Food, Music, and Scripting

It’s a beautiful day here in Boston. What a pity that I have to do work.

It’s interesting how people pick up certain habits about writing their blogs. I think Dave sometimes starts with an introductory “Good morning!” and some random thing that’s floating through his mind. For me it’s like a vocal warmup–stretches the writing muscles and gets me thinking.

Last night’s anniversary dinner was really nice. I made a risotto Milanese with pancetta, and a Siena style dish of chicken breast fillets with lemon and parsley. The risotto was fantastic, and I think I might have to add it to my regular repertoire. We decided to make a special night of it because Lisa’s trips to Italy are about to begin, and at this point we don’t know how often she’ll be home. Work is tough…

Speaking of repertoire, I’m in the middle of trying to build one for the E-52s. I’m finding it more challenging than I thought. There are two main challenges: finding good songs for female soloists and finding music that I like and the group likes too. I knew I had weird tastes in music, but there’s nothing like directing an a cappella group and watching their reaction to your musical ideas to really bring that home.

I might do a little Applescript work this morning, now that the fuss has pretty much died down over my first attempt. We’ll see how things go. I had one great plan dashed because the application I wanted to use wasn’t scriptable. It’s interesting. My initial thoughts about using script as a glue to tie website access to my desktop was that once I had the plumbing and the website API, I would be all set. Now I’m discovering the downside of relying on scripting: all the applications I use need to participate, or it won’t work. I already had to move from BBEdit Lite to TextEdit for updating my blog–I could write against the full version of BBEdit, but I’m a student and spending money for another software license when I have a passable text editor is hard to justify.