12 hours

M's coming with his luton van around 9, by then W(floopy)shaman & spski will be around...

the flat has no carpets in it, the builder is completing his work on sunday, the carpets going down monday, there isn't yet a bed for us...

i know, sounds perfect...

and as for the room shots felinity i haven't taken my camera down from it's vantage point yet since i put it up there on... sunday?

so no more pictures just yet, i'll be showing them soon enough though...

we won't have internet for a few days so i'm leaving this all plugged in until we go...

still an awful lot of packing to do x

just a quickie

i know it won't seem like such a big thing to you...

but now, i have every improvisation that i need to listen to on my shuffle...

it could happen before i move...

my room seems to be in complete disarray but i did get to smash some bottles at the bottle bank earlier which was pretty cool x

still listening

still trying to listen to every improvisation i've ever done (for the video series)...

currently on week 47, over half way there, although i don't think i can do it all before we move, which i guess i wanted, but no matter, the point i think is that this improvisation series is all about place in some respects and it all came from living here...

so even though it only represents a year and a half out of the 5 years i've lived here by listening to it all i go on a journey that ends with us moving...

of course i could just as well read my entire blog, which also began since i moved here, but you can't pack while you read blogs...

the process of moving of course doesn't begin when the moving van comes and it doesn't end when it's gone from your new place, so it works that this listening process goes over the actual move itself into the new place - unpacking -

so i'm really tired, i got 5/6 hours last night, dawn projected this morning... worked all day which involved losing my patience with a class which i never like...

i've still got a whole bunch of packing left to do... i'm going to make a tea and then i'm getting back to it x

yr2wk24 rhodes & voice

recorded on tuesday, that rhodes is now in it's suitcases x

just one more...

packing to move...

just need to get to the floor which used to be under the bed, sift through the detritus until i can hoover...

i'm listening to all of my improvisations, all 16/17 hours of them...

i'm currently on week 16...

not much to say, just packing... packing... packing...

once my current task is done i'm probably about half way through... maybe...

x

disengage

not sure what to do about internet in the new place so i'm not accepting any more challenges in the internet chess world until we're up & running...

i've still got 4 games on the go on facebook chess, but there's no time limit on them so that's alright, and i'm playing dinah & her dad over on chess.com, G (who used to live in this room) has recently beaten me and has challenged me to another game on gameknot but it seems i've broken a rule and they've completely stopped all my ability to talk to G, it's really dumb, i'm tempted to bin off gameknot completely but chess.com is not quite so good yet...

so once these 2 games are done with dinah & her dad i'll be largely disengaged from internet chess - very strange - opening firefox and seeing if it's my move is such a part of my day, i already feel slightly lost...

so far i've packed 3 boxes of books and i've decided to lose about a 3rd of a box of books... x

last time last series

cycling home tonight from W&T's, up endimian road because finsbury park is shut at night, a small trial for me & dinah which it's always been ever since they moved there a few months ago, i was singing "the last time" by the rolling stones to myself and it turned into "late in the evening" in my head when it got to a certain bit in the chorus,

i love that musical thing...

and indeed it was the last time we'll be doing that journey, at least in that way, a week from now we'll be living in turnpike lane and any late night's & W&T's will mean a whole different (& easier) journey home...

i love the last time... in anything, i used to move around alot in the early years of living in london, pre-blogging days... and whenever i was moving i would be the same, looking forward to the last time i'd do certain things, loving the melancholy/hope of it...

so in this coming week i'll be taking the tetrapaks to be recycled for this household and that will be the last time, tomorrow we're going for our regular sunday veggie roast @ pennie's (the amazon) and that'll be the last time...

thursday will be the last dawn project from here and the last journey from here to hammersmith in that way, friday will be the last journey to shoreditch in that way...

whenever i do my improvisation this week it'll be the last improvisation here, (although i was planning on doing it over @ my soon to be not landlord's like last week but i think i owe it to this room to do it here, on the rhodes)...

the whole thing steeped in lastness... bring it on,

and lo i announce the beginning of one last series here, i just set up G (who used to live in this room)'s tripod as high as it will go in the corner of the room and i took a picture (even though it's night time)... which will be the first of a series of pictures - maybe 2 a day - to document the packing up of this room...

watch this space x

yr2wk23 grand piano improvisation

recorded this 3 days ago, and in 7 days we're moving, very much counting the days these days...

say D&M last night and i'm off out shortly to see them again with felinity x

irrepressible

i don't know why, although i have an idea...

i am in a very happy mood... slightly nervy happy... we just had the cat meeting, ending in deadlock, 3 of us thinking she should come with me & dinah and 3 (all of whom were there) thinking she should stay,

in retrospect the 2 who are the negative reason for leaving were never going to change their minds but possibly T, she might... and it's just possible i might...

unlikely but i could wake up one day and say - you know what, it's better for balthazara that she stays...

however if it stays as it is, the fact that i've largely paid for her up to now could (and some would say should) give our side more weight,

G who the other day told me i could take her said today that he'd abstain...

anyway, we'll be meeting again about it and who knows what will happen...

