Monthly Archives: June 2006

Evita Exasperation

Why on earth, in this day and age when one can fit eighty minutes of music on a CD, do they still transfer two-LP sets to two CDs? I mean, even my old warped cassette copy of the premiere American recording of Evita fit both LPs on one tape.

And despite the first CD being annotated correctly, the second CD calls up the 1996 movie soundtrack listing, so I have to update it with the correct information and change all the file names.

As for the movie, it’s not bad; it does a decent job taking a stage musical and setting it in the real world. One would watch it for the staging, not primarily for the music; a movie soundtrack neve rhas the same dynamism or energy that a recording of a stage show offers, despite both being done in a studio. Antonio Banderas, however, is not Mandy Patinkin, not by a long shot. Of course, he does have the fact that he’s Antonio Banderas going for him, so that’s all right, then.

Yay!

HRH just called; they’ve finished the job in the Eastern Townships they were working on today, and he’s being dropped off at the local metro station in about forty-five minutes. Woo-hoo! That solves a whole bunch of issues.

Did a load of laundry and had a minor ick-out when I found a small swarm of flying ants checking out the dryer to see if it would make a good home. No, thank you very much. Can I show you these ant traps instead, which I have just run out to buy? And this ant spray? Thank you, goodbye.

Speaking of laundry, I knew I’d forget something this morning; I wanted to buy a second set of cloth diapers. Oh well.

I’ve finished all my Real Work for the day, plus have gone out for a small grocery order, which means I now get to open Swan Sister and play about there until HRH calls.

Friday

Liam and I got up at the crack of dawn to drive HRH to work so that we could have the car today. We came home, ate breakfast, Liam had his early morning nap while I did mom and housework-type stuff, then I dropped him over at his grandparents’ place on the south shore and went to do all the shopping I wanted/needed to do.

I have a new pair of sandals for walking etc, because the pair of slip-ons I wore on our hour-long walk yesterday rubbed the top of my feet raw (yes, ouch). My sandals were not only on sale, but they are black, which means I can wear them for the concert tomorrow. I love my other black sandals with the clunky almost-platform soles with flowers carved into them that I usually wear for summer concerts, but they rub in exactly the same place my woven mule sandals do, so they’re a no-go as well.

I also have new music, and I have new books and more on the way. I discovered that the Indigo/Chapters/Coles chain uses the Indigo web site to special-order their books for you; they just get delivered to the store instead of your house. And you prepay it. So unless I don’t want to use my credit card for some reason, it makes no sense to not do it on my own from my own computer. Because really, when do I not place an order that doesn’t pass the minimum for free shipping anyhow?

The little $8 clip-on watch I’ve had for five years is dead, the girls in the watch store told me. I thought the battery was dead; it turns out that the innards have all gone rusty. Fortunately there’s a sidewalk sale next week, and they will have tons of them so I can replace it. I’d be using my Eeyore watch instead, but I can’t find it (which saddens me enormously, much more so that it ought to).

It never ceases to amaze me how cheerful everyone working in a shop is between eleven and noon on a Friday morning. From what I remember of retail, it’s because business is slow from opening till early afternoon, and the idiots haven’t hit yet to ruin anyone’s mood.

HRH got home at 9:20 last night. Gah. I have no idea what time he’ll be finishing today. Ideally I’ll be picking him up then getting Liam, but if he’s not ready before five-thirty then I’ll have to go pick up the boy and carry on with his evening routine as usual. In which case I’ll have to hope someone’s home upstairs who can come down and sit in the living room once Liam is in bed, so I can zip off and get HRH. Otherwise, hmm. Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Now! I will listen to the Pride & Prejudice score while I review other people’s proposals. And there is leftover pizza calling my name. And I must do a once-over on all the orchestra music before tomorrow, too.

Warning:

Chamber orchestra is going to kick dead composer ass at the Canada Day concert.

Just sayin’.

Oh, sure, there’s stuff I’m still not personally happy with, like the modulated bars in the Schubert, and the runs of sixteenth notes in the Mozart, but overall? There will be strings on fire, to borrow a phrase. And while I love playing classical music, sometimes it’s fun to kick back and play schmaltzy lush arrangements of Lloyd Webber musicals. And a drum kit certainly modifies the tone appropriately. (Yes, o my percussionist friends, we have both tympani and a regular drum kit for this concert, accessorised with various chimes and bells and wood blocks. More things to hit than you can shake a pair of sticks at.)

