- Creationism (x 2)
- The skill of questioning the veracity and value of an information source
- Good literature
- “applying basic skills to accomplish daily tasks”
- these first three paragraphs
- The latest accepted standard for page markup
- This letter
- “ignoring people unless they can have a direct effect upon my life”

-Brandi Carlile, especially the acoustic album
- Bon Iver / DeYarmond Edison (one of her old students plays with them, too!)
- Bobby McFerrin, Circlesongs and the album with Chick Corea, especially “Spain”
- Sarah Vaughan, Live at Mr. Kelly’s
- Ellis Paul, the live album
- Fleet Foxes
- Jewlia Eisenberg, Trilectic

That’s the more modern stuff, but she also included some rad early (and classical) music, with her favorite performers:

- Gesualdo, especially the Motets
- Perotin (which is early polyphony), especially performed by the Hilliard Ensemble
- Victoria, “Requiem,” especially performed by Harry Christophers and the Sixteen
- Trio Mediaeval, Stella Maris
- Beethoven’s later string quartets

- There’s not time for me to get into a class, and only recently have I understood the script well enough to warrant private lessons. But with only two more months in these United States, and not a lot of money to go around, it’s all independent study, all the time.

- Arabic has a ton of differing dialects. The one I’ll be around the most will be Levantine Arabic (and let us not forget the French). Teaching materials are typically created for Modern Standard Arabic – MSA – and trying to speak it is much like hopping out of a cab in front of Grand Central and delivering one of Hamlet’s soliloquies. “Hark ye, kind sir. The grace of God be upon you on this day of light. Forsooth, couldst thou kindly direct me to the shining doors of the L train?”

- I’d eat bugs for some cognates. So far, we’ve got “beij” and “sah’ra”: “beige” and “desert.” To be fair, though, they’re written as “نيغ” and “صعلرا”. Remember to read ‘em right-to-left!

Wrestling with all my strength with a language has its rewards, though. German looks like the simplest thing in the world. The internets provide great little corners of help: streaming BBC television news, PDF versions of dictionaries, class syllabi. If anyone’s interested, I’d be happy to slap up some links to my favorite treasures so far. For now, I’ve earned myself a reward beer.

Knowing I was born at 9:24 seems to mean I see that time at least a few times a week, and see those numbers in a row pretty often. ‘Cause I’m primed to notice them, I’m sure.

Do you have any numbers that recur in your world?

I liked this so much, I’m half-tempted to write a script paralleling this one about my job:

http://www.xwordinfo.com/Hampfield.aspx

The cartoon was made by Michael A. Charles, whose website is found here. He seems like a fairly wonderful person.

For the most-of-the-people-I-know who don’t do this for a living, mixing colors is a really finicky activity that takes a lot of practice. It’s about stored-up knowledge from years of getting colors wrong: if the vibrant magenta you’re mixing is a little too vibrant and a little too light in value, you can pop in some raw umber (a green-tinged brown) to get the shade you want. Picky, picky knowledge. And easy and expensive to get wrong, but really satisfying to get right.

For the painters I love, then: lots of times when you’re mixing a color, you find yourself getting mighty close and then needed to lighten it a little, right? Those colorants can really take the value down while you’re trying to find your hue. As you’re adding white, instead of just dumping the white straight into the color you’ve been working on, pour some of the mix off first. This way, if you put too much white into the whole thing, you can pour in some of your old mix (the stuff you’ve just poured off) to bring it back to exactly what you were looking for.

K. kept reminding me, gently, to pour off some of the mix before I added more white, especially in circumstances where it seemed like I was having to add much more white than I’d thought I would. This all, of course, traces back to the idea that if you’re trying to get a pastel, you oughtta start with the white and mix in the color, rather than vice versa. No guilt here, though: the colors I was trying to rock were pretty far from pastel.

On the union site, a few industrials have postings in the “member gallery” section that has samples of people’s work. One lady wrote out her job’s tasks as follows:

§ Responsible for shop-area set-up and preparation for Scenic Artists’ daily work

§ Maintaining inventory of shop and multiple NYC locations’ on-site supplies

§ Research – locating vendors, materials, items for purchase, pricing and availability

§ Purchasing/Invoicing – monitoring individual budget lines, monitoring of labor estimates per assignment, purchase orders, bill coding, petty cash

§ Payroll: daily submissions of coded Labor Reports to accounting; weekly submission of time cards for Scenic Department; submission of Monthly Labor Report to USA Local 829 Union for Annuity and Pension/Welfare employer contribution monitoring.

I’m not sure how much of this is sometimes/usually the job of the charge artist, but from what I’ve experienced, the industrials run around the shop cleaning things and prepping things and answering a million questions all day long. They’ve got the keys to the magic storeroom full of prizes, and seem to be instantly there the second you look confused about something. These people know where things are.

Form follows function

You have to be squatting around down on the floor either way, but pulling staples from a drop would be pretty nice with a guy like this, right? It’s even got a magnet in the end, so now there are no excuses. There’s gotta be some way to attach one to a pole…