Category Archives: Links

Sharing

One thing I love about the Internet (hello, Internet!) is that it’s good for sharing stuff with millions of people you’ve never met.

Allow me to share some music with you.

I discovered Philip Sheppard almost exactly two years ago. He’s a cellist and a very talented composer. I used to have his MySpace page open while I worked on other things so I could listen to his posted tracks on an endless loop. I got other people hooked, too, muah-hah-hah.

Now he’s posting more and more tracks, some free to download as mp3s, others embedded within his web site. As a start, visit this page to listen to a selection of his haunting piano pieces. A handful of free mp3s for download can be found here. There are other embedded pieces of various styles scattered throughout the site’s pages, too, as well as a free download of sheet music for his lovely Crystallized Beauty theme, arranged for two pianos.

Enjoy!

@PhilipSheppard
Radiomovies (Philip Sheppard’s official blog and web site)
Philip Sheppard’s MySpace page

Weekend Roundup

Good morning, Internets. It was a busy weekend.

Friday afternoon: Finish printing the ms. and start reading through it with a pen in hand. It does not suck as much as I’d feared. I suspect I’ll throw out about fifteen pages, or at least fit the info in elsewhere (probably in dialogue with someone). It’s the kind of thing that was necessary for me to write to understand where things were coming from, but not necessary for the reader.

Friday night: Awesome cello lesson. I’m getting it.

Saturday morning: HRH dismantles the upper bunk of the boy’s bed (AKA the tree fort, where a lot of the boy’s playthings are stored) in preparation for a new shelving/storage system to be put at the foot of his bed. Then, IKEA! As soon as the store opens, when there is still parking by the door and almost no one inside. The boy requests the ball room, and we sign him in for the first time and head off to reconnoitre on our own, feeling vaguely like we’re skipping school or something like that. The shelving unit and bins we are here to pick up are actually in stock. We collect the boy, who has a bump on his head from running into someone round the corner of the play structure. He has a mild breakdown when he is informed that it’s time to go. (Sign of Things Having Gone Well: floods of tears when it’s over.) Off to Best Buy so HRH can pick up yet another cell phone and a copy of 101 Dalmatians on DVD. We stop by the bookstore and buy two books for the boy, then bring home hot dogs and fries to eat while we watch the film.

Saturday afternoon: I stumble to the bedroom with a suspiciously threatening pain in my head, and nap after taking some headache candy. The boy does not nap, although HRH convinces him to have quiet time in his room for an hour or so. I take more headache candy. When the edge of what has revealed itself to be a migraine has been taken off, we head out to our goddaughter’s seventh birthday party, which she has planned as a singalong for family. With the help of a glass of wine, I enjoy myself more than I’d cautiously expected to. The boy makes new friends with the children of an old friend of mine (we are all touched when the two youngest hug gently before leaving). This old friend, another scion of an ex-pat UK family, gives me a roll of Polos and a Cadbury Flake, making me squeal.

Saturday night: Major discovery! I can eat the Cadbury Flake without having an allergic reaction to the chocolate! This further confirms my suspicion that the sensitivity responds to the proportion of cocoa solids to butter/cream/other stuff. Alas, dark chocolate; I loved you well, but circumstances force me to turn to milk chocolate for comfort and indulgence.

Sunday morning: HRH and the boy assemble the shelving system and slide the bins into it. It’s terrific. We watch 101 Dalmatians for the second time in less than 24 hours. Good thing it’s still among my top three favourite Disney films today, and was my very favourite while growing up. HRH heads out to do a landscaping consultation for Ceri and Scott, and the boy and I go along to make use of the play structure. There is soccer and much swinging and sliding and finding of bugs and playing a new game called “the running around the trees game.” (I told you, my almost-four year old is terribly original when it comes to naming things.) The boy learns the valuable lesson of the necessity of holding on to the chains of a swing while you’re at the apex of your arc.

Sunday afternoon: The boy naps for just under two hours. Wiktory! He heads out to help HRH in the garden, expanding the vegetable plot, turning compost into the soil, watering the plants, and so forth. I head out for my monthly group cello lesson where we work on ensemble pieces for the upcoming recital. For some reason I can’t get comfortable with the length of my endpin or the angle of my cello. I blow stupidly easy shifts when I’m playing solo (naturally). Moral of the story: Revisit your ensemble pieces regularly, even if the last time you played them they were easy and note-perfect.

