Category Archives: Diary

Testing The Waters

Five for five in the Roll Up The Rim to Lose! Woo-hoo!

I’m teaching my first real live workshop tonight: Designing Rituals. I was supposed to do a different one last week, but with no students, it kind of falls flat. I got a dry run when a friend offered to let me adapt that class to fit into her Saturday night program, and it was interesting, but any discussion of ethics succeeds better when there are several people to debate instead of two students who agree all the time. The student teacher ratio of one to one might have been a little imposing, too.

Wish me luck!

Cello Bits

I finally got the URL for the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra web site last night, so you can check that out. There are still some terrific pictures that have yet to go up – namely the formal “black” photo taken at our last concert in December, and the informal casual dress photo taken last November at one of our rehearsals.

I noticed again last night that the fingers on my left hand are getting black again from working on the fingerboard of my cello. While I’d love to assume that it’s due to my impassioned playing, I rather think that it’s the stain on the fingerboard starting to come off. It’s only a student cello after all. Although the last time I was at Shar in Toronto getting my strings changed, they looked at it and told me that it was a rather high quality student model – apparently it’s not plywood, its solid carved wood. When my stand-mate tried it a couple of weeks ago he exclaimed over how easy it was to get sound out of it, so I guess that dreamy, mellow, 350 year old cello I tried during the same trip to Shar which made me sound like Amanda Forsythe still isn’t a necessary replacement. Ah well.

Today is the official Drink Much In Honour Of Rob day – to Hurley’s we will go!

Significant Events

Two significant events took place yesterday:

1 – I finally had my appointment with the osteopath – hurrah! I felt so comfortable, even though a little voice in my mind kept saying, “This is a sports clinic, look at all these real sports people being treated, you’re just a tense cellist with a little curve to her spine”. My appointment lasted two hours (which made the stiff charge worth it) and there was noticeable improvement which surprised even the osteopath. It’s a wonderful treatment that involves gentle extension of the spine, loosening of the muscles adjoining the vertebrae, stretches, and so forth – less aggressive than a chiropractor. She took a whole forty minutes and talked to me about my life, my headaches, dizziness (in my case all probably connected to spinal problems – wow) and when she asked if I were active, I told her no, but curling competitively for six years as a teen probably didn’t help my back much. Turns out her brother was my first skip. Small, small world, especially when you grew up in the West Island. Unfortunately, she’s so busy that my next appointment isn’t until April! I’m on her cancellation list, though, and I’ll grab whatever comes up, even if I have to get to work late. To avoid this problem of discontinuity, I planned ahead by scheduled three more appointments scattered evenly through April and the beginning of May. Ha.

2 – Last night marked my triumphant return to the Nebula Book Club! Now in its third year, this is an intellectual and social exercise that I’ve been deprived of while I was doggedly practicing the cachucha for The Gondoliers. Now I’m back, and wow, last night really reminded me of how much I’d missed it.

Actually, there was a third significant event: I actually saw an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer that I’d seen before, thereby ending my three-month streak of discovery. It means I’m getting to the point where I started watching it semi-regularly the first time Space started the reruns. There are still tons of episodes I haven’t seen in the third season, but now I’ve got a relatively complete score-card for all the other seasons (except for the newest season, of which I’ve seen all of three episodes). I love this show – campy, yes, and very 90’s teen, but it’s well-written, has terrific characterization, and a sense of humour. Oh, an an over-arching storyline – always impressive. Other than The West Wing, it’s the only show I follow.

CURRENT READING:

When you weren’t looking, I read How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen, a short but poignant examination of what access to books and literacy in general brings people. I’m currently in the middle of Kushiel’s Dart, a rather sensual debut novel by Jacqueline Carey about the training of a courtesan-spy. I’m enjoying the first-person courtly style in which the narrator tells the story (odd, because I often have no patience in artificially elegant writing styles) as well as the varied interpretations of the ideal of love this book raises. It’s really not the type of book I usually like, so I’m quite taken aback to realise that I’m probably going to buy it in hardcover while it’s still available, and the sequel when it’s published in a couple of months too.

Expanse Of Poetry

We now have a new refrigerator. “New” in this case means “new to us”; it’s actually about eight to ten years old, possibly older. It’s huge! Being used to a five-foot high fridge with a single door that opens up to reveal a freezer unit inside, I was highly unprepared for the reality of a grown-up fridge. It has room to stand pop bottles and wine upright! And it has two freezer doors on the left – the upper one has six ice trays and boxes, the lower one has room for lots of ground beef and chicken and frozen juice. Best of all, though, is the fact that it has seperate temperature controls – I can turn the freezer temperature up high enough to keep ice cream solid while not freezing lettuce and celery in the crisper. Woo-hoo! We hosted our book club last night, and it even fit the drinks and food that guests brought over without having to take out things like salad dressings and jams (foods that don’t spoil during a single evening without refrigeration). It’s glorious!

So with this new expanse of fridge door, I’ve just spent half an hour moving around my magnetic poetry and discovering all sorts of potential hidden messages within the seemingly random mess. I adore magnetic poetry, but I think I miss the point most of the time: I see a couple of words and a whole line of poetry leaps to mind, so I search for the other words to make up the phrase and I don’t have them. I think other people use the words which are there to create unique sentences – sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure with the English language. I have two poetry sets – the original set I got for my birthday last year, and an out-of-print Hallowe’en set that I found on eBay last fall. It glows in the dark. That’s a lot of words already, but I want one more – the Shakespearean set. Maybe the Cat set too, because it has words like “purr” and “whiskers”. Just think – I could have poems like “believe and summon arms / of sweet spring / call forsooth thy knavish gods / and purr o calico creature / in worship of raw steel”. Or something equally outlandish.

