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  • Relative keys

    The husband often tries to teach me more about music theory. The wonder of modes! Which mostly just makes my brain hurt. He wrote me an email this week that contained the sentence “I think modes are actually much easier to understand than modern western harmony system based music as all 7 modes are based on 1 scale.” So there you go. Modes are easy. But I still don’t tend to take in that information when it’s relayed to me at 6am during our trip to work.

    However, it seems to be infectious because after ukulele club I wrote a fascinating email to the ukulele players about music theory, because I like to send people to sleep while they’re reading their emails.

    As you will find, C, G, Am and F are very common chords for songs which have been transposed to be played more easily on the ukulele. I was going to write something terribly fascinating about chord progressions, but I think all the songs I am proposing for the next meeting are actually in different keys (despite having the same chords).

    This is easier than you think! For example, the keys of C and A minor actually have the same chords in them – they just start in different places. The key of C starts on C, the key of A minor starts on A. This is why A minor is called the “relative minor” of C major. Other keys also have relative minors, but I have no idea what they are. This is because I play ukulele, and the key of C is our all important key. (You could read the Wikipedia page on relative keys if you want to make your brain melt.)

    Common chord progressions involve the first, fourth and fifth chords in a key. For the key of C major, these are C (the first chord), F (the fourth chord) and G (the fifth chord). As all these chords are quite easy on ukulele (on soprano, concert and tenor ukuleles, anyway!) many songs for ukulele are written or transposed into the key of C.

    Do you know Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah (more famously covered by Jeff Buckley and kd lang)? Well, in the first verse, he sings “I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord – but you don’t really care for music, do you? It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift…” If the song is being played in C major, when he’s singing “the fourth, the fifth”, the chords go from F to G (the fourth, then the fifth chords). When he sings “the minor fall”, the chord goes to A minor, and then the “major lift” it goes back to F. Isn’t that cool? “Yes, Celia, very cool – please stop talking about chords now.”

    I know sometimes music theory can sound a bit nonsensical (don’t let Chris start talking you about modes), but when you’re starting to play an instrument, I think that learning a teensy bit of theory can make the whole structure of songs much more understandable. For example, if you’re trying to remember the chords for a song, and you know it has a C, F and G in it, you’ll say to yourself, “Well, it’s fairly likely that this other chord will be an Am, because, like, Am is totally the relative minor of C major. Dude. Also, there’s 20 billion songs with C, F, G and Am in them, because I learnt them all at uke club.” (I know you all talk like that in private.) And you will probably be right! That’s always a nice feeling.

    If you have read all of that, you can now make yourself a little badge that says “Music Theorist” and wear it out when you go grocery shopping. This will be a wonderful boost for your social life. I promise.

  • Incinerated

    While I hung out washing this morning and raked leaves on Sunday morning, the husband built this incinerator from an old drum we got from a friend’s property, and some other scrap metal he picked up somewhere. Our house is surrounded by tall eucalypts that spend all year dropping leaves, twigs and sometimes quite large branches, and the preponderance of this dry material means that large bonfires aren’t a sensible idea. Hence the need for an incinerator.

    We burnt a pile of leaves and declared the incinerator a success. I hope that all the washing won’t smell like smoke as a result – I like the smell of fresh wood smoke, but not stale on clothes.

    The chooks are much less wary around me when I walk out to Chickendome to deliver potato peelings, wilted lettuce and apple cores – they move away from me when I open the door, but cautiously trot up when I scatter the vegetable scraps on the ground. They haven’t been let out yet – I think I’m going to wait another week, until they’re more comfortable with me and I can be a bit more confident that they’ll make their way back to Chickendome at dusk. My mother has advised me to hand feed them some sesame seeds, which are apparently the equivalent of chocolate cake to chicken-kind and will inspire their eternal love and devotion. And perhaps some eggs.

  • Remembering

    I remember travelling in Bali when I was 13 and reading The Crown of Dalemark by Diana Wynne Jones. I absolutely loved her quartet of Dalemark books, and named a wooden puppet that I bought after one of the characters. I think they remain some of my favourites of her novels (they are much creased and bent from re-reading), although I also love the Chrestomanci series, which were some of the first books of hers I ever read.

