Came out of my shell a little today – we had a friend for lunch & Djelibeybi made roast turkey with some of the trimmings (turkey was excess from Christmas that we’d had to freeze because we ended up with such a vast amount of meat!) and for afters I made ebelskivers with homemade passionfruit curd – VERY fine, if I do say so myself.

In the evening we ventured out to St John’s Smith Square for a concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of Australian composer Percy Grainger’s death. And what a great programme – marvellous Grainger and some great Grainger-inspired works by other composers too. A really excellent programme and topped off with an encore of an all-out Sousa version of Country Gardens. The only version I’ve been able to find online is this one from YouTube where they all sound quite bored. Consider this, but with enthusiasm and then with the brakes totally taken off, everyone playing with gusto and vibrancy and you’ll get about half an idea of how good this was.

Anyway, came back after the concert and I needed to put up another sound file on SoundCloud because I applied for a composition job for a film score today too, so I pulled out the laptop, attached my audio disk and started Pro Tools. Everything was going well until Pro Tools froze, as it does. After that it started glitching a bit, so I closed it down and reopened it. At which point it started giving me errors and wouldn’t play the file. So I rebooted the computer, at which point the system decided my disk could not be read and telling me I needed to initialise it. Which of course would wipe all the data. This is a big deal because this particular disk contains all my scores. Everything I’ve done for the past ten years. And with the recent apparent failure of my grand plan to back everything up online (where 90% of the files just vanished out of the folders they were in for no apparent reason) this disk now contains my most complete backup. Which I now can’t get at at all. Going to attempt to sleep on this problem…