Various

I see Erin has quite nicely taken over the blog in my absence. With that many posts in a weekend without me, perhaps I should just bow out for good!

I arrived home late last night. Safely. In Pennsylvania it was raining, but as I neared upstate New York, I started noticing lots of salt trucks everywhere. That combination was rather ominous, so I slowed down a bit. Nearly falling down a dozen times walking from the car to the house suggested that slowing down had probably been a good idea.

The conference went really well and was well worth going to. I met a bunch of great people, many of whom I’ll encounter again, I’m sure. I also got the chance to spend some time with a couple of students that I had gotten to know at Yale, so that was nice.

But it’s good to be back home now. Especially since three big packages arrived while I was gone. I had finally gotten really fed up with scrappy little computer speakers that all too audibly protested whenever, say, the sopranos hit a high note. So, not wanting my fairly large CD collection to go to waste, I went on Ebay and purchased a receiver, CD player, and a pair of speakers. The speakers, by the British company Bowers & Wilkins, came with a marvelous, slightly snooty manual. Anyway, I spent the bulk of the day setting up the system.

Okay, listening to the system. Having listened to my favourite recording of Handel’s Messiah, a Rheinberger organ concerto, Grieg’s Peer Gynt, some spirituals by the Robert Shaw Chorale, and some forty-part motets sung by the Huelgas Ensemble, I think I now have a pretty good idea of the sonic signature of the system! It sounds great. Tenors and altos shine particularly well.

Maybe I’ll skip the semester and just sit on the couch and make up for lost listening time.

Sydney