When we woke up this morning it was damp and gray outside. It rained yesterday morning, and sprinkled on and off throughout the day. This makes me quite happy, if only because we still cannot seem to get into any sort of useful schedule for (manually) watering the yard, and at least when the water comes from the sky, we’re not responsible for remembering to either turn the sprinklers on, or worse yet, turn them back off again.

I did not get around to staining the boards last night, because I have been feeling dreadfully lazy all week. Despite not having any actual Christmas-specific knitting projects to do this year, there are still things I need to be finishing up (or, for that matter, actually starting). The problem is that it is just so much easier to curl up somewhere, wrap myself in a cozy blanket, and allow cats to curl up in my lap, effectively immobilizing me and conveniently keeping me from doing anything remotely productive.

Richard and I were ruefully laughing about this the other day – the difficulty we sometimes have getting things done. You don’t think about this when you are a kid. When you are young, you are convinced that adults have it so much better because they don’t have anyone telling them what to do. Except sometimes it’s the ‘someone telling you want to do’ factor that makes sure things actually get done. And it’s just not the same if you have to be your own keeper.

Happy Holidailies!

Now that November is over, and December is upon us, and I am realizing that I have less than 20 days to accomplish an impossible list of things I really wanted done before my family arrives for Christmas, I am starting to experience a very small amount of panic. One of the biggest issues is simply due to the fact that there are too many little things still remaining to finish on the house. We need to glue the transition strips in place on the floor downstairs. We need to swap out the ancient lever-based thermostat downstairs for one that is programmable. We need to finish going through all the bedding and make sure we’ve got complete sets for all guest beds, so we don’t suddenly discover that guests have to make do with sofa cushions for pillows and knit afghans for comforters. We need to tackle the remaining boxes that require unpacking (and either unpack them, or hide them, because I am sick to death of seeing them). And this does not even begin to address all the non-house issues, like figuring out what to get everyone for Christmas, and writing up (and sending) the yearly Holiday Recap letter, along with a massive stack of holiday cards, and purchasing all those gifts once we figure out what they are.

One of the house-related things that we might still be able to take care of in time is getting the bookshelves built for the library room downstairs. However, this requires us to not only pick a stain color, but also to pick a wood. We found a stain we liked, but the wood has continued to present a challenge, and I admit that when faced with decorating choices, no matter how small, a majority of my brain just shuts down because I am continually afraid of making the wrong decision. Things that are easily changed (and not too expensive) are okay because I can just fix it later, but decisions for things like wall colors, or furniture styles, or even something as stupid as the type of wood we want for the bookshelves downstairs just make me panic. I hate feeling this way – I know it’s completely unreasonable to feel like this (although reason never counted much when it comes to any sort of inferiority complex), but I feel like every other woman out there was born with the decorating gene and seems to have no problem figuring out simple stuff like colors and stains, and what goes with what. I may be able to build a database full of complicated stored procedures without blinking an eye, or generate lengthy white papers and reports as if they were nothing more complicated than a shopping list, but ask me to choose a paint color, or put together an outfit, and I become a dithering idiot.

Sunday we went to the local bagel place for breakfast, and then we drove off to Target with a gift card Richard received, and bought twin blankets for the guest beds, and a cute winter-themed doormat for the front porch, and then we went to Home Depot and tried to tackle the ‘wood and stain’ question again. The problem that we’ve been facing is that it’s not as simple as just picking a color – since we want these to be floor-to-ceiling shelves, that will be attached permanently to the walls, there will have to be crown molding at the top (100 year old house = floors and ceilings that are not true) to hide any gapping – and crown molding does not come in the same types of wood. Different wood types pick up stains differently, and if our goal is to have it look as if it’s always been there, having molding that’s obviously a different color kind of defeats the whole idea. We could buy pre-stained molding that would work if we wanted to use oak for the shelving, but I really wasn’t too crazy about the colors it came in, and the only other pre-stained molding I halfway liked was a bit too red.