i spoke to our future landlord yesterday at last and he confirmed that we can move in on the 1st and that the rent is the figure we thought it was and this alone is enough to make me dance up and down, i think i've been delaying it because of this scary meeting and now that's done, even though the matter is still in the balance, it's showing it's face,

it's dancing about with joy face...

but as i'm happy because i can move my lovely sister felinity has to move out of her home for a few days while they sort out something... and balthazara... what will become of her?

oh, strange days x

yr2wk22 rhodes & guitar with P + DawnProjectVideoblog

i so cannot wait to get out of this house...

currently there's a custody battle for my balthazara going on, certain people in this house - one of whom does love balthazara very much - but the other 2 are the 2 who form the negative reason we're leaving - they don't think i should take balthazara with me, essentially, of the 7 people that live here, 4 of us agree that she should come come with me & dinah but there's a meeting tomorrow night with the others... around 9 o'clock, do send me love for balthazara at that time (GMT) if you can x

in other news though it looks like googlevideo have resolved their issues, they've been rubbish for a couple of weeks and T's improvisation with me last week has never worked on googlevideo which is why i posted it from youtube instead,

basically D's improvisation with me a couple of weeks ago started off alright but stopped working after a few days, it's almost 25 minutes long so way too long for youtube and i didn't know what to do but it started working again about a week later, by which time i'd uploaded T's improvisation with me, which as i say never worked, but at under 9 minutes youtube could deal with it,

so it was with some trepidation that i uploaded P's improvisation with me on friday, coming in @ over 15 minutes so beyond youtube & even facebook, i was more than a little relieved just now when it finally worked... and there it sits at the top of this post...

he came round on friday and he's a lovely player, we had a couple of go's at the improvisation, the 1st one never quite worked, a very real risk when playing with someone for the 1st time, but this 2nd one worked out really well i think...

i've also posted another dawnproject videoblog, this one encompassing the last 3 weeks, ever since the clocks changed..:

kenneth

thursday was a really mad day for me...

spski joined me for the dawn project which was previously unheard of and very pleasant, i decided to cycle into work and back instead of taking my keyboard there on the tube then on to the rehearsal with the new band...

i found out that me & dinah can move into the flat we wanted...

i found a way to get from finsbury park to south bermondsey without going through any barriers...

i met the new band who turned out to be lovely, quite a possibility there i think...

and i was travelling home around elevenish, i got onto the northbound picadilly line platform @ kingscross and there was a seat free, only it had a bag on it...

so i asked whose bag it was and if they'd mind moving it so i could rest my keyboard and it turned out to be kenneth's bag and he asked me if it was a trombone i was carrying...?

he's from barbados and i guess he's in his 60's and we spoke at length waiting for the tube about singers, musicians, the crash of the cymbals, ray charles, harry seacombe, he was a passionate man and he expressed it well, his love of music...

i love random meetings x

print to tape

i've spent quite a lot of time today with W(floopy)shaman's camera, last week's dawn project was the last one with the 1st tape and tomorrow i ride out with the 2nd tape, but i have no money and therefore i'm recycling an older tape,

so this afternoon i transferred 20 minutes of video onto my old computer, then onto my new computer, 4.25Gb of it... to make way for the new dawn project stuff, it was all stuff i'd video'd back in the easter holidays and some of it is gorgeous...

well, once i'd done that i realised i wanted to begin the process of getting from the 1st dawn project tape onto computer so i sent over the 1st 6 days of filming, 10 minutes of video, again onto the old computer before reaching the new computer, i've just edited together 2 seconds or so of the 1st 6 shots and it looks like this:



it struck me, coming back to tomorrows filming, that it would be useful to have last weeks 1st shot at the beginning of the tape, for when i'm setting up tomorrow's 1st shot, so i investigated the "print to tape" option... sadly to no avail... so now i'm going to have to take the old tape up there, set up the shot so it lines up and then put in the new tape... oh well... but hang on... you can't change a tape while it's on the tripod...

oh well, i guess i'll set the tripod up exactly then taking off the camera to change tapes won't push it off too much, if at all... except the small amount left right movement that is possible with that tripod clamp... hmmm...

oh well...

vlad contact lens puncture

vlad and the puncture are today, the contact lens thing is yesterday and this morning...

so let's start with the contact lens thing...

yesterday as i put in my lens i noticed that one of them (the left one) had a very small knick in it but i didn't have time to get new ones out so i put it in intending to change the lens when i got home, i had my keyboard with me because we were rehearsing with T's band in the evening, i was also listening to each of the collaborative improvisation i've so far done on my ipod...

so i was travelling from shoreditch to kennington on the 133 bus around 7ish and i was pretty tired, the bus had been fairly empty but it was just about to get really busy, i rubbed my right eye a little too vigorously and suddenly i couldn't focus in that eye...

i started to look around me to see if i'd knocked out the lens somewhere and at that exact moment a crowd of people came in and i moved along my seat to let someone else sit down (hugging my keyboard stand)...

i asked the man who'd sat down to look at my eye and see if he could see my lens... he couldn't, it wasn't anywhere to be seen and if it had gotten on the floor it would have been all over anyway... london bus dirt...

