#silly personal shit

Just had a family member basically say to me "please stop talking about your hyperfixation"* which I really don't talk about much at all (to them) and I really really really had to dial back the urge to say "FUCK. YOU."

The only time I wish I had a partner is this time of year, when I am so itchy I'm almost to the point of walking over to the park so I can scratch my back against a tree trunk like a bear. If there was another person around here they could give me the good old double handed backscratch with fingernails (carefully) on bare skin that I require.

Yesterday I played some Bach on YouTube - Itzhak Perlman playing the Partita No. 1 in B minor - while I was at the library trying to write. It was good. It was fine. But it wasn't the version I grew up with, which I knew was Yehudi Menuhin. So I poked around and found that version, too. It's the version I listened to when I was a little kid and we had basically two choices for our entertainment media: a TV with poor reception out in the boondocks of SE Ohio and maybe 3 stations to choose from if they even came in on the rabbit ears, and a cabinet stereo/radio (WWVA country or KDKA out of Pittsburgh). So I listened to my dad's music - opera, show tunes, bebop jazz, and lots and lots of classical. My middle name is my dad's tip of the hat to Debussy. And maybe that version isn't as technically good as Perlman was in 1978, or even as good as Menuhin himself would have been later in life, but I realized yesterday that he was 19 years old when he recorded that. And the peculiarities of phrasing and tone are a part of me. (There's a long story about me trying for literally decades to figure out what work it was - all I knew was that it was Bach and it was violin and the one part went "dah-DAH-dah-DAH dah dah dah-dah-dah". Blessings on the music store people and classical musicians and DJs over the years who put up with my floundering attempts to recreate it well enough to identify.)

A couple of weeks ago my boss told me (on the QT, because he really wasn't supposed to tell me, the CEO planned to talk to me sometime soon but he couldn't wait) that I was getting a raise, over and above the COLA I got starting October 1st. A fairly large raise, because they had done a salary review/analysis in conjunction with negotiating the contract with our new union (which due to the nature of my position I'm not eligible to join) and concluded that I was underpaid.

First heirloom tomatoes of the season: a Striped German that weighs about 1.5 lbs all on its own, and a Berkeley Tiedyed (which I think displaced Brandywine as my favorite last year.)

Text from my mom. My sister's reaction was "is she sure it was a dream and not a memory?"