The monthly post about the boy is up and backdated.
First rehearsal with the new test conductor last night, and what fun. He had us playing the Schubert passably in pretty much no time at all. He’s younger than I thought (by quite a bit) and an oboist. We were missing an oboe so he pulled his out and wandered around playing the oboe theme while conducting. It was mildly alarming to have an oboist wander at you at various points, but it certainly encouraged each section to play out when they were supposed to. He greeted us in French and talked to us equally in both languages, which impressed us. I already like his musicality and his personality. There were grumpy people making their grumpiness known, but that’s not unusual, alas.
Best news of the night: One of the pieces he’s considering programming is Ralph Vaughn Williams’ English Folk Song suite! I bounced in my chair with excitement. (Otherwise I sat there in mild pain, because the particular chair I was in slanted nastily toward the back. Ugh. Time to look into one of those firm wedge cushions.)
I need to do two more takes of six brief sections of dialogue for this recording, then I’m going to hook it all up to the computer and listen to it. I’ve already noted which takes I need to delete because of an error on my part or noise interference (like helpful cats scratching or jumping up onto my desk and scattering papers). I fervently hope everything’s okay, because if not I have to do the whole thing over twice tonight once the boy’s in bed, and I don’t do work after the boy’s in bed very well. The boy and I are headed downtown tomorrow morning to ride on the underground train to hand this in.
This morning’s excitement included being addressed by a policeman, who pulled up next to my car while I was unlocking it after dropping the boy off. How long had I been there, he wanted to know, and was I not aware that I wasn’t allowed to park on this side of the street between nine and four? I blinked, looked at the signage, and pointed out respectfully that the signs indicated that motorists were supposed to park here between nine and four on a Thursday, and that in fact all the cars on the opposite side of the street were parked illegally. He looked at the signs, looked back at me, said, “T’as raison, j’ai mal identifié le côté de la rue,” and gave me a huge grin. I laughed and wished him a good day. There was such a difference between his neutral opening words and the tone of his reply to me. He must encounter argument and abuse pretty much regularly, so to have someone correct him politely must be quite a novelty. He gave me another huge grin once his partner had turned the car around and was headed back down the hill toward all the illegally parked cars. I think I made their day.
It’s confirmed: we’re trying out a third conductor tonight! And I am very happy because there was a bit of kerfuffle about memberships dues not covering what this conductor requested as his fee, but the majority of members were okay with paying a supplement to obtain his services for this concert. If we decide he’s the one for us then membership fees will go up, and I’m perfectly fine with that; we pay a ridiculously low fee as it is, and more than doubling it only brings us to ten dollars per month the orchestra plays each year. If he’s as good as his reputation suggests he is, we’d be getting a real deal. Also, audiences would increase because of his affiliation with other musical events and organisations, and our recruiting of new members would also increase. There’s a lot of potential here. 
Lovely Easter weekend with my parents. I am now ill, of course. The boy left with what we thought were allergies on Friday and arrived there with a cold, so naturally I caught it, and have it worse than he did. Add to that the general malaise my body experiences after two six-hour car rides within four days, and you have a very unhappy me. We almost kept the boy home from school today but decided against it, and I’m so thankful. Not only do I have a work meeting downtown at 12:30, I’m wiped (see above re. sick and fibro-related backlash from the weekend) and suspect I wouldn’t be able to handle him on my own with much success.
Or four years minus two months. The boy has become quite adept at informing people that he’s going to be [this many fingers] old on his birthday.
If I had to distill this past month down to two words, they would be singing and bunnies. I have been woken up a good five out of seven days each week by a small child burrowing under the covers with me, then singing such classic hits as “Little Bunny Foo-Foo,” the alphabet song, a little preschool ditty called “Ducks Like Rain,” “The Wheels on the Bus,” “Old Macdonald,” “Five Little Ducks,” and various little songs of his own devising. And perhaps it was the Easter thing, but he’s become obsessed with rabbits: pictures, stuffed ones, hopping around like one. He started carrying around the small white bunny my gran sent him to keep BunBun company, and just acquired a silky-soft black one for Easter whom he calls Blackie-Whitey, or Blackie for short (very inventive is my almost-four-year-old).
Ceri and Scott lent us the breathtaking Planet Earth series of nature documentaries, and we’ve been enjoying them immensely. They’re far beyond the nature shows of our youth. Of course, they do tell similar stories, and so the boy was introduced to the cycle of life rather graphically. “Why is that wolf chasing those deer?” he wanted to know. So we explained that it was chasing the caribou (ahem) because he was hungry. “RUN, CARIBOU!” he yelled at the screen. And so we talked about the fact that wolves aren’t good or bad, that this is just the way things are. We had to revisit the concept when the wild dogs chased the antelope, and the shark chased the seal (in graphic slow motion), but he eventually got it. He loves the different climates and landscapes, and all the animals, and he especially loves the planet rise in the opening title sequence.
This past month has seen a huge explosion in alphabet and letter recognition, complete with drawing letters and reading. Words he can absolutely read include Liam, Mama, Dada, cat, car, cello, train, school, and lesson. (Why have I not shown him how to write ‘book’ yet?) He demonstrates amusing logo recognition, too, pointing out Chapters, Zellers, Best Buy, and the toy store with great enthusiasm as we pass them in the car or see them in flyers. One morning we were cuddling in bed together and he started describing drawing letters. It took me a few moments to understand what he was talking about, but I clued in somewhere around the second letter. He described drawing the strokes necessary to write out his name, and I was wide awake by the end of it, at which point I gave him a huge hug. Being able to actually hold a pencil and draw it out is one thing; being able to describe it abstractly without the accompanying physical motions is pretty stupendous, in my opinion. Especially at stupid o’clock in the morning. He’s been able to write his name for a while, but now he does it clearly without prompting. He has become fascinated with the difference between upper and lowercase letters, although he’s making the classic mistake of confusing the lowercase D and B. He’s very proud of being able to write his name in lowercase letters and understands that the first letter of a name is capitalized. Serifs frustrate him, because he traces them and thinks they’re extra bars or ascenders/descenders and guesses the letter in question incorrectly, or asks what letter it is because it doesn’t match the twenty-six he knows.
The biggest new experience this month was without question riding the metro, or the ‘underground train’ as he calls it. He loved watching from the platform for the lights coming down the tunnel, watching the trains passing in the other direction, looking at the art in the stations while people got off and on; the entire experience was exciting. I’ll be taking him with me to a downtown meeting next week just so he can have another ride. The other exciting new thing is the Lego Star Wars game we bought for the Xbox, which he just adores. He figured out how to make the characters run around, jump, and attack in no time at all. Playing in co-op mode is a bit of a challenge because he’s likely to run off in the opposite direction, and the characters are yoked within a certain distance, but he’ll get better. This month’s awesome new film was Bolt.
I just had an hour-long rehearsal with my duet partner that went quite encouragingly well. I recorded the session with the MiniDisc, and have now spent an hour struggling with the transfer. The first time I had the levels set too high so the bass warped everything. The second one I did was too low and had odd clicking/crackly sounds throughout it. Third time’s the charm, yes?
So the plan to not work didn’t happen. I’ve edited two stories, both needing a decent amount of work for various reasons (one was a first draft, one was shoehorning an already excellent 10K document into 2K words; my head justifiably hurts). 
I am effectively dead. I am calling in Not Living today, because that’s about as useful as I can manage to be. Work will happen tomorrow.