Wishful thinking

A recent article in the Seattle Times focused on the home and lifestyle of two people that I don't know personally but have a lot of musical friends in common with. It made me think about all the ideas we had for our little Mt. Vernon house (824 sq. ft., the home in the article is 880) and how I want to have a cozy small home that nonetheless has room for parties, sessions, and guests. And how I want that home to have a beautiful, functional garden that evolves gracefully over the years, even though both William and I are (slowly) working on having income that doesn't require us to be in one place all of the time. How I want to be able to whip up charming little touches for that house and garden, although my crowning DIY garden achievement to date is a wobbly fence made out of poultry netting, broomsticks, and wire and my idea of interior decorating is lining up my rock collection on the windowsills.

So - will there someday be a magical transformation in my 'home-making' (gah!) abilities? Or should I just be content with what I have and not try to be someone different?

Whistle Lake, Anacortes, WA

These are really not my best, but...here they are anyway. Next time I go for a hike in the rain with a camera I'm bringing an umbrella and a tripod.

Fiddle musings

I just had a lesson with the amazing Irish fiddler James Kelly. I consider myself a reasonable fiddler - not the greatest, but not the worst either. I have good tone, I know a few hundred tunes, I can get through a set of tunes without getting lost, and I can play for several hours without being stiff or in pain the next day. William and I lead sessions regularly and have been doing so for several years; to be able to lead a session, you have to have your act together and we are pretty good at that.

But, I don't have the kind of detail I need, and this lesson proved it. We spent the majority of the time working on my playing at a very small level: slowing down rolls and triplets, changing bow strokes to let the rhythm come through, softening my bow arm so I'm relaxing into the ornaments instead of tightening up in anticipation of them. At the very end, we got into actually playing a tune so that I could start applying some of what we had been talking about. I am not going to completely change how I play but I am going to be doing more exercises than tune playing for a while. I want to be in control of my playing and be able to make it come out the way I hear it in my head, and that's going to take a lot of thinking, a lot of listening, and a lot of work.

Auditions and visitations

Yesterday William and I went out to 'audition' to play for an upcoming event. They want background music for a couple of hours and while generally I wouldn't be inclined to go out of my way to prove that I can play the piano, it was actually nice to get a chance to try their instrument out and get a feel for the space.

Then, we went down to Seattle to visit a friend's mother who's in rehab after falling and breaking her hip about 3 weeks ago. She's doing well and will hopefully be home before Christmas, and we had a pleasant visit discussing traveling and mutual friends. We went up to Capitol Hill for dinner and to walk around a bit...if we ever get to be the kind of people who maintain houses in two locations, I'd vote for an apartment there. It's probably nothing but car horns and sirens and people stumbling home in the wee hours of the morning, but there are bookstores and art stores and clothing stores and restaurants, and the people-watching opportunities can't be beat. I lived in that general area for a few months in 1997-98 - and, there's a whole 'nother post for the future right there: What Might Have Happened If I'd Stayed In Seattle. Ah well.

Slightly obsessed

I did something today that I swore I'd never do: I got up at 6 am to go to a regular swim practice (the special early morning ones that I've been to before don't count; we get coffee and muffins after those). I did this because I was promised that we would work on my breaststroke. We did in fact work on it, and now I have a mantra that goes like, "head down-elbows up-back straight-bottom down-knees in-feet out". Easy!

I just read an article on Early Vertical Forearm.

I have to restrain myself from telling people that my 100 IM time yesterday was two seconds faster than my time from the meet two weeks ago.

I am tentatively planning to be in the pool Saturday morning at 7 am.

Why not?

It's December, and look, I'm posting! I think I'll try to keep it up for a bit, maybe just on weekdays. I'm writing quite a bit as it is and it will be nice to look back in a year or so.

So, moving. This year has been unbelievably frustrating in so many ways, and unbelievably rewarding in others. We really wanted to settle in the Pacific Northwest and it just is not happening; work opportunities are not coming together the way we hoped they would and we are living off our savings right now. But! From another point of view, we just had a year to do practically anything we wanted to. I wanted to play chamber music, work on my photography, and join a swim team, so I did. William wanted to perform classical guitar recitals, work on electronic music, and do a bunch of writing, so he did. How can we possibly call this year a waste?

