One of those catherines

This is Andrew posting. I have some devastating news. Catherine died suddenly last night in Williamstown from a heart attack. She was having a cycling holiday. We don't have much more information at the moment, and we'll let you know when we have more details, and when arrangements are being made.

If you have a special offer of help (eg knowledge of legal requirements, etc), please let Gillian Brent, Geoffrey Brent or me know.

No flowers please. There will be other ways to remember her, and I'll post when we know what's happening.

Also no visitors for the meantime please unless specifically asked, or if one of us spoke with you earlier.

Edit: She was the most wonderful, vibrant, beautiful, thoughtful, caring, passionate person and I cannot believe she is gone. (Gillian here - I missed that incredibly essential line when doing the copy/paste - I am so sorry.)

Well, it's certainly been a time here. 

( A funeral )

( COVID-19 in Melbourne )

On a cheerier note, I did manage to get a haircut before everything in Melbourne started escalating, so now not only is my hair out of my eyes but it is also *exceedingly* pink. I figured I might not be able to get another haircut for a while, so I might as well make the most of this one.

I celebrated the increasing lockdown by going online and ordering a bunch of fancy food including a dinner party from Hazel restaurant, which was great - a number of our fancier restaurants have started doing this thing where you order a meal that is mostly done, but which you finish in the oven or on the stove at home. That way you get to enjoy the food at its best. So we had some truly delicious eggplant parmagiana, roast pumpkin with tahini yoghurt and pepitas, foccaccia with curd cheese and hazelnuts, and salad for dinner, with lemon delicious pudding for dessert, and it was great - it tasted like a really good home made meal that I hadn't had to cook. Very comforting, and we will be doing this again. I have also just made another bicycle trip to the Mediterranean Wholesaler, and I can say with some confidence that we will not be running out of pasta for a while now.

( Hamilton! )

In other cultural news, we read The Taming of the Shrew yesterday, so at least that's over with. I had a little fun with the casting - the three men present played Katherine, Bianca and the Widow, and all the male characters were played by women/NB readers. It didn't help as much as I'd hoped. But it was fun casting the Induction so that the suitors were all Huntsmen, the servants were Players, Katherina was Lord, stage-directing the gaslighting of Sly/Petrucchio, and Bianca was also the Page, who plays the part of a woman – that was my favourite part, because Bianca is, after all, the masculine ideal of womanhood, until it turns out that she has been faking it all along...

I've also read and reviewed some great books recently. I enjoyed Sarah Henning's mildly genderswapped Princess Bride, and reviewed it here, and I utterly ADORED Jo Walton's 'Or What You Will', and my review will be up in a day or two (Sarah and I are trying to pare back my squeeing so that the review isn't as long as the book...). If you like fantasy, stories about writing, Florence, food, and Shakespeare made more queer and strange, this is a book for you. We've also started watching Crazy Delicious on Netflix, which is a wonderfully fantastical and bonkers cooking show and highly recommended.

And that's about it for now. We are, as you see, in good spirits. Nothing like having some really good reading and viewing  and food to help with that. Work is work and there's no more to be said about it. I'm still recording music regularly for Wesley, which is good. I miss my scientists and I miss feeding people, but we are very lucky, really.

How are things with you?

Wow, I really did let time get away with me, didn't I?

So lots of things have been going on.  I'm feeling a bit better about work - not coincidentally, one of my labs has started inviting me to their weekly meetings, which start with twenty minutes of catchup and admiring R's new kitten. This is very soothing. Also, we had a new round of the Locker Key Fiasco, which recurs every couple of years and is essentially an infuriating nightmare. It is, however, also a nightmare that I absolutely can't do from home!  So I had to go into work for a couple of hours a fortnight ago so that I could try to reconcile the keys we have with the locks we have, and figure out which idiots had left stuff behind in their lockers when they moved to other jobs or other institutes. This really shouldn't have taken more than an hour, but SoccerProfessor was there and feeling very chatty, and so I wound up being there for a whole extra hour...

I've also been spending a lot of time organising an online 150th birthday party for two of our Professors who each have a big birthday this month - I organised an online group card, where people could add messages and photos and pictures and a virtual afternoon tea on Zoom with real cake for the birthday boys, by special delivery from a fancy cake shop, and a proper Brady Bunch group photo at the end of the afternoon tea as a souvenir.  This was very well received, and I think our birthday boys felt as celebrated as was feasible.

