Left of the Dial

an itchy wicket

So a few months back, Top Management suggested that we try seriously revamping the way our day is structured for the first time in decades. I had mentioned several times over the years that I seem to work best late at night. She pointed out that now that our kids are all old enough that none of them—not even The Brawn—gets up at the crack of dawn anymore. And even if he does get up hours before any of the others, now being a (GOOD LORD) 12-year-old, he can obviously take of himself just fine. 

So I tried it. After watching an hour or so of television together, she heads off to bed and I head down to my office in the basement to work. 

And work I do. I guess I had thought I might be a bit more productive, but a bad night's work now is generally more productive than a really good day's work used to be, and there have been nights where I've gotten three or four times as much work done in one late-night shift as I used to accomplish in three or four decent days. It's a bit crazy. 

It was only after we'd been on this new schedule for a few weeks that it occurred to me that virtually every paper or story I wrote in high school or college, I wrote late at night. I always chalked it up to procrastination, and I'm sure there was plenty of that mixed in there too. But mainly I think it's that the writing part of my brain only really truly comes alive after midnight. 

So it's been great. There are downsides, obviously, including the fact that I think I'm always at least a bit sleep-deprived, but since the primary symptoms of that are fatigue, irritability, mood changes and difficulty focusing and remembering, who can tell the difference? 

At least I thought that was the main downside. Until tonight. When I discovered that the real problem with working crazy productively at 2:47 in the AM is that you might suddenly get an insanely itchy itch right in the middle of the back where you can't reach it and despite there being 7 other people in the house there's no one to scratch it for you. 

Oh, the humanity. 

needs no fixing

So we're sitting around the dining and living room, listening to baroque brass music, as is our family's tradition on Sunday mornings, thanks to a book I read in college called Who's Afraid of Classical Music, by Michael Walsh, which stated definitively that the only time one would wish to hear a baroque trumpet concerto—from which it naturally followed that one would nearly always wish to hear baroque brass during Sunday mornings. So for years we've been listening to various baroque (and classical, an era on which I am otherwise am somewhat lukewarm) horn and trumpet concerti. 

But sometimes I'll switch it up slightly. So last week we listened to a brass arrangement of Johann Sebastian Bach's magnificent Art of the Fugue. And this week I first put on Jason Vieaux playing lute works by Bach, arranged for classical guitar.

Then, when I switched to trumpet pieces, also by Bach

I heard someone behind me actually say, "whoo hoo!"

I looked over and saw The Bean sitting on the couch, reading on her phone, and asked if she'd really just "whoo hoo'd" the trumpet.

She gave me a puzzled look and said, "well, yeah."

innocent bysitter

So it's all fun and games when you're working in your basement studio shortly before midnight and your 22-year-old comes down with a question and the two of you find yourselves watching a cool video and laughing until the next video autostarts and this one is a giant spider and you instinctively and frankly quite reasonably yell "no!" and apparently wake your good lady wife out of a deep sleep and it's clearly all the kid's fault as usual.