Orchestra Weekend

Can you tell I'm a big fan of ICanHasCheezburger?

My orchestra conductor looks nothing like this little guy, but he did ask for more volume from the string section from time to time this past weekend. We performed Mendelssohn's Elijah with a community chorus and a handful of soloists, and even though the audience was not as full as I would have liked, they seemed to really appreciate the concert.

As always, it was a treat to perform with the orchestra even though the horn section wasn't the focus. We did what we could to make ourselves known. I've mentioned this before, but when I first started playing with the group back when I was a complete novice, I would judge my personal performance with percentages. At the end of a concert, I would evaluate my playing and say, "well, at least I played 68% of the thing correctly." Sometimes I would be able to give myself an 80% rating or even a 90%. I'm not sure how I would judge my playing this time around—I could have been more accurate when aiming for random pitches, and once or twice I got lost in counting long stretches of rests with half a dozen tempo variations in the middle of them, but I didn't fall on my face. So, you know.

During one of the rehearsals, we noticed the chorus members were all wearing name tags. One of them said that was because they didn't all know each other and just wanted to be friendly. We in the brass section noted the clear distinction between the two groups—in the orchestra, we said, we don't care who the other people are. If we want to know someone's name, we'll look it up in the program.

Next up in April is a Wagner piece and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #2. Come see.

Happy Birthday...

to me! Update: Since you have asked, I only got one actual packaged gift, a beautiful hand-made bracelet from a friend, but both girls were home for the weekend, and we had dinner at the lake and a relaxing weekend. Thanks to all of you for your lovely wishes!

My Sitemeter is All Bloated and Not Quite Itself

I'm tempted to let it sit on the couch with its feet curled up under a blanket, a hot cup of coffee in hand, a block of cherry almond bark Chocolove within reach, and An Affair to Remember spinning in the DVD player. I'm one of those obsessive bloggers, the kind who checks her sitemeter as often as possible throughout the day, the kind who gauges the quality of her writing by the number of readers who regularly stop by. I've become less interested in the overall number of hits and more interested in the number of repeat hits. The return visitors are the ones I long for. When my sitemeter reads forty at the end of the day, and the majority of those hits are webpals who have conversed, I'm happy. Forty may seem low to many of you, but I've only been at this since August. To me, forty is a jackpot. A few days ago, I sat down at my laptop and discovered a number somewhere in the eighties. Eighties! Yippee! Yeeha ! Hoo-rah ! I've been discovered by the webworld , o...

Ish People

Tell an Ish person to show up around 9 a.m., and you'll see them somewhere around 9 a.m. Tell them to show up at 9ish, and you'll see them anywhere from 9:05 to 9:20. You have given them license to dilly dally, and who wouldn't take advantage of that? The other night at the big shindig dinner party, one of the drummers said the rehearsal the next morning would begin at 9ish. "I am an ish person," he says. Immediately the clanker goes off in my head--oh, good, I thought. I can deliver my daughter a little late. No Ish person is early, so if you say 9ish, that does not mean give or take 5, 10, 15 minutes. It's exclusively a taking phrase. Take an extra 10 minutes to drink your cup of coffee. We won't mind. We're Ish people. Sunday's rehearsal started at 2:00. Because it was conducted by the same people who conducted the Saturday rehearsal, my understanding was 2-ISH. My daughter is worse than I am about taking liberties with Ish time frames, so she d...

Scout Moves

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