Bianca!

We have a new addition to our family!!

Meet Bianca! She is a 9 month old long haired kitty, white with blue eyes and brown spots/tail. She is extremely affectionate and loves to snuggle! She makes the cutest little squeaky meowing sounds. She's in that awkward "cat puberty" stage, where she's not really a kitten anymore but she's not really full grown yet either, so she looks a little gawky (to use David's word). But I love her.

Emma and Gabs do not yet share my love of her and there has been much hissing, yowling, and growling. But Bianca seems to shrug it off well so far, and I am confident that as they get used to her they'll love her too.

We are thinking about getting a dog some day, but it would just be too much right now. Another cat posed a lot less change and maintenance than a dog would, and neither of us have ever owned dogs before so it would be a major change. Some day...but not now.

After all, we've had a LOT of change in the past 3 years - moving to Milwaukee, getting engaged and then married, buying a house...I think we can put off the dog a few more years! ;)

Lots of love (and cat hair),

Darcy

Going Junebuggy

Sheesh...I never thought it would come to this, but...

....I haven't had time to blog lately!!

Yes, shocking, but true. But understandable and even logical, given the work I've been doing for our quintet's huge Symphony on the Square feature concert debut this Thursday at noon at Cathedral Square. I'm really psyched about it. I did arrangements of Star Wars, Joplin's Elite Syncopations, the Stars & Stripes, Harry Potter, and am currently working on a Phantom of the Opera medley. It's a lot of work but it's fun. And for those of you who know Finale 2004, I learned how to fully use Speedy Entry mode, which combined with the MIDI keyboard, makes the previously lugubrious entering of complicated rhythms fly like lightning! I blew through the Joplin in one day, and the Stars & Stripes in one day as well! (My arrangement of Star Wars was B.S.E. - Before Speedy Entry, har har - and took me over a week...but that was also because I wanted all the juicy ostinatos and underlying rhythms that John Williams uses in the original Main Title for the movie.)

So tons of things have been happening lately. The MSO's season is almost over. We played our last subscription concert a few weeks ago which featured the Saint Saen's Organ Symphony, the music used as the Soundtrack for the movie "Babe". (David relayed to me that he heard that the translation for this movie title in China was "The Pig That Talks and Solves Agricultural Problems." I thought that was hysterical.) All of the horn solos in that piece are 3rd horn so it was a lot of fun (and work) for me. It went extremely well for all 4 concerts, and that pleased me.

Before that, the Florentine Opera did a production of Aida that was incredible. For those of you who know opera, Aida is all one big huge spectacle. I had done Aida years ago with the Cincinnati Opera - memorable not only because of the great singing but because one of the horses took a huge dump on stage right in the middle of the 2nd act.

Maybe when I have time I'll do one of my "Opera for non-OperaDorks" synopses of Aida for you. It really is a compelling plot and I found myself getting very drawn into it more and more every night. I sit on the audience side of the pit, so I can see the stage quite well. The sets were just gorgeous, and were gargantuan - I have no idea how they got those things on stage, much less on a truck to get them here. Aida, sung by Angela Brown, was probably one of the best, if not the best, sopranos I've ever heard. She had a gorgeous, incredibly resonant and powerful voice but she never sounded like she was forcing or belting like so many singers do.

But my favorite part of this production of Aida was, by far, the dancing. In the first dress rehearsal during the Triumphal March section in the 2nd act, where traditionally all the animals are paraded across the stage, something caught my eye. I thought I had seen a naked man's buttcheek fly by. I thought to myself, "no way!" and took another look. Incredulously, there were these gorgeous male dancers in gold Roman/Egyptian style coiled-rope loincloth-esque thongs, with gold body paint smeared all over their gluteal glory and dancing in a very aboriginal style with spears. Yum! For a while I was very disappointed after the 2nd act because I knew the manbutts weren't coming back in the 3rd or 4th acts.

Meanwhile here we are in the brass section, playing all kinds of juicy fanfares. It was loads of fun. And I had to laugh - the women were completely covered in body veils. Definitely indicative of the Egyptian culture, of course, but also of the fact that two gay men were producing/directing this production. ;) I have to say, it was a nice role reversal from the usual exploitation of women's bodies and sexuality! Ha ha!