In more annoying work news, the NHMRC decided to extend their grant deadline by a week on five days notice, which is just enough to massively inconvenience anyone assisting with grants, without actually helping the people writing grants very much. Meanwhile, another funding body decided to open their grants just before the big NHMRC round closed, and held an 'RAO-only' info session on the afternoon before the NHMRC's deadline, because of course the Research Grant Managers would not be busy just then. And we have our Health Minister going on about how this is a great opportunity for Australia to really get ahead of the game in terms of medical research. As medical research funding has actually halved in real terms over the last decade and grant success rates are now ~12%, this statement was not received well by medical researchers at large.

I really could just have summarised that paragraph with 'grants are still grants', couldn't I?

We've done two more Shakespeares since I last wrote, Henry VI part 3, which people are seeming to enjoy in spite of themselves, and Love's Labour's Lost, which I very much love, mostly because of the absolutely bananas musical version by Kenneth Branagh, but also because it really is delightfully ridiculous, the poetry so deliberately terrible, the logic so utterly tortuous, and look, I do rather have FEELINGS about very clever people who are also as thick as planks in certain ways.  And it's fun watching the women get the upper hand for a change.  Anyway, I had great fun playing Berowne, and in fact, I think everyone had a really good time with that one, which is good, because next up we are doing Taming of the Shrew, which will be a bit of a penance. We are playing it as a tragedy, and probably cross-dressing it too. I imagine the misogyny counter will be working overtime for that one.

I sort of theoretically had last week off work, except that I was sabotaged by the funding bodies, and by certain other technicalities that meant I needed to work a full day on the Tuesday after all, so that I could finish with grants, circulate the roster, record the seminar, and finalise the card that was going to be auto-delivered at midnight. My plan had been to make it a reading holiday, and maybe go away for a couple of nights and get ahead on my Hugos reading. Alas, none of this came to pass, and it turned out to be the kind of week off that is not at all relaxing but for which one is nonetheless grateful, because dealing with All the Stuff while also trying to work full time would have been a nightmare.

Lowlights of the week included a bunch of stressful and distressing conversations of the kind that really make me wonder if I should abandon social media entirely; a particularly infuriating situation where I was meant to be recording music for the church, but someone didn't check the church bookings, so I got there, and the church was clearly occupied, but the other two people were both late, so I had to hang around waiting for them so that we could reschedule; learning three days later that one of these people had actually been sick with a sore throat and a cough at the time (I am VERY glad I refused his offer of a lift, but I'm absolutely baffled that he said nothing when I did so, since I explained at the time that I was being particularly cautious about infection for a number of different reasons) - but it's OK, because he had now tested negative for COVID-19 (!!!); trying to support a very dear friend interstate whose father is dying in a third state and who is trying to figure out how to get to him without being stuck in quarantine for two weeks halfway there, since there are no direct flights; the death of a cousin to whom I was not close, but who was also really rather young to be dying and the inevitable family weirdness around that (made more exciting by COVID-19 restrictions and a lack of understanding thereof); and... yeah. It was a lot.

I did, however, have three really NICE things, other than Shakespeare. On Thursday, I rode my bicycle down to Williamstown so that I could have fish and chips on the beach, and got thoroughly, hilariously lost along the way. I wrote about it in detail on Facebook, with photos, so I'll just link to that here. Suffice it to say that if one has a poor sense of direction, choosing a lovely scenic route that follows rivers and the like is a really reliable way to end up in all sorts of places that aren't one's actual destination. It was a really lovely day, though - the weather was 15°C and sunny, which is almost perfect for cycling, and it was nice to actually feel like I'd been a long way from home after so many months staying within about a 5km radius of the house. On Saturday, I got to pick up my first CSA box from Lakey Farm, who do lamb, mutton, beef and goat, and will give you a selection each month that includes about 15% choice cuts, 40% mince or sausages and 45% slow cooking cuts - the equivalent to the breakdown of a carcase. I got their smallest, trial box, and it had lamb shanks, goat cutlets, mutton merguez sausages, premium beef mince, a lovely goat leg joint to roast. Oh, and some tallow soap, because they really are nose to tail (they do offal on request), so that was a nice touch. I have lots of plans for those. And yesterday, we went and spent the late afternoon and evening with my brother and sister-in-law and niece, and had a very fancy dinner from Maha Go (the new, finish-at-home option of our favourite gourmet restaurant). The quantities were ludicrous, the quality very good. And the company was nice too.

