Weekend Roundup: Cello Recital Edition

I’m swamped. I’m racing a huge deadline, both HRH and I were ill this weekend and yesterday, there are no Christmas decorations up (although we did turn the outside lights on about ten days ago), Christmas shopping is only half-done (it will be pretty much finished in one trip if I can just ever leave the house again in good health, no deadlines, and decent weather). I’ve torn the house apart looking for my binder of non-lesson, non-orchestra music that holds all my Christmas stuff and I can’t find it anywhere, which means I have to reconstruct all my Christmas stuff from scratch before our annual Yule music celebration on Sunday. There is no food in the house. Being sick and handling the fibro thing is really, really throwing a spoke in my Christmas wheel.

I’m simultaneously exhausted and climbing the walls. It doesn’t help that I mis-evaluated my current freelance project, which turned out to need about three times more editing than the sample I examined suggested it would, so my schedule has been blown to bits. I pulled off 125 pages yesterday despite feeling dreadfully ill, which is about half again as fast as my usual top speed, and burnt myself out so that I had to cancel a planned visit yesterday evening. I have another 125 to go today if I want to keep Wednesday morning for a final proofread and scan to make sure I haven’t done anything horrendously stupid. Then, I think, I will fall over. Or perhaps stay in bed for an entire twenty-four hours, because I’m having trouble making it through a basic day.

There’s a lot of snow, and it just keeps coming. It’s a good thing it’s pretty.

Saturday morning we had our dress rehearsal for the Christmas recital. I expected our usual dress rehearsal system, which was playing the solos as well as doing our group pieces, but we just worked on the group pieces. I understand why we did it — there are thirteen students now! — but I was a bit worried about my gavotte. I got home around quarter past one and HRH headed out to run errands. We had Ceri, Scott, and Ada over that afternoon for a movie and dinner, which was wonderful. The boy read both his Lego readers and a board book to Ada afterwards, who quieted down and listened, bless her. There was a moment at the beginning where she was fussing and the boy closed his book on his lap and calmly said, “I’m not going to read until you stop crying,” which is obviously something that he used to hear at preschool, but somewhat inappropriate for a tiny baby! It was explained to him that she would calm down if he read, so he opened the book again and everything went beautifully.

The recital was on Sunday. For the first time we rented a small church, because we no longer fit into the seniors’ residence we used to play at. The acoustics were phenomenal; even the tiny cellos, which usually have problems with amplification, were resonant and clear. I was worried about the order of the pieces. In the past we’ve opened with group pieces and then interspersed solos throughout the programme. This time, the first half of the programme was soli, and the second half was all group pieces. I was concerned about not being warmed up by the time my solo came up, but it turned out fine. I started oddly slowly, perhaps because I was subconsciously taking into account the fact that one usually plays too fast live, but I picked up the pace when the initial theme was repeated before the development and second theme. I was pretty happy with how it went. Midway I was starting to be unhappy with slightly imprecise intonation but I remembered something my teacher had told me at the last lesson, mainly that even if intonation is off by a fraction, it isn’t necessarily audible to the audience by the time the sound has travelled within the space, and even with that slight imprecision the piece had been pleasant to listen to at the lesson.

The response I got was really heartening. I had strangers asking me how long I’d been playing and how many certificates/grades I held, which was just odd to hear. The boy told me, unprompted, that I had been awesome. I had my dear friend Marc there in the audience for more support, who enjoyed himself immensely, too. It was a very nice afternoon. The group pieces went well, too, although the arrangement of the Haydn Op. 76 no. 3 movt. 2 felt a bit muddy. All the Christmas stuff was jolly and resonant. The arrangement of Silent Night was lovely, and I think the Greensleeves seven-part arrangement was all right, but I can’t be sure.

I finally finished spinning the last of the first 2 oz of the yellow/orange Polworth in stupidly thin threadlike laceweight singles. I am going to do some nice chunky, squooshy singles from some Merino in Blue Bells before I have to spin the last 2oz of Polworth. Someone remind me of this the next time I decide to spin laceweight to get as much yardage as possible out of something, okay?

