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

For behold, darkness shall cover the earth.

Monday, Nov. 20, 2006
8:47 p.m.
I really don�t want to update my diary right now. I just want to become a small, possibly green, maybe red, vegetable (or orange, I�m not picky) and be put to bed. My ankle hurts, my head hurts, my lower back hurts and my eyes are burning. No, I�m not getting sick, at least I don�t think I�m getting sick, even though there is always a lot of sickness around me. It�s just dry and belly dancing was rather arduous this evening.

Before I went to bed last night, I chanced a look out the window and noticed that a light layer of white shit was lying on the roofs, the lawns and the cars. It was rather lovely. This morning it was still there, so Little Princess, Buddy Boy and I walked to the university all bundled up, the two girls wearing boots even, I having done a quick mink oil job on mine just before we left the house. As we walked, the two of them blathered on about killing some demon lord of sorts in some video game they both play ad infinitum (hot flash alert!). In fact, my daughter confessed to having done nothing but for five hours on Saturday. Sheesh! and I thought I was bad for wasting time at the computer.

During my baritone�s singing lesson this afternoon, he said something about my directorial technique. I�m teaching him a piece which is much too hard for him because I feel he needs the challenge and because I get tired of the easier pieces I tend to give my less-advanced students. So he�s learning the recit and aria �The people that walkèd in darkness� from Messiah. It would help if he practised, but we�ve discussed that at length. He�s a drama student, hence the comment about my directorship. I take a phrase and I tear it apart, making him do it in little cells in order to learn the technique necessary to sing the whole thing as a smooth, homogenous whole. He kept making the same mistake repeatedly, and I kept stopping him at the same place...repeatedly. This was when he came out with his comment. So I said to him, �If you were directing a play, and you wanted your character to walk from the chair to the table, and everytime he turned so that his back was to the audience, wouldn�t you stop him and make him do it again?� To which he replied in the affirmative. I think he got it at that point.

Walking home I was picked up by Ed and his mother (she was driving) and they gave me a lift the rest of the way. As we turned the corner onto my street, we saw a buck with an impressive rack and a doe on my neighbour�s lawn. The female darted away, but the buck stood his ground, watching us, as though to make sure that we really were moving along. I thought that was rather cool. It also underlines how their loss of habitat is making the deer very bold in the area. That�s a problem, for both them and us.


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