Category Archives: Cello

Fifty-Nine Months Old!

One month till the boy turns five. Thirty-one days.

We have to remember to round his age up when people ask how old his is, now. And he’s measuring actions according to his age. He will sometimes politely refuse to try a new food. “No, Mama,” he’ll say, “that’s food for a five-year-old. I’m only four. But when I’m five I’ll like it.” He’ll do the same thing with toys or activities; he’s saving some of them for when he turns five. Mind you, the reverse is also operative: some things he tells me are okay for four-year-olds, but when he’s five he’ll stop.

One of the funniest things about this past month was his discovery of baked potatoes. That sounds odd, but it’s so much fun to see him get excited when I tell him that we’re having baked potatoes with dinner. He saw an illustration of one in a picture book and asked what it was. HRH explained it to him, and he said they sounded delicious. So I baked potatoes the next night to go with dinner, sliced it open, put a curl of butter on top, and he was thrilled. He asks for them all the time, now. It’s like he’s discovered the most exciting food ever. Baked potatoes. Really. I mean, there are other cool things associated with dinner, such as how he clears the table and puts the dishes in the dishwasher and such, and usually asks to be excused (every time he got up from the picnic at Tristan’s naming ceremony, for example, he asked to be excused, which amused me; he must be the only little boy in existence who asks to be excused from a picnic blanket, not once, but three times), but the baked potato thing is just so wacky.

He is fearless and so very confident in his inability to get hurt. He throws himself from a standing position off the top of the slide, and swings from the top bar of the swingset. He doesn’t watch where he’s going when he runs, hurls himself enthusiastically around corners, slips, bounces off walls. We are mostly sanguine about this now. We are less sanguine about his ability to selectively hear warnings and instructions, and listening actively is something we’re working on. So is following instruction immediately instead of saying “I’m just going to do this one thing first.”

His preschool is working on a play. He came home with a little script, very excited. They’re basing it on Leslie McGuire’s picture book This Farm is a Mess. The kids are all the different animals, and the educators are the narrator, the farmer, and the mama chicken (the baby chicks are being played by the three babies of the daycare). The boy has been cast as the goat, and said he needed a costume. So I, with my years of experience creating costumes out of nothing, pulled out a pair of black socks with holes in them, and cut off the toes. “What are you doing?” he asked. I slid them over his forearms and said, “These are your hooves and legs,” and I thought he was going to pop from excitement. I then pulled out an old grey t-shirt and cut out a tail and two floppy ears, tipping each with black marker. I sewed the ears to a black headband, put a big safety pin through the tail, gave him one of his grey shirts to wear, and voila, we had one little black and grey kid goat. He has been practising his “meh-eh-eh-eh” sound, and we sit down every day or so and go over his lines. The day he brought home the script he arranged HRH and I, and said, “We will do my play. Dada, you can be the farmer, and Mama, you can be the narrator; that means the person who tells the story,” he explained, patting my hand. I just about exploded with that indescribable feeling of pride mixed with joy and triumph. My son knows what a narrator is. I, of course, desperately want to be there to see this play be performed, but parents are almost certainly going to distract them (the average age here is two or three years, after all), so I think they’re planning on doing it in front of a video camera to make a movie instead, which we will all get on DVD. If they do this, I am praying that they do credits, because that will absolutely blow the boy’s mind.

Perhaps most poignant of all this month, however, was the morning that he asked for us to practise our cellos together before he went to school, and he played lovely open double stops while I played Twinkle over them. And we discovered that his own little cello, which is in truth a full-size viola, is now too small for him; he has undeniably outgrown it. If he’s going to play (and we mean seriously, not messing around with it as he’s been doing) then he’s going to need an actual 1/8 or 1/4 size cello, rented from the luthier. My teacher has a new student who is three years old, the younger sister of a seven or eight-year-old student, and so if he decides that this is something he really does want to pursue, then he has a classmate. We’ll talk about it seriously over the summer. I’ve already proposed the Suzuki week-long junior music daycamp for six-year-olds and under to him, and he’s responded enthusiastically to the idea, so we shall see. The last time he asked for music lessons I told him that if he really wanted to he could start once he was established in kindergarten, and that’s rapidly drawing nigh. The icon image is of a photo taken when he was two months shy of two years old. He is, to say the least, much larger than that now…

