Category Archives: Cello

Brief Weekend Roundup & The Birthday Monday Activity Log

I am really, really tired of househunting. HRH spoke with one of the daycare dads last week who is a real estate agent, and when he complained about how quickly houses were selling — literally in less than 24 hours between the listing going up and agents calling for clients to see it — the dad nodded and said, “What’s happening is people are buying up houses in batches unseen, painting and doing slight renos required or uplifts like lighting, and reselling them at a profit.” HRH expressed his frustration at this, because it really screws families who are actually looking for houses to live in, and the agent agreed. He said it irritates real estate agents, too. He asked how many houses we’d viewed and when HRH said about thirty, he nodded again and said, “Yeah, that’s about the average these days.” So it’s nice to know we’re not just having an atypically horrible experience, but still incredibly frustrating to know that we’re being stymied by people who are just in it for the money.

Somewhat related: The house we saw yesterday was tiny but sweet, well-located in regards to amenities and school but the general neighbourhood was a bit more working-class than others we’d seen. And it had the most adorable cat, who was about six months old. She was mostly grey with small splotches of blondish red on her sides and white legs, and was very affectionate. She and the boy played all over the house while we viewed it. And we have come to the conclusion that we will never find a house with three bedrooms on the same level, because for some reason ninety percent of the houses we’ve seen have only two on one level and the additional room or rooms somewhere else. It’s very odd.

I spent an hour last night working through the Gigue of the first Bach solo cello suite with the bow, and the Prelude of the second suite in pizz. I used the heavy practice mute, and even so when HRH and the boy came upstairs the boy ran up to me and said I was so loud he could hear me even in the garage and the noise could really get on people’s nerves. HRH pounced on him verbally and the boy had a severe talking-to about speaking without considering how you’re phrasing something, and the difference between practising something to get better and just making random annoying noise, but even after we both had a go at it he didn’t understand. It was one of those parenting days where you’re certain nothing you have ever taught your child has sunk in, never. And way to go, kid, hitting me in the most sensitive hang-up I have about playing the cello.

Saturday night we had a double-header game of Settlers of Catan with the upstairs neighbours. Everyone pitched in with various alcohol and nibbly things, and it was a really awesome evening.

In good news, I discovered today while paying bills that I only have $21.05 left on my student loan. As of the end of the month I shall be free of it. While I should like to revel in having a few extra dollars a month, I shall be a sad and disciplined Responsible Adult and just program the equivalent monthly automatic payment to my credit line. Actually, it ought to go to my Visa, which has the higher interest rate.

Today, I:

– baked bread
– baked a birthday cake for myself
– paid bills
– finished my freelance assignment
– handled the post-weekend and daily correspondence

That looks kind of short. Hmm. Plans to go to the bank and the post office were rescheduled to tomorrow morning, because when I checked the thermometer outside it said that it was 37 degrees in the shade. If I don’t have to go out into the mid-afternoon heat, why would I?

And best of all, my lovely editor with the publishing company I worked with for a few years pinged me regarding a dearth of copy editors in the company. She’d told the copy chief about my super-clean manuscripts and the beginnings of my search for a more regular copy editing position. The chief thought I sounded marvellous and told her to send me her contact info so we could get started right away. I wrote her a “hi here I am you asked for me to contact you I’m looking forward to talking to you” message and am now waiting for a reply. Seriously, a regular book copy editing gig with a publisher would be the best birthday present ever. My editor rocks.

I’ve spun up four ounces of the Luscious Ditty batts in the Baby Silks colourway from Spin Knit & Life, and am about to resume filling the second bobbin with the other half of the batts. I’m using a modified longdraw for it and enjoying it very much. It draws beautifully, and spins up equally nicely. I think it’s going to make a gorgeous two-ply light sport weight yarn.

Catching Up: Concert Recap Plus Brief Weekend Roundup

There was a national holiday, and a concert, and house stuff, and a barbecue with good friends, and the boys on holiday from school and work, and it was hot.

Well, yes, there are details, but essentially that was it.

The Canada Day concert was good, I think. I am personally not happy with my performance, but neither am I upset. I’m just neutral, because I don’t have the energy to be happy or mad. (This is a theme that has carried through the last week or so, and if I had the energy I might be interested or concerned but, well, I don’t, so.) I am very aware that my not-as-good-as-it-could-have-been performance is directly related to the exhaustion and fibro, and I’m… well, not perfectly okay with that, but I accept it. My bowings were all over the place, which was disappointing because I am very proud of my bowing work and to have it all scuttled in performance is disheartening. Our conductor’s wife is a cellist and she spoke to us after the concert about how to improve our sound, which was both encouraging and tiring. I’ve done so much work already on my sound and bow arm in the past almost-two years. I had a scattering of friends attend the concert (thank you, MLG, Marc M, Lu, Phil, and Amanda!), which was lovely, although we were missing quite a few of our regulars. About half my teacher’s students came to see us, too, which was great, and a new friend or two as well.

