Today’s Daily Stoic writing prompt: Will my actions today be good for all concerned?

If they are not, I want to hear about it.

It doesn’t mean necessarily that everyone will like what I do, but I consciously work to do the right thing, and to rectify it quickly when I make mistakes.

Right now, I have under two weeks to put together a really wonderful thing for a really wonderful person. This is the kind of project management that I just thrive on.

And we are down to eight days left on my Daily Stoic year.

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At the SCA event on Saturday, once Court had wrapped, we made a fairly quick exit, because I’d decided to go ahead and purchase a ticket for the K-W Chamber Music Society concert in Waterloo. It was scheduled for 8 pm, and it’s about an hour’s drive. I had to drop off a friend to the GO station on the way out. I calculated that if I left by 6:30, I should be fine. I arrived at my house at 6:23, furiously changed my clothing, grabbed some chicken strips and tzatziki to eat on the way–and then lost ten minutes looking for my phone, which was still in the car. No worries–Google Maps put me there at about 7:50, and I made up a little time on the way there. However, I had not been able to find a street address for the church where the concert was, so I trusted Google to find it for me. Google instead put me in front of a house where I could look in the front window and watch their enormous TV. I went to my onboard GPS, and it finally put me in the right spot–at 7:56.

I needn’t have worried. This wasn’t the TSO; they were considerably more mellow about the starting time. I then spent the next two hours enjoying two of Beethoven’s late quartets–no. 15 (op. 132), which features an absolutely spectacularly moving “hymn of thanksgiving” at its heart, and no 13 (op. 130), with its original ending (otherwise known as the Grosse Fuge. Hearing the latter quartet was one of the last concerts I attended before the lockdown. I had originally hesitated about buying a ticket, given how much was going on on that weekend, but in the end I decided to go–because the Grosse Fuge never really gets old. It’s nearly 200 years old but sounds like it could have been written in the 20th century, not the 19th.

The ensemble performing was the Penderecki Quartet. They’re a fairly local quartet, and had started the Beethoven quartet cycle back in 2019, in celebration of Beethoven’s birthday. With this concert (and another planned for December), they will finally finish it off.

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The performances were amazing; particularly so in the emphatic Grosse Fuge, and I’m glad I made the effort to get to enjoy the intimacy of chamber music again. Perhaps I’ll come back for the final two quartets in the cycle on Beethoven’s birthday in December. But (fingers crossed) I will definitely return to hear another group perform Shostakovich’s Trio no. 2 in November.

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Wheeeeeee! Giant FarceBorg outage! I’m rather glad that the bulk of the furious vigil/elevation planning via Messenger happened yesterday evening. I wasn’t hugely impacted. I spent this evening finishing off my small commission and sketching out the embroidery for Tadc’s collar, and we’re working on tying up remaining loose ends. I’ll be working on the embroidery on the weekend and hopefully the tunic on Friday. Ceremony work will probably start on Wednesday. I’m also going to drive out to near St. Catherines to a fibre store that I got gift certificates to back in May at the MAYhem event; it’s time to pick up something to prep for dyeing at the vigil. I am also working on setting up a virtual vigil. I’m so happy to be getting this done quickly, because it’s soon approaching the time of year where outside dyeing would be challenging, and we’re also still not quite at the point where we can have more people indoors. And I’m very much committed to the idea of getting as much SCA stuff in before the outdoors window closes up, because we could still definitely be looking at small gatherings through the winter.

Tomorrow, I’m going to leave a little early for the Eoforwic event to stop off and sell some gold jewellery. I have a heavy 14K bracelet and a necklace (inherited from my Mom) that is just gathering dust, a couple of broken rings, and an 18K ring I will likely never wear again; the plan is to put the money towards a piece of custom work that I am just jazzed about.