choral music

heh. and just as i get home, vox posts a new sydney cityscape banner :-) so i'm just going to use it for a few days, i think. will replace the now-very-out-of-date easter eggs anyway.

yes, i'm home. as of 5am today, i am safely back in london at last. it feels a bit weird to have cupboards and my own kitchen and stereo and stuff about and to actually not have to go anywhere, and very little i really have to do. very very weird. but hopefully by tomorrow i'll be a little acclimatised.

i'm going to try not to rabbit on too much today, but so much stuff has accumulated in my brain over the last seven weeks or so, and feeling so jetlagged that it may be a hard ask. i humbly beg your forgiveness in advance.

to start with, i feel like the universe is giving me hints. big fat hints. big fat obvious wet-fish-slap-in-the-face hints. when i first quit my job, i had a nibble of a choral commission, which still may come through, but i haven't heard anything yet. while i was in sydney, a good friend of mine asked me to write something for the amateur choir she conducts. i wrote to the old girls' union at my school about their newsletter while in sydney, and got an email back including a suggestion that i might want to consider writing for an anniversary concert they're having next year (choir and/or orchestra). and now, coming home to find a file of spnm newnotes magazines, with their attendant flyers and composition opportunities, i discover that there's a juicy-sounding composition competition coming up, for - yup, that's right - SATB choir. so i think i'm meant to write choral music at the moment. which is fine and dandy by me. i've been feeling vocally inclined for a while now, between the satie song arrangement and the set of little walt whitman songs i've been working on, so might as well go the whole hog and work with SATB. so yay! direction!

Walking in This World

which realisation has had me a little hyped up (well, as much as the jetlag will allow) to get back to sorting out my creativity stuff. i've done julia cameron's the artist's way a couple of times now, and it's been fabulous, but i'm still feeling a bit of a need for direction but it's too soon to read the same thing again, so while ordering another book from amazon this afternoon (more on that in the next paragraph, but it's medically related so feel free to skip that one), i made up the gap to get myself free shipping by ordering cameron's walking in this world as well. i've heard mixed things about this - some people saying it's great and a little more advanced than TAW, but others saying that she goes over a lot of the same ground. i think i'm not too concerned about the latter because she has a lot of useful ideas and approaches in TAW, and it's sometimes beneficial to run through ideas in different ways anyway, so i'll see how that goes. hopefully my new books will turn up at the end of the week.

The Total Wellbeing Diet

the other book i ordered was because while i was in sydney, my doctor was finally able to diagnose the digestive problems i've been having which has set me off on an investigation of my assorted health issues in a quest to finally sort myself out and make life a little more enjoyable. at first she thought i might have some kind of bug we could kill, and i was most disappointed when she got my tests back and gave me a clean bill of health - no bugs to be found anywhere - grrr! but on the other hand, she was able to put a name to my problem - irritable bowel syndrome - and a bunch of reading has actually given me hope that i can really do something about this. seems it's not uncommon following gall-bladder removals as one's innards have no way of regulating the amount of bile floating about. so i have a couple of strategies for that, and we invested in both books of the csiro total wellbeing diet, which not only has had rave reviews from all sorts of people but came recommended by our doctor as a healthy and sustainable way to lose weight, lower cholesterol, etc. etc. (and the recipes look and sound - and by all reports are - delicious) and the second book i ordered today is about controlling the symptoms of polycystic ovary syndrome (another fun little health issue i have which mostly raises its head in the form of insulin resistance and a tendency to put on weight as soon as i look at anything that has a calorie) by diet. so i've got my reading cut out for me in the weeks ahead! i need to read all this stuff, digest (hah!) it and then come up with a plan based around the csiro diet which will keep the PCOS and IBS under control, allow me to lose a little weight, and keep my meals at least approximately in line with djeli's so that we're not having to cook six (or possibly nine - seems that small meals and lots of them may be the way to go for me) completely different meals every day.

</medical bit>

but it's marvellous to be home. i have no energy whatsoever at the moment, so just messing with some photos, ticking things off, deleting them or adding them to my to-do lists on rememberthemilk.com (which i am absolutely loving, i must say - it came in so very handy in our frantic last few days in sydney), catching up on a little tv and eating chocolate to try to avoid re-napping (i caught four hours earlier today during which djeli went up to the bank, came home, called the AA, changed the battery in the car, then drove to oxford and back to make sure it was ok - really need to not sleep again until it's properly night). tomorrow i think will be the time to clean off and reinstall the old vaio laptop in preparation for hooking up the 100-odd Gb of mp3s i ripped while in sydney. i'm fairly sure that if we counted individual discs, at least, i'd have ripped over 500 of the things. if i never look a ripping programme in the face again, it'll be too soon!