That’s the single on the bobbin and across the right penny for size comparison, and on the left is a look at how it will look when plied with the as-of-yet unspun second single. This is the finest single I’ve ever spun with success for an extended period of time.

I really need to get to work now. Wish me luck.

Idle Thoughts on Podcasts

The boy was home again yesterday with a bockety digestive system. We shooed him off to school today with lots of encouragement.

I’ve been really slow to pick up on podcasts. I spend most of my time at a computer working with words, and listening to words while I do it distracts me. I can’t follow both trains of thought at the same time without failing at both, which not a model of efficiency. On top of that, if I want information, I’ll read about it; it’s a lot faster.

But I discovered the SpinDoctor podcast last summer, and I love it. Sasha, the host, started spinning at just about the same time I did, so we’re around the same level. She reviews things I’m interested in, like DVDs and books and fibre and equipment, and things I’ll probably never experience like the huge fiber festivals, and I like her personality. I generally listen to it while I spin (what better time?) but I haven’t been spinning much lately. There’s been a boy home or work to do or I’ve been knackered by fibro, and to be honest, this yellow Polworth is taking forEVer to spin up as laceweight. (We’re talking a single of about 54 WPI, on the fastest setting of my Louet S15, which is a ratio of about 10:1.) I split the four ounces into two parts to spin a two-ply yarn, and I’m so close to finishing the first half. When I am, I suspect I will stuff it in a bag and spin something else before I start the second half, because I’m so tired of it. I’ve spun all of one ounce of Merino before this, and I find the Polworth very much like it. I really prefer BFL and silks to the Merino kind of sponginess, I have discovered. Longer, silkier fibres are my thing. I don’t know how to explain my liking for Corriedale or Coopworth, then, but there you are.

Anyway. I have discovered that with the weather so cold, I can’t read books, either paper ones or ebooks, while waiting for the boy at the bus stop in the afternoon any more. Enter the podcast! I can stand there and watch for the bus, hands warmly ensconced in mitten, and listen to a bit of an interview or review or whatever.

I’m still not a huge fan of podcasts in general. I find I need to be doing something that doesn’t require a lot of attention in order to listen, and that’s a tall order when I’m fighting fibro fog a lot of the time because the fog demands that I focus all that I’ve got on what I’m doing like cooking, baking, writing, editing, what have you. The car may be a good place, but I don’t have a widget that allows me to plug my iPod into the stereo. On top of that, while I may find a segment interesting, it’s rare that I’m always interested in all the information a podcast covers so I get impatient or bored quickly. I’ve sampled a few here and there, and a lot of the time I find an episode is too long for what it should be.

I have some podcasts I’ve been meaning to listen to or try out, especially ones by friends or acquaintances, but for the above reasons I just don’t get around to it. Part of me wants to, and part of me just sighs at the amount of investment it takes in time and energy. I’ll get around to it someday.

Weekend Roundup: Mostly Cello Recital Prep Edition

Cello fell apart last week. I don’t mean literally (you’d have heard me screaming from wherever you physically are, I suspect) but figuratively. Nothing I played worked. Everything was disjointed, scratchy, jerky, lousy phrasing, no dynamic control, horrible intonation (why E flat major as C minor, why, WHY?)… every time I tried it got worse instead of better. Which is, if you think about it, the exact antithesis of what practice is supposed to do. One of the general bits of wisdom floating around is that you shouldn’t repeat mistakes, so if things are going wrong and you can’t isolate why and fix them, stop and come back later. Except every time I came back it was worse. Friday night I sat down, gritted my teeth, put the Suzuki accompaniment CD on and played the Gavotte at the ridiculous speed it called for. And I did it again. And again. And again. I didn’t stop, I didn’t pause to fix things, I didn’t listen critically, I just played it. And I played it at a speed that was far faster than I’d worked it before, faster than my target metronome marking. And then I put the cello away.