    Over the years I have read almost everything Diane Wynne Jones ever wrote. When I read about her death this morning, I went and looked at my bookshelves, and counted 15 of her books there – one of my biggest author collections, rivalled only by Terry Pratchett.

    Diana wrote about some of my favourite romantic relationships – Howl and Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle spring to mind, of course – and she wrote wonderful magical fantasy with such wit and humour. A particularly British type of fantasy.

    Last year Tansy Rayner-Roberts wrote a lovely letter to Diana Wynne Jones after she heard that she was discontinuing treatment for her cancer, and I love reading about her favourite books – I think every one of Diana’s fans will have their own vivid mental image of Chrestomanci in his glorious dressing gowns. Robin McKinley describes Diana’s stories as frisky and exuberant, and that’s exactly right – her stories are so joyous and funny.

    Although I haven’t loved her later books as much as her earlier ones (probably partly because I am reading them for the first time as an adult), I am still terribly sad that she won’t be writing any more. And after pulling all her books out of the bookshelves this morning I have an urge to do some re-reading – it’s been years since I read the Dalemark books. And The Magicians of Caprona. And Time City. Perhaps I just need to re-read them all.

  • Wicked Girls

    I bought Seanan McGuire’s album Wicked Girls recently, without having listened to much of it. But I really like her books (she writes urban fantasy as Seanan McGuire, and zombie political thrillers as Mira Grant), and she’s a fantastic lyricist, so I figured I’d enjoy the album. And I do – it’s great modern folk music.

    One of my favourite songs on the album is Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves – Theodora Goss wrote a fantastic post about this song, with a link to a video of a live performance. Her favourite verse is also mine – the one about Susan and Lucy from the Narnia books – because I love this proud version of Susan:

    “Susan and Lucy were queens, and they ruled well and proudly.
    They honored their land and their lord, rang the bells long and loudly.
    They never once asked to return to their lives
    To be children and chattel and mothers and wives,
    But the land cast them out in a lesson that only one learned;
    And one queen said ‘I am not a toy’, and she never returned.”

    I really wanted to figure out the chords because at the moment I’m going through a phase of wanting to be able to play every song I love on the ukulele. The husband tends to point out in a slightly exasperated fashion that songs played on piano, for example, do not perhaps sound their best on ukulele, but I charge on heedless of his sensible advice, and teach myself to play songs like Jealous Guy (which really does sound better on a piano, and yet there’s something about those chord changes on ukulele that I like).

    Anyway, I am not sufficiently musically talented to work out chords by listening to music – I can plunk out the melody, but moving to chords from there is a bit beyond me. So I made the husband listen to Wicked Girls repeatedly with me next to the keyboard, and we eventually put it together, providing me with yet another opportunity for me to butcher a perfectly lovely song on ukulele. Unfortunately it is in B minor, which is not my favourite chord, but I suppose this provides me with an opportunity to work on it.

    (If you happen to be wanting to play Wicked Girls Saving Themselves, you can download this PDF of the chords – Wicked Girls Saving Themselves by Seanan McGuire – chords. And were you wanting some extra verses? Because Seanan wrote some and posted them here and here.).

  • Pineapple

    New to this week’s box of local fruit and vegies were a beetroot, some celery, and a pineapple!

    Pineapple

    Cat not included. Shortly after this photograph was taken, Horace knocked the pineapple off the bench onto the floor while trying to eat the leaves, was roundly scolded, and went off to sulk on the lounge.

    The beetroot and pumpkin are going to be roasted and put into salads, and I’m trying to think of something vaguely inventive to do with the sweet potatoes. I’m still eating last week’s potato and sweet potato soup, which due to using purple sweet potatoes is a slightly unappetising purple/grey colour, and is also so thick that the term “soup” doesn’t really apply. It does taste good though – its saving grace.

