NE Ohio/Buffalo Visit: Picture Post 1 (3/29-4/1)

Whew!! Well, I'm finally getting around to uploading pictures from my wonderful trip out east to visit friends and family in the NE Ohio/Buffalo NY areas. I had a GREAT time.

Somehow I didn't get any pictures of Tamara and Bernie, with whom I stayed for the first two nights in Cleveland. They have a great house just south of Lakewood in a great area, and have a house with 6 affectionate, happy kitties so I was in heaven. Tamara has her own Pilates/yoga studio in Lakewood, and she treated me to a class on Wednesday night which was blissful after the drive. She even gave me some brand new black Old Navy yoga pants to keep! The class was so wonderful that I am now motivated to find a good yoga studio and class here in Milwaukee. A google search revealed that there are scads of yoga studios in the Milwaukee area, so I'm psyched!!

While I was in NE Ohio, I had the good fortune of getting to spend half a day with my parents-in-law. Mimi and I hit several Wooster establishments, such as the College of Wooster bookstore where I bought David's COW sweatshirt and t-shirt, and Moorefield Pottery where I bought some pottery for myself. We had a grand time. We met David's dad, Dick, at the diner that is part of Buehler's Grocery Store where Mimi and Dick love to shop. Here's a picture of us in the diner after lunch:

Somehow I didn't take any pictures again until I went to Buffalo later in the week. (Clearly, I did not inherit the "Every moment is a Kodak moment" gene that seems to run on my mother's side of the family.)

Buffalo is a great town, and I always love visiting it: mostly because my Grandma Jean (my dad's mom), Uncle Al & Aunt Wende, and cousins Jeff, Todd, and Chris live there. It's always so much fun to see them.

On Saturday 4/1, Uncle Al drove Aunt Wende, Grandma and me out to see my cousin Todd's new home! They built, so the house is not even a few years old and is just gorgeous in its sparkling newness.

A big highlight of this trip, for me, was meeting my 1st cousin once removed for the first time!! Sean William is Todd and Emily's first child. Emily is expecting their 2nd child, a boy to be named Colin, in May. What a lovely family they have!

Here's Sean, playing with his Fischer Price (I think?) barn. It comes with all kinds of animals and a slew of other farm-related characters.

Todd and Emily have two cats, named Statler and Waldorf (yes, after the two old codgers that cracked jokes from the box seat of the Muppet Show). But we didn't see much of them because Annie, their new dog, has the run of the house now. Literally. Annie is an English Springer Spaniel/Cocker Spaniel mix, and she entertained us by tearing through the house like a tasmanian devil a la Looney Toons.

I did, however, manage to capture this more sedate picture of her:

Here is (left to right) my Aunt Wende, Uncle Al, and Grandma Jean sitting in Todd & Emily's lovely cathedral ceiling-ed living room. (Ceiling-ed? Man, I'll make a word out of anything...)

Here's a picture of the radiantly expecting Emily, adorable Sean, and proud daddy Todd. Well, Colin's in there too somewhere, but you can't see him all that well yet. Give him another month or so.... ;)

After several attempts to get a head shot of Annie (and deleting lots of blurred dog-butt pictures when she hurriedly retreated from the delayed digital camera flash), I finally got this one. I think it's priceless. There's nothing like a dog nose for your computer desktop wallpaper, is there? ;)

Proud, beaming grandparents Aunt Wende & Uncle Al playing with their grandson Sean:

Next is my cousin Jeff and his fiancee, Deb Cohen. Deb is a peach of a girl overflowing with personality, and I just adored getting to know her. I immediately got the sense that I could become great friends with if we both lived in the same city. (Hey Jeff, send me her her email address, will you? I'd love to put her on the Darcegram email list!)

She's a former horn player, so of course we had tons to talk about (much to the chagrin of the non-horn-geek family members in the room during much of our conversation). I can't wait to get to know her better. I always have so much fun visiting Buffalo, and I plan to go back there this summer, hopefully with David on a "heading east" road trip.

Aren't they just the most adorable couple? Mazeltov, you two!!

