New words today: 1,218
Total word count, Orchestrated: 10,611
Broke 10K today; that’s roughly 1/6th of the way. Now I’m off to run errands before picking up the boy. There is a cheque that needs to be deposited, after all, and I think I deserve a new pair of pants that fit properly and maybe a new fall sweater.
I forgot to mention that I wore my new green shoes to orchestra last night. I love them. Yay, green shoes!
Yay! Daniel Levitin has a new book out, this one called The World In Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. I loved This Is Your Brain On Music, so I’m going to pick this one up ASAP. Because, you know, I don’t have enough books on the To Read pile. (Two-thirds of the way through Anathem, still loving it, regretting that there are only 300 pages left; sigh. Also, I have a review book I’m supposed to read and, well, review, except I am so not in the mood for something set in the Regency period right now.)
Last night’s first rehearsal of the season was great. It felt really good to be back playing in concert with everyone. Our first guest conductor is in fact someone who we tested fiveish years ago when our original conductor passed away. I didn’t remember his name or his technique at all until about halfway through this rehearsal. He worked on having us express the music cleanly and with emotion, already set bowings for us prior to the rehearsal, and used examples and terminology to shape our interpretation. One night isn’t enough to fully evaluate someone’s technique, of course; we’ll be working with him properly for a couple of months to see how we suit. My borrowed cello was solid and serviceable but I’m glad I don’t play it on a regular basis. It was somewhat stiff, and the action was very high; thumb position would have killed me. I can see why C. upgraded to her current instrument, and again I’m reminded of how easy my cello is to play (oversize notwithstanding).
When I left for rehearsal I thought, Hmm, what do I need to bring? Oh, I should take my bow. A bow is a very personal thing, you see. So I grabbed that and off I went… leaving behind my (empty) music folder, my tuner, my pencils, my cleaning cloth, and my rosin. All these things are usually in my cello case, which is currently at the luthier with my cello, and since I don’t carry them separately it didn’t occur to me that I might need to collect them as well. At least I brought a bag with me so I could carry the music home, there was a pencil in my purse, and our section leader lent me her rosin (Liebenzeller Gold, wow; wish I’d had my own cello so I could have evaluated it better) and tuner.
Of course, although she’d heard about the new mystery cello and asked after it (hurrah for the tiny musical community who shares links to exciting blog posts about a fellow musician’s good fortune!) I forgot to ask her about lessons. Argh. I will write myself a note and stick it on the front of my music folder for next week.
In other news, I am not adverse to the government sending me random cheques based on my tax return, especially when they are nice chunks of money, but I do get suspicious and start looking over my shoulder when things have been going so nicely for a few months. I keep expecting a piano to fall. (Although if it’s an apartment sized piano, I will catch it and bring it home and install it in our living room for the boy and I to mess about with.)
New words today: 2,003
Total word count, Orchestrated: 9,393
Hello, pages and words. I love you.
Two new scenes, and my two protagonists have met and shared info and are now friends. Good. I may even have given a decent sense of who the new character is.
And speaking of orchestra, it’s the first rehearsal of the 2008-2009 chamber orchestra season tonight! I, of course, do not yet have my cello back from the shop, but someone is lending me one for the night. I’m very excited about going back because I miss playing (and not having a cello within reach for the past two weeks has driven me crazy), and also because we’ll meet our first guest conductor and get our music for the concert in late November.
Now I’m going to go get myself a drink, read some more Anathem and enjoy the language, and think about what to make for dinner. (I made sun oven-dried tomatoes with sea salt, herbs, and olive oil yesterday; maybe I’ll do something with them and some chicken. If I don’t eat the tomatoes right out of the container, that is.) Basically I intend to enjoy the fact that I have the next two hours to myself before the boys come home. Maybe I’ll have a nice, warm bath. Hmm; that thought has much merit. I also have a couple of sweaters to mend, as they seem to have developed holes during their summer sojourn in a drawer. I suspect that the bath will win out, though.
Today Emru Townsend is having the bone marrow transplant he desperately needs. Emru was diagnosed with leukemia and a condition called monosomy 7 about nine months ago. Since then he has received over 48 blood transfusions, has taken countless medications to control various aspects of the leukemia (and the side-effects of those medications), and has been in and out of the hospital with colds and other things we’d consider minor, but with his immune system compromised they become very dangerous to him.
There is NO GUARANTEE his body will accept this transplant. Like other transplants, there is the danger of the host rejecting the transplant, the transplant not taking, and the ever-present danger of infection.
