Breckenridge, Books, and Babies!!

Hey faithful bloggers! It's been far too long since my last post; I'm long overdue to post something here. So here's the Darcy Digest for the past several months...

First and foremost, David and I have a new little cousin! Sara Cordelia Lewellen was born to Andrew (David's brother) and Pamela Lewellen on August 17th. She is absolutely gorgeous! I will send you the link to pictures soon. We are very proud and can't wait to meet her, although given the logistics of our own pending delivery which renders us unable to travel over the winter holidays, it probably won't be until 20o8!

The Breckenridge Music Festival was just fantastic. The musicians were from all over the place and almost all of them had full time jobs in music performance (orchestras) or college teaching. I made lots of new friends from Charleston (SC), Florida, Tulsa, Dallas, San Diego, and Indiana. The quality of the musicians was extremely good, and it was a genuine pleasure to make music with them, especially under the direction of Gerhardt Zimmermann, one of the best conductors I've ever played under. He's so concise, efficient, and clear. I really click with him musically - every suggestion he has makes such sense and actually makes phrases easier! - and his passionate energy that positively emanates from the podium is infectious. What a joy to work with such a musician. I surprised myself by using my triple horn for more than half of the playing I did! The 8D was fun to use on the bigger stuff like the Rite of Spring, the Shostakovitch Cello Concerto, and the bigger romantic works, but the triple proved to be the perfect horn for chamber music, french orchestral works, and pretty much anything high. Wow!

David and I returned home early last week, and I have loved being home again. We have lots of tomatoes, jalapenos and zucchini from our garden, and I've already made zucchini bread (with dried cranberries instead of raisins - a great variation) and a big bowl of zesty (medium) cilantro salsa. Tonight I'm making pizza from scratch - the dough is currently rising and I'm about to go make tomato sauce with a bunch of our romas that were picked this week. Have any of you ever tried japanese eggplant? They're the thinner banana-shaped variety of eggplants and they're very sweet and mild and we grew them too this summer. They're great in stir-frys or broiled. I'm putting some on top of our pizza tonight!

I read some great books this summer, all fiction (representing the rotation of my favorite fiction styles: historical fiction/murder mystery thriller/quality "chick lit"). The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai was an intricate exploration into the Himalayan mountains of India, exploring the disintegration of the various immigrant groups there as well as the parallel issues surrounding illegal immigration in the US - a fascinating, refreshingly different escape. I had discovered a new thriller author, Lisa Gardner, who wrote the brilliant and riveting The Survivor's Club. What a ride! I loved her ability to throw plot twists and shockers at you while simultaneously developing the characters with moving depth, and her writing in general was superb. Right now I'm reading the prolific Jodi Picoult's Vanishing Acts, and it too is excellent. I love authors that write different chapters from different characters' points of view, and she's a master at it. I'm impressed that she can crank out so many novels quickly yet each one is more riveting than the next. So....have you read any good books lately? I always love learning about new authors and hearing about what you all are reading these days.

The symphony starts quite late this year (9/25, my 37th birthday, is our first rehearsal!). In the meantime we are working hard to get the remodeling done on our baby boy's room! Once we get all the furniture out of what is currently the music studio (which will become the nursery), we will be ripping up the old stained carpeting in the hallway that leads into the studio and replacing it with hardwood floor laminates. We're having Lowe's do the installation. I plan to paint the baby's room white with one or maybe two buttery yellow walls. The bedding pattern I picked out for him is a bright patchwork quilt and should prove to be quite festive!

That's about all for now. How are your summers wrapping up? Would love to hear from you. Write soon! :)

Let's go to the movies!

So has anyone seen any good movies lately?