This is one of the 3 cats that live at 243 Royal Parkway (my Grandma Jean & Aunt Wende & Uncle Al's home). His name is Thurman, who I believe was named after one of the Buffalo Bills. He is an absolute moose. He likes you to rub him with your feet.

This is my wacky cousin Chris, who is a 2nd/3rd year student (he transferred, so he's sort of in between credit-wise) at the University of Buffalo. He's studying computers.

I also got to see my good friend from CIM Christine Bailey Davis, Principal Flute of the Buffalo Philharmonic. We hadn't seen eachother in over a decade, and it was great to catch up with her. Christine is a new mom and has a lovely 6 month old daughter Lucy.

I will post more pictures and travel tales from the last day of my trip, which was in Cleveland. Right now I have to go get ready for church! I'm glad my church has an 11:15 service; David's church has one at 10 so he's already gone.

Love to all of you!

XO Darcy

Spring garden blooms!

A few weeks ago, David and I were ecstatic to see the little sprouts of activity popping up in the new flower bed we dug last November. We planted over 120 bulbs!

This is what we saw a few weeks ago:

Well, every day has been another beautiful bloom. The crocuses, which you can see above, were the first to peep out.

And today, this is what our garden looks like!!

We are just thrilled! Here's a close-up of the gorgeous daffodils, many of which David's mom Mimi gave us:

I think my favorites are the hyacinths, because of their incredible texture and scent. They smell like lilacs; just luscious. Here's one up close:

So we're definitely loving the garden. And the previous owners planted tons of tulips and daffodils all over the backyard and in the landscaping bordering the house, so we've got those popping up too!!

Okay, enough flower power talk. ;) How are all of you doing? Are you enjoying spring and did you have nice Easters/Passovers/Spring Solstices? (I think that covers everything but feel free to correct me.) We had a lovely time at the Giacobassis; they're a great family, both parents are in the MSO and there were lots of enthusiastic guests. I grilled tons of veggies a la my Aunt Bev's recipe (with the lime rosemary dressing) and topped them with goat cheese. All the red peppers, asparagus, eggplant and zucchini made for a gorgeous array. David made a carrot cake in the shape of a bunny. I love the whole bunny cake pattern; you bake two round cakes, one is the face and the other becomes the ears and the bowtie:

(that's not a picture of David's carrot bunny cake, though I did decorate his; that's just a random picture I found online to show you the basic idea.)

On our version, I used coconut for the bunny fur and a dried cherry for the nose, red licorice cut into thin strips for the whiskers, and raisins for the eyes and mouth. We were low on time and other cake decorating supplies, so I sprinkled some cinnamon on the ears for shading and so our bunny simply wore a camoflauge fuzzy white bowtie. ;)

That's about all for now. I'm really tired from a very intense (but fabulous) day of rehearsing Shostakovitch 11. More on that tomorrow...Shostakovitch is definitely one of my top three favorite composers. Any guesses on the other two? ;)

Write soon and let me know how spring is going for you so far.

Love,

Darcy

Happy Birthday, David! Yay!

Yes, that's right! David's birthday is tomorrow, April 18th, 2006. He is 39 (for the first time, ha ha, Grandma Ginny), and I made him a chocolate cake from scratch!

It was a lot easier than I feared it would be, and it turned out fantastically! I used the Betty Crocker cookbook that Mimi, my mother in law, gave me for Christmas. That book has come in so handy! It has the best recipes and they're all basic and simple.

Here's David being presented with his cake before being sung to; he is modeling his "I don't want to have my picture taken!" silly face.

I gave him a College of Wooster t-shirt and a COW hooded sweatshirt, two Williams-Sonoma square baking pans, and another present he doesn't know about yet that I'll have to tell you tomorrow after I've presented it to him. ;)

Work continues to go well and with minimal stress; last week was Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet Suite 2, which has great horn parts. Juicy, passionate, tragic, dramatic. Gilbert Varga was our guest conductor. I loved him!! He was so picky and demanding and he got us to do things that we might have otherwise not done, like really making sure people didn't drag (thank god!), that we played as softly as possible in spots to really be dramatic, and even specifying when to use vibrato and when not to (for flutes and violins). I thought the end result was spectacular! Krystof was kind enough to offer to play the Rachmaninoff Pno. Concerto #1 for me, so all I had to play last week was the Prokofiev. The other piece was a Haydn Symphony which only used 2 horns.