Anyway. The good news is that we purchased a small board of poplar and a small board of red oak, and two small jars of wood stain, and at some point this evening (after dinner, and watching the last episode of Tin Man) I will apply patches of each stain to each type of wood, and leave them downstairs in what will (eventually) be the library, so we can see which combination we prefer. This still doesn’t address the issue of the crown molding, but at least it’s one step closer to making a decision, and for someone who’s as decorating-challenged as me, that’s saying a lot.

Happy Holidailies!

Saturday night’s concert went really well. Last night’s concert, however, was awesome. Having two concerts instead of one is much, much better, if only because we get a second chance to tweak everything; to fix all those little issues that might have come up the first time around. The house was packed again, and they gave us a standing ovation at the end, and I think it’s safe to say that we deserved it. And even better, apparently the reviewer agreed.

Music Review: Vox Musica chamber group never afraid to take chances

The English composer Benjamin Britten once said that everything he wrote was “an experiment.” He wasn’t talking about a hit-or-miss paradigm. Rather, he was addressing the spirit of new musical approaches, and the courage of jumping into the musical unknown.

That kind of spirit is alive and well with the female chamber vocal ensemble Vox Musica. Under the direction of conductor and music director Daniel Paulson, these 12 singers are willing to stretch musical boundaries.

This was evident in a incandescent performance of Christmas music at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Sacramento on Saturday evening.

Paulson has proved himself to be an astute programmer. He’s not afraid of including fresh repertoire for chamber choir and juxtaposing it with music from the Renaissance.

One of the most evocative of the new works performed was “O Lux” by 20-year-old Pennsylvanian Mario Burgos. This meditative work is all about the refraction of musical light into dark corners. This was intelligently and emotionally delivered by these 12 dynamic and highly focused singers.

In turn, this work was paired with the 13th century chant “Lumen Ad Revelationem Gentium.” This proved a stark contrast, with the musical approach here less a game of manipulated tonal color and more a single-handed approach to unison sound, with stunning clarity.

The evening’s program offered provocative arrangements of established works such as Anthony Lien’s arrangement of the 12th century plainsong “Emmanuel.” Lien’s arrangement gives this work, based on the well-known Advent hymn, an expansive and almost secular feel. Here, soprano Annie Coke offered a tantalizing solo full of richness and intimate warmth, while Paulson coaxed an urbane performance from his singers.

Five of the 16 works performed were arranged by Paulson. One of the most interesting was Paulson’s take on the carol “Silent Night.” Paulson’s arrangement starts out traditionally, with the classic two-part arrangement, which gives way to an almost cubist approach where vocal parts traveled into the outer limits of higher notes, flirting with delicious dissonance. This gave the carol a deeply ethereal feel.

Also noteworthy was “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” where the singing exhibited a delicate touch with Paulson’s tricky arrangement.

And the group exhibited a great facility for translating the work of John Tavener with a haunting and resonant performance of “The Lamb.”

With this concert, this chamber ensemble has proved, once again, it has the facility to jump into the musical unknown by daring a new spin on the ancient, and adding a compelling sheen to the fresh and new.

Happy Holidailies!

Note to self. Next time one has two concerts in which to perform, two nights in a row, it may not be such a great idea to stay up til 2am the morning in between. Even if you do happen to be so wired you cannot sleep, and instead decide to work your way through two discs of season 2 of Veronica Mars.

Anyway. The Vox Musica concert. After our rousing success with the first concert of the season, where we were literally turning people away at the door because we had no more room (and the people who own the building were fairly vibrating with anxiety about fire codes and numbers of people inside), the director decided to see how we’d do with two concerts for our next set. It being the Christmas season, we knew we would have a pretty good chance of getting a good showing at two seatings, so it was a good time to gamble on two versus one. I don’t think any of us were expecting, however, the frantic emails from the woman who’s been tracking ticket sales, telling us that by the beginning of this past week, we only had a handful of tickets left for each concert, and we weren’t to be promising tickets to anyone else. So much for ‘just a good showing’ – heh.

