The Three Signs - Book 4 - LisaChapter 30: A New Musical Style free porn video

Sunday was a bittersweet day; Chrissy and I slept in, enjoying what we both knew would be our last night sleeping together. I really didn’t want her to leave, but ... It was my decision, she needed to get back with her group to pursue her musical career; I wasn’t going to stand in her way. Eventually, we made it out of bed, only to spend a rather long time in the shower, then getting dressed, and going downstairs for a very late breakfast, well, in reality, lunch. After we had eaten, Lisa and I helped Chrissy pack her belongings, and loaded them into my car. Chrissy and I had discussed the option of me staying with her tonight, but she felt it would be too difficult for me to leave in the morning to get to work.

As we drove the short distance to her apartment, Chrissy asked me if it would be possible for her to ‘sit in’ on one of my lectures; I suggested the following Monday morning, for the first Computing I lecture of the year.

“It’s from 10:00 to 11:00, in the main Electrical Engineering lecture theatre,” I said. “You could meet me up in my office just beforehand, and come down with me. Since it would be the first day of class for the semester, and being all first year students, no one would know anyone, you could remain incognito.”

“I’ll have to make myself look a little different,” she said. “But that will be part of the fun! Deal, I’ll call you later in the week to make sure it’s still okay. That will be fun, I can pretend I’m eighteen or nineteen again, dress up like the young women do today...”

“You might get lucky, Chrissy,” Lisa said. “There’s lots of cute, sexy guys there at the university.”

“God, that’s the last thing I need!” she said. “Yet another guy all over me!”

“Well, there’s lots of cute, sexy girls there, too. Will has had to fend a few of them off, trying to trade sexual favours for better marks!”

“Can you imagine how the gossip tabloids would react if they knew I was in some hot lesbian affair?” she said. “That’s why I have loved staying with you, I’ve been able to do all of those things, and there’s no suspicion. I mean, I’ve been playing with the group, touring, recording, so it’s only natural I should be staying there in your house with you. And everyone there is discreet, no on outside our group had any inkling of what we did.”

“Well, everyone at the house, and in the group, respects other’s privacy,” I said. “ThatCs how we’ve been right from the start. No one’s going to judge what anyone does in their private life, no one’s going to talk or gossip.”

We pulled up in front of her apartment building, and between the three of us, we had her things back inside fairly quickly, Lisa helped Chrissy put things away in her closet and dresser. As we were ready to return home, Chrissy wanted to give us a goodbye kiss – a long, very passionate kiss, first for Lisa, and then for me. It was a soft, yearning kiss; the sort of kiss that makes you never want to break contact. But we eventually broke apart, I saw the tears in her eyes, trickling down her cheeks. I didn’t want to say anything, I was on the verge of tears myself. I kissed each tear track, and Lisa and I headed back to the car, and drove home in silence.

“I’m really going to miss her,” Lisa said when we got home. “And Tracy will be gone in a day or two, as well.”

“We still have Fiona,” I said. “And who knows what Alexa might choose to do.”

“Fee and I have been speaking with her, and I think she wants to do something with you, and maybe us as well, but she’s very unsure of how she will react,” Lisa said. “I don’t think she will actually pluck up the courage and do anything, well, do more than she’s done; not for quite a while. But that makes four partners who we’ve lost in the last few months; Merry, Ange, Chrissy and Tracy.”

“Well, life sometimes has a way of turning things up when you least expect them,” I said.

Back at Uni, it was the final week of the break before classes resumed for the year, we were putting the final touches on material for the coming semester. We were still working on the syllabi for the new Computer Science Engineering subjects, but the main focus was on the coming semester. Just after lunchtime, I had a phone call from David, things seemed to get off to a good start with the project at International Electronics, according to him all of the people there had a good understanding of what the project was to achieve, how they would have to modify their business processes, and a realistic understanding of the time frame and their involvement in the process. His comments gave me an added level of confidence about the project; since this was really the first major commercial contract we had. I saw the work we did for Bitola, for Alexa as helping out a friend; sure we made a profit out of it, but it was ... family, somehow. I wanted to show Peter that we were a worthy addition to his list of implementation partners; he had hinted at another possible contract coming up soon; we would certainly need additional staff to fulfil any more contracts. Time to talk with David about lining up a few more contractors.

