A lesson from my oboe lessons

When I was at band two nights ago, one of the flute players was lamenting that she'd be way better if she'd just take her flute out and practice it for an hour every day. Except that's totally unrealistic. Nobody who is a normal adult and has normal adult responsibilities (I believe this woman has a business contracting to sew home decor items, which she sometimes does until 2am, and has a child, etc.) has time to practice for an hour per day. I don't manage to practice for an hour per week (though that may be partly because I don't want to wear out my reeds).

So I mentioned that back when I took oboe lessons, my teacher told me to practice for 15 minutes a day. And that was good, because it got me to take the instrument out and put it together every day, with a minimal time commitment. Who doesn't have 15 minutes? And in fact, once the instrument was out, I used to often practice far more than 15 minutes some days. And then I said "In fact, this is something I should apply this to other areas of my life."

And last night, I opened "Toothbrushing Club" for about 20 minutes. I removed a superfluous and hard-to-explain character and tried to work on clarifying the location a bit more.

Best TW feedback ever

Over at the dayjob, SMEs are feverishly trying to get documents back to me all marked up, in preparation for the release that's supposed to happen the week I'm back from VP. Today's best comment: Unfortunately not true. SMEs, they're so cute.

Moraine

So a couple of days I thought I was done with this short story, and I wrote the last line of the story. I even dated it (that's how I can tell it's over). It was a little long, at 6600 words (I was aiming for 5000). But then I was walking to work, and I thought, "My, that was a lame ending. My endings are all crap." So yesterday morning, I scribbled out the date and wrote a bit more. And this morning I wrote a bit more again, and I dated it and called it done. And still, that ending seemed lame. So a few minutes later, in the last paragraph, I scratched out "the Oak Ridges Moraine" and wrote in "that stupid moraine". Much better. Now I can move on. But in the meantime, I was doing a little research about the Moraine, and I discovered that EGTourGuide lives on it. Only by one or two hundred feet, but I thought it was funny. Good for you, EGTourGuide, with all those excellent plants growing on that substandard soil, where in the olden days (you kno...

What I read: March 2024

LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence. "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read. LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes. I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr...

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