Ramblings of a rural(ish) geek

I fixed the rill yesterday. (Finally!) I pulled off the rocks along the top three levels, pulled back the liner & roofing felt, and rebuilt the sides of the pools so that the water would go over the flagstone drip edges rather than around; then replaced the liner and the rocks and turned on the pump. Nearly a day later, there are no damp bricks in the retaining wall, and the pond level hasn't dropped much (there's always more evaporation when the rill is running).

J ripped out the bigger of the two shrubberies next to the rill because it was getting too big; and the volunteer tree also got sent to the burn pile. The volunteer barberry got moved next to the red barberry in the backyard. (We have birds, chipmunks, and squirrels in the yard, we get lots of volunteer plants. Some we keep.) He also moved two of the oak 'trees' from the front flowerbed -- they're about 18" tall, but have lots of healthy leaves.

I have been weeding between rain events, but I'm way behind because the big gardens are too wet to walk in. They should dry out for the weekend. whee?

Sunday was the FCB's last formal concert for the season. It was at St James' church in Novi, and while it's a gorgeous space, we're really too big for it. The tubas were in the third row on the altar, and we could see Damien...sometimes. It didn't help that he was two steps down, on the sanctuary floor. I flubbed the cutoff at the end of Simple Song because I didn't see it, CB said he blew right through a fermata, etc. I told the set-up crew "don't do that again!". Next up is two more rehearsals to learn a bunch of new music, then a concert on the 14th and one on the 17th of June. The gig on the 17th is the first in a new series of concerts at the Belle Isle bandshell. My mother says that she will tell 'her people' and they may show up, depending on the weather (many of her Michigan friends remember going to the BI bandshell in their youth).

Tuesday night, J and I wandered off to the HS for the spring band & orchestra concert. We haven't been to one since DB graduated, but the Wind Symphony was premiering a piece that had been commissioned for Chelsea High; from a high school buddy of J's. It was as expected -- contained bits of the fight song and the alma mater, and written for a good HS band. The concert was pretty good, actually. The spring concerts tend to be the best, musically speaking, as they've had the most time to work on the pieces in it. The concert had been pushed back 30 minutes in the hope that at least some of the girls on the softball/lacrosse teams would be back from their (rescheduled due to weather) games in time to play. There were probably 15 girls still in athletic uniforms for the concert. It was a bit odd after the concert - J went and got his recorder, and then we went home. No stacking, no racking, no waiting for kids, etc. I took my concert knitting, but didn't get as much done as I used to, and on the way home I realised why -- I didn't show up 45 minutes before the concert started and leave 60 minutes after it ended.

(this may be the last one.) Last school year, the Chelsea Symphony Orchestra (the upper level strings + winds) had a camera crew following them around. It was for an episode of a WKAR show called Forte. The episode will be broadcast later today, but the streaming link opened earlier today. (DaBoy is the tuba player.)

Chelsea Symphony Orchestra for the show, and extras for a bit more from their studio performance.

(WKAR is the PBS affiliate out of East Lansing/MSU.)

I am now done being a band mom. DB's last performance was today, and he (currently) has no intentions of playing in college. It was also probably the last Chelsea Memorial Day parade I will go to, as I suspect I'll be joining the adhoc community band at the Franklin Cemetary in the future.

The band was much more together than it was last year, which is good. It helps that the drum major at the upper winds end of the band is competent. She did have a problem in the second piece, but that was because they weren't following, not because she couldn't lead.

The weather was good -- not too hot, not too cold, not too sunny, not raining -- can't really ask for more. The speaker was decent, and there was an incidental flyover -- a single bomber on its way to a proper flyover emerged from the clouds just as the band was finishing.

So there's a masquerade dance in the spring show (Much Ado About Nothing), and the director wants "animal costumes". DB decided he wanted to be a crow. You'd think there'd be black things that would work somewhere in the three theater's worth of costume rooms in town. You'd be wrong. And there's certainly *not* a good bird mask (or even a bad one we could paint). The intarwebz and my workroom to the rescue -- the mask came from a MardiGras store in Louisiana; and I dug around in the pattern stash and found a coat pattern that's almost exactly what he'd envisioned. We're leaving off the capelet, and using this one instead. And a hood from here. Everything's cut out, now I just have to put it together. Just, she says.

