Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

I am one-third done the next phase.

Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2005
9:39 a.m.
The laser printer is happily spewing out the first 42 pages of corrected score (Hubby will go over this with a fine-toothed comb and find more errors [at this point your intrepid diarist pulls out her hair screaming and checks herself into the nearest boobyhatch] necessitating more corrections before parts can be extracted). Amazingly enough, it�s not too bad. There hasn�t been a page yet without a red mark on it, but at least (apart from having copied a couple of measures a second low or high, or copied the contents of one part on the line of another) there have been no major errors. From the sounds Hubby was making while he was proofreading, though, I know these are yet to come.

We are in for a big melt here. Yesterday when I opened the door to get the newspaper I could smell the warmer air. It was actually 2�C, rising a couple more degrees during the day. The 2' of snow we got over the weekend will soon be filling the storm sewers and the river will rise. This is always a bit scary. Luckily we live on high ground. There is a stream that runs by our house, however, that gets very high and full in the spring. When the kids were little I forbade them from playing near it. The other neighbourhood children would splash around in it and play in it totally unsupervised, and I imagined all sorts of terrible things happening. The one time my daughter was playing with the kid from down the street (who was allowed to play in the stream), Buddy Boy (who was maybe three at the time) followed them in, stepped on something, and ended up getting a pointed stick right through the sole of his rubber boot into his tender wee foot. I gave Little Princess heck!

While I love singing in a choir again, I�m finding the repertoire for this spring concert tedious to the max. It�s all pop music, some actual choral arrangements of standard tunes, like The Way you L00k Tonight and Autumn Leaves (which are really nice), but mostly arrangements of rock, folk or other songs for soloists and the rest of the choir singing �back-up�. There is nothing challenging about it. I do have a solo, which I share with one of my students, If I could save time in a b0ttle by Jim Cr0ce, but it has been transposed into a very uncomfortable range, sitting squarely on the upper soprano break (C-D-E on the staff), and when I was practising it yesterday I got extremely tired. It�s very difficult to sing in that tessitura without sounding like an opera singer, keeping the sound light and clear with a minimum of vibrato.

I forgot to mention, the SAQ was back to work towards the end of last week and I was able to go to the store and purchase a nice bottle of red wine to bring to the dinner party on Saturday night. I asked the man at the desk what he would recommend for a meal that would most likely be fish, but could be anything else vegetarian as well. He found me a lovely bottle of Barbera wine which I didn�t get to taste until after I had already imbibed the other wine she was serving beforehand. That is the last time I will do that. Hubby was also able to replenish his supply of Canadian Club whiskey (he has already half-emptied that bottle), and already consumed the contents of the one-serving container of Crown Royal that was attached to the neck. Ah, the relief of being able to purchase hard liquor again!

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