The other fun news - David and I planted a large vegetable garden in the strip of land to the north of our garage - we have a fence there and lots of land we don't use, so we figured it would be a good place for it.

So the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, David went to Home Depot and rented a sod cutter and hauled it to and from our place in my CR-V. (I would have helped him do all this except I was in rehearsal at work.) For those of you who have never seen a sodcutter, it is a behemoth of a machine, weighing at least 200 pounds. David cut a plot of about 10' x 13'. We planted 5 different varieties of tomatoes (Sweet 100's, Better Boys, romas, grape, and cherry), jalapeno peppers, red peppers, pole beans, parsley, and basil. I am most excited about the tomatoes. I remember our neighbor Nancy bringing over Sweet 100's last summer when we first moved in in August. She had a bumper crop from two plants that had apparently gone wild. I used to eat them like candy. They were so sweet, popped in your mouth and you could still taste the sun in them. I am sure I will turn into a tomato by September!!

Anyway, there's much more to write about, so I'll go to another post for it. Ciao!!

XO Love,
Darcy

Beethoven's 9th, flourishing flowers, and Cinci trip pics

We're doing Beethoven's 9th Symphony this week. It's one of the "top 40" classical pieces, to be sure, but it's still a fantastic piece of music, and I had a "moment" last night toward the end. We were careening full speed ahead to the very end of the piece, and I was thinking about how amazing it is that I get to do this, to participate in one of the world's greatest artistic masterpieces. What an honor.

I just had a really strong sense of the energy of the audience (we had a nearly full house, and our hall seats 2500) and how much they were enjoying it. That always enhances my performance experience, no matter how tired or hackneyed a piece may seem to me - imagining the piece through the ears of someone who doesn't get to hear it as much as I do. It's a great perspective. And there were problems with the performance last night - it wasn't perfect. But I still managed to really enjoy it.

One of the reasons I enjoyed last night's performance so much was the fact that I finally could play the 3rd horn part. I'm really struggling with my new position as 3rd as some of the pieces I played over and over again as Principal while freelancing turn up here. This piece is one of them. I totally have the Principal part associated with many pieces, since that's what I played for so many years before coming here. So when it comes to playing a new part, one that often is in a completely different key and that has completely different entrances and rhythms, I find myself wanting to fall into the groove that I wore into my memory of so many Principal performances of so many pieces.

It's not that I want to play that part anymore; it's just that I keep thinking that that's what I should be playing while I'm sitting there when I hear that music. It's really hard to do something completely different at first. It's very weird. But I overcame it successfully last night (about time!) and was very happy.

And now for something completely different! Here's a neat sequence of pictures showing the progress of our new flower bulb bed in our front yard. They span from mid-April to the present. (The last picture was taken about a week ago.)

David has been cutting gorgeous arrangements of daffodils and tulips for our vases. We've been enjoying their beauty immensely on our various tables in our kitchen and living room. My favorites, though, are the hyacinths; they have such an enticing scent, and they give the entire room a luscious and fresh smell.

The other cool thing about these pictures is that we can see the "bald spots" of the garden so we know where to plant more bulbs this fall! Hooray!

So here are some really neat pictures of my trip to Cincinnati a few weeks ago! It was pure serendipity that I was visiting during one of my mother's amazing music concerts! This was her 5th grade chorus's debut concert - as in, these kids had never given a concert before in their short lives - but you would have never known it to watch and listen to them!

Here is my mom and the entire 5th grade chorus, warming up in my mom's ultra-festively decorated classroom:

This is the stage in the gym where the performance took place. The theme of the concert was very progressive - EARTH DAY. I was blown away by how many songs my mom found that were directly related to Earth Day - songs about recycling, getting Corporate America to care about its waste disposal, about how one person can really make a difference; African songs about the different earth elements, a really neat Spanish song about Fire, and a few feel-good songs with CD accompaniment for good measure.

She had these kids using the Orff instruments (the many xylophone-type objects which you can see below), rain sticks, percussion instruments, bongos...you name it! She also featured several kids in their own solos and in poetry narration. And my sister, Dana, had come in to teach these kids choreography on top of it all! It was SO neat!