And the gardens need a lot of attention, and I just can't do it all. So the weeds get a reprieve. Next week! Except that next week is show week, with rehearsals running late and thus 'feed the cast'; and I'm scheduled to work the election on Tuesday. Come to think of it, I've not gotten my absentee ballot -- I know I turned the application in. I should contact them.

Last night was the showcase Concerto Concert, featuring members of the senior class. DB did not put together a tuba concerto, but he did play in the accompanying symphony (which puts him one up on SR, who never did. Then again, not a lot of demand for saxophone in the orchestral tradition>). There's almost always a couple of kids who are tops in the state on their instruments, and it's always a pleasure to hear them.

The Anna-cat seems to have settled in elsewhere (earlier she was "helping" me with newsletter layout), so maybe I can go sew now.

DB's Collage Concert was yesterday. They went to two performances this year, after the auditorium was SRO last year. So the kids played to two 60% full auditoriums. i went to both, just because. (well, and I'd have to go in and get DB after whichever show I didn't go to anyway.) In general, the vocal pieces were better in the first show, and the instrumentals were better the second time around. Both shows were very good, and really showed off the variety of musical experiences available. The acappella group was differently "off" the second performance -- at the first show, the kids had 'white man's disease' trouble and the altos were not completely warmed up and were straining for the low notes, at the second show the sopranos kept sliding out of tune with each other, and there was a lot of sliding and scooping into notes. The finale was much better at the second performance -- all the WS tubas were there, and some of the choir kids took their music to the juliets so they could sing the actual words, not just ooooh and aaaah the notes.

In the last few days, I've seen a redwinged blackbird, a couple of starlings, and a grackle. The goldfinches are getting slightly more yellow. The snow is mostly gone from the yard except where it drifted deep or was piled when we shoveled the driveway. DB has been coming in the front door since the snow melted off the sidewalk on Thursday. And there are crocuses budding in the garden by the side door, where they get lots of sun and the warm from the house and are protected from the wind. They'll probably bloom today, once the sun gets around to that side of the house. I think spring may be on the way! whee!

The FCB gigs were well received. I got horribly lost in the fourth movement of the Persichetti, and completely whiffed on a couple of phrases. Some of it, I'm sure, is that Persichetti doesn't always treat barisaxes like reeded tubas, or low french horns, and gives us woodwind parts sometimes. In theory, this is good, but in practice (especially for a band like the FCB) it makes my life a lot harder. The parts are difficult to play anyway, and when you're separated by the trumpet line from anyone else who has that part.... (and the brass sectionals that I attended didn't cover those parts, although they covered other tricky parts in the Persichetti that I did have. I suppose I could attend both woodwind and brass sectionals, depending on which piece of music they're working on, but that way lies madness. And missing work on things that I do need to work on -- like the Bach.)

The "Lifetime of Music" outreach we did yesterday was fun -- the bands we played with were both very good. North Farmington has a small auditorium & stage, and a rather large music program (the 8th grade band had about 70 kids in it, the Wind Symphony about 50), and it seems that that they have to mix and match groups so that there's enough room in the auditorium for the audience. We wound up putting the upper winds down on the floor in front of the stage, and nearly everyone else (bar tubas and bassoons and bass clarinets) standing for the mass band (I didn't get a count, but probably close to 200 people). Their barisax players had never seen a barisax without a low A key set on the bell -or- with the side F-sharp that Esme has. I don't think I've ever performed Sleigh Ride that slowly, which may not have been entirely a bad thing -- due to miscommunications, there was no rehearsal on Monday, so the FCB was sight-reading in a different key than we usually play.

DB's concert went well. He played in two groups, playing about thirty notes in the Symphony Orchestra and a lot more than that in the Wind Symphony. The (much larger) stage at CHS was crammed full with close to 300 strings and winds for the Borchestrand performance of Sleigh Ride. After a decade of trial and error, the tubas have figured out how to make themselves heard, and the three WS tubas headed toward the back corner of the bandshell, where they stood on chairs to play. Yeah, they made themselves heard.... I made it to the last half of the middle school concert (DB was in the booth, I had a OneAct parent meeting across the hall), and the 8th grade band is good.

The pond is frozen over quite solidly, even with the occasional forays above freezing, and I don't expect it to melt anytime soon. The sun and breeze yesterday sped up evaporation from the birdbath, and even though I filled it yesterday it was dried up today. I filled it, and shortly after I went in there were birds at it, so I guess they were waiting! Ji brought me a actual mouse yesterday morning. Anna crept up on it, and wigged out when it twitched a bit. Then it died and I took it outside for the crows....

