Suspiciously Cheerful

Suspicious because I shouldn’t be this happy and/or laid back this close to a deadline. I should be more focused on what I’m doing. But it’s sunny outside and there is no more snow (well, other than the edges of the backyard), and I got my third lovely surprise yesterday: a small bouquet of tulips from my boys.

Today I’ve been researching Mac Minis. I had to walk away from my desktop yesterday because it was (a) loud and (b) connected to the Internet. I tried to use my Dell laptop and it was even louder than the desktop. I defaulted to the Macbook I have on extended loan, and it operated in blessed silence. All my experiences with the Macbook so far have convinced me that I want to go Apple next. HRH has told me that any time I want to go downtown to the Apple Store to do some hands-on research, he’s good to go. He gets an educational discount, too, which knocks a bit of the price down. Of course I’ll just feed that right back into a three-year warranty, but hey. It will be very exciting to have a brand-new computer with a warranty. And I’m looking at the Mini because I have all my peripherals and don’t need the all-in-one package an iMac offers. Also, much cheaper. And portable. And tiny.

I had two cupcakes for breakfast. So there.

Yesterday I managed to finish my first draft of the introduction for the anthology; I’ll polish it on Friday. I’m still poking at the order, trying new things in different places. It feels like I’m spinning my wheels, because rearranging fifty stories doesn’t net me any tangible progress except a different sequence of titles in the table of contents. It’s harder than it sounds, because it takes a lot of brain power to remember what each story is about and what themes or tones it demonstrates. It’s like making a mix tape, trying to get the right flow between the moods and styles, except it’s 277 pages of stuff instead of two thirty-minute chunks. It’s taking up more mental RAM.

Fearsclave and I are geeking out about recurve bows at the moment, and I’ve pulled my two volumes of The Bowyer’s Bible out to lend him next time we see one another. In a rather apt illustration of my personality, they were shelved between books called Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts and The Technical Manual And Dictionary Of Classical Ballet.

And now, I must go and poke at the anthology with a sharp stick again.

More Joy!

The day just keeps getting better! I just had a call from Bodhifox, cheerily inviting me to go out for tea. Of course, he’s in Ohio and I’m in Montreal, but it was such a wonderful thing to ask. To unexpectedly touch base with someone I love like that was fantastic.

Fox says there’s one more good thing to come, as surprises come in threes.

I feel like spinning around in the sun for a while. I wish there were daffodils to pick. I’ll have to make do with looking at the sun and pretending it’s warm. Also, there are cupcakes to make.

Weekend Roundup

Busy, busy, busy.

Friday morning was sunny but cold for our outing to the Biodome with Curtana and Arthur. The fun began before we got there, because we took the Metro. The boy has no memory of being on the subway, which isn’t surprising because he was very tiny and in a stroller the last time we rode it with him. He was very excited, because hey, it’s a train! Naturally there was a unexplained slowdown, turning a half-hour trip into a forty-five minute trip. He entertained himself by identifying the letters in the graffiti on the windows. The Biodome was a very exciting destination because there is a rainforest pavilion, and the boy’s Nana has recently come back from Costa Rica where she visited the rainforest herself. Also, the boy was hoping there would be jaguars, even though I told him there were none. Hope springs eternal when you are a very earnest almost-four.

We met Curtana and Arthur at the station at the other end and there was a joyful shout from the boy and a running forward from Arthur, and it looked all the world like a slow-motion reunion on a film screen, missing only a swelling of music to cap it all off. And the running didn’t really stop: they were so excited about the Biodome that they ran through it once, then ran through it again. We saw crocodiles (caimans, actually), lots of tropical birds, very big fish, tiny monkeys, bats, otters, beavers, ducks and waterfowl of all kinds, puffins, and penguins. I don’t know what they enjoyed most, but the kid slide next to the otter slide was certainly up there, as was the big screen before the penguin exhibit upon which was projected Arctic footage. They were particularly tickled by the fact that the penguins on the screen were as tall as they were, and cavorted around with them.

We had a snack, and visited the boutique (where we bought some tiny toy turtles, to go with the larger turtles the boy plays with in his bath, and a lovely bone china mug with barn owls on it for me), and spent some time in the hands-on educational room before we all took the Metro back to our respective stops. And we made a date for Arthur to come play on Sunday morning. Lunch and nap were very late after so much excitement but he did finally take an hour and a bit of sleep.

