This will be written in several parts throughout the day

March 6, 2010 – 11:53am

I am trying to prepare to bottle some beer that has been neglected in the primary fermenter for about 3 months. No visible or olfactory signs of spoilage, so I am moving forward with it. My wife is working at a craft show today, so I am taking care of the kids. Luckily the weather is nice and the kids are playing outside. But before I start on the bottling, I have to make them lunch.

March 6, 2010 – 2:00pm

Lunch went well. The kids ate outside – first picnic of the season. I am moving along on the bottling, but it will end up being an all day affair apparently. I had to dump 2 gallons of my “Abbey Experiment No. 2″ into water jugs so I had enough Belgian bottles for this batch. I’ve learned my lesson not using Belgian bottles on a highly carbonated Belgian beer – broken glass and dripping beer ensue.

March 6, 2010 – 3:45pm

I still have an hour and a half until the bottles are ready. I am starting the process now, though – sanitizing the bottling bucket, starting the yeast (I’m adding champagne yeast to this one at bottling time – It’s at 11% ABV and I want to make sure it carbonates), and cooking the priming sugar.

I listened to a really interesting piece of music posted to Facebook by Steve Layton today. Something to do with an “Improv Friday” project. I’ll have to look into it, seems pretty interesting. I also listened to my 5th in-progress Untitled Piano piece on the good sampler today (the Libretto timidity sampler is either not set up right or not really up to snuff – long piano decays never completely die out, which is really noticeable on this piece). I think I should be close to finishing it up soon. I would also like to start writing out some of the piano music from the play I wrote for in 2005 – “Square One” – and flesh out some ideas there. Hopefully by this time next year I’ll have a full album’s worth of solo piano music.

I’ve also been thinking about my journals today. I am keeping my beer bottling notes in my beer journal – a black graph paper blank book from Barnes and Noble. I have a blue one just like it that I have been keeping as a music journal since 2002. It’s not quite filled out. Since I have been keeping notes on the Libretto, though, I have not used it much. The funny thing is that the Libretto and these blank book journals are almost exactly the same size. Maybe that’s why I like the Libretto so much.

March 6, 2010 – 9:15pm

Kids are in bed, beer is bottled, wife is back home. All seems to be right with the world. Time to get some work done on the piano piece, if I don’t fall asleep first.

Written at 6:15pm on Wednesday, March 3, 2010

I’m writing this on my Libretto, sitting at the Peculiar Pub on Bleecker Street in Manhattan. I’m waiting for Jason Schoch to meet me here. We’re having dinner here then heading to the Player’s Theatre on MacDougal to see Marylin Nonken play Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories. This is the second performance we’ve seen of Feldman’s solo piano works. The last was several years ago when we saw “For Bunita Marcus” and “Piano” performed. I am excited about this performance, though, because I have actually studied the score of “Triadic Memories” – not to mention the fact that my current in-progress piano pieces are directly influenced by this piece.

It’s interesting being back here in Greenwich Village, sitting at a bar writing. I spent a lot of time in my 20s doing the same thing, except I was writing in a paper journal then, and I’m writing on this tiny computer now. The funny thing is that this computer (the Toshiba Libretto 100ct) was made at about the same time that I moved to New York and started writing at bars in the Village and Lower East Side.

In order to make it here tonight, I took NJ Transit from my home in Hazlet to work in Edison ( by the Metropark station), and after work took the train into the city. NJ Public Transportation is completely geared to getting people in and out of New York City, so in order to get from Hazlet to Edison I had to go 15 miles out of my way to Newark. Whatever. While I was on the train, though, I realized how much I miss public transportation. I used to read books on the subway to and from work when I lived in Brooklyn, and I would go through a book in a month or two. Now I never read. But on my way to work today, I started reading Charles Stross’ “Accelerando” on the Libretto (I found an electronic copy online), and it is really great. I’ve been meaning to read a Stross book for a while – I am a huge fan of his blog – but I haven’t gotten started on anything yet. I borrowed “Halting State” (another Stross book) from Erik G. a while ago, but I never cracked it open, so I returned it.

Well, Jason’s here, so time to eat!