Last night’s concert went quite well. There were some tiny glitches, but I suspect they were the sort that only the director and the singers really noticed. We had our CD’s on sale, and it looks like they were selling pretty briskly. The director gave us all an advance copy at the dress rehearsal on Friday night, and I’ve been playing it in my car every time we’ve been out driving, and it’s really weird to listen to the music and realize that those extra-low notes blending into the music on this professionally produced CD are from my own voice.

Happy Holidailies!

First, to everyone coming over from Holidailies, hello. You can get a brief overview of who I am here. And now, on to the day’s entry.

Shortly before we moved into the house in Sacramento, we bought tickets for a garden tour of several of the nicer homes in the Fab Forties neighborhood that’s just across the freeway from where we live. It was kind of fun to walk around, checking out the various things people did to their backyards, especially since it gave us some neat design ideas for our own back yard, some day.

So when we saw the signs for the Holiday Home Tour, in the same neighborhood, we thought it’d be just as fun – a pleasant stroll through several gorgeous homes, some of which might even provide some decorating ideas for our own little house.

Alas, it wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as the garden tour. For one thing, most of the houses we toured were pretty tiny, and the decorators who’d been chosen to decorate those houses for the holidays tended to go a bit too overboard on the floral thing – which resulted in small spaces full of sometimes cloying flower smells, and everything a bit too modern and a bit too perfect and sterile to be festive or interesting at all. Only the last house on the tour seemed worth the ticket price – it was large enough to not feel cramped as the line shuffled slowly through, and the decor was a bit more understated and looked more like a house someone might actually live in, rather than a design room showcase.

So the verdict is that while we will probably try to catch the garden tour again, I think it’s pretty unlikely we’ll be doing the home tour again. Ah well.

Happy Holidailies!

For the very last day of Nablopomo this year, it would have been fun to have something exciting to write about. Alas, as today was my Friday off from work, I spent a majority of the day at home, waiting for workmen to arrive. The contractor was supposed to come out and install the interior stair rail today, and we’d scheduled the washer and dryer for a preventative maintenance check (seeing as how they’re nearly ten years old and haven’t been serviced probably since I bought them).

The contractor never showed – not sure if he forgot, or we goofed on the date, or what. But the appliance guy did eventually make it out. He replaced some kind of little gadget on the washing machine transmission, and showed me how to balance the machine so it won’t keep dancing all over the laundry room (and causing leaks) and replaced the hoses (which apparently are supposed to be replaced every 5 years. Oops). He also pronounced our dryer in extremely good condition. So now we’re good for another ten years, I suppose (or maybe we’ll remember to get the things serviced more often).

I had dress rehearsal for the concert this weekend. After the rousing success of the previous concert, we decided to do two dates instead of one; now it appears that we’re pretty much sold out for both concerts this weekend. It’s a very nice position to be in, for a group as relatively new to the scene as we are, but it does make a few of us wonder how soon we’ll be going to multiple weekends of shows, instead of just two shows on one weekend for each round.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

It’s amazing how much easier it is to read things, although apparently having the new glasses hasn’t helped my photography skills much (the glasses are not crooked; the camera was). Taking the eyes a little bit to adjust – I think they’re so used to having to overcompensate that it’ll take a day or two for them to realize they don’t have to strain quite so hard – but so far, so good.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

Here is the picture you must imagine.

We are sitting in the computer room, watching the latest episode of House on Richard’s computer (because Reaper and House are on at the same time, we’ve just started watching House online the next day). Tangerine, who loves Richard more than any other person, has recently decided that after over a decade of not being one, she is now a lap cat – as long as it’s on Richard. She must be *on* him as much as she can – and her very favorite spot is on his chest. Because Richard’s chair is slightly broken, he can lean it back almost all the way horizontal, which means she can settle right on his chest (directly under his chin) and despite his protestations, Richard has been known to sit there and let her settle in, just because he doesn’t have the heart to move her.

So there is Richard, practically prone on his chair, craning his head around the purring Tangerine on his chest, watching House on his computer, and along comes Azzie. Azzie, who, while most assuredly a mama’s boy and not a very bright one at that, is still possessed of enough brain power to recognize a perfectly good lap going to waste. So he settles in on Richard’s lap.