Weekend Roundup, Mother’s Day Edition

At my cello lesson on Saturday morning I shared my concerns about the Bach Gavotte with my teacher. A month working on it alone did me no favours. I recorded it a day or so before the lesson and hated what I heard. It just wasn’t smooth enough at this point in the game. And with so much work to do for orchestra and the ensemble recital pieces… well, I said I thought the Lully would be a better choice, and she fully supported me. So we proceeded to work on different bits of it, including a full ten minutes just playing the first two notes trying to get the articulation just right. She switched me to something else just in time before I lost it.

I know I can play the Bach at the Christmas recital. But it was my goal for this recital, and we mangled the timing. I feel better about the decision, but I’m still really disappointed.

I came home through the rain, picked up the boy, and we went to get my new reeds for the rigid heddle loom. The lady was wonderful. She reps Ashford, Majacraft, and Schacht out of her home, so if I need pretty much anything in the way of spinning or weaving equipment from any of the major companies (other than Kromski, who of course makes the next wheel I want, sigh) I’m covered by her and my LYS. I was there for about twenty minutes talking to her about things, and admiring the cherrywood Baby Wolf loom set up in the corner of her living room, warped for tea towels. She’s pretty much got me convinced to do the guild thing, even if I can’t make regular meetings. It’s amazing how meeting one kind, open person can change my mind. She told us about the upcoming cultural rendez-vous at the end of the month at Stewart Hall, one of the two cultural demonstrations/festivals they host per year, so I’ll go over with the boys and check it out. The guild is going to have things set up for demonstrations and an open house, and she said she’d show me their looms and projects.

Then we stopped by Ceri and Scott’s house, and the boy played with their new Prince of Persia Lego set while Ceri scrutinized the baby blanket and told me that it was wonderful and perfectly acceptable for gifting, which made me very happy. She also sent me away with a bottle of red wine, bless her. The boy and I shared soup and a sandwich at Tim Hortons, and then went to Pointe-Claire village to pick up chocolates for the various mums and mum-figures. After that we went to the little toy store after lunch so he could buy something with his twenty dollars, and he chose a Playmobil policeman on a motorcycle. He had enough money left over for a single figure, so he walked up and down the aisles looking for something, and then finally stopped, frustrated. “What are you looking for?” I said. “Mama, I need a girl police to go with this,” he said. The only policewoman figure they had was in a two-pack with a robber, so I paid the extra so he could have his “girl police.” Also, bonus bad guy for them to apprehend!

We got back home mid-afternoon and HRH went off in the car to run his errands, and the boy has a rest. He’s fighting a cold, and needed it despite the late naptime. I woke him up an hour later, and made dinner for him. While he napped I started weaving on the warp I’d done on the rigid heddle loom earlier in the week; I had new reeds to experiment with, after all, and so I needed to use up what I had on the loom! I’d played with combining warp threads of two different grists and an empty slot, and for weft I used the coloured Lion Homespun yarn I’d first tested the loom with in April. It wove up brilliantly, the warp threads making a lovely variation in texture, and the Homespun behaved perfectly as weft. I finished weaving it that night, but didn’t cut it off the loom till Sunday morning. (I think it’s a table runner, and I think it’s a wedding present for someone. I’m going to have to start making two of everything, because I want to keep this, too!)

We received or tax refunds in the mail on Thursday (yay!), so on Saturday night after the boy went to bed we treated ourselves to a sushi dinner while curled up in front of the TV, watching episodes of Castle that Karine had taped for us. (Yes, HRH found an operational VCR languishing in a storeroom at work, so he liberated it; now we can watch tapes again!)

