I'm having 'lots of fun' identifying the tone rows in Webern's Konzert Op.24, which is what we're supposed to do for text homework. The sheet of the tone row, its retrograde, inversion, retrograde inversion, and their transpositions in twelve keys that we're supposed to write out sometimes doesn't help. In the first place I was quite careless and I transposed some rows wrongly, sometimes in the wrong direction and sometimes I don't even know what my brain was doing when I made that mistake. And then there's that 'problem' of the composer's creativity, which is exhibited through his juxtaposition of different rows such that my brain gets a big workout just trying to put the notes into their respective rows and not mix them up. I'm only at bar 16! Slow progress...

My cousin sent me this today:
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/WeirdNews/2006/01/18/1399667-ap.html
I wonder whether the hamster knew she was going to end up as food or was she very excited to have a snake for company? Maybe she could speak parseltongue and managed to escape death. Wonder how she feels when frozen rodents are put into the cage for the snake. It's like seeing your fellow humans being eaten up by aliens or something.

Oh ya, just recently I realised that my preconceived notion of two squirrels living around the trees I can see outside my window was wrong. The other day I saw three, no, four squirrels simultaneously running across the branches. Previously I've only seen two. Here's a picture I took of one of them: