Oversleeping

We had to change our plans for today. We were plan­ning on going to New York City for the day, leav­ing early in the morn­ing on the Fung Wah or Lucky Star Bus to Chi­na­town. Well, we woke up 40 min­utes too late because Pam had turned on the alarm, and I had unknow­ingly turned it right back off again (*tap-tap on, tap-tap off*). So our expe­ri­ence of ‘The Gates’ will have to wait for a few days. Good thing we hadn’t bought tick­ets already.
Took the oppor­tu­nity to get some stuff done, since I was here a day I thought I wouldn’t be: Got adver­tise­ments for the piano posted at the Longy School of Music and the New Eng­land Con­ser­va­tory (actu­ally, at NEC you can only leave the flyer there, and hope­fully some­one will post them in a good place) I take some pride in that it was a beau­ti­fully designed and pro­duced poster, com­plete with pho­tos and schematic in full color. (Here’s a PDF).

Also sent a check (or rather, a cheque) to Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity to pay for a sealed tran­script. Another require­ment of our immi­gra­tion forms are sealed tran­scripts of every col­lege I got a degree from. Which reminds me that I have to do the same with the Uni­ver­sity of Cincin­nati. Orig­i­nally the Cam­bridge per­son said I had to send a cheque in the amount of 7 pounds. Then I found out from my bank that there is a min­i­mum $25 charge for cut­ting a check (or cheque) in any for­eign cur­rency. So that’s right; the roughly $13 in British pounds would have also incurred a charge roughly twice that amount! For­tu­nately I found out that Cam­bridge U. will accept US cur­rency for these records (and I sent $15 rather than 13), but it’s becom­ing clear that we have to start doing some­thing about head­ing off these for­eign cur­rency charges — which will hold true for cheques made out in Cana­dian dol­lars just as well as British pounds.

It was good to walk around Boston today. The sun was out and it wasn’t too cold for much of the day. It also gave me a chance to stretch my legs a lit­tle. In ret­ro­spect, if I had taken the bus to New York and walked around Cen­tral Park for 2–3 hours, I prob­a­bly would be dead tired now; I’m really out of shape!

writ­ten while lis­ten­ing to Hin­demith — Sonata for Harp — i. Mäßig schnell from the album “Harp Music by var­i­ous com­posers ” by Andrea Steck­er­meier Thiele, Harp