Ice This
Okay, what is this?
I mean, I know what it is. It’s ice. It’s a very strange ice self-sculpture as discovered in my rain gauge this morning. I’ve been trying to remember if there’s been any weird ice effects before this; we’ve been having hard frosts pretty much every night for a week or so I think—certainly last night and the night before. And we’ve had lots of hard frosts all winter long.
But yesterday was positively warm, so anything that might have happened the night before that would have melted. I also did some gardening yesterday and I’m pretty sure I would have noticed gnomish* water. But is there some inscrutable Memory of Water going on here?
All the ice crystals held hands/tentacles/tendrils/teenyweeny subatomic appendages when they melted yesterday and last night as they hardened up again since they were all friends now they started building a cheerleader pyramid? 
I haven’t dumped the rain gauge out since falling lake over the weekend—maybe it has something to do with the drastic slope of the gauge? Beats the heck out of me. Maybe I’ll send it to the New Scientist and ask them. They like stuff like this.
And it was a nightmare to photograph. I must have taken two dozen photos** and they’re all out of focus.*** These are merely less out of focus than the others. My camera has these little orange squares that tell you what it’s going to focus on . . . wrong. It can’t stand shiny translucent ice, so it just ducks around the orange squares and finds a nice daphne or plant pot or dead thing to focus on.
I emailed Blondel last night and said that I’d lost about half of this week to ME, that I’d just tried singing for the first time since about Thursday and . . . oh dear. That I still wanted to come for my lesson† but not to expect much. He emailed back that he was sure we could ‘make good use of the time’†† if I was feeling up to it.
Right at the moment about ninety percent of what I learn about singing every week happens in that single hour in Blondel’s tiny spare-bedroom studio. The ten percent is just me at home picking out the melody on the piano with one finger, or urgently re-re-listening to selected youtube tracks.††† I am hoping that eventually I can do some of that what-needs-supporting, where-it’s-tight stuff for myself, but at the moment all I ever seem to do at home—aside from trying to learn the frelling tune‡—is recognise that the noise I’m making is more good or less good‡‡ and beyond that it’s all unfathomable . . . squeaking.‡‡‡
Sigh.
I had forgotten more than I had learnt since last lesson § but at the end Blondel still said, I’ll have a new song for you next week. Your coloratura is really very good,§§ I’ll look for something else with coloratura in it.
Squeak.
* * *
* Gnomish: to do with gnomes. Yes, I want to say gnomic but that’s about aphorisms. Hmm. Aphoristic water. Woo ooh.
** I looove my digital camera. It took a little while. I was last on the block. I might still be last on the block without a digital camera except that Peter bought me one because he thought I was being silly about them. Silly? Me?
Now who’s going to fix my attitude toward my little videocam? Yup. I have one. Poor thing. It sure has stamina. It’s been buried in a heap of early draft manuscripts for months. I finally fished it out about a week ago and gave it a charge, expecting it to tell me that it had eaten itself and all its software, the way rechargeables do if they aren’t. Nope. Still working. So then I put it on its bendy feet, pointed it at the piano, and sang the lullaby from PEGASUS in front of it.
BIG MISTAKE.
The bottom of a pile of early draft manuscript isn’t nearly far enough away. Not in the same county.
*** And sometimes I don’t love my digital camera quite so much.
† Have I told you that my fourteen-year-old car passed his road inspection first go? That they couldn’t even find anything wrong? Evidently there hadn’t been a hard frost recently when they went to unlock the doors.
†† Good use of the time. Sigh. I might as well be ringing Cambridge and singing and composing the second parts of lullabies^ for all the forward I’m getting on PEG II. I’m getting tired of that blank screen. This happens to me; in itself it’s not a big deal; after the fairies^^^ finish moving the furniture around they’ll let me back in the house again. Meanwhile . . . well, if I miss getting it turned in on time, you’ll just have to wonder/put off reading PEG I^^^^ a little longer.
^ Did I tell you Peter wrote me a second verse? With variants. In case I want the stress on a different part of a line, he said. Golly. We’re collaborating more on this than we ever have for ELEMENTALS.
^^ Maybe I should take up knitting.
^^^ Or possibly gnomes
^^^^ Which of course you’ve already bought
††† Now that I’m beginning to learn it a little, Alfred Deller’s performance of Purcell’s Evening Hymn is much. Too. Slow.
‡ And all those horrible where-you-come-ins
‡‡ Or possibly more bad or less bad
‡‡‡ I have the video to prove it
§ SIGH
§§ Remember that this is teacherspeak and relative. It’s true that given the general level of direness my coloratura is better than you’d expect.
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