Divers Enterprises During a Grey November

This morning I woke up lastingly after ten o'clock, since at some point earlier I had made up my mind to stay at home to nurse my cold, as the cliché has it.

Since there is time for it, I've then had to figure out what I want to do towards studying for my Greek and Experimental Physics classes. T. and Papa have heaped books on me, regarding the latter subject, as I've asked for them over the past two months.

At present it's the first volume of Richard Feynman's lectures which is the main text. After an overview of gas, solid and liquid states, particularly of water, I had a few questions this morning and for instance looked for a definition of 'type metal' — an alloy of lead, antimony and tin which is heated and poured into carved letters in order to create type-cast.

Besides I asked Papa if it's true that helium is in relatively little supply on Earth — it is indeed — and for the first time realized that zeppelins did fly between continents in the 20th century. It clears up a longstanding confusion because I couldn't quite pinpoint based on past knowledge where they were constructed and flown.

(Aside from the physics lectures, I have two standard Physics textbooks and another on Vector Calculus, the Aquatic Chemistry where I've been briefly introduced to thermodynamics and which I think is a lovely book to learn from because it is so clear and precise from my novice perspective, and a blue paperback edition in German by Herbert Goldstein about classical mechanics.)

As for the Greek, I still have prescribed reading left over to do. Besides there is a great deal one could read up on independently surrounding the military dictatorship (censorship, domestic political developments, negotiations with the US regarding Cypriot and foreign policy, etc.) and the music, literature and so on during the 50s and 60s. Then there are newspaper articles on the internet, I could find an Agatha Christie book translated into Greek to improve my vocabulary and speed of reading, and for a while I had been reading a modern Greek version of Aeschylus's Agamemnon though it was a little disconcerting to find (through the mediation of G*** Translate) that our English translation and the online modern Greek translation often diverge in meaning.

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Initially I had planned to bake homemade Dominosteine for the first time in my life today, from a recipe in one of our baking books. They are a little like petits-fours. In this recipe, the cake-like base is gingerbread with honey, sugar beet syrup, candied lemon and spices; the filling is a red currant jelly; and the top is marzipan 'diluted' so to speak with powdered sugar. To cover the whole, one is advised to take baking chocolate (Kuvertüre) and cocoa fat; the thing is that there are lovely chocolates produced by a Berlin company, where I particularly love the range up to about 65% cocoa, and it seems it would be worthwhile to try them instead of the anonymous blocks of Kuvertüre.

But I had promised myself to do the shopping now particularly for my own cooking (along the ethical lines of resolving to eat everything I kill); since I didn't go to university I consider it only sporting not to go out for other things. So this enterprise may well be postponed.

Besides I already cooked this week: roast chicken with bread stuffing and twigs of oregano and thyme on top (this technique is one I first tried out with a roast goose, and it looks incredibly lovely and delicate and besides I'm guessing that the aroma of the herbs slightly infuses the chicken), rice which Ge. made, pistachios and raisins to revivify the rice, and cranberry sauce from a jar. Once again the brussels-sprouts-making had to be postponed to another day; saturating the apartment with cabbagey fragrance at 11 p.m. didn't seem civilized.


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As for exercise, I will undoubtedly do something indoors today. As I suspected, the strenuous trips to university do pull my leg muscles fairly tight, so it hampers the flexibility which I've gained in doing 'ballet' again. The cold weather isn't helping. So I'll probably have to lay in a good ten to fifteen minutes of warming up, then stretching, then dancing which requires movement more than flexibility, and then I could finally improve my third position or do other things. Or, of course, I could dress up in the nearest thing to a quilted winter parka ensemble I can find so that the muscles are kept flexible through body warmth, and roam through the halls like the Abominable Snowman, before laying in rather pachydermatous sessions of arabesques and the like.

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Lastly, I will play the piano and cembalo and violin again. 'Playing' the violin is perhaps a flattering description, because the first thing I'm doing is trying to reacquire a decent intonation. As a twenty-eight-year-old, I've been sitting in front of the piano, correcting what I'm playing on the violin by poking at the correct note on the keyboard, and either dragging through very easy pieces or very easy D and G major scales and arpeggios. I need to relearn the distances between notes generally, so that what I hear matches up to how I adjust my grip on the violin strings. After that is half-way decent, I'll probably have a lot of fun learning how to hold my bow properly, because at present it is still weaving between the bridge and the fingerboard like an inebriated duck on a river, and I can't say that the tone which it produces is one which would gladden the judges of a Tchaikovsky competition.

Anyway, the point is that I'd like to play some of the violin repertoire, not on the piano à une main (or à un doigt, I guess, if one is in a primitive mood), and since I've decided — on going through the works which my uncle Pu has on the piano — that Paganini has a great deal of musical worth to make up for his technical demands, I've fixed him as one end of the learning spectrum. Secondly, I figure that if my vague ideas of composing are ever to come to fruition, a close acquaintance with many instruments and the quirks and challenges and needs thereof is highly necessary. Thirdly, it seems like an amusing thing to do, and (somewhat like thermodynamics) a new frontier.