I had a few emails to review on a proposal to set up some ‘private IP address ranges’, the idea being that not every device on a network really needs to be accessible by every other device on the internet. The background information raised some very interesting points; including the fact that just because a device is connected to the internet, doesn’t meant that all other – or any other – internet connected device would need to initiate a connection to it. I immediately thought of some of the networked test equipment that we had installed at the Manly Dam Hydrological laboratory, the only people who needed access to that were the researchers in the Civil Engineering School. The same as individual PCs and workstations – no one needed to initiate a connection to them.

I was interrupted by a knock on my door, it was David, and he had a young woman with him. I noticed she had a long, white cane, and was wearing dark glasses, leading me to assume she was blind.

“Will, I would like you to meet a friend of mine, Rose, Rose Peterek,” he said. “Rose, this is Will Morris, the lead singer of the group we went to listen to on Saturday night.”

I stood up, and walked to the door, shaking her outstretched hand.

“Rose, great to meet you,” I said. “Come in, take a seat, I’d love to hear what you thought about our performance.”

They came in, and David guided her to one of the seats around my coffee table.

“I loved the energy in your show,” she said. “My favourite though was the previous week, when we went to the Three Weeds where you were playing that folk music. You – all of you – are really good.”

“Well, thank you,” I said. “We’ve been playing together for quite a while, the core of the group goes back to the early 1970’s, I joined in 1973. We enjoy it, it’s a great change from what I normally do here. Do you play, yourself?”

“Yes, I play piano and guitar,” she said. “And sing, but I’m nowhere at your standard.”

“Will even has a guitar in his office here,” David said. “Quite often we will hear him playing and singing, and then I know he’s stuck in a particularly tricky research problem.”

“Really? You have your guitar in here?” she said. “The others don’t mind, I’m sure when you play and sing; it’s like they get free concerts!”

I reached over and picked up my guitar, switched the practice amp on, strummed a chord to check the tuning, and snugged the top E string up a touch. I played and sang the first verse of ‘The Black Velvet Band’, and I thought I heard her singing softly along with me.

“I love the way your accent changes when you sing that,” she said. “You sound so Irish, nothing like your normal speaking voice.”

“I must say, I don’t consciously do that,” I replied. “I do know that when I play or sing, I have what I can only describe as a ‘recording’ that runs in my head, and I play or sing accordingly. Don’t they say that the part of the brain that controls singing is not the same part that controls speech? Which is why they teach people who stutter to sing their words, rather than speak.”

“I thought I was the only person who did that when they played music,” she replied.

“Now, this might sound like a stupid question, but how do you actually read music? I hope that’s not being insensitive, but...”

“No, you’re not being insensitive,” she replied. “They actually have braille sheet music, but it’s very slow to read it and play from it that way. I think I probably do what you do, I know how it should sound, and it plays in my head, and I just play what sounds right. Generally, I will be told the key, the chord progression, and I can work it out from there. I might have to listen to the original a few times, just to get everything right, but I guess I have a good ear for music.”

“Well, I could hear you singing along with me then, and you were perfectly in tune. Do you want to try my guitar?”

“Are you sure you don’t mind? I would love to ... how does the connection to the amplifier work? Do I play it like a normal guitar?”

“It has a piezoelectric pickup fitted in the bottom of the body. Play it just like normal, if you feel on the top shoulder, there are four little sliders; the one closest to the top is the overall volume control, slide it towards you to increase the volume. The other three, running down top to bottom are the tone equalizer controls, bass at the top, then midrange, and the bottom one is treble. I’ve got them all set about mid-range.”

