Author Archives: Autumn

Hullo, World

First things first: Happy birthday to Sandman7 and Pdaughter!

I just spoke briefly with t!, who says life is very good at the new homestead in southern Ontario. Just to let those who are wondering know, the Coalition Stronghold does not have internet access and will not until early next week.

I am running around like a chicken with my head cut off today, and did not in any way need the New Construction Headache in the middle of town this morning as I tried to get gas and to the bank. Argh.

My computer will not recognize my camera at all, no matter what USB port I use. Tonight I plan to open the box under Blade‘s supervision (which at this point consists mostly of Blade drinking Scotch and tossing me a screwdriver; he’s moral support and the voice of wisdom that suggests I may not actually want to plug/unplug a particular cable inside) to insert the USB expansion card Jan gave me before she left, to up the number of installed USB ports to eight. I have pictures to share, you see, of the new haircut and the new glasses and other things, and not being able to get them off the camera is annoying.

I finished the huge freelance project yesterday, two days after I’d wanted it gone because I realized I had to do one final step. I may do a timed writing thing around noon before I have to head out to the doctor just past one, simply to get some words down. After that it’s to the south shore to drop off postdated cheques with the boy’s preschool, because they were forgotten yesterday which was in fact Wednesday not Tuesday as we all thought it was. And if I’m out there I might as well pick HRH up from work before going to get the boy from his caregiver, who is having a little party today with the kids.

Next week’s work is all mine, because I have to draft the workshop I’m doing at the Hamilton Pagan Pride Day event on September 13. Which is next weekend. We’re leaving a week from tomorrow. Eek.

Right; off I go to do more headless chickeny things. Which reminds me… I need to think of something for dinner.

Good Things

Thanks to some help from Blade, the laptop is up and running and as of some messing about on my own this morning can actually connect to the Internet via ethernet cable. We’ll make sure the wireless works properly when I get the passkey again. (Duh. And this time, we’ll save it.)

Also very exciting: We have a new bed and new dressers/bedside tables! The bed is almost twice as high as our old one. The cats complained, of course, but the boy ran in, peeked over the top (yes, it’s that high) then hauled himself up without hesitation. I have to shift my clothes from the old double dresser to my single dresser today, and then the double dresser is moving downstairs to become storage. HRH has brought home the first half of the boy’s new-to-him bunk beds as well; I suspect we’ll have those complete and up by next week.

There was something else too, but I’ve forgotten it. The fact that we have new fish in the boy’s aquarium? (Six pretty guppies. All alive so far. The bonus feeder guppy died last night; I’m hoping that it will serve as a sacrifice to the Fishtank Gods and the others will be spared.) The fact that I made grape jelly for the first time yesterday? (And poured some of the boiling jelly over my left thumb while filling the very first jar; I credit the use of lavender oil with my ability to use it today, because liquid sugar? A bad thing.)

Nope; it’s gone. I’ll come back when I remember.

ETA: Aha! Walking past a mirror reminded me. I’ve now worn the new glasses almost every moment I’ve been awake for one week, and I can’t believe how light they are; I continually forget that I’ve got them on. Pretty much everyone who has seen me has complimented me (after first cautiously ascertaining that these are indeed the new glasses), and it’s a major sign of how much I like the frames that I’m taking the compliments at face value instead of questioning them or worrying that the complimenter is just being polite. Yay, new glasses! Yay, wearing glasses full-time!

Labour Weekend and Orchestra Update

HRH helped move t! and Jan to their new home in Ontario on Saturday, and I miss them dreadfully already. We had a lovely afternoon and dinner with HRH’s parents to celebrate his dad’s birthday on Sunday. Monday saw a last-minute gathering chez the Young-Schmeisser residence, complete with pool and treehouse and swings and lazing about in lawn chairs and grazing upon barbecued summer food. It was incredibly good to see people relaxing together instead of connecting only momentarily at the rare evening gathering. I saw Amanda for the second time this summer, which is a record of some sort for us, and watched Tallis marching around holding on to parental fingertips, so very much older than she was only two months ago. It was a pure summer gathering, the kind we don’t have enough of any more.