And a good thing too, because I woke up to the news that my council area is now one of six that are having particularly high rates of community transmission, and people should not leave or enter this region unless absolutely necessary. Now, for overseas people, a high rate of transmission in Australia actually means that we have been getting about 20-25 new cases every day in the state of Victoria, which has something like 5 million people, so it's not really at the level where we need to be panicking, but about a third of them have been happening near where I live, so some caution is important. I have no idea what this will mean for the funeral. Since I am not very good at family, but very good at being a church musician, I had already offered to record something for the occasion – Joe's mother was very keen that I should come in person, and indeed, up until yesterday, I would have counted as 'essential staff' and thus exempt from number restrictions... but as of today, I'm not actually sure if I'm allowed to go at all. Especially as the funeral will be in a non-restricted zone, but I'm pretty sure Joe's mother lives in a *different* restricted zone from me. In any case, my plan is to make sure I have recordings both of me singing, and of the accompaniment alone, and deploy whichever one is permitted and feasible on the day. All of which does require people to decide when the funeral is, and what they would like me to sing, of course...

And tomorrow, I'm back at work, at my kitchen table. I wouldn't say I feel relaxed and well-rested, but God knows, it could have been so very much worse.

I am so glad I had my ride to Williamstown.  That was a proper holiday, at least, even if it was just a single day.

I hope everyone here is safe and well.

It's been a bit manic around here. Sunday a week ago we read A Comedy of Errors which is, not to put too fine a point on it, a terrible play. All caricatures and stereotypes and misogyny and general sexism, classism, and... well, really, Shakespeare did his best to leave nobody unoffended in this play. My newbies were rather shocked. So was I - I remembered it not being good, but I feel like it has become worse in the fifteen or so years since we last read it.

It doesn't help that it's very much a physical comedy, which is hard to manage on Zoom. Though Andrew and I, as the Dromio twins, got a bit of business going with a woolly hat which I decreed at the start was The Hat That Makes Us Identical, so when we were arguing through the door we would snatch it off each other as we spoke our lines, and at the end, when we went to take hands and wander off into the sunset, I put the hat on my head, and then produced a similar hat and put it firmly on Andrew's head so that we could both be Identical Dromio now and live happily ever after. As for the rest of the play... well, the new and exciting subplot in which Adriana and Luciana become pirate queens and sack the Abbey was definitely an improvement on the actual plot (I especially liked our German Luciana ending each speech in Act 5 with a very firm 'and sack the abbey.' There was something about the professorial definitiveness with which she said it that made it clear that It Would Be So. It was excellent.).

Since then, we have been on Eurovision time. SBS showed the last five years of Grand Finals last week, so we watched all of those, plus three Eurovision At Home Concerts, plus the SBS Eurovision Big Night In on Saturday plus Europe Shine A Light on Sunday. In addition, I wrote my Eurovision post, and had an absolute blast editing it with Sarah, whose comments were all things like 'Oh my God' and 'Holy Cow'. By the end of it, she told me that she was on a total Eurovision high... sufficiently so that she gave me explicit permission to add even more video clips at the last minute when I realised I had somehow forgotten about both Fuego and Helicopter Hair Guy. Anyway, the post is up now, and is getting some pretty entertaining comments.

I also spent the weekend baking - our restrictions were lifted very slightly this week, so that theoretically we can visit or be visited by up to five friends at a time. This seems like far too many, so instead, I baked a lot of very Eurovisiony desserts - sparkly cupcakes and biscuits, and several small costume reveal cakes that were white and glittery on the outside and rainbow in the middle, and then we got dressed up and delivered them to the people who would normally be hanging out with us to watch the final. We even spent a deliciously decadent twenty minutes visiting two of them *in their actual house* and catching up a bit. Alas for us - the Eurovision Shine A Light concert was actually supremely disappointing, and only showed brief clips of all the songs. But the cake was good, and it was fun hanging out on Discord to watch even a disappointing concert together. And apparently, the semi-finals actually are really good, so we are saving them for later in the week.