I'm looking forward to Tulsa. I swore up and down that I'd never go back after I graduated from high school...it's been 20 years, so that certainly counts as a nice long break. But, after my friend Leeanna died in July (it's still hard to type that, or even think about it for very long), I started thinking about family and friends, and suddenly I really wanted to be closer to the people I grew up with. My former piano teacher has offered to help with networking and referrals, so finding work should be much easier. My dad is the former president of the farmer's market and he's still very involved with what they're doing, and there's a wonderful organic-local-sustainable scene in the area. I have several good friends there who have known me for a long, long time - and they still like me for some reason. My intuition is telling me that this is a good thing and I am not going to fight it.

Announcement #2

Tomorrow is the first day of a shiny new blog about women in farming: interviews, book reviews, and thoughts on political/social issues. It's over here: http://inherfield.com

Announcement #1

We're moving to Tulsa in the spring - probably April.

Is November over yet?

I didn't officially sign up for National Blog Posting Month, but I wanted to try it anyway. Having tried it, I am a) glad it's almost over and b) wishing I had set aside an hour a day or so to write instead of hastily posting cat pictures as filler. I don't feel compelled to write about feelings much but boy, have I been having them, and I think it would have been good practice to attempt to articulate some of them. Terrifying? Yes.

I have two announcements to make - one for tomorrow and one for the day after. Then I can have some more feelings, and decide what to do about them.

Doing much better today...

...things are looking up :)

Alice is here!

It might take her a couple of days to settle in, though.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Everyone is welcome to stop by...

Supplies

Tomorrow, weather permitting, we get a kitty cat! Our friend Julie in California took charge of Alice the cat when we moved last year, and she is driving up today and tomorrow in a display of exemplary door-to-door service. Today, we went out and bought:

- litter box and scoop

- litter

- food and water dishes

- food

- measuring cup for food

- basket/cat bed

- blankets for the basket

- broom and dustpan

Catnip is en route from Tulsa, and Alice is not really into toys but we have some string on hand just in case. Can't wait to see her again!

Snow, yesterday

Spiderweb!

We got about 1.5 inches, total.

I SWIMMED!!

Yes, that's me on the starting block; closest to the camera in the red and black suit. I was one of the slowest people there but a) my times were very good, better than anyone expected and b) hardly any other 35-39 year old women participated so I got 1st or 2nd place in my solo events. One relay went well and the other one...well, I (and the other relay members, by association) got disqualified for a minor technical mistake. Still, our team had the most points at the end of the meet. Hooray for us!

Since I know you're as fascinated by my times as I am, here they are:

50 M Breaststroke: 57.47

50 M Freestyle: 44.60

50 M Backstroke: 58.72

100 M IM: 2.06.55

200 Women's Medley Relay (I did backstroke): 3:04:40

Interlude

The trumpeter swans are coming back to the area; we can hear them flying over every once in a while. They sound like this.

I'm swimming today! Results later...

Performance #2

Well, last night went beautifully, except for a small page-turning mishap. I still would have preferred a piano but for what it was, it was pretty darn good. Tonight we are playing at a piano store in Bellevue, WA, which apparently has a selection of excellent pianos; there's a chance that I might be able to choose which one I play on :)

Coming home last night was fairly tedious, it started snowing while we were playing and the roads were messy and slow for about 45 miles...then it was raining and everything was fine. I'm actually good at driving in snow, but it's not something I get to do very often. I hear it's going to be an unusually cold and snowy winter up here, though.

Performance #1

My piano trio is playing tonight, at a small venue in Blaine, WA - as far north as you can get around here without being in Canada. Preparations for this concert were going along as usual until last week, when the cellist nonchalantly informed me that there was no piano at the hall. I'm...not happy about this, but it's really not the end of the world. I'll be bringing my keyboard and I've rented a PA system for the day instead of using our little practice amp. We'll see how it goes.