Sunday morning we woke up to snow. I was pretty wiped, so HRH did the groceries. Before he left I got my Mother’s Day presents. The boy had made a card and “nests” at school, a stupidly delicious chocolate-peanut butter-Rice Krispie thing pushed into tiny foil tart shells, with peanut M&M “eggs” in the nests, and HRH gave me a card and a gift certificate to Ariadne Knits. The boy had an early lunch and a rest, and while he was napping our friend John came by and dropped off a big storage bucket of Lego, including some truly awesome specialised pieces, a robot, and a tonne of figures and horses. The boy was thrilled when he got up (which he did moments after John left, as if he has some kind of new-Lego radar). We let him dig gleefully through it for about half an hour, then we went over to HRH’s parents’ house. I stayed for half an hour and then had to leave for our monthly group cello lesson, which went relatively well for me up till the last ten minutes. I hate it when that happens, because those final minutes colour the whole thing. I went back to the south shore to rejoin the family, and we had a lovely Mother’s Day dinner, with a really nice red wine and a lovely cake for dessert, before coming home and collapsing in bed.

Weekend Roundup

Everything seems to have happened on Saturday. The first half of Saturday, at that.

Saturday morning I had my first cello lesson in just under a month. Suddenly I had to decide between the Lully gavotte and the Bach gavotte for next month’s recital, which felt slightly unfair because we’d set the deadline at the last lesson and I haven’t had a chance to work on it with my teacher since then. I really do want to play the Bach, though, so my teacher said we’d do it. On the way home I second-guessed myself and was sure I’d made the wrong decision, and I’m still fairly certain I’ll blow it badly. But then, I’d feel the same way about the Lully, so I can’t win either way. In the lesson we worked on the upper body being free to move from side to side with the elbow-led bow stroke, which felt very awkward and wrong, but it did create some very nice sound. I think I’m too locked up when I play, so my teacher’s trying to get me to loosen up while still being aware enough of my body to control the sound.

Things to remember: Keep fingers aimed more toward the bridge instead of parallel to it, remember to use the back of the thumb instead of only the side in thumb position, don’t shortchange the last note before a new bow or phrase, stop leading RH movement with the wrist (my teacher was also initially trained to do this and her teacher still calls her on it, so I don’t feel as hopeless about this as I could, although I still feel pretty hopeless indeed), and the speed of the shift needs to match the speed of the song.

I raced home from the lesson to pick up HRH and the boy, stopped by the grocery store to grab cold meats and cheese and bread, then went to Angrignon Park for Tristan’s naming ceremony. (Yes, two naming ceremonies in one week.) It was lovely. Very different from the previous week’s ceremony, which was more formal in the setup and dress. This one was a circle of friends around blankets, balloons in the wind, and a baby who decided to protest the delay in feeding. We did a couple of fixes on the fly (a dandelion for the flower, the candle went out so I used the cloud-covered sun as the light) and there was laughter, which always blesses a ritual. And I finally got to use part of the baby-blessing ritual I wrote for my second book, which was intended to be used for the boy, but he ended up arriving early and in the race to keep up we never got around to holding a naming ceremony for him.

When it was over we all hauled out our picnic stuff, sat on blankets or camp chairs or around the picnic table, and ate. The boy ran around with MLG (fencing lessons with sticks; I love my friends) and a younger boy whom he decided needed looking after, so he kept feeding him, much to our amusement. HRH and I got to play with a cheerful ten(?)-month-old, who proceeded to impress his mum by trying to take steps on his own (with support, of course) and feed himself, and rather capably, too, for someone who didn’t do it regularly. And his mum asked if I’d do a naming for him, as well! It was so nice to just sit and relax with friends, and watch kids play, and nibble at stuff. A couple of hours later the threatening clouds eventually started spitting actual rain so we all packed up in about five minutes and headed for home, where we put a movie on for the boy and I was ambushed by a ninja nap.

