Maytag Tried to Ruin My Day

I was up till almost 2 am last night. I got tired of my webhost so I spent all evening migrating this site to a new one. I’m really, really glad I did, because now everything works the way it is supposed to. Hooray!

However, because of this, I did not feel like getting out of bed this morning. With effort, and feeling a little bit like butt, I managed to drag myself to my feet at 10:30. Not an improvement over the last couple days, but so far I’ve kept myself from regressing, so that’s something.

First I went back into the “Fabula Venera” score. Turns out I hadn’t finished the harp part, and I had left off the 2nd percussion part. Needing something to do, I entered those two parts. Also, I found an interesting solution in finale to notating harp glisses, the kind that go up and down and back up again, making unusual shapes. So my score may look pretty after all when I’m done with the cleaning.

I didn’t spend much more than an hour on the score. Still lots of time left to go. And I was frustrated with myself for not getting any composing done the first two days.

That’s right, people. It was time to Just Write.

Part of the problem has been that I have about 5 ideas floating around in by brain that I want to execute. But in order to actually accomplish anything, I desperately needed to choose one and focus on it for a while. And choosing one is no trivial task. Should I do this one? I dunno. It might be too ambitious. It might be stupid. It’s too much like that other one. I might not even use it. Well today, I decided. I just picked one.

A while ago I jotted down this little musical snippet. It was interesting because it sounded like a viable 2 measure phrase, but it modulated to a different key partway through. For a phrase that short, the fact that it modulated seemed to open up a whole bunch of interesting possibilities. I dug up that phrase several months ago and expanded it into a page-long melodic statement that could serve as the basis for an interesting piece. I toyed with the idea that it might be used as a jazz head if I ever put a jazz combo together again in the future, but somehow I couldn’t quite figure out how to make it work that way. So I shelved it.

Recently, it occurred to me that it could make a pretty effective orchestral piece. I went and found the sketch I had made, one of the few complete sketches I have available, which makes it an ideal candidate to work on during this project.

So that’s the sketch I grabbed this morning. I set up a full score in Finale, inserted the first part of the melody as a trumpet solo, and then it’s just a matter of filling in the other parts. I got about 4 measures finished and then it was time to break for lunch.

That’s when my mom caught me.

She’s been waging war against Maytag for a year. They sold her a dryer almost exactly one year ago, and its favorite food is clothes. And despite the fact that it was under warranty, Maytag has been giving her the runaround, refusing to acknowledge that it is damaging her property and not replacing or fixing it. So in the last year it’s run up about $1000 (conservative estimate) in damage to her clothes.

The problem is, my mom is very bad at the internets, and she needed to submit a claim form to try and reclaim some of the damages before her warranty runs out in a couple of days. This needed to include evidence including scans of all the paperwork and photos of all the damaged clothing (a compromise, since initially they wanted her to mail them all the damaged clothing… haha, great idea). So we spent a couple hours snapping 100 photos of damaged clothes, scanning paperwork and readying them to be emailed to Maytag’s legal department. What a pain.

In the end, I lost a little bit of time today, but I still managed to finish about 8 bars of music. I mean finished, too, not any of that “I’ll come back to it later” bullcrap. This is very encouraging, if I can get 8 bars or more done each day, I should be in excellent shape.

Well, enjoy your Saturday! I’ll probably work some since I have big Mo on my side now, although probably not the full 7. We’ll see.

2 Comments:

  1. “That’s when my mom caught me” could look really bad if taken out of context.

    • Omg I laughed so hard about that. Totally not in a mean way, just that your mom is so tiny and cute and I would absolutely spazz if that happened to me! Priceless.

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