Appropriately, David & I went to go see two movies within the past week that had to do with pregnancy (how often does that happen, that there are two movies out at the same time about being pregnant?!), both of which were wonderful. Waitress, a Sundance Film Festival hit with Keri Russell as the star, was very well done, had a great message and was very touching. There was a lot of "food porn" as David calls it, because Keri's character bakes scrumptious gourmet pies to deal with her unwanted pregnancy and boorish husband. (To watch a preview trailer for this movie, click here and then click the yellow "Watch Trailer" button)

And before that, of course, we saw Knocked Up (definitely click the yellow "Watch Trailer" button when you visit that link!). I can only say that even if you have no interest in children (or having them) whatsoever, this movie will make you howl with laughter. It was absolutely sidesplitting - especially as an expectant mother. I laughed so hard I was initially worried about upsetting Peaches (nicknames for our baby depend on which article of produce s/he most represents the size of during any given week) but s/he seems to like and be soothed by motion and laughter - even my horn playing - , which is good. There were a few scenes which were so hysterical I had to catch my breath and actually got dizzy from laughing so hard. The only caution I would offer is that if you have a prudish sense of humor - if movies like South Park or Borat offend you, for example - you might be a bit in over your head. I also would not recommend drinking or eating anything unless you enjoy liquids flying out of your nose and the person next to you is well versed in the Heimlich. Uproarious!

I also cried like an idiot at the end of both movies when the baby was handed to the mother for the first time. What is happening to me!?!?

Over the past several months I've also slowly but surely used my Netflix account, which I still love. Sometimes I watch 2-3 movies in 2 weeks; sometimes it's over a month before I have time to sit down and watch anything. But it's always just 10 bucks a month for whatever I decide, no late fees. And the selection of movies on Netflix is unrivaled and I'm quite sure that I wouldn't find half the movies on my queue at Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. Anyhoo, here are some of the ones I've watched with my ratings for them:

Fat Girl - a disturbing foreign film (in French with English subtitles) with a shocking commentary on girls' self esteem and body image issues. I thought this was a brilliant film, but it was extremely violent and quite unsettling. My rating: 3 stars.

Mysterious Skin - yet another disturbing one but still thought provoking and extremely interesting. Two young boys suffer the same childhood trauma and the movie tracks how they differently they each deal with it through their adolescence. Also quite violent, but very thought provoking. My rating: 3 stars.

Unfaithful - The classically hot Diane Lane/Richard Gere movie about a woman who has an affair, and how it destroys everyone involved. I thought the plot was set up particularly creatively because her marriage seemed quite healthy and she had a great life before she started the affair. My rating: 4 stars.

Aeon Flux - And now for something completely different! This was a futuristic post-apocalyptic vision of the 25th century. Based on MTV's animated adventure series of the same name, Charlize Theron stars as Aeon Flux, an assassin for a secret rebellious force against a totalitarian government. As a true Xena and Buffy fan, I love watching women kick ass, but I had a hard time getting into the whole Sci-Fi thing. This is mostly me though - I am not much of a fantasy or sci-fi kind of girl. My rating: 3 stars.

Next on my Netflix queue are four comedies (which I sure need, after the heavy hitters I've been watching!! Sheesh!): Beauty Shop, Imagine Me and You, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, and Wedding Crashers. I probably won't be able to fit them all in before I leave for Breckenridge, but I'm still looking forward to them.

So....have you seen any good movies lately? What do you recommend?

Gardens and books

Hello Junebugs! How is your summer going so far?

Our peonies have started to open; the fuschia ones just have buds, but the white ones have started to bloom in their snowy fragrant glory. Our vegetable garden (largely David's impetus, but I help out and enjoy it too) is planted with multiple varieties of herbs, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, and zucchini already soaking up the sun.

The orchestra season is wrapping up. We've had quite the concert lineup recently - last week was Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique and Corigliano's Piano Concerto with William Wolfram. That man is unbelievable. And I adored the Corigliano. Think Shostakovitchian orchestration with the lyricism of Samuel Barber, the percussion techniques of Joseph Schwantner, and the rhythmic complexity of Stravinsky, all in one thoroughly electric and stimulating piece. All of those composers are among my absolute favorites, so I was in my glory! But the concert, which also included Copland's Appalachian Spring (which, thankfully, I didn't have to play, since I'm definitely not a Copland fan), was really tiring.

