Double To-Dos

 Today is a long double day, a day on which I have a morning rehearsal and then seven hours of sitting around while waiting for the evening concert. 

I normally plan around these days and save unpleasant and tedious busywork for the time between that I can put my head down and plow through without either being distracted by small children or sacrificing family time for. 

The last few doubles have all had significant chunks of time dedicated to learning Dorico, the new music notation software that has replaced the (now-defunct) Finale. This was big news a few months ago among my composing/arranging friends, and I've been working through the tutorials for close to a month now.

The first day of it went very poorly. But it turns out that old dogs can at least partly get their heads around new tricks, and I just finished transcribing the final few bars of Dorico's "practice" composition. I might nearly be ready to write some actual choral music on the software. (One of the to-dos for my November long double is to figure out and write whatever it is that my choir is supposed to be doing for their Christmas music service.

I'm also sorting star charts and trying to get a fix on where I can find Algol tonight with Clifford. If you don't live at my house you might not be aware that we adopted a big red friend over the summer. Clifford is my 8" Dobsonian telescope, an admittedly large but powerful and impressive astronomy tool. The boys and I have checked out lunar craters, comets, planets, planetary moons, and deep space nebulae with Clifford on clear nights. Tonight I'll be back late and am going to attempt to "split" a binary star that is apparently simple to find. We'll see. Clifford lives in the shed that we built (also new over the summer) because not everyone thought he was an appropriate in-the-house object.

More time was devoted to punching the October budget numbers into Excel. Since Mint has been discontinued (hopefully to some happy software heaven in the company of Finale) I've had to learn how to do our budget all by hand. 

I also have a bunch of reading projects at the moment--finishing up book 6 of the Iliad, reading a history of the Assyrian empire, and a play in French. But even with all of the reading I brought and a couple of drawing projects, I think I might run out of work before I run out of afternoon.

And if that's the case, I might be just fine to sit out in the sunshine and do absolutely nothing. Winter is coming, and in not too many more weeks I might be snowed into this coffee shop on a long double. But for today there's sunshine and just the right amount of not quite enough to do.