In non-Eurovision news, our Mother's Day present was a success - my niece is really ridiculously cute, and while she is not a genius of the dance, she is pretty well on the beat for a four year old, and definitely has some clear ideas about what she wants each part of the song/dance to look like, so that was adorable. Even my mother quite liked it. (Though of course, it can't live up to Iceland's brilliant Eurovision entry this year, which turns out not to be a dubious love song, but a song by a new dad to his infant daughter, with his wife and sister on dance and backing vocals.)

Yeah, that didn't stay away from Eurovision for long, but then, neither can I...

In fact, I think I need to go share this one with the Bitchery...

... and then she got distracted for twenty minutes sharing Eurovision videos with her newest collection of Eurovision fans...

Anyway.

The only other news is that my scientists are now pretty much all back in the lab for at least a few hours a week, which is good news for them. Less good news for me - word from on high is that those of us who don't need to be physically at the Institute to do our jobs should expect to be home until the end of the year which is... actually pretty awful to contemplate.  I've been doing quite well working from home for nine weeks, but another seven months is going to be hard, especially with all the people I work with most closely now back in the lab and focused on that.  It's going to make my job harder both now and when I do go back, because of the attentuated relationships. And it's going to make my job much less fun and interesting, because let's face it, the scientists are the good bit.  At the same time... yeah. Our offices are too small for social distancing, and I share with the two lab managers. If I go in, neither of them can, and both of them can only do their jobs in the lab. It makes no sense for me to go in, and I understand and accept that completely. And I still want to cry.

So, yeah. 

But on the upside, only 363 days to Eurovision!

I hope you are all doing well.
 

So much high culture in one post, how will you cope?

We read Henry VI Part II yesterday, and it was fairly silly. At this point, all our regulars have embraced the costumes-and-props side of things, which is helpful when you have twelve people playing 60-something parts. It was rendered extra chaotic by one person calling in sick in the morning, and another, more infuriatingly, sending me a text message at ten to seven, while I was trying to get dinner on the table in time for us to start reading at eight. So I had to somehow reassign all of his parts (one of which was Richard, Duke of York, the largest part in the play) and communicate the changes to everyone in the space of an hour while making dinner. Honestly, while the readings themselves are wonderful, the last minute changes are so very stressful that every time I find myself wondering if I want to keep on doing this.

On the up-side, I did manage to recruit two new players, one of whom was brave enough to come in on one hour's notice and read York. And that was really fun, because she is a friend and fellow reviewer with whom I interact a lot on our Slack (as she is the only person who is in a timezone compatible with mine), but we haven't met before. Nor has she read Shakespeare before, so that was impressive. And it was fun watching her figure out how to read Shakespeare over the course of the play - starting with a slightly stilted iambic pentameter and slowly getting a bit more free with the delivery of the lines until she sounded quite natural... and in between, embracing the silly-hats-and-funny-accents habits of the rest of the cast. I'm very proud of her, and it was fun getting to hang out and chat after the reading.

It actually is a better play than it looks, though I was amused and a bit horrified at the end when our (very good) Suffolk turned to me and went, OK, so now we're done, what actually happened in that play? Evidently, my Wars of the Roses training has stood me in good stead, because it was fairly plain to me at this point, but yeah, there is a lot going on in that play.

Because of all the last minute rejigging, I wound up with Cade AND Buckingham (as well as a bunch of murderers, apprentices, citizens, etc), so in addition to my various smaller hats, I had a proper curled wig for Buckingham and an honest working man's cap for Cade, which got a bit complicated in Act 4, Scene 8, when Buckingham addresses Cade directly and vice versa. Per the precedent established in Macbeth, all the murderers wore woolly hats pulled low down over our eyes.

And it was a lot of fun. It's fascinating the different approaches everyone takes. I had skimmed my parts and decided on an accent and hats for Cade; our Suffolk had clearly spent the afternoon trying to work out Suffolk's motivations - is he in love with Margaret, or does he just want power?; King Henry had found a properly Royal backdrop and an infuriatingly sweet and mild tone that made one itch for the moment in Part III when he gets murdered; and Margaret had not so much as looked at her parts ahead of time, but nonetheless had them down pat. I really do have amazingly talented friends, and I feel very lucky.

In Eurovision news, we are enjoying the Eurovision At Home concerts a lot - it's fun watching these singers, who we usually see performing in fancy costumes with choreography, light displays, and more, singing their Eurovision songs sitting on the floor in front of their space heaters, wearing leggings and hoodies. I think my favourites are the singers who manage to rope their families or flatmates in to be backing vocalists or dancers (especially the Irish lad who covered this year's band from Iceland and had his family do all the choreography). Highly recommended.