This upcoming week should be more challenging; I'm playing in every piece, and we're doing Shostakovitch's 11th Symphony which looks very difficult. I will be listening to my recording of it and studying/practicing my part tomorrow in preparation. We're also doing the Sibelius Violin Concerto with Elmar Oliveira. Gerard Schwartz is conducting.

That's all for now - I'm going to go catch the end of the Simpsons with David before wrapping up the day and going to bed. Just wanted to catch up on my blogging! More entries to come, with more pictures! :)

Love to all of you,

Darcy

P.S. If you want to make David's birthday even more special, email him to tell him how great he is! I know I sure am glad he was born...;) dlewellen@earthlink.net

Decisions, decisions

Hey there Bloggers...

I've had a sore throat and runny nose for the past day and a half. In addition to these symptoms, last night I was also woozy, dizzy and very fatigued. I'm hoping that it's just overwhelm, and possibly allergies. I'm avoiding medicine and am taking Vitamin C lozenges. I'm trying to get a lot of rest, but today I got up at 6am because I couldn't sleep. I'll try to go to bed early tonight...

Okay. Where to begin? I've been MIA lately, busy decompressing and processing all of the stuff I've been going through...

...like making the commitment to stay here, because I like the city so much and the workload is ideal and I want more of a balanced life. That involves less orchestra work and more time to arrange, compose, and - well, just live. You know?

Of course making a decision of any kind is cutting off some other option that you've opted not to choose. The latin origin of the word "decision" literally means to "cut off". So in making any kind of major life decision, you're in effect cutting off your other options - things you might have set as your goals a long time ago. There's a significant letting go, a catharsis, a grieving. All necessary processes to go through to get to the other side with minimal baggage so you can get on with things and launch into the next chapter of your life with unfettered passion and energy.

So what did I finally realize after several months of painful deliberation, and the ambiguity and confusion that intense self questioning brings? This is it, in a nutshell: Life is short, and we're all going to die - so you'd better make the most of your life and do everything you really want to do. (I've been deeply pondering my own mortality of late, in case you couldn't tell.) That sort of brutally honest reality check really cleared up a lot of things and put priorities into perspective.

What I discovered, in light of this stark reality, is I don't want to play in an orchestra more than 44 weeks out of the year. I know that sounds crazy, but it's really true. I love having my summers completely off, to do with what I like, to remind myself of all of the other aspects of me outside of horn playing. I think it's healthier for me to have time to regroup, to do other things, to stay refreshed and to avoid burnout...to say nothing of lip damage. (Incidentally, the orchestra for whom I decided not to audition recently has one of the highest numbers of players in a single horn section who have injured their lips; something to do with the acoustics and sound not coming back to the players, so they have to blast just to be able to hear themselves at all.)

Of course there are about a million other reasons why I chose not to take that audition, but those are the biggies and the only ones I am choosing to post online for the entire world to see. If you want to know more, you can email me and I'll fill you in privately.

Other than that, things are changing and growing and regenerating. I finally got a burst of energy and motivation a few days ago, and the weather was so nice, that I attacked the accumulated mess in the sun porch room and gutted everything. I carted a whole truckload of stuff that had accumulated on the couch there since we moved in to Goodwill, and I swept, dusted and vacuumed. Without all of the mess in there, it's really quite sunny and very energizing there. I plan to make it into an evening summer reading room (I bought a lamp to have out there) and a summer art studio. That's going to be wonderful, don't you think?

And remember the new flower bed we dug in our front yard last November? We have all kinds of sprouts and buds popping up now, and it's so exciting! I'll take a picture soon. I love our gardens!

That's about all for now. We have had a lot of kiddie shows this week. We're doing Beethoven 5, more Brahms, and a lot of Mozart (which thankfully I don't play). I am getting nine kinds of tired of it all, but that's only because we've played it umpteen zillion times at this point. Anyone would get tired of any piece after that many times.

Hope you're all having a great week so far. We're halfway to the weekend! Which, of course, means nothing to me, since that's when all of my work usually happens. But it's good for most of you, right?

XO Love,
Darcy