This was taken last weekend. I thought it would amuse Ceri, Mousme, Tal, Sandman7, t!, and anyone else who’s ever tried to write on a laptop in my house and had to contend with a very determined lap cat.
Maggie finally decides to Do Something about that damn machine that takes up the lap: if you can’t beat it…
… sit on it.
Last night was the last rehearsal of the first third of the LCO season, and the first sight-reading rehearsal for Gounod‘s first symphony, which very few of us know. It’s going to be very pretty. We now have six weeks off.
And because the universe works on the principle of synchronicity and checks and balances, when I went to pack a second back-up bow in my cello case last night I decided to take my heavy viola bow that I bought a couple of years ago to use as a light cello bow, instead of the heavy off-balance cello bow. And I found that the viola bow is broken, too: the ferrule has snapped off the little plate that lines the underside of the frog, where there’s a little tab that slots into the ferrule. It can no longer be tightened.
Augh!
(In case anyone else is keeping score, that’s two bows broken out of three, and one bow too wonky to use except in emergency (or in case of the Ramones or Metallica). I do have a 3/4 fibreglass bow with zero responsiveness that came with my cello when I bought it from its previous owner; I may have to drag that out to use until my main bow gets properly fixed.)
There really isn’t much point in buying a new bow right now, as I seriously want to start testing new advanced cellos late next spring (payment upon delivery of current book + HRH theoretically will have a permanent job with steady income = money that can be divided between investment and cello), and a bow that suits this cello won’t necessarily suit a more advanced one. Of course, it’s not that I’m planning to buy a cello next year, just to start researching and testing with luthiers, a process that can take ages until I find something really responsive with the tonal colour I like, all in my price range.
Except now I’m working with a main bow that has a cracked frog, one back-up bow that’s broken and unusable, and another back-up bow that has bad balance and hurts my hand as I try to control it. It looks like I’ll have to call my luthier and ask how much it is to replace a frog on a basic no-frills bow.
I wasn’t there, but reliable sources say this exchange happened last night while reading Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse at bedtime:
BOY: Mouse.
HRH: Yes.
BOY: [LOOKS AT NEXT PICTURE] Mices. Two mices.
HRH: Almost! When there’s just one, it’s a mouse. When there are two, they’re called mice.
BOY: Two mice.
HRH: Yup.
[NEXT PAGE]
BOY: One mouse… two mice.
HRH told me that it was incredible to sit there and watch Liam recognise that there should be a collective term for several of one kind of thing, and extrapolate it from a word he’d heard us use. “Language development is so mind-blowing,” he said. “I am so the wrong person to be teaching him this.” Which isn’t true, of course, but points to how overwhelming it can be to observe a small creature learn like this.
Ladies and gentlemen: the Incredibow.
Apart from the irresistible name it looks very gamba-like, a shape I’ve been interested in for the past few years. If there was a trial option I might have added it to my ‘this is something to try at some point’ list.
My darling little sister, who is reading my next book in MS form, just sent me a lovely e-mail telling me she got tingles from reading the opening sentences, and voila, my day is better. Thanks, love.
Also, I have remembered that work =/= writing all the time, and am reading a second-hand well-used copy of Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane. A page in and boom, the highlighter is out, and the sticky bookmarks, my notebook is revving up, and my brain is moving.
I still have to leave in forty minutes, though.
An hour and a half round trip to drop the boy off this morning, thanks to piles of snow in the road and idiots driving on them who can’t wait their turn or remember how to drive in snow. The round trip usually takes thirty-five to forty minutes, including drop-off time. I came straight home rather than run the errands I need to run because otherwise I’d only have walked through the door around noon. I am having to reinitialize all my parking-in-snowbanks and pulling-out-of-snowbanks skills that have lain dormant for ten months.
After handling correspondence and news, lunch (important because I have missed breakfast and lunch the past two days), laundry, a call from the bank to discuss things, and so forth, it is now QUARTER TO THREE and I haven’t even gotten to Real Writing Work yet.
It’s that kind of day. I’ve lost so much momentum since last Wednesday, which is the last day I got to work at all. I wish I was motivated. This is one of those days where being a writer is more work than any other job I’ve held.
I’m going to have to leave forty-five minutes early to get through the idiocy and pick the boy up too, so if I hit a groove I’ll to have to jump out of it before I want to. It is so very tempting to say ‘to hell with it all’ and go play the DS instead. But I’ll still have to think of something to make for dinner.
That freelance cheque can arrive any time now, thanks. Money would make things marginally better.
Happy birthday, Ceri! Have 31.6 centimetres of snow!
(Yes, I am smacking myself for saying we hadn’t had a massive dump of snow only two days before your birthday.)