Posted by barb on May 15, 2003 in
Concerts Andrew originally wanted to turn these tickets in, because of the flute concerto. But I like the flute, so I told him we were going. I’ve been to two concerts with pieces he really wanted to hear, but that made me want to rip my ears out (I plugged my ears during one of them), so it seemed only fair that he would have to suffer through one night. As it turned out, though, he enjoyed the piece.
Here’s what we heard:
Mozart, Overture to The Marriage of Figaro , K. 492 This one sounded very familiar — is some company using it in their ads currently?? Enjoyable piece, though. Khachaturian, Violin Concerto (transcribed for flute by Jean-Pierre Rampal) I enjoyed the flute solos and the slower, quieter bits of this piece. One of the movements reminded me a bit of Hyden’s Surprise Symphony, with quiet, lulling parts followed abruptly by loud, crashing passages. However, the loud passages were not very pleasing — they were an unpleasant assault on my ears and senses. The other movements were more to my liking. Dvorak, Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88 I don’t actually remember much about this piece anymore…if I could find my program, that might jar my memory a bit.
Overall, a nice evening at the NSO. Just don’t get me started on the audience (worst offender was a former candy-lady who brought quieter candy this time, but couldn’t stop tapping her foot for all to hear).
Posted by barb on May 15, 2003 in
Books by Jill Conner Browne
I almost didn’t make it through the Introduction of this book, because it made the Sweet Potato Queens sound exactly like the stuck up bitches I knew in high school, only older and larger. Maybe that’s all they are. Maybe I didn’t need to know that.
After the intro, I got into the book more, and quite enjoyed it. Conner gives advice on how to get any man to do anything, five men every woman needs in her life, and the best advice her father ever gave her (‘be particular’, which makes a lot of sense, and may have to become one of my mottos). My favorite chapter was on food — a topic particularly close to my heart. The recipes are sinful, but quite yummy.
Posted by barb on May 14, 2003 in Uncategorized
But in my case, it hasn’t been annual. (If you don’t know what I mean by annual, you must be a guy…or a young girl.) No. I’m one of the lucky ones who had an abnormal result last year, so I’ve been going every six months. April 2002. November 2002. And now May 2003. Ugh. However, if my result is normal this time around, I’ll be back on an annual schedule. (Yay?)
There are few things that can make worse the experience of being completely in the buff, with only a paper “cape” on top and a paper “drape” on the bottom and with one’s legs splayed for the world to see. I, however, was fortunate enough to discover one of them.
As I’m laying there, trying to think of anything else, the doctor, in position, found that the light she’d been planning to use to reveal my secrets to her wasn’t working. Her first thought was that the electrical outlet on the table wasn’t working. So, she navigated around my leg to the wall, to try another outlet, to no avail. The light was dead. She finally pulled a floor lamp over — one of those with a moveable head and “neck”. That maneuver required her to launch herself over my leg to wrestle the behemoth closer, and position it just right.
Even worse, she remembered that it was me last year who had come in for a colposcopy and the light on the scope had shorted out.
Posted by barb on May 14, 2003 in
Saxophone Wiped the Little Brown Jug off of my list — the original tune isn’t hard, but the variation in the book is a bit of a challenge. I’m still not so good with my tonguing and fingers that I can play sixteenth notes as fast as they should be played — thereby slowing down the entire song.
Fred and I ended up talking most of the time about tuning. I was trying to play the G/B/D/high G/high B arpeggio, when my high B started sounding horribly out of tune. I messed around a bit, and then Fred had a try with my horn. Finally he took out his tuner (he hates tuners, but they do serve a purpose now and then), and had me move my mouthpiece in and out until we got the right sound. At least I now know that at least some of the notes can be played in tune.
I’m going to continue working on the Dance from the Nutcracker Suite. Also he introduced the high D, E, and F. Those are played with the ball of the hand, which seems quite awkward right now. Fred says it’s not as awkward as it seems, but that’s easy for someone to say who’s been playing for as long as he has.
Posted by barb on May 12, 2003 in
Biking Man, I am so out of shape. I’ve known I’ve been out of shape, but getting out on my bike is really driving the point home. Andrew and I went out on the bikes yesterday morning, and our little 3.5 mile trip just killed my legs. I’m a little embarrassed riding with him, since I know that he could 1) go much faster and 2) go much further without me.
He seems happy, though, to go out with me. He’s proud of me for just getting out there. Plus, I’ve been prodding him to get out on his bike. The past couple summers, he kept saying that he wanted to get out on his bike Saturday and Sunday mornings, but he rarely did. My goal is for us to get out every Saturday and Sunday that it isn’t raining (or scary-wet from a night rain). We started last weekend (May 3), and have met the goal so far (Saturday, 5/10, it was raining, so we didn’t get out).
Besides being out of shape, I’ve found that I’m completely terrified of riding over anything remotely sandy or gravelly. I’m also white-knuckle scared of riding on wet roads/sidewalks. My sand/gravel fear comes from two accidents I had long ago.
When I was a kid, sometime before I was 12 (because I got a 10-speed bike at 12, and this incident happened on my “Desert Rose” bike), I rode through a large sandy patch just to see what would happen. Well, a big, huge boo-boo on my right knee is what happened. Fortunately I was just a couple driveways away from home; unfortunately my parents had just left for the evening, leaving me in the care of my brothers. Now, they actually did a good job of getting my boo-boo cleaned up, and lovingly tried to get me to stop crying, but it would have been nice to have Mommy or Daddy there — they are just better with boo-boos. Lest you think the boo-boo was small, I actually had a scar from it for years — until my second bad accident on sand overwrote the scar.
