Donna Andrews

Snow days, continued

At about three in the morning last night, I was awakened by a hideous howling noise.  I jumped out of bed, thinking that some wounded animal must have found its way out of the cold and into my house. 

Then the noise came again, and I realized what it was--my furnace. 

Oops.

As it turned out, the noises--which continued at random intervals for the remainder of an understandably restless night and then with increasing frequency through the morning--were the death throes of my furnace's hot air blower motor.  At noonish, the man from the HVAC maintenance company arrived to put the poor thing out of its misery.  The guts of my furnace are now neatly laid out on the floor beside its shell, awaiting the arrival of the new motor. 

It's on order.  Rush order, but the company's a little vague on when they can expect it.

My plight could be worse.  There are plenty of people--more than 20,000 in the D.C. area alone--without power.  I have light, working appliances, TV, Internet.  So far, the inside temperature has only dropped a couple of degrees.  And I just unearthed and set up one of two small ceramic heaters that should keep me from completely freezing. 

Still an improvement over having to go out and cope with a commute.

Take a snow day

At left is a picture of my street yesterday morning.  And at right, a picture of my street this morning.  The differences are subtle.  Mainly, you see a few more tire tracks on the right, because a few of my more intrepid neighbors have ventured down the road, either because they aren't afraid of driving in the snow or because they have essential jobs or because, essential or not, their bosses want them at the office.

Back when I had a day job, I fell into that unhappy third category.  My job, first as a writer, editor, and project manager, and later as a website manager, may have been important, but it certainly wasn't essential.  Lives didn't depend on my presence at the office.  The fate of nations did not hang on my work.  I like to think what I did was valued and important, but I was under no illusions that I was irreplaceable. Unfortunately, one of the requirements of corporate life is that even if you know perfectly well that your job's not essential you're supposed to carry on as if it was.  At least during times of inclement weather.  ("Inclement!  Dogs are sticking to the sidewalk!  SUVs are doing involunary figure eights on the Interstate!  Thousands of people have no power!  This weather ain't inclement, it's bloody well severe!")   Only wimps took snow days.

If I could do it over, I'd take a lot more snow days.  Use a few days of annual leave to have the satisfaction of staying home on days like today.  Curling up in the rocking chair reading.  Eating my way through the pantry and freezer that I stocked against just this possibility.  Venturing outdoors when I feel like it to tramp around with my Nikon and take pictures of all the pretty white stuff. And, of course, since my commute these days is completely indoors, getting some work done in spite of the weather.

If I were one of my neighbors who had to commute somewhere, I might be feeling mutinous about the fact that the county's snowplows appear to have passed by our street.  If I had anyplace I really needed to go in a hurry, I'd be a little stressed by the weather forecast, which does not call for temperatures above freezing until Saturday, which pretty much guarantees that not much snow will be leaving today or tomorrow.  If I were truly type A, either I'd have already shoveled my sidewalk and driveway or I'd be getting ready to, in spite of the fact that the snow has now hardened to the point that I can walk down to the end of the driveway on the crust without breaking through it. 

Fortunately, no one is expecting me to show up anywhere (other than online) for days.  So I consider it my duty, in times like these, to stay off the roads, where I won't cause any more work for people whose jobs are essential--like the police, tow truck drivers, and medical workers who might have to deal with me if I tried to drive under these conditions.   

 

Barking up the wrong end of the stick

I happened to catch a small part of an episode of Nashville Star this morning--and yes, I do mean I just happened to catch it; I had been watching Criminal Intent on the USA Channel before going to bed last night, and when I turned the TV on this morning, Nashville Star was on. I haven't ever watched a complete episode of the show; nor am I a regular viewer of American Idol, though I've seen the odd episode or two--usually when visiting friends who watch it.  Anyway, I tuned in just at the moment when they were announcing the results of some kind of phone-in poll, where the home viewers apparently get to select which of two women got kicked off the show.  I didn't know which was which, and I was rather amused that it took quite a few seconds after they announced the victim's name before I could tell which of the two performers had just had her hopes shattered and which was surviving to sing another day--both faces stayed frozen in similar anxious expressions for long after I think I'd have processed the good or bad news and reacted.

For some reason, I stayed tuned in after that, and heard something that annoyed me.   But it annoyed me in an interesting, rather thought-provoking way.  Apparently sometimes you get to pick your own material on these shows, and sometimes you have to do what someone assigns you.  The winner of the phone-in vote had been assigned to sing "I Was Country When Country Wasn't Cool."  And she wasn't happy about it.  Griped about it publicly, in fact.  One thing she said--and it stuck me at the time, so I wrote it down, which means this may not be an exact quote, but it's pretty close--was "melodically, that song was hard to go somewhere with."

Huh?

Okay, I'm not a big fan of country music--though I do own a few CDs by people like Wynonna Judd and Patsy Cline and Leann Rimes and Sara Evans.  And from that list, you can probably peg just what kind of county music I like--performers (mainly, but not entirely, women performers) with big, beautiful, flexible voices.  But I'm not up with what's in and out in Nashville, so I have no idea whether "I Was Country When Country Wasn't Cool" is considered an old standard or just a dinosaur; whether it's in or out or so out it's almost in again.  All I know is that singing "I Was..." hmm; let's start calling it "IWCWCWC," for heaven's sake--doesn't seem like it would be that much of a hardship for someone with a good, strong voice.  Nice song.  Downright tuneful.  Reasonably appealing even to someone like me with limited taste in country.  Seems to me as if it would be a pretty decent showcase.  And she didn't do a bad job of it.  Could have been better, though.  Better, for me, would have meant just plain singing the song. 

I probably just made my lack of any talent or training--and possibly taste--in vocal music plain, but one thing that really annoys me is when someone starts singing a good, strong, powerful song then tries to jazz it up a little too much.  Improvising on the melody before they've really shown us the melody to begin with.  Turning the volume up, like Spinal Tap, to 11 on the first verse, so there's nowhere to go from there.  Reaching what could be a powerful, sustained, dramatic note and choosing to warble around it instead of just hitting it. Sometimes the strongest thing you can do with a song is just sing it.

I can see why singers might tend to do this.  If they've sung a song dozens or hundreds of times; and maybe heard it hundreds or thousands of times, it probably isn't that exciting to do the same old melody one more time.  But sometimes I wish singers would step outside the "Oh, how can I put my spin on this?  How can I possibly make this different?" and just sing the song.  Try to see what it is about the words and the melody that made people love the song in the first place--IWCWCWC was a number one hit on the country charts, after all--and play that up. 

Which doesn't mean that I'm going to change stations the minute the singer varies from the song as written in the original sheet music.  I just wish more singers with the kind of voices I like--and the Nashville Star contestant in question, Allison Hacker, does have that kind of voice--would do less interpreting and more trusting to their voices to put across the song.

And since I try always to bring the subject around to writing, sooner or later--sometimes writers, like singers, do themselves in by trying too hard. Using a few too many similes.  The two dollar word when a ten cent one will do.  Trying too hard to be literary and writerly, instead of just writing the scene as clearly and honestly as possible.  We all do it sometimes--I've got a lot of files where I keep beautifully written scenes that brought the book in question to a screeching halt.  Sometimes I read them over and bask in how beautifully written they are . . . and in how right I was to cut them out.