This week, we have Doc Severinson's farewell week - the last concerts he will ever play before he retires - and all four concerts are sold out. I think they have been for a while. And then next week we have Mahler's 2nd Symphony, which I have never played onstage before (I did the offstage brass with Cinci a while ago, but it was only the last movement and I didn't even have to get dressed up, so I don't really count it as having played Mahler 2).

So keep your fingers crossed that I will survive through the end of the season.

So have you read any good books lately? If you liked Moby Dick and are in the mood for a wonderfully epic historical fiction, I can recommend Sena Jeter-Naslund's Ahab's Wife, a thoroughly researched escape into life in 1850's Nantucket through the eyes of Una, Captain Ahab's wife. It was so well-written, and I felt completely transported. It took a while to read, because the writing was so intricate and written in period dialect, but it was well worth it.

I also read the James Patterson mystery whodunnit thriller Mary Mary - which I also enjoyed but don't remember much about off the top of my head. (Fast-paced, action-packed adventures are often like that for me - fun at the time, but not especially memorable.)

I then explored a new author that Jen recommended for me. The brilliant young novelist's name is Zadie Smith, whose book White Teeth spans the British 1940's to present day and tracks the interrelationships of several intergenerational British immigrant familes and cultures - Jamaican Jehova's Witnesses, Bangladeshi Muslims, non-religious English. The ease with which Smith taps into and portrays each character so believably is truly stunning and made for a wonderful escape.

After that, the murder mystery genre was up again in the reading rotation. I had picked John Lescroart's The Hunt Club. It was published by Signet and was supposedly a New York Times Bestseller, which as I read it I found hard to justify. Not only was the story line plodding and often all dialogue/no action, but I had figured out who the murderer was halfway through - which made me impatient for the characters in the book to catch up with me. But what really steamed me was that I found several errors in spelling, grammar, and syntax as I read. And Signet is a reputable publishing house! It made me mad that I was wasting reading time on such a book. I will not buy this author again, because life is too short to read crappy books. The climax of the mystery was moderately entertaining, I'll admit, but I give it 2 stars, at best.

So now I'm reading The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, which is good so far; I will keep you posted. After that, I think I'll be in for a quality "chick lit" romp - like Jennifer Weiner's Little Earthquakes or Everyone Worth Knowing by Lauren Weisberger (she wrote The Devil Wears Prada).

So what are you reading lately? And how do your gardens grow? ;) Post comments and let me know....

Frozen tootsies in search of heat (or "Where the &!$# is Spring?!")

Okay, folks. I'm getting about nine kinds of tired of this 40's-50's Wisconsin weather. It's MAY, for crying out loud! It's time to break out the cute summer blouses, the capris and pedal-pushers, the adorable new summer sandals! It is time to show off one's pedicured tootsies painted all kinds of cheery corals and reds and pinks!

It's time for the HEAT!!

I was born in Georgia and grew up in Cincinnati, which may be why I absolutely adore hot weather. I am never happier than when it's 90 degrees out and humid. It does great things for skin and hair, and I adore the feeling of freedom that comes from an entire season where no jackets, coats, or socks are required. Unlike many women, I love to sweat. It's good for the skin - it purges it of impurities, allowing you to glisten with healthy radiance.

Which isn't to say that I don't also enjoy the fact that our house has air conditioning. :) But I am definitely more acclimated to hot weather than the cold. I've become more tolerant of winter weather over the years simply by necessity (hello, Cleveland and Wisconsin), but there's no question as to which extreme I do better with. David calls me a "thermophile" because I will roast happily next to a space heater for hours and bury myself under two down comforters (both as recently as yesterday). I call him a "frigiphile" because in the dead of winter he goes all Nanook on me with his frequent leisurely pleasure walks in the negative 5 degree tundra - and that's before you factor in the wind chill.

So I am very excited about the inevitability of warmer weather. (It has to come sometime!) I bought some adorable Papillio sandals in the (they're made by Birkenstock so they're way comfy, but unlike some of Birkenstock's aesthetically challenged regular styles, Papillios are updated, fashionable and cute). I also got some Dansko sandals (Mirabelle, in black), which are dressier and not quite as comfy as the Papillios (as in they wouldn't pass the "running 3 or more errands at a time" or "2 mile walk" test) but they are still very nice. I've defiantly worn them three times even though my toes froze every time.