Saturday was our all-day spiritual workshop retreat day, missing some people but still fabulous! It was a really great day with wonderful food, interesting workshops and discussions, fun activities and insightful ritual. I’m so glad we’ve decided to do this twice a year. It gets us together and talking about great topics, doing more ritual, and having fun. Carving out time here and there for these things is difficult; setting one whole day to focus on this kind of thing is easier and very rewarding. (Not that we don’t do it at other times, too! The two workshop days don’t replace the regular ongoing work, but supplement it.)

Sunday morning Arthur and his dad Forthright came over for a couple of hours of train and Lego play. I made some quite nice scones (adding extra brown sugar and underbaking them just a tad to produce a very sweet and moist result, nom nom nom) which both boys wolfed down (Liam was actually keeping track of how many he ate and proudly held up five fingers when I asked him what number he was on near the end of the playdate). There were tears at the end when the boys had to part, but reassurances that lunch was coming for one and that they’d see one another again for the other seemed to soothe them. After a lunch of pancakes and a nap, we were off to Ceri and Scott’s house for a movie and dinner, a treat rescheduled from last week when the boy had been very, very ill in the car. I got another three rows knitted on the damn ribbing of the mitts I’m working on thanks to Ceri’s presence, and the boys played downstairs. And I got a belated Yuletide gift from Ceri, a lovely set of fingerless gloves crocheted in the Phoenix Gloves pattern by Julia Vaconsin in a beautiful Lorna’s Laces colourway with soft greens and reds and pinks (Gold Hill, perhaps?). They’re exquisite and I adore them. I wanted to wear them for the rest of the day but I couldn’t handle the DPNs I was knitting with properly, as they kept catching in the gloves, and I didn’t want them to get spattered with tomato sauce from dinner, so off they came when they finally had to.

And to my surprise there was decent sleep each night as well. Wonders will never cease.

Now it’s headfirst into the anthology. Today and the rest of this week will see me tidying up last-minute loose ends or edits from the final contributors, scanning the original material for final comments and errors, and then playing with the order of the essays. It all takes a lot of brain power, more than it seems that it ought to.

On The Other Hand…

The Beethoven symphony, the Vivaldi, and Scheherazade are going to sound great. The concertmaster’s rendition of the Scheherazade/storyteller theme is magical.

And the conductor has said that she will make a final decision on concert tempo for the Hebrides next week. So there is hope!

In Which She Grumbles About Cello

Here’s the thing.

I have lost pretty much any joy in playing and practising, because it’s all about L’Arlesienne and the Hebrides, and I hate them. I am better than I was when we started working on these, yes. But no matter how much I drill them, I’m getting them wrong, and there is no sense of satisfaction or progress. In fact, all there is is frustration. If I can play them at ridiculously slow speeds, that doesn’t help me in top-speed concert situations.

We had a strings-only rehearsal on Saturday, and the Vivaldi was great. The four young soloists are terrific. But then we finished by playing the Hebrides at concert speed, and it’s a train wreck. I suspect that this guest conductor has set us more than we can carry off, which she couldn’t really know when she decided on the programme. And I hate saying that because I don’t like to suggest that a concert is going to be less than good. But when the entire section of celli shakes its head at a piece, and there’s someone saying she’s not going to play in the concert because she doesn’t like how the music is sounding, it’s not an ideal situation. There’s doing my best and being proud of it, and then there’s the sense of hopelessness and resentment. (Mendelssohn, I hope you’re happy, you section-wrecker, you.) And it’s not just our section with the Mendelssohn problem, either.

So every time I sit down to play I want to play anything except Mendelssohn and Bizet, and I know that I need to practise them more than anything else. And I get cranky. I know that I am light-years beyond where I was seven years ago when I played L’Arlesienne the first time. It doesn’t make a difference. What does make a difference is that fact that I’ve improved in general, so now the bits I get wrong sound really awful instead of blending into the general not-very-goodness of my playing.

This 7/8 sounds slightly choked in fourth position and above. I suspect it has something to do with me getting used to the touch up there and figuring out the proper angle of string-stopping. Still, I find myself thinking of how clearly my 4/4 sang in fourth and up. I plan to take the 4/4 out of its case next week and try to play all this stuff I’ve been working on on it, just to see if the 7/8 is making a difference. My first two months of rental are up at the beginning of April. I do like the sound of the 7/8, and it handles nicely in respect to size and proportion. I just have no clue if it’s made a positive difference or not.

So yeah. I’m kind of looking forward to the post-concert break, and to different music.