Category Archives: Diary

Concert Reminder!

Right! Since it’s little over a week until the first concert of the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra 2006-07 season, consider this your official notification and invitation to an evening of excellent music!

Next Saturday evening, November 18, at 19h30 (this time now confirmed) we will be presenting a wonderfully varied programme for your listening enjoyment:

Overture to “The Devil in Hydraulicus” – Schubert
Melody in F, op. 3 no. 1 – Rubenstein
Symphony no. 8 in F major – Beethoven
“Waves of the Danube” waltz – Ivanovici
Two Hungarian Dances – Brahms
“Skaters’ Waltz” – Waldteufel

Admission is $10 per person; entrance is free for those under 18 years of age. The concerts usually last a couple of hours, a bit longer if there’s an intermission.

The concert takes place in Pointe-Claire at Valois United Church, on the corner of Belmont and King. The 203 and 204 buses stop within one to three blocks away, and the Dorion/Rigaud commuter train stops at the foot of Queen. While there are general public transport directions here for you, I usually encourage people who are carless to find someone who has a car and share the cost of the driver’s admission to the concert among them. It’s more fun to enjoy the evening in the company of others. (Here’s a map for those of you who will be driving.)

Soothe the gloom of November with an evening of soul-warming music! See you there!

In Summary

Today was a dull, gloomy, very rainy day. And I ignored it all, and wrote all day long instead. The novella now stands at total of 11,174 words, which means 4,193 new words today (whee! — not that this is going to happen often). I encountered an interesting development in the form of passive-aggressive insistence from a character whom I had intended to be an old, dour, stubborn obstacle somewhere down the line insinuating herself into the storyline as a young, charming, sympathetic woman. I shall have to make the obstacle the board of governors instead.

I went to orchestra tonight feeling not as bad I generally have been feeling because I managed to get some practice in today, and it showed when I played the Beethoven. Unfortunately, I ignored the other pieces in favour of the Beethoven symphony because it’s what needed the most work, and that showed too, particularly because we played them last and my right hand has been stiff all day, so I kept fumbling the bow as well as missing fingering. Although I console myself with the fact that twice tonight, the Beethoven was so good that my throat closed up and I had to fight back a feeling of being swept away by the music.

Our principle cellist is test-driving a new cello, and she let me try it at break. Oh, it was so gentle on the fingers. I’ve been told by luthiers that my cello is remarkably easy to play, but it requires pounding and sawing in comparison to this one, which was incredibly soft and gave almost no resistance at all to fingers or bow. It felt as if it was cooperating in the creation of sound, as opposed to being played. I played a band solo on it, and some of the new sequences from the latest song we’ve been working on, and it was… well, I keep saying it over and over, so there’s no point in belabouring it: My cello was stiff in comparison. Although it made me despair somewhat, I’m glad I had the chance to play it because now I know how good a cello can be, and that’s the kind of thing I can look for when I eventually get to a point where I can seriously shop for an upgrade.

And from the file marked “Eep”, I realised tonight that we only have one more regular rehearsal before the concert date. I’m not quite sure when that happened. Possibly when the last half of October got eaten by my book deadline.

Rainy Morning In November

Another 1,700 words in the story yesterday afternoon, bringing me up to 6,981. I now know more about obscure Baroque intruments than I ever thought I’d know.

As I expected, I’m feeling a bit of resistance to working on this novella. I’m experiencing the odd double sensation of wanting to be writing because I enjoy it (when it’s flowing, of course), and not wanting to be writing because it’s work and I’m understandably rather weary of setting words down. And because I began with a vague idea and started writing to discover what happens, I don’t have an outline to fall back on to see what I should address next when I exhaust my current scene. Or rather, I have a few jotted notes that describe various events and conflicts in the story, but I need to write a bridge from where I am now to get to the first one. I’m going to put the word [bridge] in square brackets and highlight it, and then just start writing that first event today. Writing that event will give me a better idea of what needs to happen in the [bridge] section.

Today I will also practice the Beethoven at least once, hopefully twice. Yes.

New Speakers!

Oh, my goodness. A subwoofer makes all the difference. These Vivaldi cello sonatas and concertos? Positively creamy. A dark cream, but creamy nonetheless.

