I’m sitting third chair again, as our missing section member is back after a half-season off. I miss second chair a bit because I learned so much from sitting with the principal cellist, but I won’t miss the feeling of being on the spot every week.
What was waiting on my music stand: Handel’s Water Music suite (which we played remarkably well for sight-reading; it helped everyone ease back into the swing of things after a couple of weeks off); Haydn’s 99th symphony (E flat major, a frustrating key for me because for some reason I only remember to flatten half of the A notes when I play it); a double violin concerto from Vivaldi’s Estro Armonico (hurrah, Vivaldi!); and a symphony by William Boyce, whom I knew was an English Baroque composer but not much more than that.
It is a wry truth in my house that whenever I have a new Haydn symphony to play, I don’t own a recording to help me familiarise myself with it. He wrote over a hundred of them. I own thirty, with two recordings of the 94th. With our tendency to play the later symphonies and my personal preference for that era of Haydn’s symphony-writing career, one would expect that I would have a good chance of owning whatever symphony we’re to play. But no: every time we begin a new Haydn symphony I have to track a new recording down. This is by no means a hardship; I enjoy Haydn immensely. It’s simply become a sort of running joke. (If you’re a geek and wondering: 1 through 20, 82, 83, 85, 92, 94 (twice), 96, 100, 101, 103, and 104. 80, 81, and 99 will soon join them. I love Naxos.)
As usual, I was simultaneously impressed and frustrated by my sight-reading. Overall I’m not bad, but when I lose the music I’m jarred out of the zone and never quite get back on top of things. Also, it was cold, so no one’s fingers were in top form. For once, I remembered to put my glasses on at the beginning of the night. I hate the folding chairs we have to use in the auditorium; I did something to my hip at the beginning of last weekend and it started acting up again last night after finally healing. I might finally have to look into a wedge cushion for proper support. Folding chairs are evil for cellists because they slope backwards and we have to sit forwards, so there’s a lot of stress placed in the lower back. If you’ve ever taken a really good look at how I sit in concert (yeah, right) you’ve seen that I angle the chair so that I sit on a corner of the seat. It hurts less, because the corners are relatively flat.
Also: Last night we got the numbers for the monies collected at the Messiah for charity. Are you ready for this?
There were two charities. Each charity got over $1700.
Yes, I blinked a lot too. That means the performance brought in almost $3500. How incredible, and absolutely wonderful.
Orchestra begins again tonight.
The plan to “choose silence” and not waste energy on energy-absorbing things that don’t support a healthy mental and emotional environment continues apace. This means, by extension, that my commenting in general is going to decrease. If you’re one of my regular reads, it isn’t that I’m not reading your thoughts; I’m just not saying anything unless I can say something meaningful and say it right. One of my goals is to cut down on idle conversation, because I’ve observed lately by listening to others that it (a) consumes energy that can be better directed elsewhere, and (b) very often creates negative energy that gets spread around. And combating negative energy means using up yet more energy, perpetuating a vicious cycle. I want to spend more time thinking about the words I use, and that doesn’t make for very efficient light conversation. I’m also trying to cut down on the amount of negative energy I encounter, to further reduce the amount of stress in my life.
The weekend was less stressful than I expected, probably because I made the conscious choice to be alone, to focus on me and my thoughts instead of getting caught up in idle conversation. (Or, in the words of another on-line journaler, I “chose silence”. 
‘Other news’, of course, being news wherein I do not obliquely express an unhealthy desire for a majority of the planet’s population to vanish. After the last post, I didn’t want to leave you all wondering what had happened to me over the weekend, as I’m going away and won’t be journaling. I wish I could say it was on a mini vacation, but it isn’t. So I hereby provide you with a short recap of what I did while Liam napped:
For the second day in a row our water has been turned off. I couldn’t give Liam a bath again. I have piles of today’s dishes by the sink. I’d planned to do Liam’s laundry tonight. If we need to go to the bathroom we’ll have to knock on the neighbours’ door. Why? Because the downstairs neighbour tried to use her washing machine last night, knowing that the connection was jerry-rigged yesterday to temporarily stop the leak that had been going on for some time. (But whenever a puddle would appear in our garage, it was, “No, nothing’s wrong in my apartment”. Why she chose New Year’s Eve to call the landlord and tell him about this ongoing problem, I will never know.) The jerry-rigged plug was jarred loose, and there’s water all over the garage floor again. HRH checked it, and sure enough, using the washer had broken the temporary seal and water was leaking once more. The only way to stop it was to turn off the main water. The landlord’s back and trying to fix it now.
I am currently doing my best to avoid working. So far it seems to be successful, because now I only have an hour and fifteen minutes left before I have to get ready to leave for lunch with Lady Roo.