Saturday morning I went to my lesson. We warmed up with my lines in the pretty arrangements of Silent Night and Greensleeves that we’re playing, then my teacher said there was half an hour left and she didn’t think we needed half an hour for the Bach, so why not look at the Bazelaire she’d given me for the next recital? And we played through the first half of the first movement, working on the wacky thumb-index-index pizzicato movement, and it was so much fun. Then we turned to the Bach. I kind of gritted my teeth again, then took a steady breath, threw all my feelings about it away and started. And it flowed, and had phrasing, and drove right on to the end. When I was finished I started to laugh, and my teacher exclaimed and asked where that had come from, and she even made me stand up and take my Suzuki bow. Apparently running a piece at ludicrous speed seven or eight times in a row to recorded piano accompaniment is a good thing. I didn’t even play it through again, or look at trouble spots; it didn’t need it.

I drove home and had a quick lunch. Then the boy and I bundled into the car and drove to the local movie theatre to meet with his best friend from preschool and her mom to see Tangled together. It was so much fun. Granted, listening to Zachary Levi for an hour or so was part of that, but the design, the palette, the characterization, the execution, the pacing and plotting, and the songs and score were all fantastic. (I’d sneaked a listen to some of the songs released earlier that week on various music and film blogs, and had in fact purchased the soundtrack two days before the film, so I knew about that last bit ahead of time!) It has firmly settled itself among my top three favourite Disney films, and very possibly has bumped Beauty & the Beast out of my #1 spot. I can’t make a confirmed judgment as to that yet, because I’m going to need to see it a few more times first. We’ll certainly go see it at Christmas when we visit my parents, because Mum wants to see it and HRH needs to see it, too.

The boy’s friend came over to our house to play for an hour and a half after the film. I made peanut butter chocolate-chip cookies, they played with his trains, and at some point they ran through the house playing cowboys & knights, one waving the wooden sword and shield HRH made and the other with a Nerf gun. It was great.

Her mom picked her up and I headed into Montreal for my piano rehearsal scheduled for 5:20, where we each play our solo pieces with the accompanist. Despite giving myself forty-five minutes to get to NDG I hit bad traffic and was ten minutes late, but things were running behind anyway. I got to listen to everyone’s pieces and their work on the timing or the trouble spots, applauding with everyone else enthusiastically after each. And then, like the Farewell Symphony, they all left one by one as they were done; I was last, with an audience of only my teacher and the pianist. And I kicked my Gavotte again from start to finish. I was very pleased with it. We didn’t need to work on anything or test timing or cues; I loosened my bow and that was that. I’m feeling really confident now about next weekend’s recital. I got home in time to read to the boy in bed. That night HRH and I ended up clearing out the storage room because I was looking for something. We moved some stuff into the laundry room and emptied at least three big boxes. It’s much easier to locate things now. Ironically, though, we didn’t find the box I was looking for.

Sunday was my day at the Yule Fair. I was scheduled to do a talk with Ellen Dugan on green magic and magical gardening, and she was so fabulous. We had a blast. I got to touch base with Chris Penczak and Judika Illes again, too, and pick up a couple of books. I so love working with other authors at these kinds of events. And it always comes as a surprise to me when they say they’ve read my stuff and are impressed, or refer to a concept I’ve discussed somewhere. I had some wonderful discussions with people who came to my signing afterwards, too, and was very touched by some of their stories about what my books have done for them. HRH and the boy came downtown with me and took the metro to see the Christmas window at Ogilvy’s, which was unfortunately half non-functional, before having lunch out together.

We had to leave the fair and get back home for mid-afternoon because I was possibly expecting a drop-off. It didn’t happen, however, and good thing; both HRH and I were coshed by a really, really bad cold and fell asleep while the boy watched movies. I’d felt the beginnings of it when I’d woken up in the morning, but a couple of Tylenol took care of the aches and sore throat for a few hours. I was stunned at how brutally it hit me mid-afternoon, though.

