Category Archives: Music

Mailbox Joy!

Not one, but two cheques!

Payment for work done is a lovely thing. That’s one of the hard things about this business: you put in a lot of work, and only see a lump sum somewhere down the line. These aren’t large, but any money is good money.

Not as lovely was the parcel pick-up slip in the mailbox. The postman didn’t even bother to ring. It’s dated Friday, when I was home all day; the time is marked only “PM”; and the ‘other’ box is checked as the reason. At least s/he had the decency to not claim the delivery was attempted but no one was home. Likely s/he was running late and decided to drop the last parcels at the postal counter instead of actually trying to deliver them. Whatever — it is the lovely lovely black velvet Edwardian-style jacket I got for a song on eBay! Huzzah! I will pick it up tomorrow on a walk with the boy.

Full weekend: a thoroughly enjoyable show of The Mikado on Friday night, brunch out on Saturday with the Preston-Leblancs, brunch in on Sunday morning, psankya egg-decorating early Sunday afternoon, a great visit out to spend time with Karine, Adam, and boys late Sunday afternoon, and an excellent, excellent Sinfonia concert Sunday night. My view of the celli was blocked by the person in front of me, and I found I could appreciate the music as a whole more since I wasn’t watching what the cellists were doing. I wasn’t ‘working’, in other words. Now if I could just switch that analysis mode off at will when I’m reading books….

In Which She Does A Brief Recap Of The Weekend And Dodges Writing About Herself By Posting About The Boy

Thank you everyone who stopped by to see HRH on his birthday, or sent greetings and good wishes. He had a wonderful time with his friends, and is very excited about all his gift certificates and tickets and game cards and art supplies. Well done, troops.

By Friday night whatever had been eating through my spine during the day had ceased, and it was nice to be able to sit back by the fire at the pub and just listen to the conversations going on around me. I did actually have a book in my bag, but I didn’t need to use it.

Speaking of things in my bag, I have lost my sunglasses. This is very upsetting, because I hate sunglasses in general and I have owned this perfect pair for about four years. I had them when I walked from the car to the house after band on Saturday. Now, they are nowhere to be found. I mourn their absence. They may have fallen into the snow, in which case farewell till spring, assuming I’m lucky enough to find them when the piles and piles of snow finally melt, and they’re salvageable. (Look, a Canadian winter. I’d forgotten what those were like.) Lots of snow fell this weekend. HRH shovelled three times, and each time he moved the snow it was as if he hadn’t done so earlier. Today it is very clear outside (and thus the discovery of the loss of my sunglasses). The sun is rising significantly earlier and setting later, and the angle of it has visibly changed in the past week.

I am remarkably reticent about the things that are on my mind these days. I habitually use this journal as well as my other handwritten journals to work out and record how I feel about things, but these days it feels very much like more of the same thing I was feeling yesterday, and the day before that, and haven’t we had these general life problems before a few times too? And on top of that, I am experiencing computer aversion. The two main books on the go right now are frustrating in very different ways. I’ve reached a part of Swan Sister that isn’t very clearly defined in my brain, and while I usually see this as an opportunity to allow my brain to simply create without boundaries (and it is usually a success), this time it’s a major stumbling block. (Imagine, a stumbling block at 30K. You’d think I’d see them coming by this point.) The Poppy book, while now having a pulse again in my work-brain, is a problem because of the Revelation, because to implement it would require an even more drastic overhaul that I had originally expected. I would have to scrap eighty percent of the novel, and throw out most of what makes the plot currently advance. I read the first couple of chapters during Liam’s nap yesterday and it’s good as it is, just not what it needs to be in order to be a complete success. It’s an enjoyable read, but not a Story. I have to think about it a lot more, and this is ungood because what I want to be doing now is actually writing, not planning or rewriting. I may ignore both of them, pull the Pandora book out and start writing the final chapters of that instead. (Because today, ignoring the problems is much easier than trying to work through them and feeling as if I’ve made matters worse by the end of the precious work day. One must choose one’s battles.)

I’ve spent the morning handling correspondence, and doing banking. I’ve crossed half the things of today’s To-Do list. Since I don’t feel particularly interested in elaborating what’s on my mind, I will share Liam-news.

Liam has been singing Twinkle Twinkle an awful lot these days. He has also been requesting it on the cello. We are a little tired of fending him off from giving the cello full-body hugs at high velocity while it is being played, or using the body as a percussive instrument to accompany the bowed music. He informed me that the f-holes were moons the other day.

Yesterday he drew a picture, and by ‘drew’ I mean he scribbled with his markers on a sheet of construction paper on the floor with his Thomas the Tank Engine next to him. When he was done he looked at me and said, “Ati!”, which means Thomas in Liam-Speak. It took me a moment before I realised that he was referring to the set of scribbles. And when I turned it around, it did look remarkably like the engine once he’d pointed it out. I am mildly freaked out by this. I put it up on his door.

Toilet training also proceeds eerily well.

I made delicious homemade pizza Saturday night, and Liam ate an entire slice as well as stealing the pizza bones off my plate. Sunday we went over to HRH’s parents’ home for dinner, where we had excellent prime rib and lovely potatoes, with cauliflower and broccoli in a light cheese sauce. Liam gorged himself on it all like everyone else did, having seconds and thirds of everything. Then he sat on my lap, appropriated my coffee spoon and helped himself to my serving of impressive home-made black forest cake, and ate more of it than I did (I’m not a big fan of cherries in cake; I’ll eat them fresh but that’s pretty much it). He also helped himself to a few spoonfuls of decaf cappuccino.