And highly... something... is this contest in which AIs are competing to write the best Eurovision-style song. I've only listened to a couple so far, but they are pretty golden. Right down to the lyrics which very nearly make sense, and do sound like the average Eurovision song contest lyric written by someone who almost, but not quite, speaks good enough English to write songs that make sense.


In singing news, I suggested to my brother that we collaborate on recording a song which my niece can then dance to, as a mother's day present to our mum. I came up with a simple way to do this, so naturally my brother had to come up with a much more involved process that would, admittedly, have been much cooler, but also a lot more work. But apparently, it turns out that even recording a single track with the enthusiastic assistance of a four year old is quite hard enough without trying to do fancy split video things, so he has now recorded the guitar, bass and whistle for 'Six Months in a Leaky Boat', and I spent quite a bit of today recording the vocals, backing vocals, and weird synthesised probably-vocal bit in the start of the third verse. I think it's come together pretty well, though my part is far from perfect - it is really, really hard to know exactly when to come in at various points, and given my propensity to muck up the lyrics at various points (and the need to lay down two tracks, not counting the weird synthy one, which matched up properly to each other), well, the start of the second verse could certainly be improved. But I think it's good enough.

Anyway, I have sent it on to the small choreographer, and we will see what she does with it. Apparently she was rocking out to it when my brother played it at home. In between banging the end of the guitar while he was trying to record...

Having spent most of the day wincing at my own vocal inadequacies, I thought I'd actually listen to that Ave Maria I recorded last week, and you know, it's actually pretty good when you listen to it on a proper computer and not a phone. So I've put it on SoundCloud. I gather they did wind up using it at the committal, and I'm glad they found it comforting.

And that's about all from me. Back to work tomorrow. The trouble with these three day weekends is that I get in the habit of not being at work and never want to go back...

I hope you are all staying well.

Sad news from Italy - my dad’s cousin in Milan had a stroke yesterday and died today. There are many, many reasons to believe that she would not have survived regardless of COVID, but COVID certainly made it so that nobody could go with her in the ambulance, so that there was a question of whether the ambulance would even be allowed to take her to a hospital, so that when she died they didn’t hear for some time, because the doctors were all too busy with still-living critical patients. They knew she was dying, because dad's cousin's son's ex-girlfriend is a critical care nurse and she rang them to tell them that G had suffered a brain bleed. But, yeah. The secondary impact of COVID is certainly something.

They aren't allowed to travel outside their suburb, and they can't have a funeral - the most they can do is a quick committal ceremony with the priest and two people (so either her husband or one of the children can't go).

I’m fine - I only met her once, when I was six, and in fact my only memory is that she gave me a marmalade cake of some kind for breakfast which I did not like, and I tried to politely say that I liked it but did not want any more, only I didn't really speak more than a few words of Italian, so I actually said that I did not like it, but did want some more, and I still remember her bemused expression as she got out another cake for me and my own horror at the thought of having to eat another marmalade cake!

But it's hard for Dad - they were the same age.  Which means that she was probably the leader of that entire generation of cousins in Italy, as Dad is here - they were the eldest of the generation, and there were a LOT of cousins. I gather they are trying to organise a massive group chat with the Italian cousins as I type this.

I recorded myself singing the Schubert Ave Maria for her (on my phone with an accompaniment track from my computer, background traffic noise and all), and sent it to Dad in lieu of flowers, and then he sent it on to G's family, and also to my aunts, who have apparently been playing it down the phone to assorted great aunts and emailing it to assorted cousins here and overseas, and if I'd anticipated that, I might have attempted recording number eight (since I managed to achieve some sort of obnoxious background noise at some point in every recording except for the one which I accidentally deleted.  Recording number 7 just had me dropping my phone on the floor in the last bar, so it was the best of the bunch).

It's a little bemusing. I am glad and flattered that people are moved by my music, but I also feel a bit like a show off, especially as I am not very close to the Italian extended family. And it's also that weird thing where I feel like the character in L'Etranger, with the wrong emotions for the occasion, though that's not entirely right either.  I am sad, but I pretty much channelled all the emotion I had for the occasion into my song, and so now I'm done and so I feel weirdly insufficient in my emotional response. And mostly, I am sad for Dad and my aunts and the cousins, not for myself.