Not Dead

Just really tired and working when I can. I handwrote a weekend roundup blog post on Monday (it was a really, really busy weekend) and haven’t had the time to transcribe it. Maybe I’ll do it this afternoon on the laptop while the boy watches some Peep & the Big Wide World on the computer, his favourite after-school activity while he has a snack.

What I Read In November 2010

Heart’s Blood by Juliet Marillier
A Scholar of Magics by Caroline Stevermer (reread)
Widdershins by Charles de Lint (reread)
Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay (reread)
Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay (reread)
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart
The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (reread)
All Clear by Connie Willis
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (reread)

I don’t have a lot of brain to recap, but in brief:

All Clear was simply excellent. It was so good I reread the last quarter again, then picked various scenes from Blackout to read in conjunction with scenes from All Clear in order to get a better idea of how things happened in a particular timeline, and then went headlong into rereading The Doomsday Book in order to get more of the Oxford time-travel project.

Catching Fire was good, Mockingjay was problematic. At first I thought the writing/pacing had fallen apart, but then I realised that it hadn’t failed, it was a reflection of a problematic narrator’s state of mind/sanity. Very interesting, though not comfortable, and has generated a lot of criticism around the Internet as a good/bad ending.

Heart’s Blood was a surprise; I had totally missed the fact that there was a new book from Juliet Marillier last year, so I found this one in paperback when it was released. It’s sort of got a Beauty & the Beast theme running through it, only it’s so much more, as you’d expect from Marillier with her Celtic settings and serious political stuff. I was worried it would be a bit too heavy on the romance, but it got very interesting about a quarter of the way in and absorbed me more and more, until I tore through the last third. Oddly, the marketing copy makes it sound like it’s primarily the male protagonist’s story, when in fact it’s told in the first-person from the female protagonist’s POV, and is more about her personal evolution/development that intersects with his.

Little Women has been my iPod book-on-the-go since the beginning of September, what I read if I’m waiting in a line or at the boy’s bus stop in the afternoon. I’d have finished it in October, except someone new moved into the neighbourhood and their kids were assigned our stop, so I had to be social instead of burying my nose in electrons. I’ve moved on to Little Men, also a reread.

Lots of rereads this month. I guess I was looking for comfort or a very particular feel in a novel, and so went to books where I knew I’d find that feeling or style.

Fine. I had more brain to recap than I thought.

ETA: I read both Mouse Guard Fall 1152 and Winter 1152 this month as well. Absolutely gorgeous art!

Major Milestone; Or, Reading Achievement Unlocked

Since the beginning of kindergarten, the boy has been enthusiastically experimenting with letter sounds and word recognition (especially repeated words within a large block of text, my favourite of which has been ‘gizzard’). Yesterday, however, he accomplished something huge, something that was the key to so much more.

He read an entire book to me.

He had two ped days at the end of last week, and woke up with a dreadful cold on Thursday. He was home with me on Thursday, spent Friday with his local grandma while HRH got the brakes changed on the car (all four, ouch ouch ouch), and had the weekend at home as usual (a lovely afternoon and dinner were had with HRH’s parents on Saturday, supplemented by the joy that Highway 30 is now 90% open between here and there, cutting our travel time by about twenty minutes!). Then despite all my efforts and prayers to the contrary, I had to keep him home from school yesterday because the cold just wasn’t fading quickly enough. His poor nose is a mess of chapped and cracked skin because we’ve been blowing it so often. Vaseline and Glysomed lotion are our friends. Anyway, I managed to get him to nap on Thursday, Saturday, and yesterday (possibly Sunday as well, but it’s such a blur I really don’t remember), although it was a battle each time. He kept insisting that he wasn’t tired; I pointed out over and over that more rest meant getting better faster. I resorted to easing into it step by step. He’d protest; I’d suggest snuggling and reading; then we’d turn out the light and snuggle and chat; then the chatting would get quieter until we were just snuggling; then the boy would pass out and I’d slip away. Each time he woke up with smiles and hugs and admitted to feeling better.