We did forget the corn on the cob we’d bought with the intent of bringing it to roast on the BBQ and share with everyone, though. Now we have a ton of corn to eat in the next few days.

We had a general meeting of the orchestra membership last week, something has hasn’t been done in at least eighteen years, possibly the entire life of the group. There have been some changes. They’re growing pangs, really, because for three decades Andres helmed the group, having founded it and maintained it on his own. When we lost him so suddenly the group needed to develop some guidelines and new methods out of thin air, and we’re still working them out as we encounter obstacles. One of the things we’re refining is our method of selecting and reviewing conductors. Our most recent conductor’s term has ended, and we’re now preparing to audition three new conductors over the upcoming season, one per concert session.

This happened some what precipitously, because we didn’t have a clearly defined review system in place. The point is, most of us expected to be somewhat adrift for the first while due to the unexpectedness of the event and the timing, but to my surprise at this general meeting the exec revealed that we not only had a guest conductor in place, but we had a programme and our first concert date scheduled. This is going so well that I can’t help but suspect our decisions in the matter have all been the correct ones. Not only do we have our first guest conductor scheduled, but we’ve had a call from the director of the WIYSO expressing interest in one of the future guest spots, as have a couple of others. There were some suggestions from the membership too, revolving around multiple performances of the same programme in different areas instead of a single concert, raising membership fees to generate more available capital with which to pay conductors (thereby enabling us to attract higher-profile directors), and communication suggestions (especially an interactive website with a members-only section to enable us to share ideas and receive information). The plan is to have a different conductor for each of our three concerts in the upcoming season, to evaluate each, and then vote on one to invite back.

From what I can remember, our first programme will consist of a Mozart divertimento for strings, the Iphigenia in Aulis overture, Haydn’s 104th symphony, and a Vivaldi concerto for four violins with continuo (our prize for the winners of the Lakeshore Chamber Music Society’s concerto competition). Our first rehearsal is on September 17, and our first concert is on November 22. We’ll have to be really focused and on the ball with this new conductor to prepare a concert in that period of time. This will happen naturally of course, as everyone will be hyper-aware and paying very close attention to the new director’s technique. New blood to stir us up will be good. I’m looking forward to exploring music with a new director. One of the things I realised through this summer mini-crisis about the orchestra leadership was that I was focusing on my own satisfaction with my technical performance in a concert and extrapolating that to measure the orchestra’s overall performance, which was wrong of me. I was also shifting my personal focus to technical improvement because I wasn’t getting artistic or interpretive satisfaction from the overall musical experience. The orchestra really needs to grow and develop musically now. We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks.

Apart from that, musically I’ve been kind of on hold. I’ve been playing songs and such, testing my treble clef reading, but the 7/8 search and the mystery cello repair hasn’t moved forward. Why? Because my luthier and I miscommunicated about vacation, and he wasn’t gone the first two weeks of August but the last two weeks. Had I known I would have brought him my cello for its tune-up and the mystery cello as soon as I got home from our trip. Ah well, everything ought to be back to usual now that it’s September; I’ll call him Thursday. With orchestra only beginning two weeks from now, there’s time to take my current cello in for adjustments, new bridge, new strings, and a quick repair to the soundboard crack, and get it back in plenty of time. Otherwise, I can always test another cello out and use that!

I find that my initial ‘no I should upgrade the quality/level of the cello I’m using’ is ebbing to ‘something equivalent in a different shape would be just fine’. Which is a good thing, really, because it’s assuaging a lot of the ‘OMG so expensive where will I find the money now!’ jitters I’m having. I’m interested to hear what the luthier will have to say about the mystery cello, too.

Right. More work. I want to finish this project up so I can really focus on writing this week.

