You give me fever.

My pedagogical duties for the semester are done. I am nice beyond nice and I do believe that it totally paid off. Last night at the dress rehearsal I saw the special needs student who missed her lesson last week without calling me, so I asked her what happened. She told me she had been sick all week with some digestive ailment (you do not want to hear the details) and had called and left two messages on the music office phone, messages which I never got because no one ever retrieved them and put them in my box. So I told her I was going to be teaching a lesson at 1 p.m., could she come for 2:00? See how nice I am?

Anyway, the girl I inherited from Vlad had her penultimate lesson for the term today (there just isn’t time to give her one more, we’ll make it up next term) and we worked on the jazz tune Fever which she wants to use as her audition piece for some star search programme. She’s a very difficult student right now, always fidgeting, not standing up straight, not doing what I ask, acting embarrassed constantly. I finally asked her why she was taking this course, and her response was that she liked to sing. So I asked her if she wanted to get better at singing, and she said, yes, of course. So I had to launch into my speech about her actually doing what I ask and stop saying, “I hate that sound!” and all the other antics or she wouldn’t get anything out of the course, and I would feel really bad because she just wasn’t applying herself when I was putting so much into it. I think I made an impression.

The other one, the one I especially made time for today, forgot her music (insert rolling eyes here), which turned out to be a very good thing. During the warmup exercise, she made a comment about hating to go over a certain break, so I turned the lesson into a technique session on smoothing over register changes. We worked on the middle voice one and also the one at the top of the staff. By the end of the hour, she was making much better sounds than she had at the beginning, and was rather amazed at what she was capable of. Chalk one up for me.

Speaking of Vlad, she came to the dress rehearsal last night and I got to chat with her briefly. Her weight loss is obvious in her face, as her cheeks are a little gaunt looking. She’s wearing a wig, which is quite attractive, and seems perky enough.

However, something very disturbing happened yesterday. We have mice living in the walls, and the electronic trap isn’t working, so I’ve resorted to putting out the poison pellets and old-fashioned mouse traps. I had one baited with peanut butter in the cold cellar which had gone unsprung for several weeks, so I moved it to a spot next to the hot water tank. Yesterday I went to get something from the freezer and noticed that the trap was not where I’d left it, so I looked around and found it behind the tank, upside down, with something in it.

I flipped it over and discovered the remains of a mouse (I think it was a mouse) that had been eaten by something else. I shudder to think what’s living in the basement. Moles? Rats? (insert shudder here)

The official count so far is 40 cm of snow since Monday. That’s a lot. Winter is here.

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