Yesterday he still wasn’t going to nap without a fight, despite yawning. “That’s my morning [meaning wake-up] yawn, not my tired yawn!” I was told indignantly. “Choose a book and we’ll read,” I said, and gave him a time limit within which to do it. When I got back, he was sitting on his bed waiting for me. “Mama, I’m going to read to you,” he said. “All right,” I agreed, and pulled the cover up over us, expecting him to do the first sentence then hand the book to me to finish as usual.

And he opened Lego City Adventures: All Aboard!, a level 1 reader, and he read the whole thing to me from cover to cover. I helped him with a word or two, but otherwise he sounded out the words he didn’t know on his own.

When he got to the end (even reading the advertisement in the back for other books in the series) he looked at me and said, “Mama, when I read you a book, can you not cry?”

How could I not? I was so proud of him, and so overcome by the thought of the freedom that now lies open to him. He can sound things out; he can learn anything, anywhere. With concentration he can read cereal boxes, street signs, books, flyers, magazines, letters. There is so much he now has the ability to do. And it’s that “so much” that overwhelms me. He’s been teetering on the edge, and now swoosh, here he goes into an entire universe of information and communication. It won’t be easy; he’ll get frustrated, and he already has, because blocks of letters in English aren’t pronounced consistently and his ear for discerning slight differences hasn’t fully developed yet (as demonstrated by his insistence that train starts with a ch sound, not helped by a picture of a train under the words “choo-choo” in more than one book). But it’s going to be a wild and wonderful ride.

It’s been a tough five days here. He’s been sorry for himself because he’s sick, I’ve been trying to fit work in while he’s home which never works, and we’ve been butting heads and rubbing one another the wrong way. We’ve had good times, too, of course, staying in jammies till noon, building train layouts and watching Sesame Street and Sid the Science Kid together (thanks be to all the gods for having PBS again!), making lunch together, and ‘working’ in my office together (he never stops drawing, it’s astonishing). I was very close to breaking yesterday when I was given the gift of my son reading a book from start to finish. No deciding he’s too tired and pushing the book at me to do it instead; no getting angry and slamming it shut; just a simple, focused recounting of the story. It was beautiful, and made up for a lot of the frustration we’d been experiencing together.

And then last night I lifted the calendar page to write something in December, and saw that he has YET ANOTHER PED DAY this coming Friday. That nearly broke me again, because Ceri and I had scheduled a trip to the yarn store to knit together that day (or rather, Ceri shall knit, and I shall spin or something) and I was kind of looking forward to a day off without him. But he can come with us, because he loves the yarn store, and I have promised to pack him a lunch. And there are the toys he usually plays with there, plus we’ll pack our usual going-out bag of his own toys and books, and I would not be at all surprised if Ceri, Ada, Molly Ann and whoever else may happen to be there are treated to a live reading of all 189 words in Lego City Adventures: All Aboard!. We happen to be going to the bookstore before the yarn store, and I suspect I will be buying him a new Lego City reader as a reward for reading the first one all on his own. Because the best thing to do when you finish one book is start a new one, of course.

Ladies and Gentlemen…

… it is currently snowing here on the eastern bank of Montreal’s south shore. (Geography and absolute cardinal points: Montreal scoffs at those.)

One of the reasons I enjoy checking in with online social media like Twitter is that I can see posts chronicling weather hitting eastern parts of Ontario, then west of Montreal, the island itself, and then look out my window and see it hit here. It’s fun.

One more hour of work. Then I ought to be finished my second pass of copyediting on this freelance project, and I shall knock off for the day and spin some more Polworth in the ‘Sunspot’ colourway. (“Is that called ‘Phoenix’?” Ceri asked me the other week. It ought to be; it’s all the different colours in a flame, and very enjoyable to spin on a grey day.)

There are tiny little specks of snow being blown all over out there. Nothing’s sticking, though it’s lovely to watch. By the end of January I will be so over the “hurrah, snow!” thing, but for now, it’s terrific.