What I Read This August

Mountain Solo by Jeanette Ingold
The Girl’s Guide to Witchcraft by Mindy Klasky
Thin Air by Rachel Caine
A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi
Charlie Bone and the Wilderness Wolf by Jenny Nimmo
The Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
Audrey Hepburn by Barry Paris
What Would Audrey Do? by Pamela Keogh
Rostropovich by Elizabeth Wilson
Just Play Naturally by Vivien Mackie and Joe Armstrong
The Mirador by Sarah Monette
Boccherini’s Body by Elisabeth Le Guin
Hell and Earth by Elizabeth Bear
The Girl of his Dreams by Donna Leon
Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult
The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs

Not much to say this month, really. Sarah Monette’s series keeps getting better and better. Hell and Earth was an awesome conclusion to The Stratford Man duology. I couldn’t read very far into Boccherini’s Body, although I desperately wanted to. My full review of Ms. Hempel Chronicles is here. Plain Truth was my first Jodi Picoult novel, and I will read more.

That’s about it.

A Farewell

Well, this is it; the last day of a somewhat sane CBC Radio 2.

This past spring, CBC announced a major overhaul of Radio 2 in an effort to find more listeners. They’re broadening their musical scope to include, well, pretty much everything. Radio 2 was developed as a classical music station. Over the past few years they’ve slowly been whittling away at that, adding jazz, fusion shows, a little bit of this, a little bit of that… essentially music in which I have zero interest. Each time I’ve dropped another show I once enjoyed. Gone was Danielle Charbonneau’s lovely, relaxing program Music for Awhile between dinner and eight; gone were the live classical concert recordings of Symphony Hall at eight o’clock that I’d listen to at home before bed or on the way to orchestra. I turn the radio off at six now, because I find Tonic harsh and discordant and it drives me up the wall (although I like Katie Malloch, go figure). I find that I often flip the dial to the CJPX 99.5, the local French all-classical station, although I miss a host’s presence identifying the music and it doesn’t keep a reference list of what played when on its web site. (Although having just visited the site to start an Internet stream, I see that they now have a date/time search function. That’s good.)

I’m grieving for the loss of Tom Allen’s weekday morning show, Music & Company, in particular. Of all the daily hosts, I find he’s the most in tune with my sense of humour, my musical tastes, and my mood at the time. He’s going to be the new morning show host, although the content is going to be very different, and I’m trying to find solace in his continued presence. I’m going to give it the good old college try, but I suspect it’s not going to be what I need in the morning.

I’ve written of my displeasure to CBC and groused about it here and to people in person, but I’m feeling frustrated and useless at a move I sense will lose more listeners than gain new ones. It’s unfocused, a patchwork of scattered musical style, and although they claim they’re maintaining a commitment to classical music the only show with classical as its base is scheduled between 10 and 3, when many people are at work or school and can’t access a radio. I’ll be the first person to stand up and say that the definition of ‘culture’ is not limited to classical music, but in many places across Canada there isn’t an alternative to the classical content found on CBC R2 up till today. I’m not the only frustrated listener, either. Stand On Guard is a website devoted to proving to the CBC that there is a substantial percentage of listeners who do want classical music to remain as the focus of CBC R2. They’re also fighting to restore the CBC Radio Orchestra, the last surviving radio orchestra in North America, which was axed this past spring as well.

I’m listening to Tom Allen’s final minutes as host of Music & Company, and I feel as if saying goodbye to it is like a microcosm of my commitment to Radio 2. Goodbye Studio Sparks; goodbye Disc Drive. Thanks for being the soundtrack to my life for thirty years, Radio 2. I’ve discovered many new artists and composers through you. You’ve been with me through two university degrees, my marriage, my retail and freelance careers, the writing of five books for publication and countless not yet published novels and short stories, and motherhood. You inspired me as a musician. I’m going to miss you very, very much. I will be open-minded and give the new programming a try next week, but I sense I won’t be tuning for long; it’s just not the kind of music I want to be listening to. I’ve sent personal farewells to some of the hosts, and left notes on CBC blogs as well. These people deserve to know what they’ve added to my life.

Now I’m thoroughly depressed. This probably calls for some Invisible. ‘Holiday in Cambodia’, perhaps, or the PPK medley.

It Figures

Someone gets a really good picture of me at the last orchestra concert… and I’m not playing my cello.

Because if I’m not playing, I’m marking up my music in the desperate hope that a new fingering added half an hour before the concert begins will actually help. Sigh.