Lewis’ Blog

Just returned from the last of the annual holiday family gatherings, and now it feels like this winter break is at an end.  Tomorrow will be a nice coda — a farewell dinner with my sister, and then off to school again.

Hoping this next quarter will go well.  Both Laurie and I are embarking on schedules that look pretty intense from the outside.  We’ll see how the intensity looks from the inside, but certainly with a booked weekend schedule in January we will be keeping quite busy.  Hopefully Boo will quit biting Laurie.  This has been doing nothing for household morale.

I didn’t get all the reading done that I’d wanted to over the break, but I did do some reading that I wasn’t expecting to, so all in all I’ve had a good break on that front.  Notably I finally finished the Cloudspotter’s Guide, which I highly recommend.  I think I have always appreciated the beauty of a good cloudscape, but the depth of my appreciation has surely increased after reading the Cloudspotter’s Guide.  Just having someone articulate some new ideas to think about with regards to a subject (in this case clouds) gives one more to think about when confronted with it, and Pretor-Pinney does this in such a way that the esthetic experience is not disrupted but strengthened.  A fun read too.

Bought textbooks yesterday.  One of my classes is doing the old buy-the-professor’s-latest-book trick, which is hopefully more organically related to the structure of the class than it is circularly profitable for said professor.

But seriously, why haven’t I mentioned the latest addition to our musical instrument menagerie, which surely is a most blogworthy event.  It’s not every winter break that a man is lent a newly refurbished, gold-colored, cat-scaring-the-crap-out-of, Italian accordion.  I am far from understanding how this machine works, specifically with regards to the approximately two hundred buttons on the left side, which when individually depressed result in the sounding of various harmonies.  Some buttons produce the same harmonies as others, but mostly different buttons produce different harmonies.  The pressing of some buttons results in other buttons also going down as if pressed, in which case sometimes these latter buttons will have a like effect on the former buttons when they are pressed, but not always.  In a fair number of cases there is a relationship similar to dominant-tonic between vertically adjacent buttons, but not in all.  It is my personal project to make a map of these buttons over the next quarter, without consulting an expert or any reference material.  I feel that this project will often come as a welcome change from studying language and the philosophy thereof.  It is a sub-project of this project that I learn how to play Monk’s Dream on the accordion, chords and melody.  It seems like the accordion is begging to play this song for some reason.  Anyway, thank you Ben for the excellent gift.  I promise to put it to good use.

But now it’s getting late and I am tired, and it is time to expel from my system some of the coffee that’s been making me slightly grumpy all day.  Good night.