Cyclamen is out

I happen to know that on this day in history Real Madrid was founded (1902). I read that off my daily desk calendar Christmas present, but I read it as ‘the real Madrid was founded’ and wondered what had become of the fake one. Apparently it was the best football team of the 20th century according to FIFA and, in 2011, the world’s second most valuable one according to Forbes. Here endeth the annual mention of football on my blog.

There’s a bit of sneezing and wheezing going on in the house today and has been these last couple of days. Many people are reporting a sudden increase in nasal activity and plants are being blamed. Even I, who have never suffered from hay fever*, am sniffing and sneezing and have cold symptoms. I took an antihistamine tablet two days ago and am still drowsy. For me they only work as sleeping tablets, though they do relieve the symptoms a bit I am useless for a couple of days after taking one. Neil had to have three yesterday, but luckily he is not affected in the same way as I.

View of the moon over the vigla yesterday

But for sure the flowers and plants are out and budding. We have orange blossom in the garden. The Lemon tree is slightly confused as it has blossom and lemons. The vine is starting to grow back, the rose has been in bloom on and off through the winter, the apricot tree is starting to grow leaves again after its pruning in November, and so is the plum tree. I don’t know much about plants by there is cyclamen everywhere at the moment, those ‘Judas plants’ are coming back up and the wild fig trees have buds on their sticks.

The sun is out, the sea is calm, there is more washing to be done and I am battling with a new piece of software on my PC. At least I will be later. I have rigged up my keyboard to the PC via a midi input and I now have Cubase 5 to load on later today. The idea is to get back to writing and recording music. It’s been about 10 years since I’ve handled Cubase so I’ll need to go back to basics, and it’s bound to have been updated since I used whatever it was I used, on a Mac, in a cellar back in the UK. All I know is that my sound box (Roland JV 1010) is now so out of date it doesn’t seem to be compatible and I can’t remember how to wire it up to make the sounds anyway.

These things have been in flower as well.

But that’s an adventure for later on this morning. If anyone knows how to do all this midi-Cubase-Windows 7-JV 1010 – recording, please drop me a line!

*Hay fever: I once suffered a very nasty bout aged about 11 when playing on a friend’s farm, in the hay barn in all day, making tunnels and generally unknowingly being dangerous. And I suffered another bout of it in my twenties when I went to see a particularly bad production of it at the Savoy Theatre (before it burned down). Oh, and I didn’t burn it down because of the production, though the man who lit my first musical in London was head electrician at the time. Coincidence.

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