Also, there is this faint feeling that I rolled the dice on 'what is the appropriate thing to do in response to this situation' and got lucky and am thus being praised far beyond my deserts. Because my first thought was to send Dad flowers or fruit or a hamper from the mediterranean grocery store or something like that, and I probably would have done so... but here I was with the recording app I'd just downloaded for choir purposes and I've just spent weeks having my singing used in church services overseas, and I know the Schubert and there are plenty of accompaniment tracks available online, so I thought, why not? And it turned out to be the thing people wanted.

I suspect the real problem here is that I am completely neurotic, especially when it comes to my family.

(We have been playing the Cats Are Cute game fairly obsessively on our iPads this week, and I told Andrew that I was Level 44 neurotic.  He did not argue with me.)

Dad just texted that they want to try to use the music for the committal service, which I think is going to happen today.

There is no tidy ending to this post.

It really was a very strange Easter this year. My virtual church crawl amounted to I think thirteen services in the end, more if you count listening to the complete Johannespassion on Good Friday, and then the very strange but wonderful version for three musicians on Saturday, and I think you should.  I was in the Way of the Cross, as it turned out, which made me happier than I had expected it to, as did our minister's surprise YouTube appearance for the children's section of the service - he hates being filmed, and his sermon and prayers were only audiofiles, but you can't really demonstrate crafts on audio, and I was surprised at how much it meant to see his face.

It's odd how much of a difference that makes.  So much of my social life for so long has been online or by telephone, that I wouldn't have thought faces mattered quite this much.  But they do.

Sunday morning was more church services (a modest four), followed by the timely delivery from 'Essential Food Supplies' of our Easter morning box, containing really good hot cross buns, a lot of Lindt chocolate, a bottle of red wine, and a dozen free range eggs.  We really did need eggs, as I explained to Andrew, so clearly the box was justified. I made a really good lamb mini-roast for lunch, with a roast beetroot and labneh salad and roast potatoes and sweet potatoes, and stewed apples with spices and chocolate for dessert (quite good, but a little closer to chocolate soup than I was looking for).

We had family Zoom, which was mostly dominated by everyone competing to make the most absurd Zoom backdrops (pretty sure I won that one, by screenshotting Dad's backdrop while he was holding up a picture of my niece in an Easter outfit, so that suddenly we had a backdrop of my niece dancing among the icebergs on the sea).

And then I spent an hour looking up recipes for fake blood and face paint that could be made from household ingredients and concocting them (turns out that equal parts moisturiser, cornflour, water and flour make a pretty good white facepaint that you can tint with food colouring), and also setting up a sock puppet Zoom account for Banquo's Ghost, complete with spooky backdrops, on my work computer, so that I could appear and disappear as needed. (With jesusandrew  playing Macbeth I felt that it was important for Banquo to be able to appear elsewhere.)

Macbeth was a lot of fun. We have begun to really embrace the benefits of Zoom for the purposes of special effects.  About half of us had backdrops of Scottish castles, and I even had a special one of marching Ents for when Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane.  My penfriend, LadyMacbethchen (who was playing the part you might expect from such a nickname, and playing it VERY well, especially in the face of some really atrocious Scottish accents) is a birder, and had recorded the appropriate bird calls for various scenes.  lederhosen , who was playing, among other things, the Doctor, garnished his backdrop with a Tardis, for which Andrew helpfully provided sound effects.  All the witches had decided to wear shawls over their heads, and splodgenoodles had a saucepan, wooden spoon, jug, and several small bowls on a tray, ready to turn 'double, double, toil and trouble' into a cooking demonstration.  Meanwhile, all the murderers had independently decided to wear beanies (all of which I believe had been knitted by the occupants thereof, though not for this play), which may or may not be stereotyping, but was pretty funny. But when you have 12 readers and 37 parts, costumes are surely necessary...

And yes, in the 40-odd lines between Banquo's death and his appearance as a ghost, I scurried out of the room, ran into the bathroom to slather my face with white face paint and fake blood, then dashed down the corridor to log on as Banquo's Ghost, with the camera off, the better to appear and disappear. This worked fairly well, only I couldn't really read the play in the dark, and disappeared a bit earlier than I should have (having spent my preparation time focusing more on concocting facepaint than on... reading the play...) - and then as I was scrubbing my face, I heard Andrew's Macbeth reacting to me again, so I had to splash more fake blood on and come and creep up on him from behind to haunt him in person. 

