Author Archives: Autumn

Five Things

1. Jteethy has a job! Woo-hoo!

2. Sun! Sun! The snow of yesterday is pretty much gone! (Only a metre or so of the winter stuff left to go now…)

3. A weekend that feels like a weekend so far, and will only get better with a visit from Ceri and Scott this afternoon, a flying visit with the inlaws while we get ready to go out and they start minding the boy, and then the concert tonight.

4. Fresh bread, Dijon mustard, fresh slices of grilled Angus roast beef, and Swiss cheese.

5. A really wonderful night of sleep after a decent dress rehearsal.

Friday Photos

Hurrah! This has been an extraordinarily good mail day. Not only did I get a CD I’d ordered for Liam and the ceramic poetry pendant I’d bought from a handcrafter, but the Fed Ex man just came and gave me the box of the newly redesigned Way of the Green Witch!

Every time I get a box of author’s copies I post a hero shot, and today is no different:

I’m sure Fed Ex guys have seen it all, but this one either truly didn’t notice or tactfully said nothing about the smear of hair dye on my jawline. Sigh. Figures he’d ring just as I was halfway through.

And as I’ve brought up the topic of my hair, I just have to say that I’ve been loving this cut. I especially love feeling the curls brush the back of my neck when I shake my head. I adore long hair, especially long curly hair, but I’d finally decided it was time to cut it after years and years of long hair. Last year I had four inches cut off in June (which translated to six inches shorter when the curls sproinged post-cut), then two in November, and now another three gone which translates to four and a halfish post-sproing. That’s almost ten inches hacked off in nine months, and no, my hair doesn’t grow very fast at all. I haven’t had hair above the shoulders in years and years. It’s certainly much cheerier and easier to care for. I’ve been asked for photos of my haircut, so here you are:

And a gratuitous Liam/Autumn picture too, taken when we were having so much fun a couple of days ago in the sun:

And, heck, why not, a hero shot of the boy to show off how big he is:

There are your Friday photos. I have no idea of this will become a regular thing; it’s just the second Friday in a row that I’ve posted pictures.

Morning Links

Someone woke up at four-thirty, and I didn’t get back to my bed till five-twenty… and didn’t fall asleep till six-thirty. And then someone woke up again at seven. Did I mention I only got to sleep at one? And that my damn MP3 player was discovered to be dead after only four hours of use so I couldn’t use it to fall asleep?

Needless to say, I am not firing on all cylinders this morning.

We were hoping Sparky would sleep in, so HRH took the bus to work and I’ll be dropping the boy off with the caregiver. If I’d known he was going to wake up at his usual time I’d have told HRH to carry out the usual plan, and stayed in bed. But he was gone before the boy awoke.

Apart from that, here are two links, one amusing, one interesting:

The amusing: Princess Leia’s plea to Kenobi, cast as an e-mail scam:

[…] Our Bank Accounts both Here and Abroad are being Frozen by the Imperial Senate. Furthermore, we are Under Threat of Detention by the Grand Moff for Interrogation about my Father’s Assets and some Vital Documents.

By Virtue of our Position as Civil Servants and Members of the Royal House of Alderaan, we Cannot Regain this Money Under our own Names.

I have therefore been Delegated to look for an Overseas Partner into whose Account we would Transfer the sum of Twenty-Six Million, Four Hundred Thousand Galactic Standard Credits (26,400,000.00) for Safekeeping. Hence we are Sending you this Message in the Memory Systems of This R2 Unit. […]

The interesting: Cellist and teacher Emily Wright talks about the obsession with performing perfectly, and suggests instead that a public performance is a chance to show people where you are at that moment, not your ultimate level of perfection:

Perfection is important in aircraft engines, prescription doses and shark cages. What makes art great is that perfection can actually detract from our visceral enjoyment of it. Vibrato mars pitch, and we love it. Van Gogh skewed his room, and it speaks to something profound inside of us. Gil Shaham’s skittering spiccato bow is thrilling, and he risks everything in each performance, and most of the time, it pays a very precise dividend. But even when a note or two escapes him it is well worth it, because he makes himself so vulnerable to (and is at peace with) the possibility of catastrophe.

*facepalm*

Now I remember what I did yesterday afternoon. You know, those couple of hours I spent staring at the monitor, but thought I’d just spaced out? I transferred a bunch of web pages to the pro site.

It did not go smoothly. I got it in the end, though. No wonder I wiped it out of my memory.

Today’s web work has also not gone smoothly.

Coding is never as easy as it presents itself to be. According to the instructions I’ve been following, my redirects should all work, and they don’t. The redirection keeps adding a trailing backslash when I am very specifically not typing one in, and everything breaks along the way. And the redirects I’ve taken off/edited show as taken off/edited in my list of redirects, but are still redirecting incorrectly when I actually type the page address in. Wake me up when everything is as it’s supposed to be.

(Why yes, I am avoiding the spread of manuscript pages on the floor of the living room. Why do you ask?)

I wish I had the money to hire someone to do this.

ETA: Well, that will solve things eventually — I just deleted the subdomain. Not on purpose, mind you, but I am not at all fussed about it. And guess what? The non-existent subdomain still redirects. Which means that for whatever reason, the changes I’m making aren’t updating properly. I may or may not recreate the subdomain expressly for the purpose of having a redirection. Not important at the moment; people can default to the second URL on my business cards.

Thoughts On Orchestra And The Upcoming Concert

Augh.

