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My stunning Hallowe�en costume has been hanging up for a few weeks now, and yes, just as I had hoped, I�ve been looking at it and loving it and anticipating Hallowe�en with glee.

There�s just one thing. The next step involves making metre-long slices in the existing costume. Two of them.

It�s so pretty, and it looks so damned drop-jaw good on me. I�m petrified to ruin it, quite frankly. These two metre-long slices would really make the costume though.

S�okay. I have five weeks to work up the courage to do it. Well, four, because next week is chock-a-block full of work and teaching and such things. Three, actually, because I�d need a week to recover from the heart-stopping knowledge that I�ve committed hara-kari on a costume that�s taken me hours to get to this almost-perfect point. Now that I think about it, it�s only two weeks, since I�ll need a week to do the finicky final touches after I�ve hacked it apart, and then a week to rest and like it again while recovering.

Oh please, gods, let this work.

I feel the sudden urge to go fetal.

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Has it ever happened that you casually glance out the window and you don’t see any cars go by, or people on the street, or anyone moving in the dep across the way, or dogs in the park dog-run, and wonder if, just maybe, you missed the end of the world?

Auspicious Circle

I thought I’d blog something positive, seeing as how when I scan past entries I notice that I’ve been blogging bad news more often than not. I�ve been rather glum recently.

So! I had orchestra again last night, and there was new music waiting for us: Handel’s Toccata and Fugue in F (I think; I might be misremembering the key signature). There were only two copies of the cello part for this, and four cellists, so I shared with another cellist, the one of the infamous Canada Day concert shared stand. Now, when I share music, I end up squinting to my left, and I get dizzy. Sure enough, I couldn’t follow correctly, and rapidly became alarmingly nauseous. I stopped trying to play, and eventually laid my cello down quietly, stood up, left the stage, and sat outside in the cool fresh air, breathing deeply. I had a flash of “why am I bothering, I’ll never do this right” which surfaces every once in a while, ignored it, and eventually went back inside, figuring that if it got worse I’d just pack up and go home. I sat and followed the music until we switched to the Mendelssohn symphony, when I pulled my own stand forward and opened my own music. “Oh,” said my seatmate, “you don’t want to share mine?” “No, but thanks,” I said politely, “I’ll use mine, it has all my marks on it anyway.”

Now, the conductor has told us a few times now that this is a difficult symphony, and I’m still waiting for the proverbial piano to fall, because I’m having a ball with it. So we started, and every once in a while Sean or my old stand partner Walter (who now sits in the second chair, at the seemingly casual request of our principal cellist which everyone in the cello section knows is a veiled promotion and the mark of favour) would check on me: “Are you feeling okay? Do you need air? Water?” No, I was fine, I told them, my mind was somewhere else now, and so long as I didn’t think about my stomach I’d be all right. They were very kind.

From that point on I proceeded to have a fantastic night, first with the opening movement of the Mendelssohn symphony, then for the last ten minutes of rehearsal during the Rossini overture we’re doing. I truly adore these new strings; I do need a softer rosin, and I had to stand up and retune them (via the pegs, not the fine tuners) every twenty minutes or so as they stretch, but all in all, it went spectacularly well. So well, in fact, that time flew, and I wasn’t ready for the evening to come to an end. (I have never, ever understood why people are in such a hurry to leave something they do for fun.)

As I was packing up, Walter turned around with a smile and said, “You’ve been practicing; I can tell. Having the free time to do it is really showing. Soon you’ll be in my chair!”

Well, well, well. I think I must have glowed. “I do have the time, and the headspace,” I agreed, “but these new strings have something to do with it as well, I’m sure. Thank you.”

My intonation sounds more precise, my overall tone sounds more cohesive, and the sound in general is clearer, the bow moves more easily and articulation just seems to be more present than it did before. Having someone else notice really did wonders for my confidence. Maybe it’s the new bridge; maybe it’s the still-new bow; maybe it’s the new strings; maybe it’s all of them, plus me.

Hmm. Just looking at that list makes me add up how much I’ve spent on upgrading my instrument and accessories over the past nine months and wince a little bit — just a little bit. It’s cheaper than buying a new instrument, after all. And now that it’s all done, I don’t need to worry for a while.

I do sound better, and that I can even tell shows me how much I’ve improved over the past year. I love playing with these new strings, because I love the sound. Loving to play is a good thing, because I’ll play even more. And the more I play, the better I get. What a nice change from the vicious circles I usually get caught up in. What would I call this — an auspicious circle? Whatever the term, I’m thankful for it, and intend to keep on enjoying it, as well.

Feline Challenges

Oh dear. Cat trouble all around, it seems.

Pursuant to the loss of the elderly Sir Grey, my mother has decided to reserve another Maine Coon kitten. Her reasoning, which I fully agree with, is that no animal as social as a Maine Coon should be solitary, and they had reserved him months ago expecting the little guy to have a dog and a cat to romp with. An empty house is unfair. So, Mum has decided to go ahead and reserve a silver Maine Coon from the same breeder, despite my father’s waffling (and if he finds out via my blog, I do apologise, but you had at least two days to tell him, Mum). This one’s ETA is December, so Seamus will only have three months on his own. (Yes, three months; when did it get to be three months to the end of the year?)

