So Wednesday night at orchestra, we were working through the second movement of Mendelssohn’s first symphony, and the entire orchestra was having trouble (in different places ) with the sixteenth note legato passages. These things are evil, particularly for cellos (and clarinets, apparently, although for different reasons). Your fingers have to stretch in really bizarre patterns, and no matter how we try to work out alternate fingerings, the pattern remains bizarre (in different permutations, but bizarre nonetheless). Bizarre fingerings while attempting to sound light and smooth and soft and sort of like gentle wind on a sunny day is nigh-impossible. The third or fourth go-round of this passage left our stand-in conductor attempting to reach for encouraging words while still sounding disappointed. From the very back of the cello section came the very dry comment, barely audible, of, “Mendelssohn played the piano.”

It’s true. He was a pianist. And he was evidently thinking pianistically when he wrote these long sixteenth note passages and scattered them liberally through the Andante of his first symphony.

Wretched pianists. Check out the physics of four strings sometime, and understand why we can’t play stuff that’s a cinch on the piano, with its nice shiny black and white keys all in a line with only an inch shift forward or back to hit an accidental, in nasty key signatures with three flats.

Bitter. I know. But!

Today, it doesn’t matter any more. I take comfort knowing that this morning, our family grows.

Oh, come on. You didn’t honestly believe that after nursing kittens, especially the tiniest one who wasn’t gaining weight and worried us all for a while and required extra-special love and attention, I’d manage to get away kittenless?

I hardened my heart. I did. We argued for and against. My husband was no help at all. My parents’ acquisition of their new kitten didn’t help, either.

Nix on any more cats, indeed. You all saw this coming.