She took the guitar from me, and I saw her feeling around it, checking where the volume and tone controls were, and she checked the tuning, strumming a few chords.

“I like the tone, and it feels nice to play,” she said. “The steel strings give it a different tone from nylon, too.”

She started picking out a tune, it sounded vaguely familiar, and once she started singing, I recognized it straight away.

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine

I was impressed at her finger-picking; it wasn’t an easy tune to play at the best of times, and with her not able to see her fingers at all, I was very impressed. She would use her thumb to pick the bass line, while her fingers provided the rhythm and melody counterpoint. When she started the second verse, I joined in with the counter tune, ‘Canticle’.

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
(in the deep forest green)
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
(Tracing of sparrow on snow-crested ground)
Without no seams nor needle work
(Bedclothes the child of the mountain)
Then she’ll be a true love of mine
(Sleeps unaware of the clarion call)

Tell her to find me an acre of land
(A sprinkling of leaves)
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
(Washes the grave with silvery tears)
Between the salt water and the sea strands
(And polishes a gun)
Then she’ll be a true love of mine

Tell her to reap it with a sickle of leather
(Blazing in scarlet battalions)
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
(Generals order their soldiers to kill)
And gather it all in a bunch of heather
(A cause they’ve long ago forgotten)
Then she’ll be a true love of mine
Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine

When we finished, she was beaming, she looked so excited.

“Thank you for singing that with me,” she said. “I’ve never had anyone else singing with me before, and to have you singing with me, that was so brilliant!”

“I enjoyed it, you’ve got a great voice, very pure, and perfectly on pitch,” I said. “And your finger-picking, I don’t think I can do it that well. You should come to our rehearsals on Saturday afternoons, play with all of us.”

“Seriously?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “We’ve been asked to play a regular gig at the Three Weeds, and we’ve lost one of our people, Tracy Mann is off for a few months working on a TV mini-series. So having another good guitarist, who can sing, that will fill a gap. If you need a lift there, or home again, get David to ask me, it’s not a problem.”

“Wow! That would be way cool. What time should I get there, and do I need to bring anything?”

“We normally kick things off with a barbeque lunch, around noon, just bring yourself and your guitar.”

“David? Are you in there?” Michelle called out from the main office. “Graham Hellestrand wants to talk with you about the proposed programming subject syllabus.”

“Oh, fuck, he’s still pushing his stupid ‘Scheme’ functional programming bullshit,” David said. “I guess I should go and see him; Rose, you don’t mind waiting here for me?”

“No, David, you’re at work, that’s your priority,” she said.

“Don’t worry, she can wait here Mate,” I said. “Rose, I’ve got some stuff that I have work on, but you are more than welcome to sit there, and keep playing my guitar.”

David headed off to try and rein in Graham Hellestrand, while I went back to my emails on private IP addresses and address translation processes. Rose kept playing my guitar, it was relaxing with her singing in the background while I tried to wrap my mind around the proposal. I had been working away for about thirty minutes, making a few notes, and stood up to stretch.

“That must be a rather interesting project you are working on,” she said. “What is it about?”

“Okay, how much do you know about a computer network called ‘The Internet’? I asked.

“I have a friend who’s a computer software engineer, working on communications networks,” she said. “He’s told me about that, and IP addresses and all of that stuff.”

“Okay, so this is a proposal that a number of us internet researchers are kicking around; that’s how most of the new development is done in this area, someone comes up with an idea, a few others of us work on it, and eventually something that is practical and working emerges at the end.”

I then explained the basis of the private IP address range proposal, and how a router placed between a ‘private network’ and the main part of the Internet would translate addresses, so that only those devices that had to be accessed from outside the private network would actually be accessible. I then talked about how eventually, the Internet would ‘run out’ of available addresses, if every site used the standard addressing scheme. I noticed that she was starting to squirm a little in her chair, and I wondered if I was boring her.

“Are you okay? I guess all of this is rather deadly dull, sorry if I got carried away a bit,” I said.