The insane housing market led us to make an offer on July 1 with which we were ultimately uncomfortable, so we refused the counteroffer. Rumours that we bought a house are therefore unfounded. I am both okay and not okay with this. I am very, very awearied by this househunt, and of this crazy-stressful market that has houses selling three days after they go on sale. I am tired of feeling like we have to offer on a house while we are standing in it to ensure that we have a chance. And while I know we made the correct decision, I can’t help but feel that I turned down a perfectly serviceable house. (Despite the fact that it was missing a third bedroom and the boy’s bedroom would have held his bed and dresser and that’s about it. And the fact that it was further away than we wanted to be. The house wasn’t spectacular enough to balance the distance issue.) Our agent is fabulous and reassured us that if we felt at all iffy we were doing the right thing by continuing to look. But thirty houses and four offers in, I am pretty depressed.

I missed the chamber orchestra end-of-season party because we attended a lovely barbecue with Rob and Kristie and half their wedding party (the other half had attended an earlier barbecue). It was wonderful to have some of my questions and concerns addressed and put to rest, and I am really looking forward to performing this ceremony. It was fun to be with people I hadn’t seen in a long time, and others I don’t see often enough, and to see the number of kids running around with one another. That night the boy had a fever teetering on the edge of do-we-take-him-to-the-hospital-or-not, but I kept an eye on it, and he was pretty much back to normal the next morning, if a little clingy.

Saturday HRH went out to do some plastering, so the boy and I hung out together. He now has his first electric toothbrush, as he saw mine and for the first time coveted it instead of being nervous. There has been a lot of enthusiastic brushing of teeth since we brought it home. He also napped for two hours, so I suspect that his body was still fighting whatever triggered the fever. We picked up a few groceries, and for that night’s dessert I made peanut butter sauce for ice cream, and built most excellent sundaes with vanilla ice cream, dark chocolate and the peanut butter sauces, real whipped cream, and chocolate sprinkles. They were so good that I called the upstairs neighbours down to feed them some, too, while the boy had an evening splash in his tiny pool.

Sunday my in-laws had an early birthday dinner for me, at which I embarrassingly fell asleep before supper and couldn’t eat a piece of my own cake. I’m really, really tired, okay?

The freelance work I’m currently doing is labour-intensive and focus-intensive, both not ideal for my fibro-fogged state, and not overly fabulous pay, so I’ve been keeping my eyes open for something else. t! sent me a link to an online freelance thing, asking if I’d heard of them, and I saw that they hire copyeditors. Aha! thought I. I like to copyedit. Straight copyediting is faster and easier than reviewing a manuscript for flaws and weaknesses and telling someone else how to edit it. So I retooled a resume (which had to be done anyhow, as it’s three years out of date) and went through the whole online application process, only to have it tell me at the end that they were only looking for writers from my region, which made me quite cranky. Still, it led me to wonder why I’d never contacted my current freelance place to ask about a test for editing, so I did that. No answer yet, as I enquired on a holiday weekend.

And great; the doctor’s office just called to cancel the boy’s appointment, because the doctor has had a death in the family and has gone home for a week. So the boy is at home with me and we have the car for no reason, HRH having taken the bus to work. Although it means we missed the home-based daycare strike thing this morning. Our daycare isn’t striking, and they were anticipating physical harassment from union people who had called with thinly-veiled threats, and all the parents had been warned that they would encounter difficulty dropping their kids off as a result. The boy’s best friend there happens to be the daughter of a regional police supervisor, so HRH and I fervently hope that he showed up in his marked car and in full uniform to drop her off and casually hung around with a cup of coffee or something. Because physically preventing parents and kids from walking into their daycare? Not cool. Kids shouldn’t have to deal with stuff like that in association with a place they trust, and that’s why our daycare refused to join the strike action in the first place.

The boy has been pretty good so far this morning about leaving me to work in my office. There have been interruptions, but not as bad as usual. I think we managed to impress upon him the importance of me working. The cancellation had him thinking we were both free to play, but I think I’ve cleared that up now.

Back into the fray.

