bear

If William Carlos Williams could not only come over and help us out with the plums in the icebox, but the hundred-odd plums that are falling off our neighbors' tree into our yard on a daily basis, and have been for the last several weeks? We'd welcome him. We can't keep up. We really need to buy a net or something for next year, rig up some kind of system to catch them so they don't go splat. We've been retrieving the ones that survive the fall, and cleaning up after the ones that don't, but it's kind of a lot.

Our neighbors have a lovely mature plum tree in their backyard that drops tiny clingstone plums beginning in late July/early August, smaller than ping pong balls. They can be eaten raw, or they can be boiled down into something between a jam, a sauce, and a compote, straining the pits out afterwards. But honestly, running out of ideas. (On toast! with yogurt! Baked into a cake! As a side sauce for roasted meat ...) Probably I should get over being scared of Proper Canning (boiling jars! loud popping noises!) so that we can more safely preserve the jam for later in the year. It would be lovely to eat, say, hamantaschen with hyperlocal plum preserves we made ourselves! But what we've got is both too thin to work for that, yet permanently boiled onto one of the pots. Ah well.

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Other than the plum-pocalypse, late summer carries on. Choir has begun, and there are intriguing rumors of a more challenging small-group chamber choir to audition for. Repertoire-wise, this year involves ... not a lot of new-to-me music; if I hadn't been sick in April, it would have been a very good year to add on a second choir with more challenging rep. Ah, well. I am delighted that we will have an a cappella piece during the spring concert; I do miss that, being in an orchestral choir.

( content note minor body capability navel gazing re exercise )

Happy 10/13, fellow Philes, even though it'll technically be past midnight on the West Coast by the time I finish writing this post.

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October has been busybusybusy so far, particularly musically.

Part of this is because hyounpark and I have ended up becoming section leaders for our choir - I've got the sopranos, and he's in charge of the basses. Most of what we're responsible for is leading sectional rehearsals as necessary, and we get access to our conductor's rehearsal plan beforehand, so we can enter important markings into our scores and be go-to contacts for the musicians in our section when they have questions. Another married couple are the section leaders for the altos and tenors, so we keep joking we should go on a double date or something.

It's had the side effect of making me feel like I need to be more responsible about preparing for rehearsal beforehand, though, where I have sometimes in the past been a bit more, um, casual, and then done more panicked cramming as we got closer to performance dates, heh. (I blame All-State Choir for instilling these bad habits in me; four years of that experience taught me I really can learn tons of complex music in a very short period of time, and I refuse to acknowledge that it's a bit more challenging now that I'm decades older. ;) ) Hyoun is rather more disciplined than I am about it, so I'll walk into the living room and he's actually listening to recordings of whatever music we're supposed to be working on for the week, while reviewing the score. And then I feel compelled to join him, heh. Left to my own devices, honestly, I would just put the recordings on repeat for the afternoon before rehearsal, and look at the score while listening over dinner. Ahh, the weight of responsibility and guilt motivating me!

Stravinsky continues to challenge me. I feel like I have the first two movements of the Symphony of Psalms down pretty decently now, and we still have four weeks until that concert in early November. But the third movement, I cannot get the timing on some of the faster entrances down, and it's annoying me.

Ah, well, we have time for that. What's a bit more nerve-wracking is that our first major appearance for the season is actually next Saturday, and we *still* don't have the sheet music for one of the two pieces we're doing. All-State Choir cramming vibes, indeed! At least the first piece we're doing is an abridged version of Beethoven's 9th, which most of us have already performed elsewhere, and many of us can sing it from memory; consequently, my brain has been shrieking "Seid umschlungen Millionen! Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!" at the top of my range at me for much of the last 10 days. The second piece will be Robeson's Ballad for Americans, which most of us haven't done before; I sure hope it's as easy as our conductor is saying.

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I thought I'd be awake enough to write about the Death Cab for Cutie + The Postal Service concert I went to earlier this week, or the Chuseok festival we went to the weekend before last, but I need to be in the city early tomorrow morning/later today, so they'll have to wait. The bands put on an excellent show, though, and I'm looking forward to going to more concerts at the Greek Theatre in the future - amphitheatre! stadium height seating so that shorties like me can see!

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I wish I had anything helpful and informed to say about world events this week, and/or the power to do something that moves the needle towards justice and peace. I don't, but if I did, then I could/should/would be using that knowledge to freaking fix things, right? (And it feels disingenuous of me to not acknowledge it because it's so horribly affecting so many people, but then that also feels like I'm centering the wrong aspects.)