What a difference a day makes

Here's the house across the street, now being repaired.

 By day's end it will be good as new. Full on effort by skilled crew. Yes, of course they're Latinos. Cheerful, working, showed up early this morning. Immigrants get the job done.  They'll leave it clean as a whistle.

Then, walking after the storm, I notice no mud; this area drains very well, prime arable land before it was built on, second only to the Shenandoah Valley in yield per acre.

 That kind of building on irreplaceable farmland was hammered by the TDR legislation, a few years ago, despite the screams of rage of out-of-state developers, who fancied even more land grabbing than they'd already done.

 The farm I buy from legally agreed to farm in perpetuity.  Yes, they did get a very nice package in the settlement with the State. But selling to a developer would have brought much more. And the same family has farmed that land for over a hundred years. You can see several generations out working there in season.

Back to my walk, and a sweet honey scent a block away, gradually getting stronger in the breeze, brought me here.

 Bees going mad. They'll bring pollen back to the farm where I shop, and the farm honey will happen. They also mob my herbs, taking lavender, thyme and sage pollen back to the hives.

Playing Elizabethan songs on recorder this morning. Duets by Morley, for tenor and soprano. So I played the parts turn by turn. He's friendly to play. Hard for me to sing, though.

That's because though the tenor voice and soprano voice seem to be in the  same range, the register breaks are not.

 The break is where your voice moves from one range, to another, higher, range. My register break is on the d above c5.

If you have a  keyboard, find middle C. Now go up one octave. Now one more note. That's where my break comes.  That's always  a difficult note to lean on, because your break is where your vocal cords  want to shift about. And that's often the note that's very significant in Morley, basically written for male voice.

For the tenor voice, the break is a bit lower, so my break is, for a tenor, a comfortable note to lean on. Purcell, too, is really difficult for me, but works a treat for a (male) countertenor. That's that very high tenor voice. But looking at the score you'd think it would be in the female soprano range. Anyway, technicalities only interesting to a singer.

Then there's stitching, which is when I like to hear books. Listening to two main audiobooks now,  while I work and rest.

For working, it's Jeremy Irons' brilliant reading of Brideshead Revisited, an elegiac rendering, he simply gets Waugh. But it's emotionally heavy. It's written in the first person. So it's intense.

 So when I'm winding down in the evening, it's a switch to Frederica, one of the funniest of Georgette Heyers. Another great actor, Clifford Norgate, reading, great range of voices for the different characters. Both of them are on YouTube. Look up Ian Yates channel.

Between them they're a great antidote to the bad news all around. My little town now has hundreds of confirmed cases. All I can do is stay put.

 Pleasing myself, making art and music, walking, writing, cooking, taking what care I can of my friends, doesn't seem too onerous a civic duty.

 It does seem a bit removed from the daily drama enacted a mile away, in our large regional hospital.  But I guess this is the hand I've been dealt this time.