Sunday was a very quiet day. HRH ran around, though, getting the summer tires put on (to our dismay, the sound the wheels were making was not entirely the winter tires; seems the bearings may need repacking, too) and heading over to his parents’ house in the afternoon to lay the new bathroom floor. Not having the brainpower or the energy to do much, I pulled out the spinning wheel and spun up two more samples from the January Phat Fiber box (yes, I’m only a third of the way through the samples; I’m making this last). I also wove in the last few weft ends on the baby blanket I wove for the last naming ceremony, and machine washed it to block the weave. I want to run it by Ceri first to make sure I’m not going to embarrass myself by gifting it (there are a couple of errors where a warp thread didn’t rise or lower properly so there’s a skip, but while I can see every one of them like they’re circled with blinking red lights, others probably don’t). Actually, I wanted to weave instead of spin, but since there was nothing on the loom, I didn’t. I had nowhere near the mental focus or energy required to wind a warp then get it on the loom. Maybe this week. I finally got a copy of Betty Davenport’s classic Hands On Rigid Heddle Weaving, which didn’t reveal anything earth-shattering to me, but did clearly outline the process of warping from back to front, which I will try next time instead of direct warping.

Hey, my new reeds ought to be here at the end of the week.

Ceri lent me her point-and-shoot camera (I am discovering that a manual setting on a point-and-shoot is a rare thing, which makes me sad because I’ll have to pay more for it), so I can show the blanket off and the stuff I’ve spun over the past couple of weeks… once I have the energy to set it all up and photograph it. And in other random fibre arts news, I thought the size 4 Harmony tips for my circular needles from KnitPicks were faulty; one kept falling right off the cable, the screw not catching at all. I thought I’d have to contact them this week so I could keep working on my sleeveless sweater without losing stitches when the cable fell off the needle, which is what happened on Friday night. But I remembered that I had a second set of size 4 tips, which came in the full set I bought after testing a separate pair of tips and cables, so I tried one of them instead. It turns out that it’s the cable that’s faulty, not the tip. I tried another 24″ cable, et voila! The previously suspicious tips are just fine. I could call them for a replacement cable, but I have three other 24″ cables (one other from the original pair I bought, plus anotherpair from the full set) and I doubt I’ll ever have them all in use at the same time.

Finally, for dinner last night I used Karine’s garlic-teriyaki pork slow cooker recipe, and it was fabulous. Slow cooker recipes are usually simple, but this one was gleefully easy. Definitely a keeper. Next time I’m going to caramelize onions and fry mushrooms to toss on top of it before the sauce is poured over top at the table.

A Vague Cello Update

I missed a week of orchestra and a cello lesson while I was away, and my lesson this weekend has also been cancelled because my teacher is out of town for her birthday. I have no problem with that; I will just work on my Bach gavotte on my own. I will turn it into a celloy operatic aria, and surprise my teacher when we finally do get together again at the beginning of May. (May! Good grief.)

We had a group lesson on Sunday, where only half the older students could make it (the younger ones have their own group lesson just before we do). It was pretty focused, though, and things are starting to come together. My teacher ended up deciding to transpose the accompaniment for one of the quartet pieces, so I’m transposing it on my own, something I do because I think it will be good for me, but I’m always worried I will make tonnes of mistakes.

This past rehearsal at orchestra we went in early. There is a Beaver colony that meets in the church basement right before we use it, and they arranged for us to do a presentation for them. It was a lot of fun. They had a basic intro before we got there, and a chance to explore the timpani, then they coloured some handouts while we all set up. Our conductor introduced the instruments one by one, having the principal of each section play the first phrase of “Twinkle” so the boys could hear how they sounded different. Then we played the first half of the first movement of the Haydn Symphony 83 that we’d done for the last concert so they could listen for the chicken theme, and after that we played one of our new pieces, Elgar’s Pomp & Circumstance march no. 4. It was very enjoyable; they were bright and responsive. When things were breaking up at the end their leader told us that they were the biggest group in the West Island; other colonies had between five and ten kids, but they had thirty! “I like to think it’s our great programming,” he said.

