, lest it sound like I'm dumping on my upstairs neighbors, I want to point out that they're really wonderful neighbors. I like them a lot. Also, at some point during the night, the porch and sidewalk were mysteriously shoveled out. I guess they did this while I was taking a break between sections.)
