Liam's recital

My brother-in-law is in town to interview for a potential job. (Who knows, they could actually be back here next year. I am keeping my fingers crossed!)

My sister took the opportunity to send along with him a CD of my 5 year old nephew's recital. Liam's performed with other kids before, but I believe this was his first solo recital. It covered all of the material found in the Suzuki violin book 1.

My sister started Suzuki group lessons when she was 3 years old. I don't know how old she was when she was playing the book 1 tunes, but I remember every one. (Not by name, but by melody. The human brain really seems to be wired to respond to and remember music and rhythm very well, which makes me wonder if maybe we shouldn't be integrating more music in the teaching of other subjects. Imagine the possibilities.)

I enjoyed revisiting all of the pieces, but my favorite moment was listening to my sister duet with Liam on three of the minuets. It gave me such a sense of continuity, the passing along of something important from one generation to the next.

Maybe in 25 or 30 years, it'll be Liam playing the harmony for his child in her/his first recital. And the rest of us, very old and gray by then, will be sitting in the audience, remembering...

Birds

I keep seeing a bird (sparrow?) motif in fabric and decor, like this Joel Dewberry print



When we were out and about the other day and wandered into various design shops, I thought for sure I'd see whole aviaries full of bird prints and other material... but I saw just one, in the very first shop.

Now I am wondering whether this is a trend whose time has come and gone, whether it's only just begun, or whether the whole thing was always only a flight of fancy to begin with.

Idle question, really, as I don't especially care for birds. It's just interesting and mysterious to me to see what floats in and out of style, and try to guess why.

Brownies

Two weekends ago, DH had to go into work all day Saturday to help conduct interviews for potential college hires. I decided I should bake him something nice to make up for it, so I took some of the peanut butter cups left over from Halloween, chopped them into wedges, and folded them into some homemade brownie batter.

When they came out, I tasted them - delicious! I let them cool, put a bunch into a plastic container, and left a half dozen or so on a plastic-wrapped plate on the table.

Some time after dinner, I wandered back through the dining room and was shocked to find one of my cats on the table hunched over the plate stuffing her face!

I burst into laughter at the guilty look on her fuzzy little face - even while I began to worry, knowing that chocolate in quantity is toxic to cats. The question was, how much was too much?

DH googled for information. And, after I gave him the amount of chocolate in the recipe, and the weight of the greedy kitty, he concluded that she was right on the border. So I got on the phone to animal poison control, and, ultimately, they suggested we'd better take her in to the emergency vet.

We knew we'd be about 3 hours in the waiting room, if they were as busy as they'd been in the past, but there was nothing to be done about that. We loaded the guilty party into her box, and headed off to the vet.

Not 3 minutes before we arrived, my husband the engineer almost stopped the car: "Wait... did I get the math wrong? I think... I think I multiplied instead of dividing at the end!"

Sure enough, he re-ran the numbers and confirmed it.

We called poison control back while sitting in the emergency vet parking lot. As he suspected, they told us we could just go home. Sigh. (At least we figured it out before they put kitty through some unpleasant procedure. The car ride she didn't actually mind.)

Tomorrow DH goes in to do another round of interviews. I'm thinking maybe this time I'll stay away from the baking...

Halfway point

It's the midpoint of November, which is the halfway point in the blogging project.

The whole experience has been very... different. Unless I have something of a factual nature to report, I don't tend to write a lot. Having to sit down every single day and write, whether or not I have anything to say, has been both challenging (in a good way) and frustrating for me.

Today, I am feeling the obligatory nature of the project very much. With the time off, we've been gallivanting around the city quite a bit; as a result, no fabric has been purchased, no design decisions have been completed, and no quilting progress has been made. So there just isn't much to say.

It's never bad to write for the sake of having written; to just sit down and make yourself do it anyway. I just question whether it's necessary or desirable to go ahead and put it out there in a public place. (Of course you all always have the option to scroll down, and that grants me a certain measure of relief.)

Will it have been a good experience in the end? I think it may be one of those things that I will be glad that I've done. Waiting a few weeks for a sense of accomplishment... well, that's not so bad, is it?

Art appreciation

We were out and about today (a day off). We stopped off at the MFA and bought a membership, but didn't stay; instead, we headed off down to the south end, where we walked about and wandered in and out of shops and just generally looked around.

One of the shops featured an exhibit of the paintings of an artist by the name of Oana Lauric, and DH took quite a fancy to some of her work.

Ultimately the subject turned to how someone can guess whether any given piece of art might appreciate or not. I told him that unless you are loaded and can hire an expert, you can investigate where an artist has shown (to see if these are prestigious or come-as-you-are shows), and you can do a little research, but ultimately you probably just buy what you like. And if it ends up appreciating, well, that's a side benefit. (Hey, it worked for Gertrude Stein! I don't know how many misses she had amongst the hits, though.)

But to tell the truth, I haven't a clue. Any hints, Tam? Or should I just start googling?