Sunday evening: Dinner is leftover roast beef (yes, the mystery roast was beef, and oh ye gods it was tender and delicious), sliced and stir-fried with mushrooms, done in a cream mushroom gravy, served over wild rice. (“Oh-oh, this rice is bad,” says the boy, picking out the black ones. We reassure him that it’s not, that it’s special rice. He nibbles it and says, “Oh, yes! It is good!”) The beef is just as delicious the second time. And there’s enough for one more meal, too.

I woke up a lot last night. Not the best night of sleep.

Today: More editing, and finally doing the last bit of hunting for exchange rates that I need to finish up the taxes.

Potpourri

The monthly post about the boy is up and backdated.

First rehearsal with the new test conductor last night, and what fun. He had us playing the Schubert passably in pretty much no time at all. He’s younger than I thought (by quite a bit) and an oboist. We were missing an oboe so he pulled his out and wandered around playing the oboe theme while conducting. It was mildly alarming to have an oboist wander at you at various points, but it certainly encouraged each section to play out when they were supposed to. He greeted us in French and talked to us equally in both languages, which impressed us. I already like his musicality and his personality. There were grumpy people making their grumpiness known, but that’s not unusual, alas.

Best news of the night: One of the pieces he’s considering programming is Ralph Vaughn Williams’ English Folk Song suite! I bounced in my chair with excitement. (Otherwise I sat there in mild pain, because the particular chair I was in slanted nastily toward the back. Ugh. Time to look into one of those firm wedge cushions.)

I need to do two more takes of six brief sections of dialogue for this recording, then I’m going to hook it all up to the computer and listen to it. I’ve already noted which takes I need to delete because of an error on my part or noise interference (like helpful cats scratching or jumping up onto my desk and scattering papers). I fervently hope everything’s okay, because if not I have to do the whole thing over twice tonight once the boy’s in bed, and I don’t do work after the boy’s in bed very well. The boy and I are headed downtown tomorrow morning to ride on the underground train to hand this in.

This morning’s excitement included being addressed by a policeman, who pulled up next to my car while I was unlocking it after dropping the boy off. How long had I been there, he wanted to know, and was I not aware that I wasn’t allowed to park on this side of the street between nine and four? I blinked, looked at the signage, and pointed out respectfully that the signs indicated that motorists were supposed to park here between nine and four on a Thursday, and that in fact all the cars on the opposite side of the street were parked illegally. He looked at the signs, looked back at me, said, “T’as raison, j’ai mal identifié le côté de la rue,” and gave me a huge grin. I laughed and wished him a good day. There was such a difference between his neutral opening words and the tone of his reply to me. He must encounter argument and abuse pretty much regularly, so to have someone correct him politely must be quite a novelty. He gave me another huge grin once his partner had turned the car around and was headed back down the hill toward all the illegally parked cars. I think I made their day.

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.

And In Completely Unrelated News…

This morning, while I was composing the very-difficult-to-write post about my newfound chocolate sensitivity, I received word that I won a year’s subscription to Strings magazine plus a $100 gift basket from an LA luthier for a 250-word contest entry I wrote on Emily Wright’s online teaching technique via her cello blog.

Whee!

This was especially nice, because I didn’t do it for the prize; I did it because Emily was looking for an idea of how readers interpret her lessons and approach. Of course, the prize is really quite nice too, because who wouldn’t want a goodie bag of cello-related stuff? (Er. Anyone who is a cellist, that is. I have no idea what most of you would do with such a thing. No, wait, yes I do: You’d give it to me!) The subscription is timely because I was going to have to let my subscription to Strings lapse this fall; it’s too expensive for me right now.

So. Yes. What a lovely surprise.

And I really need to get back to the taxes. I hadn’t made much of a start when I came back for a break, and then the chocolate post took longer than I expected.

Suspiciously Cheerful

Suspicious because I shouldn’t be this happy and/or laid back this close to a deadline. I should be more focused on what I’m doing. But it’s sunny outside and there is no more snow (well, other than the edges of the backyard), and I got my third lovely surprise yesterday: a small bouquet of tulips from my boys.

Today I’ve been researching Mac Minis. I had to walk away from my desktop yesterday because it was (a) loud and (b) connected to the Internet. I tried to use my Dell laptop and it was even louder than the desktop. I defaulted to the Macbook I have on extended loan, and it operated in blessed silence. All my experiences with the Macbook so far have convinced me that I want to go Apple next. HRH has told me that any time I want to go downtown to the Apple Store to do some hands-on research, he’s good to go. He gets an educational discount, too, which knocks a bit of the price down. Of course I’ll just feed that right back into a three-year warranty, but hey. It will be very exciting to have a brand-new computer with a warranty. And I’m looking at the Mini because I have all my peripherals and don’t need the all-in-one package an iMac offers. Also, much cheaper. And portable. And tiny.

