mathmom's blog

I was a part of my first orchestra concert yesterday. I've been in a community orchestra for the past 4 months, made up mostly of people who played in high school or college and who want a reason to practice. There are a few of us who picked up the instrument as an adult. I definitely feel like the weak link, but on the other hand I improve every time I play, and the other members and my teacher assure me that my skills are sufficient. Also, playing next to competent musicians helps me to improve and they seem to be tolerant of my sour notes.  My one strength is that having listened to the music we pay for my whole life, I know how the piece is supposed to go, even if I can't get my body to comply. I learned several things about playing in a concert. First, it was long for me to play. It was about 45 minutes of almost constant playing, and just sitting down for that long is unusual for me, not to mention holding up a viola... I kept expecting our director to stop us and tell u...

We just finished a puzzle!  It is a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle titled, "Beautiful Santorini." I got the puzzle in the summer when I heard about a tour going to Greece and kept getting beautiful status updates. We started the puzzle way back after the hurricane in September.  The sky was finished almost immediately after we started---the subtle variations in clouds and colors made it surprisingly easy.  Then we started on the city.  It turns out that little bits of windows, doors, televisions, umbrellas, are actually harder to do than swaths of color.  It took about 2 months to make any significant progress on the rocks and grass around the town, and on the buildings of the town.  That's a long time to be without your coffee table... The best part of putting the puzzle together was finding little scenes that are unnoticeable when looking at the entire puzzle from a distance.  For example, there is a piece with a guy climbing over a wall, or pieces of th...

We got some snow. And now Luke is outside shoveling snow. Off the grass. Into a wheelbarrow. To make a fort. He notes that this is not as crazy as the neighbor who was out riding his bike wearing a swim suit. I suppose I agree.

Luke and I have been reading The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson over the past few weeks.  I remember really enjoying it when I read it as a child, even if I didn't really know who was fighting in the War of the Roses.  And Luke is enjoying it as well, despite the archaic language and difficult to understand motivations. After the third or fourth person was shot in the back and died in front of the main character, he did say, "This is worse than The Hunger Games !"  And I have to say, he's not wrong.  The main character, Dick, kills a spy in cold blood (by surprising him, not really in a fair fight) rather than be discovered, which would mean Dick's certain death.  Then he has to stay all night in disguise in a monk's habit in the abbey praying for the dead spy, after which the monks clean the blood off the floor and prepare for the wedding of Dick's beloved to a greedy, conniving nobleman.  During the wedding, though, the groom is shot through th...

"Do you have to fix something everywhere you go?" Luke, after Michael helped with an LED problem at the house we visited for dinner The answer is yes. Yes he does.

When I was a one and a half years old I was an only child, so I had actual adult supervision. -Eleanor, explaining why she didn't climb up into the cabinets when she was little.

Luke and Amanda are learning a fiddle/violin piece. I love it!