Wednesday is full of woe.

Here I thought I�d finally got the grandfather clock regulated just right, and now I realize that it�s about a half-minute fast over a period of a week. That�s not bad at all. Such a finicky mechanism, it�s tick tock is determined by the length of the pendulum, which is controlled by a screw underneath the weight. Turn it clockwise, the ticks get closer together, turn it the other way to slow it down. So, I shall try a quarter turn to the left and see what happens.

Wednesday should not be a tiring day for me, compared to Monday or Tuesday, but I think that just because it follows those two other, busier days, I am already exhausted and the fact of my annoying student�s lesson at 1:30 p.m. destroys me for anything else. I have tried, I mean really, really tried, to make a difference with that girl. I asked her today to tell me honestly how much and how often she practises. Her response was �Not enough.� I already know this. I wanted an actual number from her. So I pressed, �Fifteen minutes a day, every other day, once a week, just choir?� She starts in with the excuses that after she�s finished practising her principal instrument (clarinet in this case) she just doesn�t have any energy left over for singing. So I told her point blank that unless she practises daily she will never show any improvement, that all the work I do in the studio with her is for nought if she does not reinforce and assimilate it during regular work on her own. My suggestion was that she practise her singing for 15 minutes before she picks up her clarinet--run through her exercises, sing through her pieces--and she will be warmed up and ready to do the other (she�s preparing for a half-recital, so she�s actually practising her main instrument quite a lot). She agreed that that might work.

At least she was followed by my other voice-as-a-second-instrument student who, while she is never going to be a great singer, is a good musician and pays attention and is smart. She took the �bad taste� out of my mouth, so to speak. I can�t imagine if their lessons were reversed. I think I would just lie down on the railway track and wait for the train to come and finish me off.

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