today's been a quiet day. a really nice day. slept in till just before 8, then let the dogs out (it's freezing outside, so they did their business quickly, hurried back in). then i played some nes games on emulator, worked out for half an hour, had a slightly-late breakfast of buttered toast, more strong coffee. then practice. trying to leave the afternoon mostly free to work on a couple other projects, which i find hard to do if my partner's at home and settled in.
this is because she needs noise: not noise, but you know, something on. one of a million old tv shows that she doesn't really watch, but keeps on in the background while she does crosswords or works on this or that. it works for her. the only problem is, i find it hard to concentrate when the steady stream of british panel shows starts. i like these. a lot. just not when i'm trying to go head down on something.
so up until a few minutes ago, i've had pure silence all day. it's unsettling for a bit, and then it's good. i find it really helps my focus. some people need that background noise to get going, but i find it distracts me from actually getting things done. just before writing this, i put a richard skelton album on. skura. his drones and otherwordly music kind of a soundtrack for the project i've been working on forever. but it's just to get my head in the right space. after this entry is done and uploaded, the music's going off, and it'll be a few hours of coding, trying to get a particular bit of generative code working.
richard skelton started making music, i read, after the death of his wife, louise, at a very young age. years ago on a mud, one of my closest friends there lost his wife similarly. she was older than him by six or seven years, but not old-old. he was devastated. promise me, he said to me, that you'll never take her for granted.
i promised. that was twenty years ago. he's not on any social media except, strangely, linkedin, and i could see from there that he'd remarried, was happy. i was so happy for him. love is hard enough to find, and the universe is cruel when it takes it away in the most final way.
okay. music off. ide and shells open. time to get started.