Liam fell asleep in the car on the way home from shopping, and I managed to not only get him out of the car without waking him up, but inside the house, into his crib, and out of his jacket. I’m feeling pretty darn smug, let me tell you. Of course, he’s going to be ravenous when he eventually wakes up, because he fell asleep before he could have his lunch, but now I have the time to fix his sandwich and potatoes without the boy having a minor meltdown about how cruel I am to keep him waiting the five minutes it takes to prepare his meal. I’ll just keep them warm. And then after lunch it’s off to visit with his godparents!

As an antidote to all that feeling smartness, I feel dumb because I can’t collapse the new umbrella stroller we used. At all. I like to think it’s jammed, but I probably just can’t remember the correct combination of push-here bend-there it requires.

A Good Day

A perfect day. Except for the cold coming back with a vengeance and settling in my chest, that is.

I turned out 3,095 words in Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro, which is shaping up to be a novelette or novella and not a story at all. It stands at 5,281 words already.

I made beef stew, which has another half-hour to go in the slow cooker, and we’ll have it with the rest of the mashed potatoes seasoned with onion and sour cream that I made for feast following yesterday’s Samhain ritual.

I walked to the post office this morning to pick up a parcel from my mother, who sent me the two books she’d promised to lend me at Christmas, a selection of magazine clippings, and imported British chocolate bars as food for the soul now that the book has been handed in.

And on top of it all, I discovered that the set of speakers and subwoofer I’d been eyeing to replace those that died this weekend is on sale this week, at 50% off the regular price.

Yes, indeed. The day’s been a very good one.

So now it’s on to delicious stew, a soothing warm bath, and reading in bed for a while.

The Writing Soundtrack

Two problems.

One: I am astonished to discover that I have next to no Vivaldi recordings. I have the ubiquitous Four Seasons and an album of double concerti (for the double cello concerto, of course), and once upon a time there was also my beloved Il Giardino Armonico The Red Priest album that was enthusiastically lent to someone (who?) the week after I got it and subsequently lost track of it, but that seemed to be it until I remembered that all my cello CDs are on a different shelf. Still, there are only two more albums of cello concerti and sonatas there. Sounds like it’s time to invest in a couple of low-budget CDs of general instrumental stuff, and the Gloria, at the least. (Naxos, you are my friend.)

Two: The speakers I’ve been using for my computer have finally died. They died an honourable death, being the first set of high-quality speakers I received with my Discman back when I was seventeenish, so they’ve been in steady use for eighteen years or so. The only problem is that my sound card doesn’t have a speaker on it, so I’ve had to hunt out my big cushiony headphones and the cable extension to reach to the port on the back of the computer tower. Working with headphones is very odd. I’m not sure if I like it or not yet.

Rest

So here I am, at eight-thirty in the morning, a cup of tea at hand and the whole day ahead of me. HRH took Liam in to daycare this morning on his way into work and will pick him up again at the end of the day, leaving me the whole day with absolutely no responsibility. I’ve wandered through the house tidying up a bit, simply appreciating the feeling of not having to do anything right away.

Liam slept through the night, with no waking sounding as if he was a harbinger of the apocalypse. As a result he slept right through to 7.30, which wasn’t part of the plan: because his pattern has been wake around three-thirty for an hour/return to sleep/wake around five-thirty or six, we were relying on him to awaken early again. The sleep did everyone good, but it meant that we started the morning an hour and a half later than we expected to. Everyone was in such a good mood that it didn’t matter, though, and it was a gift for all three of us. It felt odd to kiss the boy goodbye and watch HRH bundle him into the car and drive away, when I’m usually the one corralling and transporting him, then running errands on the way home, writing immediately when I get in, and leaving just as I’m hitting my stride during my most productive time of the day in order to pick him up again.

I deserve this. I didn’t get the break I was hoping to have back at the beginning of August when the boy started part-time daycare, the break I needed after the sequence of “book interrupted by rush book/back to original book/early baby/finish original book/full-time baby/new book”. And I’m thankful to finally have this time, the time I need and have needed for so long, to rest in different ways and to reroot myself in life.

So naturally, now that I don’t have to, now that I have time to myself… I’m drifting here to write. It’s a different kind of writing, though; it’s relaxing, and feeds a different part of me. It’s restful writing.