Note the neat mural tapestry in the background:

I told my mom that I hadn't expected to be so completely entertained as an adult who has fairly sophisticated musical tastes, but I was pleasantly surprised - no, blown away is more like it! In fact, one of my favorite songs of the entire night was one that I memorized because the audience got to sing along. It's called "Good Garbage." I loved it particularly because David is an avid composter. When he first moved up here he started a biodegradable rubbish heap in our small garden patch at our old place (before we had our own yard). I got sick of looking at it (and finding it strewn across our driveway by various rodents) so I bought him an Earth Machine. We love it and it really improves the fertility of our gardens.

Anyway...back to the song. David laughed and laughed when I sang him the refrain of the "Good Garbage" song that my mom did with her kids (she had the whole auditorium full of parents and kids singing along!):

Good garbage breaks down as it goes!

That's why it smells bad to your nose!

Bad garbage grows and grows and grows...

Garbage is s'posed to decompose!

And for the closing shots, we have the star of the trip...little Jenna, who isn't so little anymore! She is 2 and a half, and is just the most adorable and fun bundle of energy you could ever hope to meet. But don't ask me...I'm hopelessly biased. ;)

I pushed Jenna on the tree swing my parents have in their backyard. We had lots of fun! (Kids are great exercise, I found!)

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

That's all for now. I hope you're all enjoying your weekend, and that May is treating you wonderfully!

XOXOXO

Love,

Darcy

May Potpourri

Well, this is going to be a bit of a hodge-podge of a post with lots of little and unrelated things to report...sort of a potpourri of news!!

David and I went to go see Akeelah and The Bee last Saturday. It was a very inspiring story about a gifted African American girl in a lower-income area of LA finding support and strength in her community to reach her full potential. I highly recommend it! It brought back memories of doing fairly well on spelling bees; I think I got pretty far into into the district bee until they fired "effleurage" at me. Damn them! Amazingly, that word was also in the movie! David said that one word that cost him a spelling bee was "pastiche", which was also in the movie. We loved it!

Oh, and you're going to just love this story.

About a month ago I was pulling into our garage and saw this cute, fuzzy, brown and white mouse scurry under the corrugated shelving to the left of where I park my car. I felt my Oberlin hippy roots and thought, "I'm going to be an animal lover here. I am not going to freak out just because some little cute innocent creature has chosen to find a home in my garage."

Well, yesterday I got into my car, which I remind you, is still only 5 months old. It still has New Car Smell (at least for now).

I opened up my glove compartment and wouldn't you know it, some of the napkins I keep in there were shredded, a la small rodent, and there were several mouse turds on the other napkins. I was horrified.

Instantly my hospitable feelings toward the mouse I had seen were gone. It was no longer cute, and I was suddenly not so enthused about sharing my garage - much less my new car - with any animals, much less nimble rodents who are obviously fond of mastication. I asked Paul, 4th horn in the MSO and car buff, about it and asked him how on earth mice could have gotten into my glove box. He laughed and said they must've gotten in under my hood, and that I should really be careful because mice can eat through electrical wiring in your car. Lovely. I told him about a humanitarian form of mouse removal that was a box trap that caught the mice in a box and you went out into a field and set them free without harming them. Paul laughed even harder.

Screw the mice. We're buying mousetraps today.

Let's see, what else? The youth group at my church is going on a Habitat for Humanity trip and they're holding a gourmet dessert auction on Sunday. I volunteered to bake a cheesecake from scratch, since I never have, and baked a trial NY Style Cheesecake from a recipe out of my Betty Crocker book. It turned out phenomenally, though for the actual auction cake (which I'm baking tomorrow afternoon) I'm going to double the crust because I thought it was a bit thin. Anyway, now we have two people under the same roof who love to bake cheesecakes from scratch! Isn't that cool? I gave away 3/4 of the cake to friends who raved about it, which made me feel good. :)

Oh, and a follow up on the digital music dilemma - my friend Mark, a computer guy out in California, emailed me the best and easiest solution! He said to rip the iTunes AAC files to a music disc, and then using the other program that imports tracks as mp3's, to import the AAC files. This will convert them and bypass the "Protected" status that makes it impossible to convert the AAC files directly. Way cool! Mark, you rock! Thanks for that!