so i had a psychedelic 10 minutes or so, listening to me & D's improvisation from a few weeks back and only being able to focus on one of my eyes and i started to realise that it must be still in there because looking down and left i could see a strange kind of shadow... so i got off the bus (a palaver indeed with my keyboard) and continued the strangeness that my journey had become walking to SLP...

i arrived and went straight into the toilet to look in the mirror and lo and behold my lens was still in there, folded over... i got it out, (also a palaver) unfolded it and put it back in, went about with the rehearsal...

only it wasn't happy about this and that eye was getting sore so i asked T if there was any contact lens solution around, which of course there wasn't... i decided to take it out and throw it away, i could possibly have kept it in water until i got home but carrying a glass of water, along with my keyboard from south to north london...?

anyway we rehearsed until quite late and i got the tube home, all with only one eye to focus with... once back at finsbury park it became clear that i should throw away the other lens (which had a knick in it anyway) and walk back to ours (but only for another 19 days) unfocussed and that is what i did ladies and gentlemen and it was lovely, i do like a bit of blurred at night time, so long as you know where you're going...

the added part of the story is that this morning i got hold of new ones (my last pair, once we've moved i'll have to get some new ones) and put them in, but once they were in i couldn't focus on anything, i blinked several times but the mist didn't clear until i worked out that i'd put both lens into the same eye... which i think i've done before and which is pretty spectacular...

ok, so briefly vlad, it had rained so the roads were wet and this is the classic time to get a puncture, on the way home from a brief stint at work this afternoon i could feel my back tire going down not too far from home, close though i was i decided to pretend that i wasn't to practise my roadside puncture repair...

i turned by bike up-side-down and set about trying to remove the outer tire... after 5 or perhaps 10 minutes of this with no visible results vlad came over to help, he has one of those jobs where you stand around a lot and he's from russia, he helped me get the outer tire off and find the puncture, also clearing the tiny bit of glass from the outer tire when we'd found the hole...

so much for my independent roadside puncture repair... anyway it got to the glueing stage and it became apparent that i didn't have any glue in either of the tubes of glue i had... so i had to carry the bike, still up-side-down, up hornsey road and through the andover estate to home before i could complete the operation... but the kindness of strangers ladies & gentlemen...? bless vlad...

x

yr2wk21 piano & voice with T

T being a student of mine with a wonderful voice... this on youtube because googlevideo is messing me around at the moment...

x

new computer

just a quick one to say i'm blogging from my new computer... i've dusted off the PC-linq USB cable and the KVM switch i've had since the last time i was running 2 computers...

i'm fairly slowly putting the software i need on the new PC... anyway, just marking the moment x

synth inspiration

cycling through north london between 8:30 & 9 at night as i did last night is quite a thing, the amount of random fireworks going of all around... i've always liked it...

me & dinah went over to walthamstow on sunday to see fireworks which is also quite likely to be where we'll be living in a months time...

yesterday i'd cycled across london from east to west from work to marylebone crossing about 4 or 5 different north/south routes that i normally take, i'd never quite gone that straight east west before...

i was meeting K (& G) & dad for an indian meal which was lovely, K told me D & M's cat is going to be in blewbury over christmas and she also started applying pressure for me to move my between christmas and new year dawn project back by a day, (being as it will be dark anyway then), so that i can be around more for M & D who are arriving at some point on the wednesday...

it troubles me but i might just relent...

i paid my 1st congestion charge today for the watts to drive Gordy's car through town for their gig tonight, i'm about to head over to hammersmith for a jam and to pick up my new computer...

and i am so enjoying this synth...

T from this house is having a performance party on saturday and i'm working out what i'm going to perform... it looks likely i'll be using the synth to give a rhythm in a strange way, singing a song for the house i'm leaving...

x

yr2wk20 rhodes, synth & guitar with D

here it is x

improvisation gay cabaret

old, old friend D came round yesterday for an improvisation which was one of the longer ones, 25 minutes rendering now...

as soon as we'd done i had to get on my bike and race down to the pigalle club in picadilly for a rehearsal for the gig i did later on last night...

my end of the whole thing was only set up 2 days before and the promoter was one of the more disorganised promoters i've come across... it was a kind of gay cabaret / new artists night, hosted by a beautiful drag queen called miss K, a monthly affair that i will probably be playing the piano for again, one of these occasions where you have to put up with a fairly unsatisfactory organiser, (having to wait until 2:30am to get paid) for the sake of working...

so yesterday:

get up for work, cycle into town,
work, cycle home, set up improvisation,
improvise (which was lovely), cycle into town,
rehearse (which was insane), cycle home,
eat shabbat meal with my beautiful dinah (which was lovely), cycle into town,
wait around a great deal, do the gig, wait around a great deal, get paid, cycle home,
crawl into bed with my beautiful dinah...

we have announced our impending exit from this house which was the big news mentioned on monday, we can now plan our move out loud instead of in secret...

i have quite a few groovy things planned next week, an improvisation with a great singer, a recording of drums for stardust & the arrival of my new computer... it's all going on...

x