The birds continue to come to our feeders, which are in full view through the sliding glass doors that lead from the kitchen out to the deck. The finches are very close to the door and are a gorgeous bright yellow. This aviar entertainment is also known as Kitty HBO. Bianca doesn't really seem to give a meow about the birds, but Emma chatters and flops over on her back waving her paws in the air when they come within feet of the door or hop on the deck toward her. Gabby sits in the classic mother hen pose with her ears back, muttering and annoyed that she can't get to the birds she sees and wants. David says I'm more entertained by the cats than I am by the birds. He may be right. :)

We had planted even more daffodil, hyacinth, and tulip bulbs last fall, and they are coming up radiantly and gorgeously. I am astounded at how tall some of the tulips have grown! We are enjoying picking bouquets to brighten our sunny little home. I am particularly impressed with the varieties of daffodils we have: the quintessential bright yellow, white with yellow centers, tiny sprays of multiple baby daffodils on a single stem. They are just delightful.

Professionally, things continue to go extremely well. I did the pre-concert lecture again a few weeks ago, interviewing then-featured composer Paul Chihara, who was fascinating and fun. The Quintet has been booked again for the Symphony on the Square concert series in Cathedral Square Park in downtown Milwaukee on June 28th, and we're very psyched about that. And one of my prize horn students, Emily Schroeder, got a huge scholarship to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY! For those of you non-musical types, Eastman is to Music what Harvard is to Law. This is a tremendous honor and I am proud as peaches of her!

I can't think of anything else, so this is going to have to suffice for a very overdue update on things in the Darciverse. Please do write back or comment on this post and tell me how your springs are unfolding for you! I'd love to hear from you.

Winter to spring

Dearest friends and family,

I have been thinking of you often and fondly during the past several weeks. Things have been wonderfully busy and rich with activity. I am exhausted but happy and fulfilled, so it's a good exhaustion. :)

And thus I finally sit down to write to you on this lovely Sunday morning, wet with the first of spring rains and smelling of our green garden, sprouting new growth with crocuses and daffodils poking their colorful heads up out of the ground. Spring and fall are my two favorite seasons and always have been. It's easy to love them - the thaw of the cold, hard, greyscale ice and snow, the technicolor explosion of gorgeous nature, the vibrant colors of autumn. Yet as I grow older and wiser, I have come to hate winter less. (I used to really hate it, but if you were constantly driving in blizzards like I was during my freelance years in Cleveland, you'd have definitely hated it too.)

Winter certainly does not provide the pleasing and aesthetic color palettes of spring and fall, and we are limited and slowed by the cold and the decrease in natural light. I used to suffer tremendous seasonal depression before I understood how to use winter to my benefit. In recent spiritual growth, I have become increasingly aware of our inherent connection to nature and the cycle of life as it manifests itself everywhere. For example, gardening, which has largely been David's initiative, has helped me to see how vital winter is if we want to see the growth of spring. This applies to our literal gardens of flowers, herbs and vegetables as well as our figurative spiritual, physical and mental gardens. We need to rest, to hibernate, to go inward and nurture our roots - just as the daffodils and tulips and rosebushes need that time to absorb their nutrients and slowly grow. Lately during the snowy, cold, dark winters, I have not expected to have the energy that I do during the spring and summer. Just relieving myself of that expectation has been energizing and liberating. Drinking hot tea helps, of course, and so do savory soups and breads and hot water bottles in bed. But the biggest and most transformative help has been accepting and understanding winter - and thus not feeling trapped, isolated, or oppressed by it.

And so I welcome spring, not out of relief that winter is over, but simply because it is where we are in nature's brilliant cycle of life - time for the crocuses to burst open in all their goldenrod glory and rich violet splendor. Time for us to plant tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant, herbs, and peppers. Time to spread rich composted soil on the earth, to dig our hands into the soil, and to water and tend gently to the seedlings. Happy springtime, everyone! (((hugs)))