Category Archives: Words Words Words

Bow Woes

Last night was the last rehearsal of the first third of the LCO season, and the first sight-reading rehearsal for Gounod‘s first symphony, which very few of us know. It’s going to be very pretty. We now have six weeks off.

And because the universe works on the principle of synchronicity and checks and balances, when I went to pack a second back-up bow in my cello case last night I decided to take my heavy viola bow that I bought a couple of years ago to use as a light cello bow, instead of the heavy off-balance cello bow. And I found that the viola bow is broken, too: the ferrule has snapped off the little plate that lines the underside of the frog, where there’s a little tab that slots into the ferrule. It can no longer be tightened.

Augh!

(In case anyone else is keeping score, that’s two bows broken out of three, and one bow too wonky to use except in emergency (or in case of the Ramones or Metallica). I do have a 3/4 fibreglass bow with zero responsiveness that came with my cello when I bought it from its previous owner; I may have to drag that out to use until my main bow gets properly fixed.)

There really isn’t much point in buying a new bow right now, as I seriously want to start testing new advanced cellos late next spring (payment upon delivery of current book + HRH theoretically will have a permanent job with steady income = money that can be divided between investment and cello), and a bow that suits this cello won’t necessarily suit a more advanced one. Of course, it’s not that I’m planning to buy a cello next year, just to start researching and testing with luthiers, a process that can take ages until I find something really responsive with the tonal colour I like, all in my price range.

Except now I’m working with a main bow that has a cracked frog, one back-up bow that’s broken and unusable, and another back-up bow that has bad balance and hurts my hand as I try to control it. It looks like I’ll have to call my luthier and ask how much it is to replace a frog on a basic no-frills bow.

Thinking It Through

I wasn’t there, but reliable sources say this exchange happened last night while reading Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse at bedtime:

BOY: Mouse.

HRH: Yes.

BOY: [LOOKS AT NEXT PICTURE] Mices. Two mices.

HRH: Almost! When there’s just one, it’s a mouse. When there are two, they’re called mice.

BOY: Two mice.

HRH: Yup.

[NEXT PAGE]

BOY: One mouse… two mice.

HRH told me that it was incredible to sit there and watch Liam recognise that there should be a collective term for several of one kind of thing, and extrapolate it from a word he’d heard us use. “Language development is so mind-blowing,” he said. “I am so the wrong person to be teaching him this.” Which isn’t true, of course, but points to how overwhelming it can be to observe a small creature learn like this.

Random Acts of Kindness

My darling little sister, who is reading my next book in MS form, just sent me a lovely e-mail telling me she got tingles from reading the opening sentences, and voila, my day is better. Thanks, love.

Also, I have remembered that work =/= writing all the time, and am reading a second-hand well-used copy of Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane. A page in and boom, the highlighter is out, and the sticky bookmarks, my notebook is revving up, and my brain is moving.

I still have to leave in forty minutes, though.

Gnarr

An hour and a half round trip to drop the boy off this morning, thanks to piles of snow in the road and idiots driving on them who can’t wait their turn or remember how to drive in snow. The round trip usually takes thirty-five to forty minutes, including drop-off time. I came straight home rather than run the errands I need to run because otherwise I’d only have walked through the door around noon. I am having to reinitialize all my parking-in-snowbanks and pulling-out-of-snowbanks skills that have lain dormant for ten months.

After handling correspondence and news, lunch (important because I have missed breakfast and lunch the past two days), laundry, a call from the bank to discuss things, and so forth, it is now QUARTER TO THREE and I haven’t even gotten to Real Writing Work yet.

It’s that kind of day. I’ve lost so much momentum since last Wednesday, which is the last day I got to work at all. I wish I was motivated. This is one of those days where being a writer is more work than any other job I’ve held.

I’m going to have to leave forty-five minutes early to get through the idiocy and pick the boy up too, so if I hit a groove I’ll to have to jump out of it before I want to. It is so very tempting to say ‘to hell with it all’ and go play the DS instead. But I’ll still have to think of something to make for dinner.

That freelance cheque can arrive any time now, thanks. Money would make things marginally better.

They’re putting up reindeer, And singing songs of joy and peace…

Not dead, just run-off-my-feet busy. I haven’t sat down at the computer in days.