Given that I wear glasses and am not coordinated at the best of times (nor am I any good with makeup), it will perhaps not surprise you to learn that my bathroom looked as though someone really had been murdered in it after all that, and that I was still washing cornflour paste out of my hair twenty-four hours later. Also, I managed to get read food colouring and fake blood onto two separate dresses over the course of a single day, which is probably some sort of record. Totally worth it, though.

Despite this, there were some real moments of pathos and terror in the play, which is as it should be. And then we stayed up until well after one just hanging out and talking, which was also as it should be. A very good ending to the weekend, withal.

Next up will be Henry VI part II - I'm assuming that we are in this for the long haul, so we are going to alternate comedies, histories and tragedies, in roughly the order they were written, so that we don't run out of the good ones too soon. (I'm planning to count Taming of the Shrew as a tragedy, however, otherwise we are in for a grim time with two bits of Henry VI and only Taming and Titus to separate them, which is not my idea of fun...)

Of course, I've just discovered an electronic version of the complete works that contains a LOT of apocrypha, and I am tempted to do some terrible things to all of us...

And that's about it for now.  I have this week off, which I am mostly using for sleeping and attempting to catch up on reading and reviewing, though I got roped in to helping run Zoom trivia for some of my colleagues tomorrow.  They are going to regret asking me to come up with questions for the history and literature questions. I did suggest that this might be a bad idea, but they disregarded my warnings.

Healthwise and in general, we are doing OK.  Maybe not quite as OK as these posts look - I'd rather focus on the fun stuff here (though an angst-filled post may be in this journal's future) - but we are better off than most.  My job is very secure, and we can live on my income.  It's fairly easy for us to self-isolate, and while I'm a bit more of an extrovert than Andrew, I've also always been someone who lives more in my mind than in my body, so having my social interactions happen via Zoom or Discord or text or phone has been fairly easy to adjust to.  My biggest problem is that at some point the urge to Bake All The Things will hit - but who will I bake for? I do miss feeding people. Though in all honesty, the underlying anxiety of all of this is taking a bit of a toll, and I'm surprisingly uninterested in cooking.  I suppose I will know that I have fully adjusted to this when the compulsion to bake hits again...

I hope you are all well and staying safe.

And can I just start by saying that I am very glad to draw a line under 2018 and move on.  I mean, I survived 2018, so that's good, but there's not a lot more I can say in its favour. 

Once again, I apologise for the long hiatus.  Things at work... just got more and more stressful and awful and were handled about as badly as they possibly could have been.  We did not, in the end, find out about even the Division Head jobs until December 17, which meant that our own jobs remained in limbo right up until... lunchtime on December 20.  Bear in mind, please, that all the new Divisions and changes are expected to be fully in place by January 1, that the Institute shuts down from 5pm on December 21 until 9am on January 2, and that most of the affected Division Coordinators were already on holiday by this point, so heaven knows when they would have read their emails.

( TL:DR - basically, my job is the same, but I'm a lot more demoralised )
In between all this, my Christmas baking combined with stress baking and a general inability to stop or sleep and reached what I suspect were new heights.  And I also wound up singing 18 times in December, which was a lot.  I am now mostly sleeping.

On the blogging front, I've made a few changes.  First and foremost, I've decided to fold Cate Sings into my Cate's Cates blog - I'm only on Cate Sings once a year, for the Advent Calendar, so paying for the extra website is silly.  And most of my Cate Sings audience reads Cate's Cates already.  Also, while I was there, I decided to change the look of Cate's Cates, in the hope of making it a bit more friendly to people with vision impairments (having been told that the italicised text was hard to read).

So you can now find all my music blog stuff indexed at http://www.catescates.com.au/cate-sings/, and the 2018 musical advent calendar is indexed here.