Sleepover

Spring. Ha. Saturday night turned into a hurricane-type rain and wind storm, followed by baby blizzards on and off all through Sunday and a temperature high of Damned Cold. Only in Canada. More specifically, only in Montreal. I expect my mother to call any moment to tell me that the forsythia is blooming in Oakville.

I had a fantastic time on Saturday night at the slumber party. Most of the time I hang around with guys, so the last time I was at an all-female sleepover was in elementary school. It was terrific to just sit around, chatting, munching non-nutritious foods (although we used very high-quality European chocolate for the fondue which means more cocoa and less sugar, and there was a lot of fruit involved), sharing daiquiris and watching movies. We even made a montage video for the one person who was unable to attend due to pregancy complications and total bed-rest orders. We all surprised ourselves by actually staying up until five (everyone was secretly certain we’d call it a night around one), and we slept until eleven when we got up to make pancakes and bacon and tea. All in all, a wonderful experience. It’s an odd feeling to realise that I have a group of girl-friends I can hang out with as well as guy-friends. It’s not that I choose to hang out with guys over girls; it’s just that I see people as people, and spend time with interesting ones, no matter what their sex.

In other news, I have been dubbed a Forest Breeze in the Natural Wonder allotment of titles:

Not only that, in a Major Arcana multiple-choice, I came out as the High Priestess:

The High Priestess is the third card in the Major Arcana sequence and focuses on mystical knowledge, intuition, wisdom, the unconscious mind, hidden knowledge, silence, dreams, ebb and flow of movement, female mystery, and so forth.This is a card that comes up a lot for me, and it’s usually trying to tell me that I should trust myself. Ironic that this card should be the one that best describes me in an on-line test. Coincidence? Or is it conspiracy? I think the universe is laughing at me.

Spring!

Whoa! Somewhere along the past day and a half, this page received its three hundredth hit.

I’m stunned. In just under one month, people have stopped by by three hundred times to see what I’m rambling about. (And yes, I set my counter to ignore my own hits on the page.)

Wow.

In other news, damn it, it’s SPRING! We’ve thrown open all the windows, I’ve gone for a walk to buy orange juice and a paper, and now I’m sitting at the computer in a patch of cosy sunlight, breathing in the warm spring smells, listening to Mozart arias on the radio. Apparently it’s going up to 16 C today. Life is pretty good.

Tonight I’m leading a class on ethics, then I’m off to a good old-fashioned sleepover with four other women. There will be much chocolate in various forms, as all good sleepovers must have. The added bonus of adulthood means daiquiries too. Woo-hoo! Tomorrow morning we shall dawdle over silver dollar pancakes and waffles, then I’ve got a Star Wars game in the afternoon, and a book club soiree in the evening. Needless to say, this does not allow for seeing Men With Brooms, so we have plans to see it next Saturday that shall not be overturned!

CURRENT READING:

Typically, I’ve begun half a dozen things at once:

Witches & Neighbours by Robin Briggs is a socio-politico-cultural examination of the witch hunts in Europe, creating a historical context of the changing face of society in order to further understand the phenomenon of the hunts. Interesting.

Pilgrims of the Night by Lars B. Lindholm is a fun look at the ancestry of modern magical belief, Western mystery schools and esoteric practice. After looking at people like Thomas “Chip” Aquinas (you had to be there) and Agrippa, I’ve learned about John Dee (who had more money than sense, most of it apparently originating with the Philosopher’s Stone and his alchemical experiments) and Albertus Magnus (whose name means “Big Al”, and who was below average height).

Mutts Six: A Little Look-See and Mutts: Sunday Mornings by Patrick McDonnell. No one told me there was a new Mutts collection out!!

Teach Yourself HTML and XHTML. Yep. I’m trying to figure out how to create another table in this template so I can format it to have different fonts and colours so you can actually read it.

And, yes; I found Perdido Street Station, so that’s next…

IN THE DISC DRIVE:

Affairs of the Heart: Music of Marjan Mozetich (and if you don’t recognise it, it’s probably because it’s Canadian and modern).
Classic Yo-Yo: a collection of nifty bits of Ma’s recordings, about half of which I don’t have. The other half is good enough to have twice.
Yo-Yo Ma Plays the Music of John Williams: no, it’s not Star Wars on the cello. I never knew Williams had written a cello concerto, let alone an Elegy (expanded from a musical theme used in Seven Years in Tibet) or Three Pieces for Solo Cello.

Shinies

Hat trick! My Roll Up The Rim To Lose score is now three for three!

I feel sluggish. It’s the typical post-show sloth that descends upon me. Hey, run in high-performance mode after dark on top of your regular weekly activities with little sleep for over a fortnight and then see what happens to you. I’ve now overslept my alarm for three days in a row. Today is my eleven-hour shift from hell day, too. I don’t have high hopes for it: yesterday was The Day That Would Never End, and that was only nine hours. Two hours more makes all the difference when you’re in retail, working at a counselling intensive job. All I want to do is order books. Why don’t the customers just let me order books? I foresee much Coca-Cola in my immediate future. And a serious chocolate run.

I have, however, managed to see friends in the evenings for two nights running. Wait – wait, there’s a name for this… oh, right: a social life.