Then we spent the entire night on the first movement of the Mendelssohn, with a play-through of the second movement at the end. Lots of really hard work. Our conductor assures us that the first movement is the hardest thing in the concert. If pressed to name a favourite symphony of all time, I would have to say it is this one, Mendelssohn’s Reformation symphony, so I am loving every single moment of this. Playing a piece of music in orchestra means I get to break music down and visit it from the inside out, something that adds infinite richness to my enjoyment of the music both on the stand and via a CD player, and I’m so incredibly thrilled to have the opportunity to do that with this piece.

My back was murderously painful, though. Stacking wooden chairs that slant backwards are not optimal for a cello payer to begin with, but my lower back was moderately screwed up thanks to two train rides and a week of sleeping in a bed not my own. I stretched it out as best I could at the break, and ended up on the floor to try to give it some relief. It had gotten steadily worse after I got home; I finally asked HRH to massage it and get rid of the walnut-sized knot on the left side, and that plus some tiger balm seems to have helped a lot. I really, really need to get one of those firm orthopaedic wedge cushions that a couple of the other cellists in the section use.

Whoosh!

And the week is past already. Good grief. Here’s a precis of what I didn’t blog about when it happened:

Mum went in for hip replacement surgery on Monday, and was wiggling her toes approximately two hours after surgery, so we are all very pleased about that. (Mum, your crew of extended-family-kids up here have said that if there’s anything they can do for you in the next month or so, you’re to call on them, and they’re serious.)

The boy got an Easter parcel from his non-local grandparents and his favourite thing (other than the chocolate, of course) was a pair of plaid shorts.

Lots of lovely feedback about the concert regarding the programming and the execution and the church. Very nice indeed. I don’t think it was recorded, which is a pity, because of all the concerts I’d like a copy of this is certainly up there on my list.

We’re going out this weekend to buy two webcams, one for my Mac, one for a PC laptop. I’ll bring the PC one with me to my parents’ house and set up a Skype account for them down there so we can see and talk to HRH and the boy. I’ll be leaving the PC webcam with them, too, so the boy can ‘see’ them more often. The webcam and Skype account will also come in handy for virtual cellofamily meet-ups. And yes, I am having lots of fun imagining things like cello quartets played together while the cellists are in three different countries. The sound won’t be brilliant but it will be a lot of fun.

Also regarding cello, I realised this week that I think an important part of studying music is knowing when to put a piece aside for a bit and work on something else. We need time to internalise what we’re learning without the mechanics in the way. Sometimes barrelling through it harms instead of helps. Lots happens in the mind without the cello under the fingers. And at my weekly lesson (Sunday was actually last week’s lesson) we started working on Mooney’s Position Pieces for Cello vol 2, to help out with some of my ensemble pieces for the upcoming spring recital. I’m also working on exercises in Suzuki vol 4 to support the recital and orchestra work, which amuses me because I’m working through the pieces book 3.

I had to go to the doctor for something minor but very irritating on Tuesday afternoon, which necessitated pulling HRH out of work because I can’t get to the doctor via public transport, which in turn required pulling the boy out of preschool because there wouldn’t be time to go back to get him through traffic. And then we waited in the doctor’s office for an hour and a quarter. Sigh. I didn’t have time to hit the lab on the way home but I did get the antibiotics I needed, and they’ve been working.