From the very start Emru and his sister Tamu have turned this situation into a drive to raise awareness and teach people about bone marrow transplants and encourage people to list themselves on their country’s bone marrow registry. Cultural minorities in North America (and indeed, worldwide) are particularly under-represented on these registries, a fact that the Townsend siblings have targeted as their main focus.
Emru is only one of millions of people who needs bone marrow transplants to deal with a variety of illnesses and conditions. The most important issue at the moment is that we continue to educate, myth-bust, and spread information about the importance of adding your name to the bone marrow registry of your country. Emru is only one man; there are thousands and thousands of people out there who still need a bone marrow transplant to save their lives. Keep the HealEmru.com link circulating; keep mentioning it to everyone you meet. The majority of racial groups are still under-represented, and that’s not going to change overnight.
Emru’s been blogging his journey and treatment, and it makes for sober but enlightening reading. I am proud of all my friends for a variety of reasons, but Emru and Tamu Townsend are stars. They have tirelessly worked for this cause and given so much of themselves. The campaign may be called Heal Emru, but Emru’s name stands for every single individual who is struggling with an illness and needs a donor for stem cells, bone marrow, or peripheral cell transplant.
The HEal Emru FAQs answer some of the common questions people have about bone marrow donation.
The Heal Emru site lists contact information for registries around the world.
Prayer and good thoughts while Emru has his surgery today are good things (likewise during the recovery period while the transplant settles). Apart from this, the easiest thing you can do is walk up to someone and say, “Hey, have you heard about your country’s bone marrow registry?”
Are you a match? Find out how you can help save Emru’s life: http://www.healemru.com
Got Facebook? Please join Help Emru Find a Bone Marrow Donor and if you learn something new, invite your friends.
Got Livejournal, WordPress or Blogger? Blog it!
Got Youtube? Subscribe to www.youtube.com/healemru
Just find someone you care about and tell them.
Contact info:
Hema Quebec http://www.hema-quebec.qc.ca
Canada Blood Services (Canada, except Quebec) http://onematch.ca/registry
National Marrow Donor Program (US) http://www.marrow.org
Am exhausted. Ran out of spoons mid-Saturday, not long after it started to pour buckets of rain upon the fest. Fortunately, the energy ran out after my workshop; unfortunately, before the other workshops and rituals I’d planned to attend. Sleeping badly all weekend plus two seven-hour car rides did not help. Neither did the energy-sapping damp weather. It’s going to take me about three days to get back into some sort of normal operative mode.
Workshop = success. Yay me. Yay workshop attendees. Yay festival organizers for being an awesome team of awesome people. Love them all with much love.
Sold some books, even. Was also asked to do an article on hearthcraft for Circle Magazine.
Both HRH and I came home from the festival with new blades from Helmut’s Forge. I also acquired a stunning kyanite pendant from Shan, a highly polished cabochon the size of my thumbnail that looks nothing like that Wikipedia photo of the mineral. (Oh, this site has a gallery of cut and polished stones; much better.) Websites variously tell me that kyanite is used for stimulating energy, encouraging clarity and intuition, dispelling anger/confusion/frustration, protecting in energy-sapping situations, facilitating communication, and promoting tranquillity, among other things. We just bought it because it looked pretty.
Stopped by t! and Jan’s new home on the way back yesterday to run around the place (okay, the boy did the running, I did a lot of sitting and drinking a glass of water) and generally admire their house and land. The boy smashed the cats’ water goblet in one of his enthusiastic turns through the kitchen. Sigh.
Finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle last night. Would have been life-changing had I not just read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Started Neal Stephenson’s Anathem this morning and love every word of it.
The boy has a cold; his chest seems congested and he coughs now and again. (Travelling with him was not much fun yesterday.) He stayed home with me till we verified that the preschool takes kids so long as they are not feverish or diarrheaic or have streaming noses, drove him in for ten, dropped the car off for HRH, and metro/bussed home. Walked through the front door at 12:30. Lay down for a while, then hauled myself here to assure you all that no, I is not ded.
Except now, having seen that the world and the Intraweebs did not blow up in my absence (the remnants of Hurricane Ike smashing into the back of the house last night notwithstanding) and my inbox holds nothing of dramatic deadline, I will drag myself off to lie on the couch again and read more Anathem, because I have the energy for nothing else.
I love the Hamilton pagan community and want them to adopt me.