I start laughing. I dash out of the computer room, all the while telling Azzie to stay put (because as i mentioned, he is a mama’s boy and will usually follow me *everywhere*) and manage to extricate my camera from my purse. Richard obligingly, using his toes, turns his chair around so as to give me a better shot. But alas, we are both laughing too hard. I cannot focus the camera because my hands are shaking, and his laughing is what finally dislodges the cats, who grumpily stalk off, having been deprived of their favored spots. Thus, there is no actual picture to share with you. So you are just going to have to imagine it.

Trust me. It would have been an awesome shot.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

There are several signs one looks for, when one lives with cats, that indicate that a cat might have a problem. One of them is inappropriate peeing outside the litter box. Of course, when we’re dealing with a herd of cats with Issues, that’s not always a sign of physical illness as a sign of some cat’s mental issues needed to be carefully handled again. But when you find little puddles of pee that look like they may have blood in them, that can’t be chalked up to ‘some cat is having a snippy day’.

The next step is to figure out which cat might be the culprit. I narrowed the area – downstairs bathroom tile (thankfully easy to clean) and one small spot in a corner (also, thanks to the newly laid wood laminate, easy to clean up), all in an area frequented mostly by only two cats – Zucchini and Checkers. Of course, it doesn’t help that every single cat seems to be full of energy, eating and drinking like normal, and keeping themselves clean and neat. But eventually we decided it was probably Checkers (and if it wasn’t, well, we’ll find out soon enough anyway), and thus came the next big decision to make in a brand new place – locating a new vet for the cats. We’ve been so very spoiled having a housecall vet for the cats all along, that it’s a big adjustment facing having to cart them off to an office for a change.

I checked Yelp.com to find vets in our area with good reviews (since the two vets we’ve been using didn’t have any recommendations for us in Sacramento) and settled on one that’s just about a mile away (figuring that shorter driving distance with pissed cat in carrier can only be a good thing) and called to make her an appointment. I felt it only polite to warn them that Checkers can be a bit…um…well, let’s just say that when she’s mad or scared, she tends to make liberal use of all five of her pointy ends (clipping her claws involves locking myself in the bathroom with her, and then being prepared to nurse a few new bleeding scratches when I am done).

Checkers, however, was an absolute angel at the vet (of course, she was so scared she kept trying to burrow into my elbow to hide). No hissing, no yelling, no flailing of paws, no gnashing of teeth – she just hunched into a tiny ball and did her best to try to pretend she was invisible (alas, it didn’t work). We (the vet and I) agreed that part of the problem may simply be that Checkers is, by her nature, and extremely high strung little cat, and something may have upset her (Richard and I have often noted that ‘appalled’ is a natural state for Checkers), and it could be as simple as that, but we’re running tests anyway, just to be sure. Plus, she’s about 5 now, so it’s not such a bad idea to establish some baseline levels for blood.

Anyway. They’ll call with the results and I’ll continue to keep an eye on her, and try to re-establish proper litter box behavior (this isn’t the first time she’s needed a refresher course – did I mention our cats have Issues?) , and we’ll just see how it goes. And in the meantime, the benefit of all this is that I think we’ve found ourselves a new vet.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

The director noted, as we all gathered in front of him this evening at practice, that we have now entered hell week. It’s more on his shoulders than on ours, since he’s having to juggle programs and coordinating set up and take down for each concert, and all we’ve got to do is sing, but that doesn’t mean it’s all sunshine and roses. The week of the concert we’re all tense. There are little whispered apologies when someone flubs a note; there are subtle winces when someone hears someone else’s mistakes. It’s little things at this point, but that doesn’t make it any easier to handle.

I am looking forward to Sunday evening, at 7pm, because that is when the final concert of the year will be done, and we can all heave a collective sigh of relief and hand in our music and, if we so choose, not sing another note until rehearsal starts back up again in February. The music, and the sound we all make together as a group, and the whole experience of this group is wonderful, but that makes those concert endings no more less of a relief.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.