The second accident happened sometime between August and December 1995, while I was living in the dorms at New Mexico Tech in Socorro, NM. Since my car was still in Minnesota with a broken clutch, I spent my summer earnings on a scooter (named Skippy) to get me around town. While making a turn onto the main street through town at one of the four traffic lights, I accidently went through a sandy patch, which was no match for the thin tires on Skippy. Of course everyone at the traffic light stopped to make sure I was okay — please, people, just let me die in peace. When I got back to the dorm, I found a big cut on my right knee (erasing my earlier scar, but later replacing it with a new one) and some scratches on both of my arms. I remember that I was wearing one of my favorite sweatshirts at the time — a brightly colored, vaguely tie-dyed thing. I was able to keep wearing the sweatshirt for a few more years, but there were several small holes from the scooter accident to serve as a constant reminder.
I’m scared of the wet roads because the two times I’ve had my car out of control have been in the rain — once the first time I took my parents’ car out by myself (no damage to the car or me, but I did do a 180 in it), and the second time in Albuquerque.
I’m going to try to overcome these fears slowly. Afterall, my tires are much, much better than those on my old Desert Rose bike and Skippy.
Posted by barb on May 12, 2003 in
Random Thoughts I was nearly panicking yesterday when I realized that while I could get Xspec running (an X-ray spectral fitting program that I’m using for my thesis), I could not get it to plot my spectra. I could set the plotting device without a problem, and the pgplot server would seem to come up. However, when I asked it to plot, at first X11 would crash, but after installing a few more libraries, nothing happened. No plot. Oddly enough, if I asked for a hard copy of the plot, the PS file would look fine.
Today I decided to try using XDarwin instead of Apple’s X11 beta. Lo and behold, the plotting worked fine. Since I had Xspec and pgplot working fine under X11 on the old Mac, I wonder if the problem has to do with the new OSX update (10.2.6).
Posted by barb on May 11, 2003 in
Movies 2/5 stars
Hmmm….
Not sure what to say about this. I had high hopes, and was looking forward to seeing Wil Wheaton in something recent. However, I just didn’t see the humor in most of it. Colin Mockery had some funny bits, as did Wheaton, but overall I kept wondering when it was going to get funny. There were plenty of good comedy actors (like Brad Sherwood and Debra Wilson), but it just didn’t come together for me.
The basic story is that Jane White wants to see her Dad, a talk show host based on Jerry Springer, in Chicago, since he left her family 15 years earlier. She tries to get on the show by being whatever freak the talk show is looking for (the first one is Closet Transvestite Prostitute).
Posted by barb on May 10, 2003 in
Random Thoughts We bought a new Mac, since Andrew is leaving his job — we had bought the current one through his work’s computer buying benefit. Rather than buying off the old one, we decided that we could get more computer for the same price if we bought new. The new one is a dual 1.25 GHz G4 processors with a 120 Gb hard drive. (No, that’s actually not excessive. If this was just a regular home computer, maybe, but I’m working on my thesis at home, and the data takes up a lot of room. In fact, I filled my 50 Gb partition on the old Mac before writing out 20 Gb worth of CDs.)
We spent much of the day copying stuff from the old one to the new one. Now I just need to get Fink and lheasoft (thesis stuff) going….
Posted by barb on May 10, 2003 in
Movies 4.5/5 stars
I agree with everyone who’s been saying that they enjoyed this second installment better than the first. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the first one, and since I haven’t read any of the comics or watched the cartoon, I probably needed much of the background presented in the first movie. X2, though, had a lot more plot and did not even feel like a two-and-a-half hour movie.
The film starts with an assassination attempt on the president by a teleporting mutant named Nightcrawler. Since the world already mistrusts mutants, this attack sparks a retaliation by the president, led by his mutant advisor, Stryker. The best target they have is Xavier’s school, which they know about from interrogations of Magneto.
Posted by barb on May 7, 2003 in
Saxophone I’m quite liking the new book. In some ways it’s much more of a challenge than the old one. For the most part, I’m unfamiliar with the pieces in the new book, which might make it sound less fun, but that means that I have the challenge of figuring out how a piece is supposed to sound based on the written music. And it can be a challenge, but I feel so good when I figure it out, and it sounds good. The Emperor’s Waltz Theme was a good example of that. I’m still going to be working on Hornpipe — trying to play a bit faster and slur the right notes, but I’m also moving on to the next lesson, which involves The Nutcracker Suite Dance.
I still play a few pieces here and there out of the old one, and I have a book of 50’s songs that I’m trying to play out of. It gives me a chance to practice reading the notes without having to figure out the rhythm at the same time.
Two things: 1) Remember that an accidental (a note that gets changed (sharped, flatted or naturalled) from how it should be played in the given key) is only held through the measure that it is “changed” in. This holds unless it is tied to a note in the next measure. 2) I’ve been hearing a weird kind of resonance or something when I play low C and C#. When I asked about it, Fred said that my embouchure looked beautiful, so it probably wasn’t that, but to also think about pulling back on the mouth piece, or watching to make sure that my fingers aren’t accidentally touching extra keys.