  • New residents

    Chickendome is finally completed and inhabited by four red point of lay chooks I picked up at the produce store today, where they were loaded into the car for me, and I was offered a cuppa. I like the produce store.

    The chooks spent some time in their box when we put them in Chickendome, before venturing out, checking out their water and food supplies, and starting to scratch and peck around. They seem to be enjoying themselves. I’m going to leave them locked in for about two weeks or so before letting them out on weekends to have a bit of a roam around the property. Now we’ll just need to wait for them to settle in and grow up a little before we start getting eggs.

    In his own hunt for domestication genes, Andersson is taking a close look at the most populous domesticated animal on Earth: the chicken. Their ancestors, red jungle fowl, roamed freely in the jungles of India, Nepal, and other parts of South and Southeast Asia. Somewhere around 8,000 years ago, humans started breeding them for food. Last year Andersson and his colleagues compared the full genomes of domesticated chickens with those of zoo-based populations of red jungle fowl. They identified a mutation, in a gene known as TSHR, that was found only in domestic populations. The implication is that TSHR thereby played some role in domestication, and now the team is working to determine exactly what the TSHR mutation controls. Andersson hypothesizes that it could play a role in the birds’ reproductive cycles, allowing chickens to breed more frequently in captivity than red jungle fowl do in the wild—a trait early farmers would have been eager to perpetuate. The same difference exists between wolves, which reproduce once a year and in the same season, and dogs, which can breed multiple times a year, in any season.
    (from Animal Domestication: Taming the Wild, in National Geographic)

    The husband keeps pointing out that Chickendome is not actually a dome – I think he would have preferred it if we had built this geodesic dome chook pen, as at least the name would have been more accurate.

    In a few years I’d like to experiment with getting some different chook breeds, and perhaps a rooster. This post on how to choose chooks is interesting – chooks that lay blue eggs sound like fun.

  • Bees

    A hive of bees – or what looked to me like a hive of bees – have been collecting pollen from the blossoms in one of the palms for the past week, thrumming away as we walked somewhat warily underneath them each day. I have been wondering what their honey will taste like. I suppose unless you plant specific things near your bee hives, your honey is going to be a bit of a mixture of whatever is flowering near you at a certain time.

    I had at least two large spiders crawl across my pants today when I flapped my hands frantically at them and did a graceful little dance trying to get them off. We were moving a stack of wood that had been cut from a dead tree that we took down a year or more ago – it has been left in a pile ever since, being a good example of our general attitude of benign neglect towards our property. But this year we are trying to be better landowners, and have been spending time each weekend in the garden, weeding and mowing and hauling things around.

    We loaded the rotted pieces into the ute to take down to the dump, and I carried the rest up to the woodstore underneath the house. Yesterday we bought a chainsaw, which has made pruning tree branches a much quicker process – although to my mind, the more exciting part of that trip to the shops was firstly, the discovery of a huge secondhand bookshop (one of those wonderful ones where all the shelves are at least double-stacked with books) and secondly, dropping into the produce store and putting my name down for four laying chooks for us to pick up next weekend. Chickendome will finally have residents. And we will have eggs. Well, once they have relaxed into their new surroundings and get down to laying.

    We have started getting boxes of fruit and vegetables from Food Connect – local and mostly organic produce, from farmers who get paid more than they would selling to big supermarkets. I have been wanting to eat more seasonably and sustainably since reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma last year, and so far had only succeeded in feeling vaguely guilty. This seemed like a good opportunity to do something differently. We’ve only been getting the boxes for a couple of weeks – so far, the only unidentified item was some sort of yellow squash, which I am going to grill. The most wonderful thing has been the red Muscat grapes, the most beautifully sweet and juicy grapes I’ve ever eaten. And there’ll be no more of them in a week or so – the tragedies of seasonal produce.

  • Off the grid

    We spent some time off the grid this weekend – staying at a friend’s place, where they live without mains power, hot water, phone lines, or much plumbing (say hello to the long drop dunny). It was nice and relaxing as a guest – after all, I wasn’t the one who had to boil hot water to wash with. I was spending my time playing with the baby. This is the sort of practical and helpful thing that guests ought to do, I think. I also did some lens-swapping – it’s always nice to spend time with another Nikon owner.