And now, I will go reheat the final slice of pizza.

Sigh

Listening to the recording made of this past band rehearsal, I am frustrated by what sounds like my lack of capability to produce anything remotely close to correct intonation Saturday morning. Sometimes I wish that my instrument was fretted or keyed so that the sound I produce would be more or less exactly the same every time, assuming the overall tuning is correct, as there are fewer things that can go wrong. One of the things I like about the cello is the ability to push a note up or down to lean on accidentals, but the price for this bonus is having no set reference where your fingers have to go to produce a precise sound, which in turn is affected by so many tiny factors that it’s a wonder I ever end up within an eighth of my desired note. Vagaries such as tiny muscle motion, balance, fractional differences in how the instrument is set up each time, length of the endpin, temperature affecting fingers, strings, and instrument structure are often the culprits, but one can’t blame everything on the co-operation of multitude of tiny factors like this. The human element renders machine-like precision impossible, however, and I don’t think machine-like precision makes for very good music anyway. I’d just like my human element to be a bit more on, and a bit less like human error.

I have to find some way to get a feed out from my amp or pickup into a set of headphones for my ear. When everyone is playing I can’t clearly hear what I’m doing, and so I can’t adjust the intonation accordingly.

On the other hand, I deliberately didn’t set up my music stand for reference except for one song, and then to be used for only one part of that song, so I’m pleased about that. I haven’t been reading music for a while, but if the stand is up I glance at it automatically which distracts me from what I’m doing. The stand is a crutch, and I’m glad I’m past that.

And quite apart from the finicky details about my dissatisfaction with my performance, the recordings sound wonderful. If I step past listening to my mistakes, the overall effect is really, really good. The problem is that these recordings are a learning tool so that we can hear those mistakes and make a note to fix them, and I have to hear the mistakes before I can relax enough to hear the song as a whole, as the audience would.

Turning In

I’ve just finished my second article for the next issue of the local journal and sent it off. Yay me. Yet again I am amazed at how much I know about a topic, and how superficial an examination must be in the space of 900 words.

Despite my cheerful optimism regarding orchestra last night, I had a really rough evening when I got there. It was a strings-only rehearsal, and we practiced every sequence that gave us trouble in the Haydn symphony for two hours. This means that we did a lot of work on the frustrating passages that are (naturally) challenging, and didn’t get the rewarding boost of playing the easier stuff in between. On top of that my fingers and my brain were not talking to one another last night and I just couldn’t get warm or count correctly, all of which conspired to make me play even worse than usual. I was so out of it by the end of the night that I missed every single entrance in the Handel bouree and couldn’t find a place to jump in before it was over. ADZO had shared an insightful chat earlier in the day with me regarding applying professional standards to everything one does, however, and that really went a long way towards me not feeling as despondent about rehearsal as I otherwise might have felt.

The boy had two shots this morning and got a bandage on each of them that the doctor then added little stickers to, a fire engine and a train to be precise. It was an excellent way to grab his attention and get him to stop the indignant crying. He also got a train sticker for his hand because he kept craning his head around to try to look at his upper arms, and he showed it to the five-month-old baby waiting his turn to see the doctor. He very helpfully took his medicare card from me and carried it into the office on his own for the nurse to check at the beginning of the appointment, too. He’s a good kid.

Tomorrow, the Friday plans which have been postponed twice will happen! But now, I have to try to get myself into a sleep-like headspace.

Die, Angst, Die

Argh! My characters are angsting about the last scene and what happened therein.

So of course I have now combined Radio Sunnydale and BtVS: The Album in a playlist to counter it. (Because there’s nothing angsty about Buffy, oh no.)

No, this music is not conducive to the era or atmosphere I am trying to cultivate for this novel. But it’s sure destroying the angst that’s built up. Move on, people. Advance the plot! Quit moaning about how your lives are changing and how you don’t know where you’re going, and get on with the change.

(See? Right on cue, Joey Ramone’s “Stop Thinking About It” has come up. Obey Joey, characters.)

LATER: Yes, butchering and skinning swans is a much better activity than angsting. Yikes. (Now I theoretically know how to skin a bird. I should go through Fearsclave‘s archives and dig out all the entries that discuss dressing fowl corpses, to pay more attention to detail.)

From Argh to Grr

The day has officially passed Argh and is well into Grr now.

I left my purse at daycare, and only realised it when I got home. And now no one is there to open it for me.

So, just in case that’s not clear: No wallet, no glasses. This means no driving. Ergo, no orchestra tonight.

*tears hair*

After all my psyching up for it, too.

I am such an idiot. The good thing is that having done it I won’t do it again soon, because I’ll be hyper-aware of my bag now. It’s just so small and light that I don’t notice it when I’m loaded with boy and gear.

Gnash, gnash.

Real Music

My early afternoon has consisted of the adaptor, cables, the minidisc player, and Audacity editing software. Mildly time-consuming as I learned how to do it all, but in the end, I have nine tracks, converted to mp3 format, and now uploaded to our band folder so we can all listen to them and say “wow” and “oh, now I hear what’s supposed to be happening there” and “I will do [this particular thing] slightly differently this time because I had no idea it sounded like that”.

Nine most excellent tracks of band rehearsal on Saturday.

We are Teh Awesome. What a fabulous learning tool this is.