Misspellings that annoy me

Mostly gleaned from various comments on the Internets:

poured over/pored over - "I spent hours pouring over my textbook". Pouring what, exactly?

boarder/border - "We need to secure the boarder now!!" What did he do, and why did you rent out the room to him in the first place?

baited breath/bated breath - "I'm waiting with baited breath for a response". All I can think of is somebody sitting around with a mouth full of minnows.

viola/voila - "You just add this, and VIOLA! Nothing to it". If it's that easy to make violas, why isn't everyone doing it? And why are some of them so darn expensive?

balling/bawling - (This one is really unfortunate. I'll let you make up your own sentence).

Again, not much to say...

...therefore posting a bit about someone else. Michele Campbell is a woman that I have known, somewhat peripherally, for about 15 years. She was a friend of two college friends of mine and for a while I only heard short updates about where she was and what she was doing. I now know that those years were mostly confused and unhappy for her, but it always sounded like she was on the verge of an amazing adventure: she ran off with {name withheld}! she's going to start an herb farm! she's going to Paris! Now, she's much happier and still doing amazing things. Not only does she teach French and write beautifully, last summer she wrote and performed a sellout one-woman show at the Minneapolis Fringe Festival. YOU GO.

Time trials

My times from our swim workout this morning (5:30-7:30 am, I am insane):

-50 Free: 45.1

-50 Back: 56.1

-100 Free: 1.41.6

-200 Free: 3:35:9

-100 IM: 1.56.1

Better than I was hoping for, and just about good enough to qualify me for YMCA State if I was an 8 year old. Swim meet is on Sunday...it's in a meter pool so my times will be longer but still, since it's my first meet those will be my PERSONAL BEST times and that's pretty cool :)

Random stuff

Here's what's happening today in each of the places I have previously resided:

Tulsa, OK: one school is on lockdown.

Decatur, IL: somebody built a deer stand.

Traverse City, MI: hunting season begins today.

Rockford, IL: someone's donating money to the Parks District.

Seattle, WA: homeless camp is being moved.

San Jose, CA: people want to know who feels most at home here.

Cupertino, CA: new hybrid buses.

And, Mount Vernon, WA: fifth graders spend a day at college.

Broth

William made some vegetable broth this morning; he's done this for the past three Sundays so that there's fresh broth for soups all week. He got about a gallon of broth out of it, and here's what he put in:

-carrots

-celery stalks

-celery root

-chioggia beet

-chanterelle mushrooms

-onion

-leek

-garlic

-ginger

-parsnip

-rutabaga

-turnip

-cabbage

-zucchini

-and a cup of the broth from last week.

The house smells AMAZING.

What we look like

William and I are both working on Large Intimidating Writing/Blogging/Business projects right now; all shall be revealed somewhere around December 1st. Anyway, these are the sort of projects which call for head-shot photographs that we can put on our sites to show that we are Serious Upstanding Members of the Internet. So, today we both got haircuts, and we both took each other's picture when we got home.

Better

It's been a rough week, but today things are looking up a bit. Right now I am appreciating:

- William practicing electric guitar; it's been a while since I've had the pleasure of hanging around someone who knows how to noodle melodiously on one of those. Very different from listening to the classical stuff (which I also like, don't get me wrong).

- My piano trio, they came over today and we played some good music in a relaxed manner.

- Vegan cookbooks, especially most of these. Everything we've made out of these has been amazing.

And so, the weekend arrives.

In which I find myself with nothing to say...

...so I'll talk about someone else for a while.

Margaret Sloan is a fantastic painter, a splendid musician, and an excellent writer, and part of her day job involves beekeeping. She is consistently thoughtful and insightful and has a lovely blog over here. It's friends like Margaret that make me miss living in California.

Doldrums

It's just past 5 pm, and it's already dusk - it would be dark if it was cloudy, but we had a (rare) sunny November day today. I lived in Seattle for 2 years in 1996-98, and I don't remember ever having a problem with the winter darkness, but now it does seem to be getting to me. Vitamin D helps, as does an infinitely patient husband :)

Also, who the heck invented the wood stove? I understand that metal conducts heat, but half the point of a fire is LOOKING AT IT. We have a stove insert in our fireplace; it heats the house fairly well but there's really not much to be said for curling up in front of a piece of hot black metal with a book.

