never a dull moment.

There are finally people working on the house! Underneath the terrifying loose pseudo-insulation and rat biowaste--the cleaning company disinfected it after vacuuming--we actually have a considerable attic up there. Snazzy steps pulling down into the hallway replace the previous 3'x3' "access" that required carefully placing a stepladder underneath it and levering yourself up and through.

The attic guys had put proper insulation down, but luckily they didn't glue it or anything, because there turned out to be a lot more knob-and-tube wiring than expected, so what was thought to be some re-wiring along with replacing our terrifying ceiling fans turned out to be quite a lot of re-wiring along with replacing our terrifying ceiling fans. The new ceiling fans, while not artistic, do look nicer, and more importantly do not shake alarmingly. No household appliance should be a memento mori.

The guys have been laying plywood on top of the ceiling beams, so we can store stuff up there; specifically, we will need to empty the garage so it can be destroyed and replaced. This was going well enough until one of them put his foot through the kitchen ceiling (he's fine), and that itself wasn't so bad until in their work to fix that they didn't put up enough plastic sheeting, giving the entire kitchen, and much of the flooring elsewhere, a layer of sheetrock dust. Anna did a deep cleaning, and then had stern words for the contractor: putting a foot through the ceiling is an understandable accident, but trashing the kitchen is not. Anna's stern words are quite stern; I would feel sorry for them, except that they fucked up.

We did a couple days of having Leela confined to the office and backyard, but it was endless barking, so we've been bringing her to the kennel for the day. They call it "All-Day Play," which I'm sure it is for some dogs, but Leela is complicated and mostly hangs out alone or with the humans. She hates going, though not as much as she hates the groomer (she unreservedly loves going to the vet). Something in her little doggy brain re-lives her actual abandonments every time we drop her somewhere, even as she grows more secure and confident with passing years. This has reached its apotheosis this month, as she is routinely "removed" from the general population into a different room, not for behavior problems as would be usual, but because she figured out that each time other dogs are being brought in or taken out is an opportunity for her to escape. (This is a beagle specialty.)

There's a double gate with a sort of airlock-like area in between, which they call the "bubble," just for this purpose; they can't really stop her, so they just stick her in solitary at the rush hours. I happened to see it firsthand on Friday, as I was taking a break from a conference to handle parenting stuff by telephone and decided to look at the video stream for the Small Dogs room. I spotted her meandering in from outside, and then a dog was getting taken out, and I watched her work her way into the press of dogs pushing up against the door, and then...go under them. Her Jack Russell heritage gives her a deep chest, but also a fantastic flexibility, presumably for those times when the rats won't come out of their burrows and you have to dive in after them. She can flatten herself a bit more than your less specialized dog, but what she can really do is flatten herself and then move, in a sort of commando-crawl. She's shorter than any full Jack Russell variant would be, so she goes over to the crowd of dogs, drops herself 3-4 inches, and slinks out under them.

She is also quite gifted at staying in human blind spots, so much so that I'm rarely surprised any more when we're walking off-leash and I look back to find her, only to discover that when I turned to look backward, she went around my other side.

Luckily she's quite charming, and the kennel folks seem to find her a fun change of pace.

up on yonder mountain

Driven by a restless, consuming curiosity, and a desperate need to grow up, I've accumulated a lot of good stories. Some of them belong inside other stories, like the saga of the aloe plants an unstoppably enthusiastic Mexican woman in Baja gave us, even though we were living on a sailboat. This one came up at work recently.

My parents were kind enough to send me to Europe a few times, including twice with my high school choir. Both trips were to the Bavaria/Bohemia/Austria area, where it's always worthwhile to visit a palace or two of the unfortunate King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886). Schloss Linderhof is lovely, even in winter, but clearly arose from a "I wish I had my own Versailles" kind of impulse. Much more interesting...



...is Schloss Neuschwanstein. It looks like a fairy-tale castle because it's meant to, and because it's the pattern for Disney's various Magic Castles and logos.

It may or may not be fair to call Ludwig "mad," but he certainly wasn't well-adjusted or mentally well. Bavaria is not a big place, and he spent a lot of money building these things, which didn't get much use before his extremely mysterious death at age 40. He was a huge fan of the problematic composer Richard "There's A Reason The Nazis Loved Him" Wagner, and up several flights of stairs, at the top of the building, is the Hall of the Singers:



It's unclear to me if any of Wagner's work was ever performed here, but that was the intention.

One of the magic things about traveling with a talented group of a cappella singers is the ability to just make music whenever you get the urge: during a long layover at JFK, for example. People appreciate two dozen high school students singing beautiful songs, in a way that they may not appreciate my violin playing. We walk into an acoustically interesting room and start snapping, to test the sound. We want just the right amount of reverb, for a room to be "live" by not deadening the sound. If there's an actual echo, the sound will be muddy and vague, and we won't be able to hear each other.

The Hall of the Singers is a good room.

I don't know who had the idea. We sang all the time, rehearsing and performing. It was just what we did. While some other kids made sure we had all the voice parts, I asked our guide if it would be okay. Clearly no one had ever asked this before--and probably has not since--but if I interpreted her thought process correctly, she wasn't entirely sure what I meant, but couldn't think of a rule against it, and said it was probably fine. She was prepared for the worst, but she had no way to know.

We were really good. Like, it wouldn't be outlandish to buy tickets to see us, kinds of good. We had a tyrannical but brutally effective director, forged in the merciless fires of Midwestern chorale culture. Our standard was not that of New England prep schools, but of competitive college choirs.

I'm not sure which song we sang. It was either "Hark, I Hear The Harps Eternal" (there's the St. Olaf Choir, a solid approximation of how we sounded and how our director conducted) or "Sing To The Lord," both being famous-ish (the legendary Robert Shaw) arrangements of a particularly resonant kind of American a cappella folk song.

(It's called "shape-note" music, after its notation devised to include more diverse levels of musical literacy. To be honest, I find recordings of it intolerable to listen to: except in extraordinary cases, it sounds like people barking in unison.)

We picked a plausible starting note, and we sang. Some of us had been performing that song for 3 years, and not infrequently, either: we did standalone concerts of our own, but also did short sets for any number of trustee and alumni and parent and faculty events. The men performed in tuxedos, which were rented for us--for the whole school year. We were pros.

We sang with all our power, in that bizarre performance hall, built by a somewhat unhinged prince for a racist composer genius. It was gorgeous. The building is like a Bose Wave stereo built out of stone. They could hear us down in the kitchens. People inched up the stone stairways to find the sound.

It's a weird thing, a cappella music. You carry it with you, always. Your singing voice is like if God handed you a violin or a guitar or a drum, and told you what kind of instrument it was, but not what it was made of, or how to use it well. My first guitar, with its laminated rather than solid wood soundboard, was constrained by its ingredients: no matter what techniques I learned or how much I practiced, it would never make great music. At best, if I learned on better instruments, I could go back and sound like a great musician playing a crappy guitar (though probably not having a lot of fun with it). But you've only got the one voice, and the best singer you can be is the best you can be with the voice you got. For each of us individually, that may be much or it may be little; but together, we change our sound. We can create a voice bigger than just our singing together. That's the voice we gave to whoever was there to listen.

This was sort of our group's theme song, which I think is an objectively stunning piece of music.