    “I have discovered that if I whistle and pretend to waltz with the baby, I can hold her attention for at least 4 minutes. Finally, an audience that appreciates my entertaining skills.”

    The property is perched on top of a mountain, looking down into a deep valley on three sides. In the mornings, we basked in the sunshine and the almost constant breeze, watching the magpies and goannas enjoying the summer heat and the clouds and mist filling the valley around us.

    We also watched the baby, who has almost mastered crawling – she would push herself into Downward Dog position, squeaking with effort, tongue out, and wobble there while we all shouted helpfully, “Move your arms, baby! Your arms!” It hasn’t quite sunk in yet.

  • Solutions

    – After listening to this interview with Alain de Botton, I am definitely going to check out a copy of his book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. I have avoided his books in the past because I have always thought they looked like too much hard work, so I think I’m going to seek it out in audio book form – I’m much better at reading ‘difficult’ books in audio form, because I can’t skim.

    – The husband is taking a serious approach to planning our trip to New Zealand in August, and is creating the most elaborate Excel spreadsheet known to man. I am contributing things like, “I must go to Dunedin and visit this bookstore.” Because visiting bookstores is a sensible thing to do on an overseas trip.

    – I was also listening to the Marketplace of Ideas interview with Mark Frauenfelder about, among other things, the value of making things yourself (value in the sense of personal satisfaction, I mean). Which is a sentiment I understand and agree with; I was listening to the interview while tying together chickenwire in the gradual process of constructing Chickendome, which I am finding a very satisfying project. The slow process of putting the chickenwire together is quite meditative. I do tend to romanticise professions that involve the creation of something – for example, I feel at heart that my brother’s carpentry is of much greater value than my own job (although this feeling doesn’t go to the extent of longing to get out and on the tools myself). But really, the idea that we need to handmake things in order to find meaning in life is such a privileged Western preoccupation that it makes me wince a little. I’m fairly certain that those who must make things by hand because there is no alternative would not agree that it enriches their lives.

    Me, referring suddenly to an email received several days ago: “But what did you mean when you wrote ‘donk’? Was that a typo?”
    The husband, incredulously: “What?”
    Me: “You said ‘donk’. What does that mean? Did you make it up? Who uses that word?”
    H: “It means an engine.”
    Me: “Is that a common term? If I googled it would something come up? And why would you use it to refer to a computer? It’s very confusing.”
    H: “You are turning into your father.”

    – I have been gritting my teeth with frustration trying to figure out the erratic problems we’ve been having with our broadband, reading with irritation on online forums that my particular modem is not known for dealing well with crappy connections. Today I have updated its firmware, reset it to its default factory settings, played it some relaxing Mozart symphonies and given it a gentle shoulder massage. And thus far it has rewarded me with fairly steady access the entire day. Writing this down ensures that within the next 5 minutes it will all go to hell, but I don’t care – it is always so pleasing when you go painfully slowly through a trouble shooting process and it actually produces some sort of result.

  • Not my forte

    Last weekend, the husband painted the door to Chickendome (our new chicken pen, still under construction) a rather nice blue colour. Today, we finished the wire – while it still needs more wiring together by way of snake proofing, the basic structure is now finished. Chickendome lives!

    “You know, I still have some glittery gold letters left over from when I decorated my ukulele case – don’t you think “Chickendome” in gold letters would look great above the door?”
    “No.”

    The husband then handed me a spray can of black paint, a metal sheet to block spray, gave me a little lecture about spraying in careful small strokes, and took one of the cars out for a drive. When he returned, I presented him with the above, and said, “Well, I used the sheet, and then I thought I didn’t need it, and then a fair bit of black paint got on the blue, and I discovered I actually did need it after all, and then I thought I’d fix it by painting that bit black. But it does look a bit weird.”

    I think it’s clear that I don’t have a career ahead of me in painting. But I don’t suppose the chooks will mind.