Monday, December 17, 2007

The last week





This semester is over.  Hallelujah!  
None of my classes were that difficult, but they sure felt like a lot of work.  
Playing the Martin Amlin flute sonata for two performances in the middle of the semester and learning the Lowell Liebermann 1st piano concerto also probably contribute to the feeling that I accomplished two semesters in one.  But even though the semester is officially over for me, I'm still slogging through my independent study German course.  I'm glad I'm doing it; glad in a glad-I-ate-my-brussels-sprouts sort of way: it's good for me, and I know it's good for me, and when the actual work is over then I feel good, but because it's just hanging over my head I've come to sort of dread it. Even though it's (thank God) getting easier.  Now I just need brain plugs to keep the vocabulary from leaking out of my thirty-something-year-old brain.  


My friend R. and I had a lovely brunch on Sunday.  We went to Leaf Kitchen.  As I described it to her: "This place is great, if a bit strange.  It's sort of like going to your grandma's house, the grandma that has slightly kooky cool things, and it's the 1960s, and we're eating in her big open kitchen." She laughed but when we got there she saw that it was sort of an apt description.  Not that I was alive in the 60s, but you probably get my drift.  Food was great.  We ordered tea, and the milk came in the cute little guy you see in the upper left.  I was going to insert him 


[here]


but I'm still learning how all of this works and frankly, it's kind of slow when I upload pictures. 


There was an ice storm here about a week ago.  You probably heard about it and/or lived through it.  That's past, and in the days immediately following it I forgot to bring my camera with me.  But today I went for a walk, and took some pictures.  
Some of the ice has melted, but a lot of it still lingers on the trees.  (See above.)


And, perhaps most importantly, I started playing Scrabulous on Facebook this week.  Yes, now I have yet another way to procrastinate and feed my time-sucking addiction.  

Saturday, December 8, 2007

Have you ever had one of those days where you feel like you've stumbled from your regular life into your life that's happening in another dimension?  
Yeah, that's how I feel today.


That is all. 

Friday, December 7, 2007

Fridays make me happy and other things do too.

I'm sort of thinking that I might need to rename this blog "Random thoughts from the red velvet sofa" because I'm nowhere near the piano bench when I write these.  And so far (ok, this is only my second posting) nothing's really been about music either.  Who knows, maybe that will change in a few moments.  And while I am here purely for my own entertainment, I now feel some pressure to produce.  Ahem, thanks Casey.  ;)  I only hope I can entertain you as much as I entertain myself.   


Things to be happy about today:

1.  A finished invertible counterpoint project! Yay!  
2.  There is snow, so it's lookin' like Christmas.
3.  Last week I was importing some pictures from my kick-ass Nikon S-10 digital camera (perhaps you've seen me with it, playing with the rotating lens, since that is, after the macro and amazing zoom, my single-most favorite feature of the camera) and iPhoto freaked out on me and beach-balled for like 45 minutes.  Long story short, I thought I lost some photos, including Misty Plum rolling over 100,000 miles, and a very cute video of my 3-year old nephew saying, "California, here we come!" (Cars is his favorite movie.)  That was pretty sad, actually.  Just now, as I am trying to upload my Happy Gnome photo, I found the very photos and movie that I thought were lost forever.  Yay! 
4.  It is the beginning of the weekend, Hallelujah.  Friday is my favorite day of the week.  


Things to be less happy about today:
1.  An invertible counterpoint project that could be more convincing musically.  Ah well.  
2.  There's snow, on top of the ice, and people around here frankly are not the greatest of drivers.  
3.  I am dreadfully behind in my German homework.  Dreadfully.  Dread. Full. Ly.  
4.  The cold that arrived on Sunday and which I thought I'd successfully curtailed by eating chicken soup, drinking lots of herbal tea, taking vitamin C by the pound, and sleeping all day Monday, has returned.  Drats!  I think it's all the recycled air in the Voxman Music Building.  It's like being in an airplane.  Really what I should be doing right now is taking a nap.   Instead, here I am.  

So in a continuation of things that make me happy, I'm going to list some favorite pieces of music.  This will most certainly have future addenda.  I hope you comment (if there really are people other than me who read this) and add some of your favorite pieces too.

Favorite pieces of All Time and Space:
(in no particular order)
Oh, look!  Blogger has a function where a person can list her favorite things.  See list on right. 

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Random thoughts from the red velvet sofa during an Iowan Ice Storm, or, the beginning of a new blogger's journey

Wow, the technignoramus begins a blog!  Since I don't really consider myself to be savvy in *any* thing technical (it's amazing that I can upload the pictures from my digital camera to my laptop), this is an adventure. Really, I'm just here because I'm procrastinating.  If you know me, that may not come as any sort of surprise to you.  It just seems like a fun thing to do tonight.  At least .... more fun than writing a trio using invertible counterpoint at the 12th in the style of Lassus.  

More sure to come in the near future ...