Category Archives: Diary

In Which She Natters About Cello Stuff, With A Side Of Diary

It’s confirmed: we’re trying out a third conductor tonight! And I am very happy because there was a bit of kerfuffle about memberships dues not covering what this conductor requested as his fee, but the majority of members were okay with paying a supplement to obtain his services for this concert. If we decide he’s the one for us then membership fees will go up, and I’m perfectly fine with that; we pay a ridiculously low fee as it is, and more than doubling it only brings us to ten dollars per month the orchestra plays each year. If he’s as good as his reputation suggests he is, we’d be getting a real deal. Also, audiences would increase because of his affiliation with other musical events and organisations, and our recruiting of new members would also increase. There’s a lot of potential here.

Apparently we are playing Schubert’s third symphony as the main course for the July concert. So naturally, while looking for audio reference, I discovered that I own only the first, second, and fourth symphonies. I went away and thought about it for a while, then remembered that I’d bought a full six-symphony set the last time we did a Schubert symphony (the fifth?), because the set was less expensive than a single CD with the fifth on it. I had to hunt it out, though. It wasn’t with my other Schubert CDs. I blame the boy, who used to pull CDs out and then reshelve them in interesting new places. I checked my records and apparently I’ve played Schubert’s third before. I have no memory of it, but then, it was in 2003, which was six years ago. However I played it then, chances are rather good that I’ll play it much better now.

I am so very excited to be working with this conductor.

I dragged myself out of the maudlin cold-heavy apathy yesterday to go down town for a meeting about this meditation recording gig. I now have the equipment and some reference DVDs to inspire my delivery of the script. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I came home in a better mood than I’d left, and feeling much healthier, too. I practised not once but twice, the second time with a strict metronome set at ruthless performance speed. I uploaded vacation photos. I opened windows (HRH took the plastic off the front living room Wall of Glass, huzzah!). I made a delicious pot of chicken cacciatore (for some reason, there are never any leftovers). And I set up the breadmaker to start its thing at three in the morning so we’d all have fresh bread at breakfast (because I forgot to make it the regular way yesterday and there wasn’t enough time for me to make it last night before I passed out).

Today: Recording, laundry, celloing, doing something with the shoulder roast that’s defrosting. I can’t even remember if it’s beef or pork (it’s from the organic farmers, so doesn’t have a label beyond ‘shoulder roast’), although I suspect it is pork.

And shh, don’t make any sudden moves: I’ve actually been starting to think about Orchestrated with more interest again. The month away from it killed my momentum. I’m not sure whether to print the first draft out and read it while making notes longhand, or just go back to the beginning of the file and start work. I may just print out the first two chapters, as those are the ones that need the most rearranging.

Back

Lovely Easter weekend with my parents. I am now ill, of course. The boy left with what we thought were allergies on Friday and arrived there with a cold, so naturally I caught it, and have it worse than he did. Add to that the general malaise my body experiences after two six-hour car rides within four days, and you have a very unhappy me. We almost kept the boy home from school today but decided against it, and I’m so thankful. Not only do I have a work meeting downtown at 12:30, I’m wiped (see above re. sick and fibro-related backlash from the weekend) and suspect I wouldn’t be able to handle him on my own with much success.

The boy’s monthly post should have gone up on the weekend but it wasn’t finished, and I’m scrambling to handle more pressing stuff, so as much as I’d like to do that today it won’t happen.

A brief summary of the weekend: Much broken sleep for all three of us, successful clothes shopping on Saturday afternoon, coffee out with Fey of The Dark Side of Fey podcast and her husband on Saturday night (much excellent discussion of spirituality and community and such things, she’s a girl after my own heart and I adore her), taking a trip to see the local flock of trumpeter and mute swans Sunday morning, time with family and a lovely roast beef dinner on Sunday afternoon, taking the 407 toll highway home to avoid the 401 through Toronto (o 407 how we love thee, we shall never ever forsake thee despite thy toll).

I wish it was a day where I could get away with just lying on the chesterfield with a box of Kleenex, a book, and a cat, but the real world calls.

