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.