Did I say the church was on the corner of St John’s and Lakeview? I misremembered. It’s about three or four houses along Lakeview. I’m so used to churches being on corners that I neatly edited my memory of Cedar Park United. So if you’re driving down St John’s this Saturday looking for a church, just turn west on Lakeview. No, really. Trust me.

I had a really bad fibro day yesterday; not only was the body clunky but I spent two hours after I submitted the proofs staring at a computer screen and I don’t remember any of it. I started waking up around the time I brought the boy home, and was in great form when I left (so I thought). Loved the drive to rehearsal, which was at the church, but took the northbound exit at St John’s instead of the southbound, which I do every other time I drive to this church because I am a creature of habit and nine times out of ten when I take St John’s I’m going north. There was a beautiful fiery coral sunset to admire along the way. I cannot express how much I love this time of year, with dry roads and crystal-clear nights.

When I got there I discovered that the church had invested in new folding chairs that are not only padded but feature straight seats, for which all the cellists were thankful as most folding chairs slant backwards and create nasty stress on the lower back. These chairs are the perfect height and enable my knees to be at ninety-degree angles. They were set up on a grey-blue runner, so I didn’t need to pull out the leather belt I use to stabilize my endpin on stone floors. Excellent! As a bonus, the ambient light was good enough that I didn’t need my stand light. (This was a mistake, but more on that later.)

We shifted the order of two small pieces within the suite: the chanson now comes before all the airs and dances instead of after the finale, which makes me very happy because now everything resolves nicely. Before the shift there was the massive pounding finale followed by a very gentle song, which, while lovely, kind of robbed the suite of its oomph. We had our guest mandolinist there again as well as the guest vocalist there for the first time, and the balance is lovely. I’m really enjoying this suite, the damned Passepied aside. (Although last night it worked for me — I kept up and only lost my place once instead of every three bars.)

I tried playing with a shorter pin last night, which made the cello more vertical, and there’s not as much body in the way as when the cello is more horizontal as a result of the longer endpin. It’s comfortable (at least with these particular chairs). I also played with the yet-again-remodelled bow (HRH took more off the body of the stick for me this week so it’s nice and light, although the frog is still chunkier than I’d like, not that we can do anything about it) and I was impressed by the quality of sound I was producing. Every church has really different acoustics and affects how we hear our instruments and the ensemble; this one is pleasant, but overall the orchestra has problems hearing the other sections because the strings are on two different levels. It never ceases to amaze me that it takes moving out of the cavernous auditorium in which we regularly rehearse to remind me of how badly it swallows sound.

I was the only inside cellist there last night so I was playing the lower cello line alone in one of the pieces, as compared to the three outside cellists playing the upper line. I wondered why it sounded so thin. And my cello’s nasal A string is really starting to hold me back; I have to constantly pull my weight and stroke when I use the open string, which is more work than I need to be doing. Maybe I’ll try a wolf eliminator. It can’t hurt, and it’s under ten dollars. I wonder if I can get one before dress rehearsal Friday night. Maybe I’ll go downtown tomorrow morning to my regular luthier and pick one up. I could ask them about 7/8s, too. If I get there when they open at 9h30 then I can be home by noon. Too bad I didn’t think of this before; I could have gone out this morning instead, because it’s beautifully sunny. Or maybe I’ll try the new luthier; it would take about the same amount of time to get there by public transport. I don’t know if I’m relaxed enough to try to travel somewhere new and head into an environment I know nothing about right now, though. After the book is handed in, I think.

Not only was the body clunky and fine motor control was pretty much absent (not a good thing when you have to make minute changes to balance in the right hand, although the left hand seemed to be just fine), but my body temperature plummeted about half an hour after arriving and thought processes slowed down too. By the time we got through most of the smaller pieces, I was fading fast. As a result I was only partially present for the symphony, which engendered interesting results. I managed to sail through places where I’d stumbled every single time in rehearsal, and messed up perfectly simple things. I have got to remind myself to get up and walk around at half-time. It would help give my mind a break. It’s just that I like to use the time to run through tricky bits on what we’re going to do next. (Also, as I am shyness incarnate, this way I don’t have to mingle and chat.) I strongly suspect that the ambient light, while adequate to see by, affected my not-wholly-thereness.

It really felt like I was woolly, or part of me was missing. It was slightly alarming when it came to the drive home. I was determined that the I-lost-two-hours-staring-at-a-monitor thing of the afternoon was not going to happen to me on the way home, thank you very much, so I turned the music up, held the wheel with both hands, and stared at the road directly ahead of me. Once upon a time I could drive home from t!’s house and not remember any of it, but that was okay because I was nineteen, it was the West Island, and it was around one in the morning so the roads were deserted. Highways are bad. Then of course, when I got home, I couldn’t fall asleep until midnight-thirty.

I’ll say one thing for being slightly out of it: I was much better at moving past being anxious about small mistakes. But I was so exhausted by the end of the evening that I wonder how I’ll handle Saturday night. It’s a really long programme. I’m still not convinced by the opening of the Ravel, we didn’t get to the Faure, and no matter how I angle my chair I can’t quite see the conductor, and I’m sitting in front of him. I’ll try the old raise-the-stand-an-inch trick and see if that helps. Proof that I was out of it last night: that didn’t even occur to me.

On the other hand, I really liked the tone I was producing last night. I was hitting a few strings during crossings (thanks, stupid clunky right hand), but aside from that and the nasal A string I could actually appreciate the sound. You have no idea how happy that makes me.