I pulled the third draft of Orchestrated out again this week, cutting things out of the first chapter ruthlessly, and poking at the brief book summary for a query letter and the three-page detailed synopsis. I’ve been at a very awkward stage with this book for a while now. I need outside eyes to look at it, but I’ve been feeling that I can’t ask anyone to do so because (a) my writer friends are either swamped or (b) triggery about writing issues at the moment, and (c) I’ve agreed to beta for other people in the past and bailed consistently because I’ve been swamped or exhausted myself. Reasoning that it’s much easier for people to handle looking at only the first five pages (the number commonly requested by agents) plus the brief and full synopses rather than two hundred pages of novel, I pulled those eight pages total and asked three wonderful people for help, and they’ve agreed to give me feedback on them. The goal is to tweak till the end of April, then start going down the list of agents.

And work sent me a freelance project Wednesday afternoon, after I waited for four work days. The timing was frustrating because in order to have it approved by Monday to add it to my invoice, I’d need to hand it in early on Friday. And of course, today is Good Friday, and for the first time at this job HRH has both Good Friday and Easter Monday off (this is known as Irony, because we’re not spending the weekend with my parents as we have in the past, when HRH has had to book the Monday as a vacation day), so the boys are both home, which skebards the idea of me working all morning. Plus we’re having a guest over this afternoon. So I had to crush two days of work into one day, and on top of that it was a really rough assignment, one of the ones where you have to crush a author’s dreams by pointing out all the very deep flaws in the manuscript. I worked a bit last night (forgetting that I had to be at the bank to deposit a US cheque with the teller before eight because thy’d be closed Friday, dashed out and was the second to last person they allowed in before they closed the doors, whew), did a final polish and last proofreading this morning, and sent it off. I did the best I could. Now I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that it’s either approved before five PM on Monday, or that my rewrites are minimal.

I’ve been watching Craigslist and Kijiji listings like a hawk, looking for a secondhand bike for the boy (because eighty dollars for a new one? gack). So far we’ve had one strike, and one no-reply. On a whim I also looked for looms in Toronto and I found a listing for a 32″ folding rigid heddle loom, for less than half the retail price even before exchange and what shipping would cost me. I shot off a quick query, and wonder of wonders it was still available, so I have put the money aside for that and I’ll pick it up when I’m visiting my parents. (Note to self: Bring the big suitcase so you can get it home.) It’s a Kromski Harp, one of the models I’d wished I could get my hands on and had put out of my mind as nigh-impossible. I went so far as to inquire about the Kromski Fiddle, the Harp’s 16″ poor cousin, and one of the few Canadian retailers told me that it would be $165 plus about $60 shipping, so I nixed the whole idea and pulled out the vintage four-shaft loom I had and started bashing away at it, trying to make things work instead of easing into the weaving world via rigid heddle loom. Rigid heddle loom are less complicated than my four-harness table loom and much more portable, and it’s the portability and weaving width I’m really excited about. Apart from being over the moon about the find and the incredible price, I’m thrilled about having a weaving width of about 31″, about twice the weaving width of my current table loom. It’s less flexible regarding pattern potential, but I’m at a point where I’m more interested in basic weave fabrics right now anyway. And the folding loom comes with the place for a second block for a additional not-included heddle, which creates a two-harness situation and extends the pattern possibilities to the equivalent of a four-shaft loom (each rigid heddle has an up, a neutral, and a down position, which creates two sheds). And did I mention that it’s portable? And that it has a weaving width of something like eighty centimetres? I’ll enjoy sharing it with my mum on my visit. Also, this means I won’t have to rent a spinning wheel from the shop that disappointed me at Christmas, and that I won’t be stuck knitting all week, something that would certainly drive me mad.

Now, I need to make potato salad. Have a wonderful Easter weekend, everyone!

Weekend Roundup: Spring Concert Edition

We had a good dress rehearsal Friday night. This church has fabulous acoustics. The celli were a bit crushed as the front pew hadn’t been moved, so some of us were staggered and our principal ended up turned so that she was almost facing the sanctuary instead of the first violins. They had lovely padded folding chairs, though, and bonus cushions that some of the cellists filched from the pews to use as added elevation at the back of the seats.