I haven't listed my food blog posts for ages, I now realise, so here's what I've done since late October:

• Walnut and Chocolate biscuits, with a write up of the Relay for Life fundraiser
• A Very Hungry Caterpillar birthday cake in the shape of a 3 for my niece's birthday
• Almond biscuits with Davidson Plum powder and Ruby Chocolate
• Ravioli primavera
• Lemon and Raspberry Tart with Ruby Chocolate
• Vegan gingerbread cakes with spiced apples
• Several experiments with different kinds of pectin and a successful pâté des fruits recipe
• Accidentally Low Sugar Pistachio and Apricot Biscuits
• End of year post with photos of a lot of my Christmas baking

On the politics blog front, I've now moved Cate Speaks to its own domain, www.catespeaks.com.  I wrote an initial election post-mortem, and am working on a proper one, but haven't got there yet.  I also wrote a really ridiculous version of Santa Claus is Coming to Town, called Santa Claus is Coming to Nicaea, all about Saint Nicholas punching heretics.  And I wrote an end of year wrap up.  I've also decided to start moving my various book reviews, including my Hugo reviews, over to Cate Speaks, because they will be easier to find there, and I think they are probably deserving of a wider audience.  But I haven't actually done anything to action this yet.

Stories Under Paris remains on hiatus, but I have the kernel of a story about Saint Martha and the monster, which I suspect is going to be my grief-processing story, and which I hope to be able to find a suitable station for.  If I can write it.  I have no idea if I can still write fiction.

And that's about it!  Christmas was singing and family and a LOT of food.  Andrew bought me the new Robert Alter translation (with EXTENSIVE commentary) of the Hebrew Bible, which is very exciting and which I am yet to open.  Everyone else in my life clearly wants me to organise more picnics, since I scored a fantastic, rainbow-shaped cooler bag from mysterysquid and acerbicmuffin, and a whole set of thermoware from the Pineapple of the North, which will apparently allow me to create an entire feast and cold dessert at home and then take it across town to feed people with the hot stuff remaining hot and the cold stuff remaining cold.  So that's exciting.  I have a few more days off before work starts up again, and with a bit of luck I won't spend all of them sleeping.  Or shopping for a new fridge, since our current one is reaching the end of its llife.

Wishing you all a very happy, healthy and stress-free new year, with the hope, energy, and resources to work towards the future you most desire.

So, in the last three weeks, I've run a conference, hosted a birthday party, sung in an opera concert, made two pretty OTT birthday cakes, cantored three services at Mount Carmel, done a lot of heavy lifting in the garden, gone back to work, organised and baked for a fundraising morning tea, organised and captained the WEHI team for Relay for life (including more baking and also a science fair), and also just done all the normal stuff one does, assuming one can remember what that is.

Which is my excuse for disappearing from Dreamwidth again, and also probably why I am absolutely exhausted and hurt all over.

On the bright side, all of these things were raging successes.  On the less bright side, this increases the odds that I'll have to do them again sometime.  Which is not intrinsically a problem (though I could happily skip the conference organising), but not all in three weeks again, please.

...and a week went by and this didn't get posted.  Let's see how I do now.  I think I'll split this up into a few posts, and start with... the conference!

( Read more... )

Also, I am very proud of how well I tamed the program organising committee.  I started stealth chairing towards the end of the first meeting, when I realised that no decisions were ever going to be made unless someone was firm ("I know you are all super busy and have to leave in fifteen minutes – what did you decide about item 1, again?"), began chairing somewhat more forcefully in the second meeting ("So it sounds like you've decided this.  Let's move on to item 2...") (also, prescriptive minutes are a thing), and by the third meeting, nobody was even pretending that I wasn't setting the agenda and running the meetings.  By meeting number four, I had them completely trained.  I would send them information a week in advance about the things we needed to make decisions on, and the meeting would be a quick update on the progress of the logistics, followed by decision-making and assignment of actions, and then we'd be done in forty-five minutes.  By meeting five, they were positively enthusiastic about this regime – it turns out that people *like* going to meetings where things get done, and once they realised that this was a possibility, they were working as hard as I was to make sure this happened.  From then on, I had them eating out of my hand, and it was all super easy (which made up for the insane turnover on the administrative side).

Which is also handy because with the restructure, I don't know if I'll actually have a job in January – but now I know an awful lot of senior medical researchers who are well aware of just how good I am at what I do.  And I know which ones are easy to work with, and which ones would drive me crazy given the opportunity.  I really don't want to leave the Institute, but if I have to, it's nice to know exactly who I will call first.  (My favourite committee member is, in fact, having serious problems with administrative support just now...)

So yes.  Let's just also put in shorthand that work is super stressful right now, not because of my scientists, who continue to be lovely, lovely people, but because nobody has any idea what is going to happen over the next few months.  And people keep leaving, or being walked out on no notice, and every DivCo has an exit plan. 

What a good thing we have all these initiatives about positive workplace culture!