Wednesday Activity Log

So, um. A lot of today was “lie on the chesterfield under an afghan and read”, because that’s all I had the energy to do.

I did practice for half an hour, and, as I expected, my hands are wrecks. See, one of the hallmarks of fibro is a loss of power in limbs and extremities. Mine manifests mostly in the hands, which means I can no longer amaze people by opening jammed pickle jars and the like as I used to. Now, twisting a bottlecap off a beer can be a challenge. (I know, I know; that sounds like such a first-world problem.) With weak hands, I have to watch my cello playing rather closely. By addressing some of my bow hand issues over the past eighteen months my teacher and I have been able to maximise the use of my right hand. My left hand, well, it’s mostly fine, except when I’m really tired and my focus isn’t the greatest, and then my fingers actually trip one another up because they don’t get out of the way quickly enough in a shift/string crossing combo. (I am certain that made no sense to anyone but a cellist, and even then you’re probably wondering why it happens because the hand is a unit. If one of my fingers has just played a note it tends to tangle up in the rest of the hand as it moves in a shift if there’s a string crossing involved because my hand jumps the gun while my finger lags. This is absolutely a result of trying to cross strings and shift at the same time, which is a no-no and a habit I have yet to train out of myself with complete success.)

Today, I:

– plied the 4 oz of fibre I spun yesterday
– wet-finished and skeined said yarn
– rested an awful lot
– practised for half an hour
– finished Lady’s Maid by Margaret Forster, a semi-fictional story about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s maid and companion
– went to pick up the boy
– house research

Dress rehearsal tonight.

Canada Day Concert 2010 Announcement/Reminder Thingy

Hail, faithful orchestra groupies! July 1 is coming up, which means that the annual Canada Day concert presented by the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra is also nigh!

On Thursday July 1 the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra will be giving a free (yes, free!) concert as part of the overall Canada Day celebrations in conjunction with Pointe-Claire Village. We do this every year, and it’s always terrific fun. Our conductor is the justly famed Stewart Grant, who is phenomenal.

This year’s stirring programme features:

Rosamunde Ouverture – Schubert
Gentle River, Prairie Sky – Grant
Symphony n. 5, “Reformation” – Mendelssohn
Pomp & Circumstance, March no. 4 – Elgar

See the composer of that second piece on the programme? Why yes, he does share the same name as our conductor. And if you made the leap to thinking our conductor composed it, you’d be right. We’re thrilled to be playing this piece. And on a personal level, Mendelssohn’s Reformation symphony is my favourite symphony of all symphonies, and playing it is an incredible experience.

The concert begins at 20h00. As always, this Canada Day concert is being presented at St-Joachim church in Pointe-Claire Village, located right on the waterfront at 2 Ste-Anne Street, a block and a half south of Lakeshore Road. The 211 bus from Lionel-Groulx metro drops you right at the corner of Sainte-Anne and Lakeshore. Here’s a map to give you a general idea. I usually encourage those facing public transport to get together and coax a vehicle-enabled friend along by offering to buy them an ice cream or something. It works nicely, and it’s fun to go with a group. And hey, you can’t beat the price. Be aware that if you’re driving, parking will be at a premium because of the whole Canada Day festivities thing going on. Give yourself extra time to find a parking place and walk to the church, which will be packed with people.

As it’s a holiday, the village will be full of various celebrations, booths, food stalls, and the like. You might want to come early and enjoy what’s going on.

Free classical music! Soul-enriching culture! And as an enticing bonus, the fireworks are scheduled for ten PM, right after we finish, and the church steps are a glorious spot from which to watch them.

Write it on your calendar, tell all your friends and family members! The more the merrier!

Wednesday Activity Log

Today, I:
– handled correspondence
– showered
– took public transport out to the south shore to meet HRH
– visited seven houses
– came back home
– edited yesterday’s freelance assignment at the coordinator’s request
– brief cello practice

And now I am going to go pass out on the couch till the boys get home and dinner is made. Orchestra tonight; I’m so exhausted that I know it will be a minor disaster.

Weekend Roundup, Birthday and Recital Edition

What a wonderful weekend.

Friday I did over half of the freelance thing in four hours, had a catnap, wrote the boy’s five-year-old celebratory post, did more househunting research, and started the laundry. We let the boy stay up an hour past his usual bedtime to finish building his Lego Atlantis sub, and HRH went out to the party store just before it closed to get helium balloons with which to surprise him the next morning.