On Saturday we had a very relaxed day at home, for which I was very thankful because I was fighting a low-grade but insidious headache for most of the day. Looking for music to listen to in my burned CD box, I found the copy of the Aria soundtrack mp3s that Marc gave me. Now, I know that theoretically the Xbox can play mp3s, and I wanted to listen to this music without calling it up on the computer and turning my speakers so that they faced the door to the office, so I turned the console on and put in the disc. The Xbox does indeed play mp3 discs! (Not that I doubted you in the least, Ceri. I just needed to prove it to myself.) The problem was that the Xbox wasn’t being run through the stereo (it used to be, but must have been accidentally left out of the last Massive Rewiring Run that also ended up running the Blu-Ray player through the stereo only and not the TV at all), so the music only came through the TV speaker, and sounded awful and flat. So when the boy went down for his nap, HRH unplugged everything, sorted it out, and wired all the consoles and the Blu-Ray player into the TV and thence to the stereo. We now have everything in surround. Muah-ha.

We had an early dinner, got dressed, and headed out. The boys dropped me off at the church for our warm-up, and went to feed Ceri and Scott’s cats and reassure them that they had not been abandoned. From all reports the cats were kind of casual and all “Oh, hi. Food? Well, if you want to, but we’re not starving.” (Which is, I suppose, a good thing. But somewhat odd, as anyone with cats will know.) The concert was very well-attended, with the church pretty much full. A huge thank you for their attendance and support goes out to Paze, Tamu and Patrick, John and Mel, HRH and the boy, and Marc M, who left another engagement to come to the concert and then went back, bless him.

The concert went very well. It was tight and a lot of fun. Oddly enough, I didn’t have the choking-up problem at the end of the Butterworth where I usually do; this time it was at the beginning, during the gorgeous clarinet solo. There was a minor hiccough in the Butterworth, but so very minor (although these things always seem major to the people involved when there’s a hiccough) and at the best possible moment it could have happened, a perfect transition point. I don’t remember anything particularly worthy of triumph on my part, but I do remember enjoying playing the Haydn even more than I usually do. I nailed one of the nasty Debussy bits I always fail at but fluffed it the second time it came up, most likely due to White Stick Syndrome. Overall, I enjoyed the whole thing. After the concert I got a spontaneous hug from the boy and an enthusiastic, “Mama, that music was so good!” Although when I put him to bed he seemed somewhat stuck on the wasps, asking why they kept coming back, and indeed why they were in the music at all to begin with. He wasn’t so sure about them.

(Today I opened iTunes and instead of choosing something specific, I wanted a surprise, something I probably hadn’t heard in a while. I told it to play my entire catalogue of mp3s on random. It gave me… Vaughan Williams’ ‘Wasps’ overture. I don’t know if this is evidence of a sense of humour, or evidence of a complete lack of one.)

Sunday morning HRH made waffles as a huge treat, and I did a batch of scones. The boy and I picked up Paze and Devon and headed out to our monthly Pagan playgroup. (This is why I made the scones. I proceeded to forget my Tupperware container there, sigh.) I’m having trouble settling into this year of the playgroup. It’s half again as big, which isn’t exactly the problem; it feels like there’s too many older kids feeding off one another, and it makes focusing hard. The older kids run around and act crazy in the next room before and after the meeting, and the boy always asks to join them. Every time I say no, because this is supposed to be a quiet, focused time for learning and crafts, and if he starts he won’t stop. “But they’re doing it,” is his standard comeback, to which I usually reply that just because someone else is doing it doesn’t make it right. And snack time used to be bowls of healthy things like veggies and fruit and cheese and scones, and this meeting had piles of cookies that the kids focused on instead of the hummus and pita and grapes. (The Girl Guide cookies for sale were a different matter entirely; they’re sealed. I was just stunned at the platefuls of cookies the older kids had, and which the boy asked for because he saw them; he ignored everything else because the older kids only ate the cookies. I’d like to see purchased cookies banned from the group’s snack time.)