Good Celloing

I just had an hour-long rehearsal with my duet partner that went quite encouragingly well. I recorded the session with the MiniDisc, and have now spent an hour struggling with the transfer. The first time I had the levels set too high so the bass warped everything. The second one I did was too low and had odd clicking/crackly sounds throughout it. Third time’s the charm, yes?

Beyond the somewhat argh-ness of the transfer, the entire experience was great. We bumped up the speed each time we played it through, which I was very thankful to do; I like playing it faster than I do in lessons. When we get it going at 104mm, it’s great. We both seem to have the same instinct of when to bring the pace down a notch and when to reassert the original tempo, too, which is a good thing. Apart from the usual missed notes and wrong fingers, I’m very impressed with the recording. We’re doing a great job. Considering the fact that this is the first time we’ve played it together, I’m all the more encouraged. Listening to the recording is interesting; I can’t tell who is who a lot of the time. I mean, I know what bits I play, but if I’m not concentrating I can’t tell which cello is producing the theme or the accompaniment at any given point. Which means the balance is good. And we had fewer problems than I expected; we listened to one another quite well.

Just before she arrived the postperson dropped off the box of cello goodies I won from Emily and Benning Violins! I had to leave it sitting there on the table while we played. I opened it while I was transferring the recording, and here is a photographic record, as promised to various cello players in the blogosphere!

The box of cello goodies!

The very cute little box! Emily drew little cellos and notes and bass clefs on the other side.

The open box of cello goodies...

The contents!

The contents, unpacked.

The contents, unpacked! There’s peg lubricant, polish, a microfibre cleaning cloth, the Larsen A, and a brand-new cake of Gustave Bernardel rosin. It is perhaps somewhat sad that I am very excited about the microfibre cleaning cloth. I needed a new one. I’m very excited about the rosin too, of course (the idea of spending fifteen dollars to try a new cake of rosin is alien to me), and hey, a Larsen A! But evidently all it takes is a nice blue cloth to make my day. I’m a simple creature. Thank you, Emily! I will think of you every time I swipe my bow with the rosin or clean off the cello.

Aha; on the fourth transfer I have established proper levels and volume, and there are no pops or clicks. A little voice has piped up inside my head and says, You know, the Mac Mini will come with Garage Band! This will be very exciting! I wonder if I can link my microphone directly into the extended-loan iBook to record my part for my partner to practise against, even though it doesn’t have GarageBand on it. Hmm. Worth messing about with next week. If not, the MiniDisc-to-computer it is.

And to top it all off, I have a lesson tonight. I’m looking forward to it, especially now that I’ve listened to the recording (multiple times) and know what bits really need work, and what places my partner and I will have to listen to one another extra-hard.

Damned Work Ethic

So the plan to not work didn’t happen. I’ve edited two stories, both needing a decent amount of work for various reasons (one was a first draft, one was shoehorning an already excellent 10K document into 2K words; my head justifiably hurts).

Made bread. Should probably eat lunch, although it’s almost four o’clock and I haven’t even thought about what to feed myself, let alone what to do about dinner.

Received the FedEx box with half a dozen photo albums inside it that document my general life from birth through marriage. Very odd. I saw pictures of people I haven’t seen in years, and realised that I don’t even own a photo of my paternal grandfather who passed away over twenty years ago. (Well, I didn’t until this morning, that is.) I ‘m looking forward to sharing the early albums with the boy, the ones of me as a baby and up to around five. The ones of me from about age eleven through sixteen make me cringe, but meh; part and parcel of my past. Some good haircuts, some bad. Particularly bad first pair of glasses when I was in something like grade four. (It was the eighties; I need say no more.) Lots and lots of Christmas morning pictures from various years. Bad t-shirt/shorts/kneehigh socks combos. Adorable handmade party dresses for the under-ten parties. I was fascinated to see photos that I dimly remembered, but remembered slightly differently. It was also interesting to see how my grandmother had labelled the photos. She assigned my CEGEP grad to high school, for example, which amuses me because all the photos she took of my high school graduation were lost since she hadn’t taken the lens cap off the camera. I’ll have to slip a note under the plastic for Posterity’s sake.

Today I landed a local recording gig for a self-published meditation CD set. That will be done next week after I come back from our Easter jaunt. Speaking of the Easter jaunt, today I also arranged a coffee date with a somewhat well-known podcaster that is partially personal and partially work-related, to happen Saturday night. We need to work out an actual interview arrangement for sometime soon, too.