Saturday morning the boy woke us up at 5:15, and while HRH got back to sleep I did not, so I gave up around 6:00 and got up with the boy. He was not impressed that the World Cup coverage was on instead of his cartoons. The morning felt rushed for some reason, and I headed out for our recital dress rehearsal just before nine-thirty, which was fifteen minutes later than I wanted to be out the door; as a result, instead of taking the detour and time to treat myself to a breakfast sandwich as I’d originally planned, I hit the local depanneur to pick up an orange juice and a huge granola bar. I’d expected the rehearsal to be as stressful as home had been, but it wasn’t; it was relaxed and went very well, and was very enjoyable.

After lunch I made the boy’s birthday cake while HRH did the final tidying up (who knew the front window could be that clean?). My parents had arrived in town the night before, and they came over around one-thirty. The overcast skies and drizzle cleared up enough for us to sit outside, which was lovely. Mum brought fresh peas (both the kind to be shelled as well as sugar snaps) and Niagara cherries, both of which the boy was into as soon as he saw them (he won’t eat tomato sauce, but will eat sugar snap peas by the handful, and asks for them as a treat; go figure). And he got cherry juice on a brand new button-down shirt, of course, but at least the juice kind of matches the shirt’s colour scheme.

HRH’s parents joined us around three, and the boy asked when we would be able to open birthday presents, so when everyone had settled down with a drink we let him go to town. He was perfectly thrilled with all the Playmobil and Lego (“Oh, this is what I wanted! Thank you!”), and while he didn’t seem as enthusiastic about the clothes, he has chosen to wear three new shirts from the pile of birthday clothes already, so while they were not immediately gratifying they did make an impression. He finagled various adults into helping him build the new sets of things until dinner, and had HRH fill his pool so he could play in it and take the Playmobil seaplane in. He was in and out of that for the rest of the afternoon while the adults snacked on crackers alternately piled with Brie and my mother-in-law’s wonderful seafood dip.

We had flank steak and herbed sausages for supper, and while the sausages were dry (partially a result of their composition and partially to miscalculating the cooking time) the flank steak was really quite excellent. We put out a pile of fresh raw veggies and made dip to serve with it, and a potato salad. Dessert was the cake the boy had requested, vanilla with maple frosting. The recipe for the cake is a definite keeper, though I used four whole eggs instead of eight yolks. I’m not sure why I continue to use new recipes for special occasions because so much can go wrong, although it didn’t in this instance: it was lovely and moist, although the frosting I made was essentially my regular frosting with about a half-cup of maple syrup added to it for flavour, and since maple syrup is sweeter than sugar it was a bit cloying. Now I understand why people use maple extract.

Sunday morning we introduced the boy to The Rocketeer, one of our favourite films, and it was a hit, as we’d expected: it has racing planes, a dirigible, and a rocket backpack. After lunch we got tidied up and headed out for my spring recital at the seniors’ residence, meeting my parents there. The last time my parents saw me in recital was at my first and only big public one about twelve years ago, where I played the full Breval Sonata in C (my mother tells me I have definitely improved, which is a relief). We had a really big crowd in attendance this time; either the seniors were more active, or our fame has spread. (I doubt it’s the latter.) We had two more cellists, and three violinists, so there was an increase in attendant families as well. There was a bit of oddness during setup when we discovered that the piano was tuned to A443, which meant we had to crank our cellos up three notches above the 440 we’re used to, translating to about a quarter-tone on my instrument in yesterday’s weather. You get used to A440 sounding one way, and when you adjust the tuning across the instrument it sounds really wrong to your ear for a bit even though it’s in tune with itself. The opening ensemble piece felt unsettled to me and a couple of other cellists as a result, but the audience probably didn’t notice a thing. Apart from that, I think that this is the recital I have enjoyed the most so far. Everyone did a wonderful job with their solos, and the ensemble pieces were great. I was comfortable both physically and mentally, I aced my trouble spots in my Lully Gavotte, and we delivered lovely versions of The Entertainer (all of it, no shortcuts; it’s a longer piece than people expect in its proper form) and Ashokan Farewell. All the ensemble pieces were good, but those two really stand out in my mind. Our final piece was a unison performance of the traditional fiddle tune Soldier’s Joy, and we had four violinists, a pianist, and twelve cellists playing it. We did it three times, each time a little faster, and at the dress yesterday our teacher reminded us not to speed up during each repetition because then the final set would be too fast for precision. Well, of course that’s exactly what happened, but everyone hung on and made terrific noise. My parents told me that the little kids had a blast barrelling along at the end, and it was a great way to finish the programme. I’ve never left a recital feeling that good about myself and the class. I felt like I looked good, I sounded good, and I felt really secure about everything. So secure, in fact, that when HRH complimented me repeatedly on the way home about my sound and delivery he didn’t make me feel awkward or self-conscious. I got some very nice comments from my classmates about my sound at the dress rehearsal, too, which was nice, detailed comments that went beyond the basic encouraging sorts of remarks, too.

