Tuesday, 24 December 2013

I couldn't quite get myself out for a walk this morning. I woke up with a bit of a sinus headache and just didn't feel quite up to it.

I'm on vacation now from Berlitz until the 6th of January, so I'm trying to get various things done.

This morning I did the weekly grocery shopping at Shufersal since I obviously did NOT have time to do it yesterday. I was very happy to see that they had 6-packs of 1.5 liter bottles of PespiMax, since last week they had none. I bought six of them!

For lunch, we went to Buddha Burgers. David had a vegan shwarma burrito, and I had hummus with vegan shwarma. We split a piece of their fabulous vegan cheesecake for dessert. It was ALL very delicious!

I've had a cyst (actually, TWO of them, right next to each other) on the last joint of my right index finger (finger number 2 for you keyboard players) for several months now. They didn't hurt, but they had become somewhat annoying, so I got an appointment with the dermatologist about them. Today was the day. He dipped a stick with cotton on the end of it into a thermos of something very cold, probably liquid nitrogen, and pressed it on the cysts. It hurt a little when he did it, and actually more afterwards. Now, they have merged together into one bigger bump, but I'm sure this is part of the process of finally eliminating them. The doctor said to come back to him in about 4-6 weeks.

After I came back from my appointment, David and I drove down to Ice Park, where we ate frozen yogurt and took a couple of walks around the mall. While we were eating, they had an ice skating show. About 3 local girls who are learning did solos first. Then, the professional male skater (I think he's from Bulgaria or Hungary, but he's had a gig here for months) came out in a full Santa costume, gave a present to the last girl, and then did his routine to some Xmas song (I don't remember which one now). After that, Diana, the female professional skater and acrobat from England (who has also been here for many months), did her routine in a red Xmassy costume to "Santa Baby". She was great, as always, especially her amazing acrobatics on a ring that she climbs onto and then they raise it high above the ice! At the end, all the skaters came out with Santa caps and skated around the rink a couple times to a version of "Jingle Bells". Who'd have thunk?

I spent much of the rest of the day making further changes to my ChucK piece. Now I'm working on setting up additional instruments which will be randomly chosen to play the melody. My main goal in all my work on this is to increase the variety of music the code will produce each time it is run without changing the code itself at all, and without changing any parameters, either.