FCB Halloween concert was yesterday afternoon. It went pretty well -- no major trainwrecks -- but it's a relatively easy concert. It's short (about an hour) and mostly pops stuff (movies, popular songs, etc) -- the heavier stuff is in the December and April concerts. It's still a lot of notes, though, and the setup for this one is a little bit more involved, as we decorate the stage. My hand seems to be holding up pretty well, but I'm still doing the stretches and the taping.

In a twist, I didn't do much musicking at church -- the choir director is out of town, and her deputy had just come back from 10 days in China....

There will be high school football on Friday; so I expect that I will spend my Halloween at a football game. Current weather forecasts are saying it will be chilly but dry. I can live with that. There will be stadium coats, but I think they'll be able to avoid doing halftime in them. (DB just texted that, in a *stunning* turn of events, they will be playing Thriller!. oooh. the shock!. He will ask if they're doing the dance.) DB will be working crew for the Orchestra Halloween concert tonight, and tomorrow after school is set/scenery move-in for Footloose!.

The kids and I did some raking/garden clearing on Thursday (DB was not called for show rehearsal, so I put him to work at home) and got a lot of leaves moved out of the front yard. I also trimmed back the edges of the sidewalk and cut back the lilies in the front flowerbed. I remembered to move the short orange lilies from where they've been hiding to somewhere more visible (they were planted when SR was in 3d grade, to honor a classmate). Today I need to spend some time clearing the East garden, and plant the new early spring bulbs.

There is a redbellied woodpecker who has figured out that the tube feeder is a weird tree, but hey, it's got good stuff in it. Over the weekend, it brought another, so now we have two pairs of woodpeckers at the birdfeeders.

There was a complete football game on Friday. Both the football team and the band were sloppy. Next home game is Homecoming, which is a mess in a lot of other ways. OTOH, Marching Band Festival is *before* Homecoming this year, so they will not be doing a revised show the day before competing the full show.

September FCB is not a really good time for a slow reentry into playing -- there's a 90 minute concert on Sept 28, so we get a lot of music, much of it new, very quickly. My hand seems to be holding up OK. My left shoulder is letting me know that I need to move it around during rehearsals -- it's been cranky during rehearsals, but once I start moving after it's fine. I finally got three hours in the sewing room, and built a new bag for my instrument stand*. I should probably build a new music bag as well, but the one I have works pretty well -- I could wish for a different arrangement of pockets, and a leash for keys, but there are other things I need more. Like a Halloween costume.

We watched a juvenile hawk (he still had leg feathers, so juvenile which makes him hard to ID, but we think he's another Cooper's Hawk) dismember a dove Saturday evening. After he flew off, SR & DB went out to survey the debris field. DB found a stick to poke it with. J found this quite amusing -- maybe because they were acting 10 years younger than they actually are?

I will get into the garden today -- it's warm and dry enough, and there's no lack of things to do out there. And the cat is already there, so it's not like I can do any errands.

(* but wait! didn't I already build one? Well, yes, but I'd revised from the first one, and the revised one was suboptimal in a lot of ways. So I backed off some of the revisions and made another one. So I've made three -- the first one wore out after 7 years, the second one was better than nothing but not good, and now the third one is just right.)

There are snowdrops blooming in the garden by the side door. They were not blooming yesterday noon-ish when we got home from church.

We went to a really good HS concert on Saturday night. Intended to show off the best of CHS music, it did. Band, orchestra, choir, small ensembles, a couple of soloists, etc. The grand finale was all the instrumentalists on stage and the vocalists up in the "juliet" balconies, doing an arrangement of tunes from Phantom of the Opera. Even the lighting crew got into the show, popping spotlights on and off to show whichever group was performing.

There was a female red-bellied woodpecker at the birdfeeder this morning, completely ignoring the suet feeder five feet away. I tried to get a picture, but it's hard to get a decent picture through the rosebush -- that birdfeeder is placed for optimum bird usage, not visibility from the house.

There is a black cat sprawled on his back in the sunbeam. He's very restful to look at. :)

There is open water in the pond, melted down to the bottom. Only in the shallow areas, and not under the snowdrift, but still....

And it's opening day of the 2014 baseball season. Go get 'em, Tigers!