I really need to walk away from the computer now.

Brief Weekend Roundup

I am effectively dead. I am calling in Not Living today, because that’s about as useful as I can manage to be. Work will happen tomorrow.

Friday: Excellent day running around with the boy. Dinner with Tal and Kris, which consisted of much laughter, wine, delicious food, and OMG Battenberg cake, which I have not in forever, or at least since Marks and Sparks abandoned the colonials closed their Canadian shops. Awful night of not-exactly-sleep where I am very, very ill for some reason.

Saturday: Resting in bed with tea until I decide I am able to get up and drive safely. Excellent cello lesson. Visit to the mall to pet the Easter farm animals. Scored a secondhand copy of Lego Star Wars for the Xbox, and a secondhand controller which is red so I will play better. Lunch out consisting of hot dogs and fries, as I had promised the boy. After nap, we all head out to the south shore so I can drop by the luthier and renew the rental of the 7/8 cello for two more months. Then all three of us play our new video game, and the boy is quite good at figuring out what’s what. We end the day by watching the Deserts episode of Planet Earth.

Sunday: Summer tires put on the car. I make my first homemade tourtière. After nap we head out to have a home-hosted sugaring off meal with excellent friends and many children. Everyone eats too much breakfast-style food drenched in maple syrup. I think the tourtière is too dry and kind of wishy-washy on the seasoning, but everyone else claims it’s awesome. (Next time I’m doubling the sage and cloves, not boiling off as much of the broth, and using a different pastry recipe.) After the boy’s in bed HRH and I head out for our once-monthly steampunkian-horror game, which was most excellent. I got nine more rows of the lap blanket done. (It’s the only knitting I’m getting done at all, and only during this game.)

Which brings us to today, where I feel lethargic and achy. The damp weather doesn’t help.

My mother has informed me that the FedEx shipment I missed is not in fact my cello goody bag, but a box of photo/scrapbook albums she and my dad shipped to me from my grandmother’s apartment in Vancouver when they went out to visit her last week. I’m looking forward to seeing them.

Figures

The boy’s hair has been cut, I have paid a slew of bills (my poor bank account, at least it was flush for twenty-four hours), we have new books, there is a new Hot Wheels fire truck, and of course I missed a FedEx delivery while we were out. When do I get FedEx deliveries? Never. Well, not entirely true; two of my sets of author’s copies arrived by FedEx in the past. As I’m not expecting anything like that, however, I’m guessing that it’s the cello goody bag I won, but I won’t know till Monday. At least, FedEx says they’ll come back on the next business day, which I am assuming is Monday in their world as in mine. Woe. I would have liked to have opened a parcel today. Especially a parcel with surprises in it.

In half an hour or so I’ll start the dough for the rolls I’m making for tonight. I may make a double batch and freeze one set.

Yes, that’s about as exciting as it gets today. It’s damp. I’m going to go find a cat and an afghan.

Win!

Hello, spring!

Good Things of the Day So Far:

1. The exchange rate. Hello, an extra twenty-three cents to every American dollar I just deposited into my bank account!

2. SUN! I had to take off my scarf and then my velvet jacket while running my errands. The sunroof was opened, the car window was rolled down. All the house windows are now open as well. I’m wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt for the first time in, oh, months. Also for the first time in months, I am not cold.

3. I have daffodils that I bought from the Cancer Society! So many that they all don’t fit in my little Caithness vase!

4. A stack of new library books. Om-nom-nom.

5. Not one but two pairs of leather shoes purchased at Winners: a pair of plain black Rockport Mary Jane flats, and a pair of taupe Clarks casual Mary Jane heels. (Curiously, the heels are more comfortable than the flats.) I paid less for the two together than I’d have paid for either of them separately. SCORE! (Of course, taupe isn’t my thing; I’m kind of, heh, neutral about it. I intend to have them dyed, I just can’t decide on black or brown. Because, well, CLARKS, and holy cats they’re comfy.)

And finally:

6. The anthology ms. has already been approved. The request for my delivery cheque was just put in. HOW COOL IS THAT?

Yeah. A good day so far.