Whee!

‘Cause it’s much with the proposals, and even being asked if I want to write a fun book I didn’t dream up myself, which I could do in my sleep. (Almost. You know what I mean: I’m that familiar with the topic, and it’s practical information and lots of spells and such, not the deep philosophical metaphysical slippery spiritual stuff that always takes longer than I think it will.)

And honestly, I could do two at once, even if they both have early 2007 delivery dates, because they’re all so very different. (Just so long as they don’t have the SAME delivery date, because that would mean handling rewrites and copyedits for two different books at the same time, and please just kill me if that happens because even the barest hint of that thought makes me weak and wibbly and wanting to dig a hole in the corner of my office in which to hide. Gah. Back to the good thoughts.) It’s not like I don’t usually have three or more things on the go at the same time as a rule anyhow, simply to give my brain somewhere else to work when I hit a wall on one thing or another. And they’d all have saner deadlines than two months from now, because while doing one book on an unusual deadline like that is barely doable, but two at once? Impossible. (I am a goddess, yes, but there are limits to my goddessyness. My thoughts go veering back to that hole in the corner of my office.)

And if they’re all accepted, then we can simply schedule them over the next couple of years. Then I’d have multiple books coming out two years in a row, eight to ten months apart. (Hmm, is that a sense of deja vu? I think it is. Except not the insane deadlines or the to-the-rescue parts. And yay on that.)

While the proposal ideas got good response when casually discussed, they’re all being officially formally presented next week now that I’ve finished polishing them and have submitted the final drafts. I’m all bouncy and excited about it. I’m sure you couldn’t tell.

Oddly enough, the seasonal spellcrafting proposal is the idea I’m the least excited about out of the three I could be writing next. Or perhaps it’s not odd, because it’s the idea I’ve had the longest and I worked out all my bounciness about it two years ago, while everything else is shiny and new. And then there’s that series proposal that I did that isn’t really a potential assignment for me, but I’m excited about it anyhow, cause it’s my baby as well.

All right. I should stop bouncing here and do something else.

Hurrah!

OSM gets $105M concert hall

Montreal’s symphony orchestra (OSM) will be getting a 1,900-seat concert hall by 2011, Premier Jean Charest announced Tuesday.

The $105-million project is the Charest government’s first cultural public-private partnership.

The sixth concert hall at Place des Arts will be on the northeast corner of de Maisonneuve Blvd. and Saint-Urbain Street, and will raise to about 8,000 the number of seats in the whole facility.

The stage will be able to accommodate up to 200 singers and 120 musicians.

“The concert hall will boast some of the best acoustics in North America,” Charest said.

Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal’s current home, has often been criticized as lacking.

The concert hall will be smaller than the Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, but will be used exclusively for classical music.

It’s about time! No architect as of yet, but there’s an acoustic engineer attached to the project.

(Full article here.)

Frustrated

I’m currently very ticked off because I cannot find the all-weather rain shield for the stroller that I bought last fall. It never got taken out of the box, because we just didn’t go out on the really horrible days. Now that I have to go out to the grocery store before lunch and it’s a half hour both ways and it’s pouring, I need it. And of course it isn’t where I left it, because the garage has been rearranged a trillion times since last fall. (I can’t find anything down there when I want it because it keeps getting moved around, actually, but that’s beside this particular point.) One would think a baby item would logically be put with all the other baby stuff, but no, it isn’t with all the other equipment neatly stacked along the wall. I looked in cupboards, on shelves — nothing. Which means it probably got put in a box during one of HRH’s odd tidying sessions and is now under a stack of other stuff somewhere, and will not be found until Liam is seven years old.

I’m so frustrated I could scream. I know I’m easily irritated these days, but so very grr and argh.

Later: Okay, baby sleeping for just under two hours goes a long way to making me feel better. And it’s really amazing what you can do with an egg, some lentils, a bit of pasta, and cheese when there’s nothing else with which to feed someone.