Well, yesterday we got the news we’d been dreading – that Djeli’s employer didn’t have the money for his project so weren’t renewing his contract. This is not ideal! D hasn’t been able to make his part-time job into a full-time one like he’d hoped, and I barely have time to breathe, far less fit in work, which makes all of us dependent on poor Djeli. We reviewed our finances this morning, which was a bit painful, but necessary, and came up with a plan.

For me the really big thing is to ensure I can keep getting my work done. Critical to this is that I rarely seem able to get anything done with Djeli in the house. It’s very distracting. I feel (pointlessly) guilty for not having done any housework (no time!) and then I faff about and get nothing done. Today I came into college but hadn’t realised that on Saturdays the place is crawling with the miniature people and parents of Junior Trinity. It was chaos! The library’s open till 3, but we’re not supposed to plug our laptops in in the library, but mine won’t run more than about 30 seconds without juice, so I need to be in the cafe. Obviously, this needs some thinking about.

I hid in the library while the cafe was at its loudest & most chaotic and pulled together a plan to make sure I really truly know when everything’s due in and what steps need to be followed to get everything done, which was a very scary experience, but good to have done it. After that I put in an hour on Ansel Adams, the went and borrowed a tenor viol and did some practice. The violing is really coming along nicely (although my not-used-to-frets fingers are quite numb now – sure they’ll be nicely calloused soon :-D) and today I even got up to the fourth piece in the beginner’s viol solos book our teacher left with the viols for us. I’m still having trouble getting my feet to the right height to both support the viol and not hit my left knee with the bowing when playing on the top G string (trickier than it sounds) – will have to try the box file next time. Today I made a pile of laptop, iPad and a couple of library books. Anyway, I felt much better after the violing, and have come to the conclusion that the weird ensemble is throwing me off with the Ansel Adams – still not happy with the second section, but it really needs to be finished by the end of this weekend in some form – so I’m putting the short score to one side and will work directly in full score for a bit to see if that helps me work it out a bit more easily. I did another half hour on it after the viol moment, laying out the staves and starting to move the first section into its relevant parts, which feels like useful work.

And now they’re about to shut college up for the day, so I should away home and start work on the Personal Project proposal and picking out texts to use in my Rude Health piece. Simply a massive to-do list for the weekend and nothing that can be delayed!!!