quintet all day (325/365b)

quintet all day, first with marielis, in which we worked out the logistics of our next couple months, and then with olena, practicing hours and hours in order to be able to make more recordings tomorrow.

unpacked lots of new lights - i bought lights for videos/photos and so did klaus. i bought soft boxes and he bought led panels. we had fun setting them up and i wanted to take some headshots right away, but it was too complicated to use the lights without any prior experience. good thing it's warm outside and spring is basically here. outside light is just beautiful.

spring is springing

got home "early" at 7pm.

more nirthday (324/365b)

henry was too sick to go to school today... woke up crying in pain because his ear hurt. lucky him stayed home to play with his mama, and got to go over to ingrid's house to celebrate centa's nirthday. when you don't have a birthday you can celebrate as many times as you want! it's kind of a plus - the day before it should be? the day after? all of them? every day is an unbirthday!

our celebration was coming to an end when brian let us know nina was at our door so we shuffled ourselves over. nina helped henry finish his sewing project from manuela, and it came out so cute! he did most everything himself, but the directions were hard for any of us to follow.

team work

henry's in a good mood even though he's sick

spelling happy birthday together

i had to have lead a discussion with the kindergarten. originally jacky was going to do that, but there were other things going on for her and she didn't come. so it was just andi, me, and the two kindergarten people. it was very sad and uncomfortable, but i think very productive and necessary. we kept it to under an hour because it was sandwiched between two sessions of recordings with quintet.

in the first recording session my dstring unravelled. i borrowed irmtrauds car, drove to and held the meeting, then raced against time to get to the really nice luthier who had promised to wait for me to sell me a set of strings (unfortunately dominants are not my favorite, but that's what he had, and they are still 130euros so i'm kind of stuck with them for a while) then raced back and finished the recording.

in the late night another uncomfortable talk on the phone, to talk about how we are going to do the summer stuff without marielis because she has her diplom to finish, and we have so many important gigs. the rest of the recordings we'll have to do with someone else because she wont have time to do the videos etc.

very impromptu nirthday celebration (323/365b)

centa's birthday or not-quite-birthday celebration. she made a delightful cake for herself with new beaters (mechanical "old school" ones). - those were our present for her, but it was so funny because i didn't know she would do her celebration today, and theodore wasn't home yet, so i tried to get her to postpone making her cake till when he got home. when he got back, he seemed very disinterested in making the cake because the three of them went up to wrap the present. they got down in time, made the cake together and we celebrated in very haphazard style.

us cool people

for me??

felix and centa share a moment

extra work (322/365b)

theodore apparently told everyone at school and everywhere else that his birthday was today... because he was born at 11pm on the 26th in boston and that means it was 5am on the 27th in graz. he does have a point.

barbara came over and worked a bit in the morning. we even designed flyers for potential events in november. quintet just creates so many side projects, that are individually quite manageable, but in sum quite time consuming and overwhelming. one step at a time seems to work best. but i'm still obsessed with arranging. currently i am going one 5 second phrase at a time on a piece on youtube at 0.25x speed, and just writing down the notes one at a time.

checking notes on the viola before entering them into finale
my finale2003 version is one i still have left from when i went to college in ... what was that year?
oh yes, 2003. i still have fond memories of the finale class i took.

i took theodore, henry, felix and ronja to the kids chorus, and theodore and henry to the library in the meantime. every time i go to a library here, i get completely aggressively attached to the Dewey decimal system and well organized libraries.

Theodore did another krol roger show tonight. he got himself home by 8:40. unfortunately, brian got there at 8:20, and waited there for theodore until i called to say he'd gotten home by himself. it's not ideal that he goes home alone that late, but it's kind of cool that it works.

theodore's 9th birthday (321/365b)

theodore's birthday. i can't (i truly can't!!) believe he has turned 9.

very busy day, basically like a typical monday only worse. in between theodore's school and music things i took him for lunch at parks where we had a grumpy waitress. i got home and rushed to bake a cake, but i sadly left it in a little too long, and it got a bit dark. nina and manuela came over to celebrate with us. felix tried to scream during singing. brian had to leave for chorus before the last of the presents was opened. watched the third man after all the bedtime stories had been finished.

Nina plays rush hour before cake time

from persons far and near

9 years old!

the happy group after all the screaming and singing

nightmarish concert after a comically awful dream (320/365b)

i don't usually share dreams, since i think they are usually only interesting to others. also, i haven't been remembering them very much lately. there was a time in my life that i wrote every single dream down that i had, and they began to get so vivid, and so frequent i was waking up at all odd hours of the night to write in my dream book. eventually that novelty wore off. i have had some great ideas in dreams. also, once, in a dream, i proved, without a doubt, the existence of god, though sadly, i forgot how as soon as the day arrived.

this one is too funny and was too vivid not to write about though: i call it the tattoo dream
i was on a beach somewhere, with my quintet on a work trip. i was very dizzy from sun/dehydration, and asked a stranger for a glass of water, which she told me she would let me have if i just read through her catalog of tattoos she could make. i paged through it and chose one, i thought it would be small, but it ended up covering my entire calf. i was so nervous about what people would think. barbara made a kind of concerned face and told me ... "yeah... i would remove that." i asked her "yes please! do you know where i can do that?" ... yes, she could, but i would have to wait a few months, you can't remove fresh ink, and she's never heard of anyone removing it the day they got theirs. klaus told me he didn't understand the joke, and i explained that nobody understood the joke. i was mortified. and the thoughts and emotions (the most vivid part of the dream) just piled up. how could i hang out on the beach? what if mary came to visit? what would my dad think?

so i looked it up and i guess it's true
you've got to wait to remove that tattoo
-wannabe leonard cohen lyrics

i drew it pretty much right away
WHAT are those wingdings characters underneath?
what does it meeeean?

vacation is over and it's back to school and kindergarten and routine. everyone very tired but overall well mooded.

i wanted to go see buchbinder conduct 3 beethoven concertos from the piano, and have been looking forward to going with pauli but in the end he cancelled on me and i went alone. sadly it was actually a truly awful concert with a terrific soloist. the orchestra just didn't follow anything. i was all alone standing in the back, and after the intermission, i was still holding out hope for the great c-minor concerto, but no luck, it made me annoyed enough that i just went home. buchbinder became an ehrenmitglied of musikverein, which was kind of fun to watch after the break, he gave a nice little speech about how music is the only language that doesn't need a translator, no matter where your music originates.

more museum (319/365b)

made it to the joanneum this time for the guided tour for kids about hibernation. sometimes i felt like i could have given a better tour, but the under 10 set had fun. brian met us at the museum, and took henry to buy new sports shoes from willhaben. the shoes have been a point of contention between theodore and henry. henry likes theodore's better than his own, so has been wearing theodore's whenever he can, because theodore allowed him to once. he now has his own, that he picked out himself. sparkly purple ones and shiny silver ones - real soccer shoes. he's so happy.

felix decides he wants an egg, so he makes one himself.

brian and irma heading down down down to the museum