I had two cupcakes for breakfast. So there.

Yesterday I managed to finish my first draft of the introduction for the anthology; I’ll polish it on Friday. I’m still poking at the order, trying new things in different places. It feels like I’m spinning my wheels, because rearranging fifty stories doesn’t net me any tangible progress except a different sequence of titles in the table of contents. It’s harder than it sounds, because it takes a lot of brain power to remember what each story is about and what themes or tones it demonstrates. It’s like making a mix tape, trying to get the right flow between the moods and styles, except it’s 277 pages of stuff instead of two thirty-minute chunks. It’s taking up more mental RAM.

Fearsclave and I are geeking out about recurve bows at the moment, and I’ve pulled my two volumes of The Bowyer’s Bible out to lend him next time we see one another. In a rather apt illustration of my personality, they were shelved between books called Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts and The Technical Manual And Dictionary Of Classical Ballet.

And now, I must go and poke at the anthology with a sharp stick again.

Interview Outtakes

The second half of the interview with Neil Gaiman has been posted at fps!

Here are the promised outtakes.

First, a single line because it made me laugh. The context: The assistant had given me the two minute warning, which meant about seventeen minutes had gone by.

    NG: You haven’t even asked any questions, I’ve just monologued at you!

And here’s the post-interview stuff.

    A: I have tons more questions that I wish I had asked —

    NG: I’m sorry!

    A: But obviously we are out of time. So what I will ask you to do is —

    NG: Do you need me to scribble on anything for you?

    A: I would very much like you to. It took me – I’m not kidding – since I was given this assignment it took me five days to figure out what I would ask you to sign, and finally I said, Well, since the interview’s for Coraline, I shall ask you to sign that.

    NG: Spell your name.

    A: A – r – i – n.

    [NG shakes his fountain pen]

    NG: I, of course, was an idiot, and left this uncapped.

    A: Do you need another? [because OF COURSE I have brought a fountain pen to a Neil Gaiman interview] Oh, you’ve got a back up. Okay. [ballpoint, alas]

    NG: How is this, it should work – A-r-i-n? [writes]

    A: Yes, that’s correct!

    NG: Where’s it from?

    A: My parents made it up.

    NG: Ah! [draws]

    A: Well, obviously it’s all over the place now, but thirty-eight years ago they made it up. My mother is Scottish, from Kirkcaldy, and wanted to call me Aran, for the Isle of Aran.

    NG: Right.

    A: My dad’s Irish, and wanted to call me Erin. So, they compromised. They went halves.

    NG: [laughs] So you have an Aran meets Erin. Which leaves you somewhere around the Isle of Mann in terms of geographics.

    A: [Laughs.]

    [NG continues to draw]

    A: I’m trying to get my son to agree to let me read him The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish.

    NG: How old is he?

    A: He’s going to be four in a few months. And he won’t – ‘No Mama, I don’t want to read it, I just want to look at the pictures.’ And he’ll look at the pictures and say, ‘Why is he holding a gorilla mask?’ And I say, ‘Well, we’ll have to read the book and find out.’ ‘No, I don’t want to do that yet.’

    NG: That’s so cool. The point I knew that The Wolves in the Walls worked as a book was when my friend Gary Wolfe called me from Chicago to tell me his grandchildren had been over, and the 3 yr old had made him read them The Wolves in the Walls and he did. And then the light was going, and she asked if he would read it again. And he couldn’t really see the text properly so he began, ‘Lucy was wandering around the place.’

    A: Telling the pictures.

    NG: And she said, “Granpa. It’s ‘Lucy walked around the place.’” And she, on one listen, had it cold.

    A: That’s great. I love hearing my son start to do that. ‘Here Mum, I’ll read this book to you,’ and you know, he’s pretty darn close, and you realize that reading really is an awful lot of memorization.

    NG: Yeah. It’s – there’s so much of words that is memory, remembering the shapes, the word shapes. We don’t actually read it; we only think we read it.

    [NG shows A the drawing he’s done in the book.]

    A: [laughs] I love it. Thank you, so very, very much.

    NG: You are so very welcome. Thank you for coming.

    A: I’m looking forward to you coming back in August.

    NG: I will be here!

This is the last post on the topic, I promise. But you must understand, it’s been eating my life since Tuesday of last week. In a good way, but still. Now it’s all out of my system.

Here is something totally unconnected: I have an appointment with the luthier tonight to adjust the 7/8 cello, and get the rental thing started. I hope I can stay awake that long, and be focused enough during the appointment to test and evaluate the adjustments.