WUMB concert
I fell back asleep after my alarm went off this morning and didn't get up until Arlene's alarm went off. That's 3/4 of an hour extra sleep. It was a welcome change from waking up at 5:30 and not being able to get back to sleep, even if it did make me late for work. To be fair, half the hour late for work was taken up with sending a cassette tape to an e-mail friend and taking my time around Bullough's Pond (common mergs, pair of buffleheads) and Edmands Park (nothing remarkable) on the way in.
Not much remarkable at work, either; I was steadily busy but don't have much to show for it.
I bicycled around the river walk at lunch and saw my first tree swallows of the year. There was also a Canada goose sitting down in the middle of the marsh. I've wondered where they really nest, so I'm guessing that's my answer. I expect to see mass quantities of goslings in a few weeks.
And how about the herring? I wouldn't think that the warm, early spring would have much effect on ocean water temperatures. I wonder if the herring run is a more consistent date than bird migrations.
We went to another members' concert at the UMass/Boston radio station this evening. This one will be broadcast on Sunday, April 30 at 11:00 AM, and will be available in streaming audio on the web. The performer was Stephen Fearing, originally from Vancouver BC. He lived in Ireland for quite a while, and once performed with a schoolmate who went on to be the drummer of U2. (That's OK, I was in high school band with George Duke, and that doesn't make me a musician.) This guy is an excellent guitarist. He uses lots of complex chords and plays lots of melody and bass runs and ornaments on the guitar. He was very easygoing and modest in talking about himself and his songwriting and the Juno award (He says they're not really the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys; picture the award nominees hanging around the Zamboni area of a hockey arena drinking beer out of plastic cups; not like the Grammys) that he won. He described how he wrote one song, “The assassin's apprentice” (not, as one DJ announced it, “The assassin's appliance” at 3 AM in a motel on Prince Edward Island after watching Cape Fear. He says some songs don't turn out the least bit the way he expected when he started them. Sometimes the phrase which originally inspired the song gets cut out by the time the song is finished. Sometimes the original melody gets discarded -- very difficult when he's been thinking about the words and melody together, decides they don't really work together, and tears them apart. Well, you can hear all that, and the MC reacting to “The assassin's appliance” with “Hmm, death by Maytag?” by streaming audio on the 30th.
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