Over the last twenty-four hours there has been lots of snow. Official reports vary, but according to our backyard we’re looking at around eighteen inches. It’s stopped, but we’re due to get about fourteen more centimetres tomorrow. (How very Canadian: Imperial and Metric describing accumulation in the same paragraph.)

The boy stayed home today and HRH took the car in to work after spending an hour and a half shovelling the driveway. For those who have inquired, no, HRH did not get the snow day that most elementary and high schools got. CEGEPs don’t close unless something traumatic has occurred on campus. He’s out there shovelling again now.

This morning I wrestled the boy into his snowpants (“No, no , no Mama, no snowpants”) and coat and hat and mitts and boots and scarf, and myself in tights under jeans and legwarmers over that (a lucky and unexpected find in the winter accessories box) and my old snow coat, and opened the back door for him. Liam was decidedly unimpressed with this deep snow thing. He kept falling over and flailing in a swim-like fashion, then rolling over on his back to look up at me and say, “Help, Mama, I am stuck” in that funny precise way he has of speaking. We fell over in the backyard for half an hour before coming in and shedding piles of snow-covered clothing on the kitchen floor and drinking hot chocolate. Like me, he thinks the hot chocolate is the best part. I am all about the apres-ski.

Friday night I went to a cello quartet concert with someone from orchestra, and it was absolutely phenomenal. It was one of those evenings where I was reminded of why I chose the instrument I did, and also mildly despair-inducing in that it made me feel that it was completely useless to even try because I can never play like they can. (Granted, they all had at least two music degrees each and played in pro symphonies. But still.) I really appreciated the evening, because not only was it the first time I’d attended a live music performance since May, but it was at my orchestral colleague’s invitation to share her double pass. It was great to have a night out with someone I don’t know very well but with whom I have things in common. I thoroughly enjoyed her company.

Late Saturday afternoon we went out to have dinner with Ceri and Scott, and this marked the first official Taking Liam Out To Dinner at a Friends’ House With No Other Kids. We all had a fabulous time. Liam was very well-behaved apart from the not-at-all-subtle exploring of rooms and the joyous chasing of cats, who mostly (meaning any cat who was not Tybalt) didn’t seem to mind and even let him pick them up and carry them around (I don’t know who was the most surprised when he walked in holding Miho). He ate surprisingly well, too, which I hadn’t expected, although it was hard not to enjoy the food as the meal was one of the best I’ve had in a while. (Liam seems to have decided peas in a pod are the current vegetable to be defined as Dalishious, replacing the chopped and frozen parsley he had dubbed Dalishious a few days previous.) I made a chocolate espresso pecan pie for dessert, which immediately made my Make This Again and Often list when we tasted it. We all had so much fun that we didn’t check the time until eight o’clock, at which point HRH and I scooped the child up and fled, expecting disastrous things to ensue with his schedule. Going to bed two hours later than usual didn’t seem to completely mess him up: there were no mid-night wakings, I got him back to sleep when he woke up at 5:15 the next morning with minimal fuss, we all got another two hours of sleep, and the only other effect seems to have been the boy being slightly whiny over the past two days. Not something we want to do on a regular basis, of course, but we’re very impressed at how he handled it. We wish we could have stayed longer, of course.

I spent a lot of the weekend baking, because Sunday was a cookie-exchange day. Bearing ten dozen oatmeal cookies, I spent a lovely afternoon with friends and acquaintances and snuggled with Tallis while chatting with some other mums. Liam cried a lot over the weekend when he’d try to scoop a cookie off the cooling rack and was told he wasn’t allowed because they weren’t ours, but the delight on his face when I unloaded all the new cookies once I’d come home from the party was proof that the cookie-denial was all forgiven. (Besides, he’d already stolen four of mine from the first batch out of the oven. It wasn’t like I didn’t let him have any at all.)

I like to wait as long as possible before breaking out the Christmas albums, but after watching the however many feet of snow fall today I put on Holly Cole’s Baby, It’s Cold Outside, Diana Krall’s Christmas Songs, and Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong while making supper.

I have piles of e-mail to handle, but that will get done tomorrow morning.

It was a very long day. I’m going to turn out the light now.