“No, it’s not that,” she said. “It’s a bit embarrassing, I’m not quite sure how to explain, but ... listening to someone talking about technology, computer stuff, all the networking details ... I find it ... arousing. And I was just getting all ... well ... turned on and messy down there ... I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put you off. You must think I’m terrible, or something, that I’m somehow strange or perverted...”

“No, I don’t think that at all,” I replied. “I’ve never had a reaction to talking about networks like that before though. At least, not that I know of! Maybe that’s why some of my students rate my lectures so high!”

“Oh, God! If I was in one of your classes ... I would be a puddle on the floor!” she said. “I think it’s your accent, your voice, too; there’s something very sexy about your voice, it’s almost like you are singing.”

“I know when I first started lecturing,” I said, “I made a real effort to speak clearly, not to run my words together, like so many Australians do. Probably because all of my music experience, when I am up in front of a class, it’s like I’m singing on stage. But ... I do apologise, I didn’t meant to get you all worked up like that.”

“No, don’t be sorry, and don’t stop talking about all of that,” she said. “I mean, it’s all rather enjoyable, well, obviously. I just don’t want you to think that I’m somehow strange or crazy!”

I was smiling; this was the first time I had ever heard of someone reacting that way to a discussion of internet protocols. But at least I knew I had her full attention; something that I often wondered about during my lectures. I probably talked for another thirty minutes, answering her questions about how the overall Internet was structured, how routers worked out how to route packets to their required destination, error correction, and other stuff, some of it back from my thesis. Eventually David returned, muttering under his breath about ‘functional programming bullshit’, and Rose decided that she had taken up far too much of my time.

She thanked me for the music session, and also talking to her about various networking things. She promised she would come over on Saturday for the rehearsal, at least to play with us, but made no commitment to playing with us at the Three Weeds. I reminded her to ‘bring your guitar with you’, and gave her my card with my home address and phone number on it.

At home that evening, we were having a farewell dinner for Tracy, as she was flying up to Cairns tomorrow to start rehearsals. Mary Beth and Lisa had worked together to make a rather nice meal; chicken schnitzels, and some lemon cheesecake for dessert. When we were all seated around the table, Lisa made a short speech, telling Tracy to have a great time on the set, to ‘break a leg’ as the traditional wish to actors about to go onto stage. Tracy was visibly touched by our farewell, and thanked us all.

“I really can’t thank all of you enough,” she said. “You’ve welcomed me here, into your house – and thank you so much for that, Lisa and Will. The trouble with my chosen career is you have to accept being a bit of a nomad, you have to go where the work is, and unless you are one of the fortunate few who lands a permanent, long term role; then you are always going to be moving from role to role, job to job, location to location. There’s something very satisfying, very secure in knowing that I have a permanent home, where no matter what happens, I can come back home to. I feel like I have an ‘anchor’, if that makes sense.

“Including me in the group, you all gave me lots of confidence, you made me believe I had the talent, the ability to be up on a stage, playing music and singing. I know I never would have been able to play my role in ‘Sweet and Sour’ without all of your help. So thank you, and I’ll be back here in a few months, once this job is over.”

“So, it’s all about what happened in Darwin when Cyclone Tracy hit?” Fiona asked. “I remember that, wasn’t that right on Christmas Day, in 1974?”

“I remember that too,” I said. “We were having breakfast on Christmas morning, and we heard the news about the destruction in Darwin. Then all of us – grandparents, cousins and so on – we had just sat down for the big lunch, and my father had a phone call from the Director-General of the PMG’s department, wanting him to head up there to manage the recovery of the communications system. He spent the next six weeks or so up there, living out of a tent, getting the emergency phone system operational.”

“Well, there’s going to be three episodes; each of about an hour in duration,” Tracy said. “I’m excited to see what sort of effects they have, simulating the actual cyclone.”

After dinner, we watched TV for a while, and Tracy and I headed off to her bedroom, to spend one final night together. When were undressed, it was into her bed together.