On top of that, Scarlet has e-mailed to inform me that the feral cat who produced the litter of kittens we’ve been nursing tested positive for feline immunodeficiency virus, which means that it might have been passed to the kittens in utero or via the mother’s milk. There�s no way to tell until they’re tested after four months old, since they can still possess a sort of trace phantom FIV from contact with the mother until that age. The main problem is that an FIV positive cat can’t be in contact with an FIV negative cat, or the virus can be passed along.

This is a problem, of course, since Scarlet was hoping to have all these cats gone to good homes as soon as possible, so she could have her office back to normal. If we can’t mix these cats with her other non-FIV household cats — well, you see the problem. It also means that she has to keep the kittens till they’re four months old and tested to ascertain their FIV status, because it would be irresponsible to pass a potentially FIV-positive cat along to a household with non-FIV cats.

There are irresponsible people out there, of course. We are not members of that particular demographic. So these cats will stay at home for two extra months, and once we’ve found out whether they’re FIV positive or negative, we’ll be able to place them properly.

Oh dear, indeed.

Loss

I heard today that my parents lost the last pet I’d grown up with. That makes all three within one year.

You have to wonder about the skewed idea of justice that the world has. Last year, it was our female cat Bo’sun, of lung cancer. Last month it was our dog Megan, also of cancer. Yesterday, they put down our cat Grey, of Cushing’s disease. These were animals who were deeply loved, and well-cared for in every sense of the word, who still developed fatal diseases. And everywhere, there are strays and feral dogs and cats, scraping out a living on the streets and in the wild, living to an astonishingly old age.

My parents aren’t completely alone; they brought their new Maine Coon kitten home last week, of course. When I go down at Thanksgiving, though, there won�t be a dog bouncing at the front door when I come in, or a familiar thin hyper-purring cat climbing into my lap when I sit at the kitchen table.

Why do things move so fast? Do you ever get the sense that the world is moving inexorably on, and you’re just standing there, bewildered, not knowing how to keep up? That things are changing, and you don’t know how to make them stop, even just for a little while?

I’m upset about Grey, of course; I’m upset for my parents, too. More than anything else, though, I feel like there’s been a link disrupted to my life as a teenager, when I still lived with my parents. I’ve lived on my own for ten and a half years, but only now do I really feel like I can’t go back in quite the same way. Our family pets have always played huge roles in our lives, and this particular set of three was around for about twelve years. Every time I went to visit my parents, there they were, waiting for me along with my mum and dad. And now, it’s just not going to be the same. At all.

Life goes on, of course, the way it does when anyone you love dies. You adjust. Sometimes, though, when I get really upset about the death of a pet, I wonder why we do it to ourselves; why we bring these little fuzzy things into our homes for a decade and integrate them into our hearts and lives to such an extent if we know they’re only going to go away some day, leaving us lonely and in pain. Of course, you can say the same thing about friends, or lovers, and some people do. They don’t let anyone close, brood over the past betrayals, and end up bitter, lonely individuals. I think, though, that we seek animal companionship for the same reason we reach out over and over to men and women: for love, for warmth, for interaction with another intelligence. To provide care and support; to receive those same things in return, to a varied degree. There have been times I have cried, and my cats have actively sought to comfort me; times I have been very ill, and they have stayed with me. When I am happy, they share that with me as well.

So we do it repeatedly; we open our hearts to these creatures who cannot share our seven to nine decades of life, because even those ten or fifteen precious years count for something. The pain is worth it.

At least, so it seems while you still have the comfort of their warmth and love, and that pain is still only a vague future. When tomorrow becomes today, and you cry, and protest the injustice, the story reads quite differently. And, as always, I wish I could rewrite the ending, so that everyone could live happily ever after.

Eudoxa Joy!

I have now re-strung my cello with a full set of Eudoxa strings, and the wound gut sounds sooooo mellow. I adore it.

There’s just one problem. The silver or aluminium winding is so soft that my bow is having difficulty catching it. I put more rosin on the hair, but it’s still slipping a bit. It will improve as more rosin transfers to the strings as well, but I’m starting to wonder if buying softer rosin might be the way to go. There’s a deliciously dreamy rosin that my old stand partner uses, but it’s about thirty-six dollars a cake, and I just bought a total of a hundred and sixty dollars worth of new strings over the past week. Maybe if I have a really successful workshop this week, I’ll use some of that money and try either Eudoxa rosin (to match the strings, and much less expensive at $12 a cake!) or the Leibenzeller. Rosin does last for years, though, unless you drop it and it shatters. I use Hill light at the moment, and it was fine for the Aricores, but hmmm.

The cello is lying on the floor in the living room at the moment. I wander in and tighten the pegs every half-hour or so. Honestly, they’re losing between three-quarters of and a whole tone every thirty minutes. They really, really need to stretch.

Were You Always This Odd?

Found on Neil Gaiman’s blog (and why the hell haven’t I linked it before?): this question from a fan.

1. When you decided on becoming a Writer, did you have trouble on deciding what type of novels you were going to write, for example you thought that maybe you were a science fiction writer, or a modern fiction writer. Or have all of your stories always been dark and macabre?

Lovely.