Let's see, what else? Oh, yeah - reading! I finally finished The End of Faith by Sam Harris. I enjoyed parts of it but man, he really got on my nerves near the end. I personally agree with him that religion in general causes more division in the world than it does unity (The Crusades, The Spanish Inquisition, The Holocaust, 9/11...the list goes on and on) and that there are other ways (better ways for some people, myself included) to attain universal truths and spiritual sustenance than religion and dogma. So those parts were really good, and I really enjoyed them.

But his argument that you can't be a devotee of a particular faith without being a violent fundamentalist was just ridiculous and irritating. Just because you don't follow the parts of the Bible that advocate violence against nonbelievers doesn't mean you're not a Christian and that you can't find meaning and strength through Christianity. David pointed out that the author of that book sounds like a fundamentalist who's completely against religion, and that he isn't any better than those he argues against. I agree with him.

But I'm glad I read it. It was very enlightening on many levels, particularly about the Muslim faith. I have an entirely new understanding of 9/11 and the situation in the Middle East - from a religious perspective. It changes everything.

So now I'm reading Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. I resisted it for so long because it was so hyped and I had this image in my mind that it was historical fiction. Well, it's well- researched fiction, but it's set in the present day, and it's much more of a mystery/thriller. After that last book, which was like reading for a college Philosophy class, I need something more fast-paced. And I definitely want to see the movie!!

Okay, enough of my rambling! That's all for now.

XO Darcy

Digital Music Diva ;)

This past Christmas, David's mom (my MIL) Mimi gave me a gift that would be more exciting to me than she would have ever imagined.

The gift was an iTunes page-a-day calendar. Every day, I read a new page about a new song and/or artist that I may or may not have ever heard about. I am more and more easily bored by the 2-3 chord progressions in the typical over-processed "pop-in-a-blender" stuff that seems to be running rampant on the radio these days, so discovering new music (or music that may be new to me) is a huge deal for me. I am LOVING it!!

So what I do is this. If the song for the day seems interesting, I save the sheet. Once I have a collection of about 10-20 songs, I take them to the computer and listen to them online. The digital music program that came with our Dell computer, MusicMatch, has some of these songs. But others can only be found on the biggest and best online digital music source on the planet: iTunes.

So I downloaded the free iTunes program. And I want to let you know what an amazing difference it makes. MusicMatch's music browser was okay, but I found tons of music I'd never been able to find before on iTunes. It's amazing! For instance, I would have never thought of listening to Ziggy Marley's "Tomorrow People", U2's "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)" which is amazing because I'm a huge U2 fan, Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek", or Jack's Mannequin's "The Mixed Tape".

I also discovered another incredible group worth listening to, probably my favorite so far, called Panic! At The Disco. I recommend their songs "The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide Is Press Coverage", "I Constantly Thank God For Esteban", and "I Write Sins Not Tragedies". You should totally check out their sound if you're into alternative rock. Sort of a more edgy Maroon 5, if you liked them. All amazing songs, and I'd never even heard of most of those artists before!!

The only problem I'm finding, is that my Phillips mp3 player, shown below (actual size), does not play the download format from iTunes.

As frustrating as this is, I'll admit that it's a pretty smart move on Apple/Mac's part. It ensures the sales of their iPods, the only digital music players that will play the iTunes downloaded songs' format (AAC). I wish I had known this before I bought mine! But then, I hadn't discovered iTunes yet.

So what I'm going to have to do is either buy an iPod - you can get one for about $70 if you look in the right places - or just burn the iTunes tracks to CD and not be able to listen to them on my current MP3 player. I think what I will also do from now on is to search for new music with iTunes, and then see if I can download it from MusicMatch (those files are compatible with my portable audio player).

I'm also having a horrible time syncing the songs from my computer onto this damned mp3 player. Sometimes it syncs, and sometimes it doesn't. If it doesn't go into the right folder or if it isn't sorted correctly, it isn't accessible even though it's taking up memory space on the thing. I just have to figure it out...and it's worth it. You can carry around up to 7 hours of music on this tiny little device, without the disc changing or skipping of CD's. It's worth it, to take long walks with sort of your own private radio station with only your favorite songs!!

More later, I'm determined to figure this out so I can go on a long walk with my favorite tunes in my ears...

~Darcy