My parents came back with us and we sat in the yard talking while the boy splashed about in his pool again, and then we went out to dinner, which was fun and pretty good. I can’t believe the amount of food the boy ate over the weekend. HRH and I wonder if he’s on the verge of another growth spurt, which would be just crazy. We parted ways in the restaurant parking lot, and after putting the boy to bed HRH and I sat down and seriously went through the latest list of houses our agent sent us for review. I think we’re ready to start this again after a few days off to heal.

It was a lovely weekend. We had lovely weather, we enjoyed great food and great family time, and the boy had a blast doing what the boy does.

In Which She Examines The Current Void (And It Probably Evaluates Her As Well)

So my comment spam these days tends to be mortgage and loan related. Ah, keyword searches. Why do I never get exciting cello spam when I drone on about music?

I’m sore all over today from the whiplash the life speed bump we hit yesterday. I know, I know; physical reaction to mental/emotional trauma. Who’d have thought? Fibro aside… well, no, fibro’s part of it, because I’m so drained I can’t bounce back properly. Still. Also, it sucks that therapeutic crying exhausts me. It’s a lose-lose situation.

I was looking forward to rehearsal last night, both to distract me and because I’ve done a lot of cello work this week. Except that exhaustion thing? I muffed things I can do in my sleep, and it was like a bad dream about dominoes or a house of cards: every time the celli were asked to work on a portion of music I got less accurate and dropped out more. Even on the easy stuff. And I sank deeper and deeper into that unavoidable self-loathing/numb detached headspace and general grumpiness at the world, because gods damn it, I practised this stuff, and I played it well at home. Not that it seems to make a difference when I’m playing where and when it counts, and especially not when the conductor turns around and is right in front of me to lead the celli. I just can’t do it at full speed, and it’s really, really frustrating me. We played through one of the hard parts I’d worked on my a lesson a couple of weeks ago and at the end my teacher leaned over and poked me with her bow with an approving nod. I shook my head, and I was so depressed at the end of the night that she sat there and gave me a pep talk. She reminded me of how I work within the rhythm, always being on the beat in hard passages, that I drop the right notes to drop in a run if I can’t get them all, and how I’m in sync with her bow changes. The left hand will get there, she said. She reminded me of how far I’ve come in a year, two years, and I realised that I could probably handle Scheherazade now without the problems I’d had last year. (The Hebrides overture, well, no, and there are some very similar runs in the Reformation symphony, it occurs to me now, damn you for being a pianist, Mendelssohn.) She pointed out that I drop a lot less than I would have dropped before, which is true. I appreciated the pep talk, but it didn’t lift my gloom entirely.

There’s that not-comforting-at-all adage that “What does not kill you makes you stronger,” and you know what? Maybe you don’t die, and maybe you do get life experience from all the crap, but when you have fibro it doesn’t actually make you stronger. It just keeps eroding you, bit by bit. On the other hand, it’s certainly character-forming.

I read a terrific spinning-related metaphor this morning from The Crafty Rabbit, though:

[F]ulling is a pretty good metaphor for life. You’re all ugly and uneven and imperfect and full of little bits of hay. Then you get beaten up–tossed from hot to cold, agitated with a plunger, smacked against a table. And then it turns out, after all that, that the abuse has smoothed you out, rendered you shiny and resilient. You’re still imperfect, yes, and you’re beautiful.

Fulling is the process whereby yarn or cloth gets cleaned and transformed or locked into its final form, for the lack of a better description. Some cloths felt when you do this (usually intentionally) and some yarn will, too, if you’re not wholly careful. Part of what you try to do with yarn, though, is shock it so that it plumps up and the scales on the fibre catch one another to make a stronger strand. You can’t turn a worsted-weight woollen-spun Coopworth yarn into laceweight silk by this method, but you can smooth out your Coopworth skein, plump it up, and make it stronger and nicer to touch.

It’s a good life metaphor, but this particular Coopworth skein (read: me) is tired of the fulling process and would just like to hang in the sun. Failing that, to stay in the hot bath with nice smelling soap, and have the cold immersion baths and furious agitation stop for a while.