STILL RECOVERING

More than a week later, I am still recovering from this wretched cold.  Nevertheless, this morning I decided to take my four mile walk.  My computer, which claims to know the temperature outside my apartment, said it was 32 degrees, so out came the long thermal underwear, the turtleneck shirt, the sweater, the long workout pants, the hoodie and the gloves.  Off I went, looking like nothing so much as the Pillsbury Doughboy in Ghostbusters.  Not surprisingly, I did not see a single person walking, jogging, running, or cycling.  But the walk went well, and I assume that I am indeed getting better, albeit slowly.

Meanwhile, I am practicing Mozart's C Major viola quintet, K515, in order to join an existing quartet for an evening next week.  Even in a Mozart quintet the second viola plays a good deal of what we in the game call sewing machine music [repeated eighths for four or eight bars, as a support for the interesting stuff being played by everyone else.]  Oh well, you have to start somewhere.

I am making strenuous efforts to find quartet mates.  It is dawning on me that even in Chapel Hill, a protected outpost of sanity and progressive politics in an increasingly insane North Carolina, there are not that many people who play amateur chamber music.  During all the years I lived in Western Massachusetts, I was only dimly aware how unusual a place it is. 

I am keeping track of my two predictions -- that there will be no more shutdown or debt limit crises, and that the flap over the botched runout of the insurance exchanges will evaporate -- and I shall revisit them when appropriate either to trumpet my wisdom or to eat crow.