We got home and the boy had only a bit of sandwich before nap time. HRH headed out to take a look at poor Mousme’s buckled basement floor after severe water damage (much more severe than anyone had suspected, as he discovered that there was pink insulation as well as that blue Styrofoam insulation packed between the floor joists, all of it still soaking wet from the flood, with water beneath it all). While he was out I made the heroic decision to pull out the top-down sleeveless sweater I cast on in April 2009 in order to work through the bits that scared me (binding off for the cap sleeves, casting on fewer stitches there in the next round to form the body under the arms). This is the sweater that I frogged last October and cast on to knit again, then stopped at the sleeves because I was worried that I’d ruin it somehow. I just went ahead and did it this weekend, reasoning that if I ruined it I’d only lose about four inches of work and could always start again. Anyway, the scary-to-me bits are done. I have some very iffy raglan increases and some loose stitches that I am hoping will block out when it’s all done. I’m past the hard part, but I am such a bad knitter that I managed to knit a circular rubber stitch marker INTO the row I was working on while I was doing a cable cast-on increase in the middle of a row. It’s now woven into the sweater. I’ll have to cut it out when it’s all done. I now see why some people use split rings as markers. However, now I’m on the straight knitting bit for the body of the sweater. I’d like to say it’s all fine from here, but I think there’s a bit of shaping under the bust. It’s probably just k2tog, but it’s the placing that’s tricky.

I had a cello lesson last night, where we played through some of the ensemble stuff. I have another this Wednesday, as my teacher is gone over Easter weekend, and then one next Tuesday because I’m gone the weekend and following week to help Mum after her surgery. I didn’t have a lot of focus; I kept wandering from tenor clef into bass in a piece that stayed entirely in one clef or the other (a holdover from Debussy and Vaughan Williams, which jumped back and forth between the two clefs all the time, I think) and dropping accidentals. Not my finest hour, but some good work done on phrasing and shifting nonetheless.

And then I came home and had a hot bath, started to reread the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, and had a good sleep. The end.

Deep Sigh

Okay, this week’s freelance assignment has been handed back. It was really tough, because it was good; it was the structure that fought against it. I’m not super confident about my report, but that’s why they’re reviewed by the editorial team. We’ll see if they want me to handle a rewrite. I’m kind of dazed now.

We had our last regular rehearsal before Saturday’s concert last night. We did the entire programme with bits replayed to work on them. I had a great day yesterday, but I ran out of steam three-quarters of the way through. I already miss the Vaughan Williams and the Butterworth, even though the concert hasn’t happened. There’s something fabulous about sitting in the middle of all that lush or tight music, and I am an unabashed fan of early twentieth century English music based around folksongs. Which is not to say I don’t get anything out of Haydn and Debussy; sitting in the middle of all that is just as exciting. But Vaughan Williams and Butterworth are extra-special.

(Mendelssohn’s fifth symphony, the Reformation, is being considered for the Canada Day concert. I adore the Reformation symphony.)

I have to say that I am loving the whole I-don’t-have-to-wear-boots thing that spring is giving me. Even though I wore them Tuesday night, along with my winter coat. My sinus cold is dragging like all my colds drag, and I ache all over, but what else is new?

As a reward for getting through this week, I made brown-butter sea salt Rice Krispie squares. Tonight after the boy is in bed I plan to tune in to Unwoman’s live at-home concert stream, assuming I can stay awake. I missed last night’s, but I watched the recording this afternoon (which included some of her fabulous originals, as well as not one but two great covers of Dr. Horrible’s ‘Brand New Day’ on cello, as well as Amanda Palmer’s ‘Ampersand’ on piano). And I am kicking the laundry list today.

Finally, Molly the owl has two hatchlings. The boy and I check in regularly before he goes to school, when he gets home, and before he goes to bed.

Now, there are Rice Krispie squares calling me. And woo-hoo, my report was okayed!