The Day of Labor

I’d like to begin by saying I am effing sick of spiders.

I’ve been living in the basement of this house for about 16 months, and it’s great. It’s like having my own little suite complete with bathroom and cable and I could keep myself entertained down there for days if I ever needed to for some environmental-distaster-type reason. God forbid. It’s cool during the summer, and warm during the winter.

Really the only thing wrong with it is all the spiders.

And yes, I know that they’re basically harmless, and I’m grateful that since there’s so many spiders that there aren’t any other bugs around. But I don’t like the idea of them crawling around on me in my sleep.

So anyway, I’d say during the warm months I probably end up disposing of a good 10-15 spiders per week. They hibernate during the winter, but during the summer they keep respawning like some nerdy FPS game reference that I don’t don’t actually know because I don’t play those.

My favorite part is that they seem to be getting bigger. I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m unintentionally selectively breeding them towards gigantism. The big ones tend to freak me out a bit more than the small ones, so they tend to live a little longer than the little ones. So, you know, it’s genetically advantageous to be huge. Or something.

Anyway so I took most of the weekend off, battling spiders and watching sports and playing bridge. I think scheduling off-days is just as important as scheduling work time.  If you don’t schedule off-time then you end up thinking about how you should be working the whole time and then it isn’t really off-time at all, is it? It’s just stress-time. So I think I’ll be mostly taking weekends off during this project. I did work a little bit during the weekend, but nothing too substantial.

Today is labor day, and while most people are taking today off from work, there are no three-day weekends in real life. So I decided to work. Besides, I was motivated and ready to go this morning when I woke up.

I wrote a lot today. I’ve got the whole composition mapped out at this point; it will be a short and sweet 24 measures. I managed to write several sections, and so basically the whole thing is done except for a short 4 measure climactic statement, which I will hopefully be able to finish tomorrow. I’m pretty pleased, the Finale playback on it sounds pretty interesting right now. It’s very twisty and turny and modulates a lot, as per the original sketch. I would have continued working, but I’ve also discovered that my brain and ears get fatigued after about 6-8 hours to the point where I can’t work any more for the day. I hit that point and it was time to stop.

So if I can continue working at this pace, finishing a piece about every 3 work days, that would be incredible. I’d be able to complete a selection of about 4 or 5 pieces, with plenty of time left over to finish everything else.

So things are looking up so far! I’ll check back in tomorrow and let you know if I get the piece wrapped up the way I’d like! 😀

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