that's it

Dear Laura,

Just want to make sure you know, your store of ability to bend down for today has been totally used up. Totally. Got it? Thanks.

Sincerely,

Your surgery site.

While I'm thinking musically

I'm writing up the long musical post, but mothering has taken up enough time that I'm not done. And now I'm going to have lunch. But first:

Eb major - you are warm and kind, always there for
your friends, who are in turn there for you.
You are content with your confortable life and
what you are currently achieving; if you keep
in this state you will go far.


what key signature are you?
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Musical cliffs, or clefs anyway

So I mentioned exciting stuff yesterday? Well, it's exciting to me, anyway.

I joined a local choir last night. Now, this is nothing like the level of joyeuse13 and abovenyquist's choir, which has auditions and does big public performances and tours of Europe, no no. But it's still a big step for me, and I feel a bit like I've jumped off a cliff into the deep end.

I'd been thinking about this off and on for a while. I got encouragement from a friend recently to believe my voice was worth learning more about singing, and then last week heard the music director doing really great stuff with the choir and a cool arrangement of his own and a brass section. So I congratulated him about it afterwards and said I was interested, and he said come on by.

So yesterday we went to the usual Wednesday Cafe dinner and Maggie to her weekly Adventure Club. (I love Wednesdays. I can always get her to nap obediently just by telling her that if she doesn't, no Adventure Club.) Dinner went well, I stuck to my resolution and introduced myself to a couple that sat down near us. Got their names, gave ours, did my usual warning of how terrible I am at learning names, please be patient with me. Met their (his? hers? dunno) mother later. Turns out they have a little girl who's in Maggie's class and apparently likes Maggie and follows her around. Figures - Maggie knows the adults' names but not the other kids, little Emma apparently knows the kids' names but not the adults. So meeting other people with kids the same age is really good. Turns out the mother and grandmother were both in choir, too, over in the large loud clump of sopranos.

So as soon as I finished dinner I was up and walking around in the hall some - can't sit too long without hurting, after all. I saw Victor, the music director, came in. I told him I was interested in learning about joining choir. I was mostly thinking that I'd be told sure, they'd see how well I sang, or they'd be taking new people in January or something. No. He took my hand, said come sing! Asked me what I sang, soprano, alto? I said LOW. He said fine, he'd put me in the altos. Could I read music? Well, yeah, slow though. Fine, great, come at 7!

So, I did. Felt terribly nervous. There was a lady teaching a kids' choir that stopped when we got there, she then sat down with the main choir, in the altos. Once I'd been given a folder and had Victor dig out a bunch of music to put in it, he sat me down by her. She's Morgan. And apparently she's the equivalent to my sister phoenixsinger, who went through high school choir year by year in whatever section they needed a strong voice in. Morgan was singing with the altos, but sometimes when he was practicing stuff with the tenors she was singing with them, sometimes with the sopranos. (Heck, at one point she was singing with the tenors, and I thought hey, that's all in my range, and it's COOL - and I softly was singing with the tenors myself. I don't know much about vocal music, but I do sing awfully low.)

They started out practicing some Advent vespers, and I could sight read that and sing along just fine, that was fun. Ha. Shoulda realized of course I can do that, that's the level of stuff they hand everybody. Then they started in on the tough stuff.

The next piece of music - oh dear, it kept changing keys, and it kept changing time signatures! Amazingly complex. And then there was a piece of Bach that stayed nicely in one key and time signature, but was still a VERY complex piece of music. My ears were trying to go in five different directions, and there were these really strong sopranos in my right ear. They practiced a couple more pieces of music after that, not as complex but still complex to me.

Mostly sitting for an hour and a half really hurt and wiped me out. Karl and the kids came in when they were finishing - Maggie came running in to see me. She was also enthralled by Ty, Victor's little puppy.

I brought the music home, and I'm starting to plug it into Finale Notepad so I can hear just the alto line. We'll see how that goes. I don't know if I can learn this sort of thing on my own or not. I've never done this level of music, I don't have the training, and I've been picking up what I can of musical theory here and there in bits.

I'm thinking I may want to upgrade to a higher level of Finale other than just the freebie Notepad level. Either the Songwriter level or possibly PrintMusic, that's on sale. Anybody else out there who uses it? I've already asked bkseiver for opinions. If you want to see what the versions are, go here http://www.finalemusic.com/notepad/plus/index.asp and see where it says "Find the best notation software solution for you! Click here to see a basic feature comparison chart of all our notation products."

The things I do for love

Whew. selenite was looking at a page of bumperstickers, and came across one and was annoyed. I looked to see why. It was a sentiment he mostly agreed with, one word wrong.

So I said to him, would you WANT a bumpersticker that said it the other way? He would.

So I have spent a chunk of the evening fighting and railing and occasionally cursing the computer, the image manipulation program, and the Cafe Press website (must I shove every individual byte up the pipeline myself?) until I got a bumpersticker made that he liked. It's frankly rather visually better than the original one was, IMNSHO.

While I was at it, I finally ordered the Bujold quote wall clock I designed for the nursery some months ago, and the Project Orion t-shirt I did up after one of the typically odd conversations selenite and Gerry and some of the other ORAC people got into many meetings ago.

For someone with utterly no background or training in graphics work or software, I don't do too badly. And generally the process always manages to teach me something new.

Even with the cursing at the computer, I *like* getting a chance to do something like this. I like making romantic gestures for the people I love - sometimes big grand ones, sometimes quiet ones just to show I pay attention and I care. selenite isn't the sort that lends himself to Great Romantic Ideas in the everyday run of life. But if I can find something like this, where I can make him something cool that he wants that he can't get otherwise, that's a great opportunity.