Author Archives: Autumn

liam speaks:

Dear Diary:

Today I pulled my mother’s hair really hard by double handfuls — twice! –, hit her, and bit her shoulder. I had two time-outs by noon-thirty. I coloured on the TV screen, and all over my train tracks. Then I threw a massive tantrum after lunch and refused to go to bed for an hour. I got some awesome screaming in, and nearly threw myself out of the crib head-first two times. She read to me to calm me down, which was great, but I only got an extra two stories.

Then the mean people next door started their ride-on mower right outside my window while I was still asleep and I woke up screaming.

But in between I’m having a good day, when I forget that I’m not.

Love, Liam

Who has my child? Because this one is so not mine.

Weekend Roundup

Saturday night was, of course, Tarasmas.

I love nights like this, when quite apart from being able to perform and watch fun radio dramas with zero preparation, I can see people I don’t get to see often enough. And yet I still managed to not exchange a single word with Kino Kid, or Mousme, or other people to whom I ought to at least have said hello. Talked to Scott about games and work and Ceri about consoles, talked writing with Sandman7 (who honoured me greatly by requesting my help with something), talked career with a much happier MLG, watched the second play with Tal and laughed and laughed, and talked work at the very end of the night with Rosy (who also honoured me greatly by suggesting that she might be open to a subcontracting arrangement).

Tarasmas was held in a new location, which I preferred to the old venue; I found it much brighter and more conducive to mingling. Excellent radio plays, as always, and hilarious interpretations by the actors who, as always, were given their scripts just before they walked on stage. Also, I wore new funky shoes: brown sueded clogs with owl appliques on them! Who knew my feet could fit in junior girls’ footwear? Certainly not me, at least not until I saw these clogs and tried them on.

HRH and I put away a bottle of white wine, half a baguette, and a block of Brie over the course of the night. Bringing it was an excellent notion. And it felt very, very good to have imbibed a glass of wine before I was on stage in the first play of the evening, another glass while on stage, and one and a half rapidly following. I’m usually very careful about what I drink and rarely have more than one glass of anything alcoholic when I’m out, often because I never feel entirely comfortable and relaxed at a party, and at home I prefer to drink non-alcoholic stuff except on rare occasions, usually social. But I felt wonderful going in on Saturday night, and my willingness to knock back half a bottle of wine evidently reflected that.

Then Sunday morning the Preston-Leblanc and Murphy-Hiscock households combined forces to conquer — er, tour — the Ecomuseum. It was the perfect autumn day for it, too, with golden sunlight and air just cool enough for a sweater or blazer, and leaves changing colour everywhere. The coyotes and the wolves were running around and playing, which is very unusual and such a treat to watch! I bought us a year-long family membership, so Liam can go see the animals any time he wants to. And we picnicked, too, although HRH and I forgot to pack a lunch for us while packing one for the boy. Later that afternoon I attended an informal bridal shower organized by one dear friend for another dear friend, and I’m so glad I could make it. I saw a different set of people I haven’t seen in ages and got to catch up a bit.

I crashed last night at 8:00 and slept right through till 7:00 this morning, with a brief half-hour waking at 5:00 when a cat knocked something off a counter.

Today’s writing jam with Mousme has been postponed, as she is otherwise engaged in switching careers. I have been ordered to be prolific.

What I Read This September

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (reread)
Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life by Julia Briggs
Vivaldi’s Venice by Patrick Barbier
Ecoholic by Adria Vasil
The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracey Chevalier
So Yesterday by Scott Westerfeld
Talk to the Hand by Lynne Truss
The Steam Magnate by Dana Copithorne
The Virtu by Sarah Monette
The Adventures of a Cello by Carlos Prieto
Marrying Mozart by Stephanie Cowell

Look, Lint!

Today’s highlight: scrubbing bathroom grout with bleach and an old toothbrush.

No, actually, I had a lovely morning out running errands with HRH and the boy, and tonight is Tarasmas.

HRH and I cleaned out the garage/basement last night. Sorted through boxes, books, clothes, the whole nine yards. Now, if we can just keep it this organized…

And a final, completely unrelated, observation: I am really loving the production design for the first His Dark Materials film.