“Do you remember that first weekend when we met?” she asked me. “Even if my role didn’t require me to seduce you, I would have done that anyway.

“I remember you wanted me to get to meet ‘the twins’,” I said, cupping my hands around her breasts. “You had me confused for a while!”

“Yeah, that was so much fun, that first murder weekend we were at together,” she said. “And Lori ended up killing me, for trying to steal ‘her man’. Then you took me out for a really nice dinner, to an Italian place in Leichardt. And I almost gave in to my desire for you, getting you staying overnight with me.”

I started to kiss and nuzzle her breasts, and she stroked my hair, sighing softly. Before long, we were making love; I was lying on top of her, slowly sliding in and out, kissing her lips softly. When she came, Tracy whimpered softly, and held me tightly against her body. I kept moving slowly, enjoying the sensations of her body around my prick, alternating my mouth from kissing her lips to sucking on her breasts. Tracy came again for a second time, she held my body tightly to her, moaning softly; the extra tightness around my prick took me over the edge, and I groaned as I spurted inside her. I collapsed against her body, and we just held each other for a few minutes. Once my erection had subsided, and my breathing was back to normal, I rolled off her, and lay on my side next to her, my head on her shoulder.

“As much as I really enjoy making love with you Will,” she said softly, “to me the nicest part about being in bed with you is when you wrap your arms around me while we sleep. I feel like I’m in a big ball of protection. That’s what I’m going to miss so much being away from you, the cuddling, how you hold me when we sleep. I mean, the sex is nice, but I can have sex with almost anyone. But no one holds me, no one cuddles me quite the same as you.”

She turned on her side, so that we were spooning, and I moved to cup her breasts in my hands. She pushed her backside against my prick, and reached down to position it between her thighs, my knob resting against her wet pussy. She sighed softly, and placed her hand over mine, and I listened to her breathing, as she slowly fell asleep.

In the morning, we made love again before showering, getting dressed and goingdownstairs for breakfast. When it was time for me to leave for work, Tracy followed me out to the garage to say goodbye.

“Thank you again for everything, Will,” she said, as she wrapper her arms around my body. “I’m really going to miss being with you, living with you.”

“I will miss you too, Tracy,” I replied. “I hope everything goes well for this role, and the mini-series you are shooting. I guess we will see you back in, what, two or three months?”

“Yes, we are scheduled to have it completed by the end of May,” she said. “You take care, try not to let yourself get shot again!”

“No, I try to avoid that,” I said, laughing. “But being serious now, I’m going to miss you being around, and miss sleeping with you. I hope it goes well, and you know that there will always be a room here for you, anytime you want to live here.”

We kissed, she help me tight against her; her kiss was soft, tender, longing. When we final broke apart, I could see her eyes were wet; she wiped the back of her hand across them, and told me to get on my way before she really started crying.

I felt sad on the drive to uni; not that I had a lot of time to dwell on Tracy’s departure once I was there. It was a day full on, preparing various class assignments and programming exercises; including setting them up in the on line assignment submission system. This involved setting up the test data that would be automatically run when students submitted their program, and the expected results that would be compared with what their program produced. The work that David had done on the ‘give’ assignment submission system made our work of grading programming assignments so much easier; it did require a reasonable amount or work setting up each assignment in the system, but it made grading over three hundred individual programming assignments feasible.

The remainder of the week was more of the same; we had the final student numbers for the semester. We had just under three hundred and fifty full time students, and just over one hundred in the part time, evening class for Computing I. We had barely sufficient tutors to run all the tutorial classes; we called a few of the honours year CS students to see if any of them would be interested in working as a tutor for the semester. We arranged for a meeting with all tutors for first thing Friday morning, to make sure they all knew what would be expected of them as tutors; how to run the classes, what assessments would be required, and any other necessary administration tasks. Michelle had prepared a number of handouts for the tutors, and we had assigned students to tutorial classes. The class lists would be available to each tutor.