Protea Piano Trio

I set this up and took the photograph, and I'm very pleased with it :)

William took these during our warm-up on the day of the October concert at the museum. Jeanette Wickell, violin, Ray Kamada, cello, and Angeline LeLeux, piano.

Swimming

Among all the music and art (or attempts thereof), I've also been working on my swimming. I'm planning to participate in a swim meet - my first one ever! - in a couple of weeks and have been working on sorting out the finer points of my strokes. I'll be doing 100 (meters) freestyle, 50 backstroke, 50 breaststroke, and 100 IM (25 each of butterfly, back, breast, and free). I'm not the slowest on my team but I'm close to it...being a competitive sort, it's been tough to stop thinking about who's faster and just focus on getting my own times under control.

Getting ready for the meet has taught me something: swimming requires concentration. I've been swimming laps off and on ever since college, whenever there was a pool and some motivation, but it's always been a way of simultaneously getting some exercise and letting my brain relax. Now, especially when I'm keeping pace with others, it's alarmingly noticeable when I let my mind drift, because suddenly I've fallen behind and need to power along for a few strokes to catch up. Seems like an obvious thing, but concentration and focus have always been reserved for musical and academic pursuits, and it's a completely different feeling to have to tell my body - instead of my mind - to stop daydreaming and get on with it.

Exhibit

One of my goals for this year was to have some photographs on display, in public. This seemed like such an overwhelming achievement that I didn't even really think about how I was going to do it. Well...the violinist in my trio, Jeanette, is the curator of a small gallery in Bellingham, the Center for Expressive Arts. She changes the art there monthly, and so, simply by asking, I have two photographs on display there during the month of November. I had them printed by American Frame and found frames with matting at Goodwill, so the total cost for each photo was about $12.00. We went up on Friday night for the 'opening' (such as it was, it was part of the downtown Art Walk so a few people did stop by but it wasn't really a huge event). And I saw people I didn't know looking at my little photographs, and pointing them out to their friends. What a splendid and bizarre feeling that is! I remember being at arts camp in junior high as an orchestra student, and telling one of the art students that it must be so nice to have the work done and hanging on the wall at the end instead of having to play in a concert and hoping there were no disasters. She said that she always wanted to change something when she saw her art hanging there, so it really wasn't completely stress-free. Now I know what she meant...

Musically speaking

So, there you have what's been going on photographically around here (and in Montana; we spent a week in Whitefish with William's parents about a month ago). And now for some musical updates:

-William played a solo guitar recital in September at a local library, it was magnificent. He's scheduling a small Northwest tour for February and, even as I type this, is meeting up with another guitarist in town in the hopes of putting together some guitar duo performances. His thoughts can be found over here on his guitar blog and his recordings can be found on his website.

-I've been playing with a violinist and a cellist as the Protea Piano Trio - we started rehearsing in May and performed our first concert at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham in mid-October. We have two more performances scheduled for mid-November as well. It's difficult music but not impossible, and it is SO MUCH FUN to not be a solo pianist right now. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the social aspects of Irish music vs. the isolation of classical, and I just might have found the best of both worlds in chamber music. We sound like this.

-And, we are playing Irish music every Sunday night in Bellingham and thinking about recording a CD. More on that later, probably...

Lake McDonald, Glacier National Park

Abstracts, shore of Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park

I've been interested in abstracts for a while, but haven't really gone out of my way to make them happen. These were taken when I was having trouble getting the (standard, boring) lake shots metered properly and just started looking for something else instead.

Boulder River Wilderness, October 2010

Glacier National Park, October 2010

Fragrance Lake/Larrabee State Park, September 2010

Deception Pass State Park, August 2010

Bleak

My very oldest friend - we grew up across the street from each other - died suddenly last Thursday and her funeral was today, in Houston, TX. The last-minute flights were unbelievably expensive and so I wasn't able to join her family there. On the advice of my parents, who are very intelligent and thoughtful people, I spent the afternoon on a beach. It was a grey chilly day and there were only a few hikers out, but the sun started to break through eventually.

Deception Pass State Park, Whidbey Island, WA