Thursday

More orchestra goodness last night. There were times when I was reading those really high notes in the Grieg and translating them to fingers in the right place without thinking, and I caught my brain saying to itself, “Maybe you do deserve to be in the second chair.” Nothing like a very respectable performance in a cello-exposed theme to make oneself feel good: expression, intonation, and the right notes all combined to make a rather lovely sound. Although we’d worked the opening movement of the symphony for an hour leading up to the Grieg and my brain didn’t fully make the key signature shift, so I fumbled through the first go at it. I’m really enjoying how our conductor is working the music and the sections so far this season. There’s very obvious improvement by the end of each rehearsal. It’s terrific to look forward to rehearsal, and to leave feeling great.

My principal gave me a fingering she wants us to use for a particular phrase in the overture, and I kept trying to work it during break. She asked how it was going and when I said I was having trouble with the stretch for the last note she took my left arm and readjusted it, pointing out that by having my elbow so low I was ‘breaking’ the wrist and limiting the pronation of the hand. That’s something I never noticed. It’s odd how certain things stick in your mind from lessons ten years ago: I’ve always been hyper-aware of raising my right arm too much, as it was a problem I had as a beginner. Evidently after years of telling myself to keep it down, I’ve not only learned the lesson but have proceeded to overcompensate, thinking that I still make the mistake. On the way home I hit upon a good idea: if I think about holding my arms as I was trained to do in ballet, long and slightly rounded, then the arms will automatically balance and fall into the right place, with the added bonus of my shoulders both dropping and being parallel. I do wish I could take lessons every couple of weeks to get my technique back into shape. I talked to the principal and she gave me one of her cards, and told me not to worry, in a couple of years the boy and I could have lessons together! I love that idea. Suzuki method it may be, but going back to basics in any method can’t hurt. And I like the idea of being able to participate in a lesson with Liam: it’s less like work for both of us that way, and more like fun. More motivation to set aside practice time, too. I joked about setting up a tip jar on the floor between our stands and dropping a quarter in it every time I ask her a question or she gives me a tip about playing in general.

Also, it should not have been that hot and humid yesterday. Four days before October. Just wrong.

More laundry today. It felt like my whole day evaporated yesterday what with the late start in the morning, dropping the boy off, driving HRH to a job downtown and then running my errands. I had two hours to work at home and do two loads of laundry before I had to leave and pick the rest of the family up, then do the usual evening things before leaving for orchestra. This sample edit I’m working on is hard to wrap my brain around because there’s so much to do with it, and as it’s a sample I’m doing it for free to demonstrate to the writer how we might work with one another. I’ve got to limit the time I spend on it as a result, but it does need a lot of thought and analysis, and I want to edit it in two different ways to illustrate the choice of direction the writer has. Above and beyond that I have to transcribe the work, which is atypical in every way and so I have to keep rechecking what I’m typing to make sure it actually matches the original. Fascinating stuff, but time-consuming.

The boy is napping. Time to do more laundry. Then I won’t have enough time to get into that edit, so I may do some research on Baroque instruments (no, it’s for the Vivaldi novel; I’m not pining for yet another instrument. I think playing the cello and the fretless bass, plus planning for a double bass sometime in the next five years and wishing for a harpischord is more than enough). I’ve started telling myself it’s okay to not turn on the main computer on days where I’m not working, so I sit down with the laptop instead to mess about reading news and doing research, and it feels more relaxing, less rushed.

Right. Laundry.

Foiled

I did a bunch of running around this morning. Finally picked up the sheet music to an Arvo Part piece that Sandman7 and I are considering playing together, and picked up a CD of Boyce symphonies because I enjoyed playing the first one so much last season. I also came home with Edgar Meyer’s recording of three of the solo cello suites by Bach (2, 1, and 5, if you’re curious), played on a double bass. I am so glad I have a subwoofer wired into my computer system. The volume isn’t up very high but already the lowest notes are making the window and things on my altar on the other side of the room rattle. Much is my love for Edgar Meyer. Also, much is my admiration: the intervals, stretches and shifts are murderous on a bigger instrument like the double bass, and he’s managed to make it all sound liquid. I would love to hear it played live in a church. (Now I want a double bass even more.)

The main reason for going out, however, was to get HRH’s anniversary present… which was not available. Well, one kind was available, but it was much too expensive for something of lower quality. Argh! Looks like I will have to resort to a much less exciting alternate option, which he pointed out to me in passing this morning. I could have driven to a different shop much further north in the city, but I have a sample edit to begin working on today, and there’s no guarantee the item would be available there either. (No, I can’t call, because it’s a look-at-various-ones-and-evaluate kind of thing.) Maybe for Yule.

There was also an astonishing lack of Glenn Gould recordings available, considering the anniversary year this is. I could have bought remastered recordings of two things I already own, but I’m not that obsessive.

Now, to work.