We held the tutors briefing first thing Friday morning, and since there were a number of the tutors who would be tutoring for the first time, Greg went over the roles and responsibilities for tutors. After the briefing, I asked him his thoughts on the group, particularly the new tutors we had for the year. He felt that they would need more support from us that the usual crop of tutors would; even if only to get reasonable assessments on student performance, so we could know what areas of the material students were having problems with. After we wrapped that up, I drove down to International Electronics, quickly met with David, who told me that everything was progressing smoothly, then spoke with Gordon, who was very happy with how David and Judy were working out.

“Those two really know their stuff,” he said. “David, in particular, has been asking questions that I hadn’t even thought of myself, he has a good understanding of what things management need to be able to do to understand the financial position of their company. I’ve got a good feeling about how the project will work out.”

I told him that hearing that made me pleased, and reminded him that if he had any concerns or questions to call me. We agreed on the weekly project review meetings, just before noon every Friday, which I could easily fit in before my regular lunch meeting with Alexa. She had told me that she wanted to hear my views on a new ‘extension’ to the MS-DOS operating system, that was meant to make it easier to use, and look like the new Apple computers. It worked out well, I had recently got a copy of the Microsoft Windows utility, version 1.02 – an early evaluation release, intended only for educational institutions, and had been playing around with it. I thought it was a fairly rudimentary addition, visually it was rather ugly and jarring, but that may have been because of the basic nature of the display system and monitor on the computer I had been using to testing the software.

I told her what the aim of Windows was; layering a Graphical User Interface over the command line interface of MS-DOS, in an effort to make it appear more like the Apple Macintosh system. I felt that while it was a good start; there were still some issues with it, performance of the system not the least of my concerns. There was also the issue that just about all monitors and display adapters for the PC worked in ‘character mode’, not bit-mapped like the Apple Macintosh, making the quality and useability of the displayed images worse.

“I think it’s not bad as a first attempt,” I said. “But there’s still a long way to go, with both the software development and the hardware to support it before I would bother moving to it. There’s a lot more to making computer software useable and useful that making the user interface look pretty; reliability and performance are far more important, but, of course, that’s not seen as ‘sexy’ by some programmers. In classes, we stress that getting the correct results, all the time, is just as important as the user interface. Because if people can’t trust your program to work correctly and reliably, and give them the results in a reasonable time, without causing frustration, then no matter how pretty it looks, they won’t use it.”

“Which reminds me, aren’t classes starting back next week?” she asked. “When would be a good time for me to sit in on one of your lectures?”

“Well, I guess it depends on what time suits you; I would suggest you attend the introductory lecture for Computing I. You can either come at 10:00 a.m. on Monday morning, or at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday evening, when the part-time class meets.”

“Tuesday night would work better,” she said. “Where should I meet you?”

I suggested we meet for dinner beforehand at the Thai restaurant that Mary Beth and I would meet at in the past. She said that would work for her, and give her a chance to get changed into some clothes that looked more suitable for a university student. She felt that sitting in on the part-time class would look more convincing; she didn’t believe she could pass for an eighteen year old, straight out of high school. It would be interesting to see how Chrissy would ‘disguise’ herself on Monday morning, I thought.

Alexa and I talked a little more about developments in the world of technology; I also talked about some of the research projects I was working on. She was interested when I talked about the ‘private IP’ address space, asking just how many devices could be connected to the internet as it stands.

“The initial design of the Internet would have allowed for not quite 4.3 billion addresses,” I said. “The problem is that this assumes that all addresses are allocated efficiently, so that each possible address is used. That hasn’t happened, those companies that got in early snapped up a ‘Class A’ address block, giving them over sixteen million individual address. Now, there’s no way most of those organizations would use them; but they aren’t likely to give their address allocation up. Add to that that the Internet is planned to be opened up to commercial organizations, outside of the original scope for government, military and universities, and we are going to see a rapid increase in the number of connected devices.