I have just finished a last go-over of the workshop (Whose brilliant idea was it to present a workshop I’D NEVER GIVEN BEFORE? Gah!) (Oh, wait, that would have been me.), have signed all the books I brought for sale, have separated all the postcards with the book and contact info on them… now to go get changed.
There is so much happening today, so many talks I want to sit in on, and there are so many people I want to sit down and talk with one on one. And there’s a family gathering once I come home for dinner too.
Off I go!
The biggest news of the past month is, of course preschool. “Bye Mama! I’m going to school!” Liam says jauntily in the morning, and heads down the stairs to the car with HRH. Sometimes I even get a “See you later!” or “Have a good day!” as he waves up at the living room window and then climbs into the car. His teacher called me after
his first two weeks and gave me the update: they love him, he plays enthusiastically with everyone but has one special girl he absolutely adores ( “I’ve seen love affairs begin this quickly before, but not often,” she said!), his language skills blah blah blah, has a wonderful imagination, eats well, has adjusted well to the structure and directed play as opposed to the completely free play he was used to, is very sensitive and picks up on emotional states very quickly, helps set things up and clean them away, falls asleep at rest time within ten minutes and sleeps well, and so forth. If there’s one thing he has to work on it’s dressing and undressing himself. (Yes, we know, trust us. And we find it odd that out of all the things he could choose to rebel against, it’s pulling pants up and down and taking shoes off.) It took a week or so (and a new pair of shoes one size larger so that he can slip his feet in and out more easily) but he now puts them on and takes them off by himself, and even puts them away tidily by the door. I am always particularly amused when he carefully hangs his cap on the handle of his bedroom door.
He brought home ‘art’ his third day there: a piece of paper with bits of coloured construction paper from the scrap box glued all over it. “I made art!” he said, bursting through the front door. “Put it on my fridge!”
He sang selections from The Sound of Music in bed to me the other night, then patted my face and said “Sing with me, Mama!” So we sang ‘Do Re Mi,’ and ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ (I must learn all the proper words), and ‘Eidelweiss’. Singing in general has increased in frequency, accuracy, and volume. He’ll even sing for other people instead of clamming up when they notice. He tends to sing to himself when we’ve finished a story and our cuddle at bedtime, kissed him, tucked him in, and closed the door behind us. Putting him to bed at home has become much easier, and his midnight wakings have vanished. On average he wakes between six and six-thirty, which is right on time for school mornings.
He has lately been introduced to a 1996 BBC animation of The Wind in the Willows, and absolutely loves it. He has dubbed ‘Concerning Hobbits’ (of The Fellowship of the Ring score) “the Wind in the Willows music”. Sometimes he has an ice cream cone for dessert on the back porch after dinner, and he often brings a book out with him and asks one of us to read aloud while he sits on the deck and eats his treat. One night he asked if we’d read to him and I said that I had something new to share. I brought out my Ernest Shepard-illustrated copy of The Wind in the Willows and read the first half of the first chapter to him. He was spellbound. He has to be in a very quiet mood to listen to a chapter book like this, but we’ve managed to do it once or twice for a few pages so far.
The other film he is obsessed with is Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. We watched it in three or four sittings to make sure he didn’t get overwhelmed by the appearance and behaviour of the various spirits, and he has been asking lots of questions about spirits in general since. “Can you tell me about river spirits?” he asked me in bed one night. “Lots of things?” He plays at being a river spirit in the bath and listens to the soundtrack at night while falling asleep.
When we got the laptop back up and running he went into my office and pulled my chair over to the writing desk. “I’m working, Mama,” he called. I came in to the office to see him confidently tapping away on the keyboard. “What are you working on?” I asked. “I’m writing a message to you!” he said. So I opened Word for him, enlarged the font to something huge he could see very easily, and let him go to town.
Overall I see him growing into a confident and enthusiastic boy, wearing size nine shoes (size nine!), who converses clearly and plays complicated little games, who is ever more capable of handling increasingly complex tasks. The odd whiny/resistant period has almost vanished. I think we timed the preschool thing perfectly; he needed more structure and social-oriented activity than I could provide for him. When we were out shopping one day I heard him say, “quatre, cinq… quatre, cinq,” and I stood there in the middle of the grocery store aisle, staring down at him. “Are you… counting?” I said. “Yes, but there are no more,” he said, waving his hand at the empty space after the sequence of air fresheners he’d been counting. It’s like a miracle: we send him to school, and he comes home counting in French and singing songs I never taught him. It’s just incredible, after being the ones to teach him everything for a while. We love it. And so does he.
