In which Chorus looks ahead to vacation...

I AM READY FOR A VACATION.

I WANT TO LEAVE FOR VACATION RIGHT-FREAKING-TODAY.

Anyhoo, we are leaving for vacation in a week and I am looking forward AAAAAAAAH WHY CAN'T WE LEAVE TODAY. 

We will be driving across this great and beautiful country and a little bit of the great country to the south of us, stopping here and there and everywhere to play golf.  Our first destination point is Georgian Bay for three nights with my dad and his wife, then we will head to Ottawa for a week with WH's family, then home via Toronto for our annual Blue Jays game.  This year, we'll see the Yankees (Boo!). 

Right now, we are flood watching. We did have a hotel reservation in Minot, ND, but the hotel is right in the middle of the area that is recently evacuated, so we've had to shift our plans a bit. We have a hotel reservation and a golf reservation in Grand Forks as well, so we're keeping an eye there too.

It's a beautiful day today in Prairie City, sunny and warm and MAYBE IF WE CAN'T LEAVE FOR VACATION TODAY I COULD JUST GO LAY DOWN IN THE GRASS SOMEWHERE INSTEAD.

I'm finding it hard to focus on work.  You might have guessed that.

On Sleeping

I really like to sleep. I LOVE to sleep. I have had discussions with some friends and acquaintances who don't like to sleep, who view sleeping as an inconvenient interruption of otherwise busy days, but not me. I LOVE TO SLEEP.

Thankfully, I have also been a really good sleeper for most of my life. I fall asleep easily, I sleep through the night without interruption, and I sleep through thunder storms, sirens, etc. It also takes very little to get me to fall asleep on the couch for a nice nap.

In the last couple of weeks, however, something seems to have interrupted the flow. While I'm still falling asleep pretty easily, I wake up several times a night (last night, every hour) at the slightest noise or movement. For the last few nights, the temperature has been very warm in Prairie City, so I've had difficulty getting a comfortably arranged with blankets, sheets, husband, cats etc. But I don't think that the heat is entirely to blame, as restlessness was starting to become a regular occurence even before the temperature spiked.

And to make matters worse, when I wake up during the night, WH also usually wakes up (he's a much lighter sleeper than I am normally), and then NEITHER of us can get back to sleep and we're both cranky in the morning. Thankfully, he slept through all my turns and shuffles and sighs last night.

I'm hoping that I can get back to my normal schedule before the end of the summer and before the busy-ness of rehearsal and concert season starts up again!

Book List....

Ok now, let's see how we do. The bolded titles are those that I've read, in case you haven't seen this on some other blog already!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (I've only read the first... it's a long story)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Thirty-seven.... not too bad, all in all!

Easter Monday

Coffee's On!

Mama Cat woke me up briefly this morning at 4am while she tried to get resettled under the covers, and I was aware that the bedroom was very quiet. The kind of quietness that descends on a room in which two people are sleeping very soundly. Such peace.

We slept in and are now sitting downstairs in our PJs watching old episodes of Press Your Luck and Let's Make a Deal, and waiting for the coffee to finish brewing.

The agenda for the day includes getting our tax information together to take to the accountant, laundry, and WH is preparing for an audition this evening. So there will be music in the house today as well.

We had Easter Dinner for the family here tonight; it was truly a wonderful evening. We ate lots of ham and scalloped potatoes, drank our fair share of nice wine, and played fun games. Lots of laughter. Eventually, the evening descended into the listening of Florence Foster Jenkins recordings.... It was a very fine Easter.

What are you up to today?

In which Chorus has a bath.

*Not actually Chorus.

So between Friday night and Saturday morning, Prairie City got a not-insignificant amount of snow fall, which necessitated much shovelling on Saturday morning. WH had a rehearsal, so I donned my big coat and my boots and my mitts and my scarf and my toque and headed out. I was grateful that the weather was not cold, quite beautiful in fact, and I had a nice time shovelling our sidewalks, and our neighbour's front walk, and half the front walk of the duplex on the other side.

(At the same time, on the other side of the street, our ancient neighbour pushed his snowblower up and down the length of the block in a quiet and easy manner. I found this HIGHLY annoying.)

When I woke up on Sunday morning, I was understandably sore in the mid-back and arms. As the day went on, the sore got worse. So by the time I was beginning to think about bed last night, a bath seemed like a nice way to get the muscles to relax. So I filled the tub, applied a liberal dose of bubbles, and sunk in. Lovely!

It didn't take very long before I was joined by Mama Cat and Baby Cat. Mama Cat is always highly suspicious of baths, and will watch from the back of the toilet or from in the sink. Occasionally, she'll lean over and sniff to make sure I'm not drowning. Baby Cat, on the other hand, leaps right up on the side of the tub for a front row seat. And when she's not playing with the bubbles, she eats the bubbles. "Yum! Soap!"

Baby Cat = Not a genius. And the more bubbles she eats, the less likely she is to ever become a genius, I figure.

And now we're back!!

Well, we had a pretty wonderful and relaxing time! Among the highlights:
-swimming in the warm outdoor pool
-skating on the outdoor rink (on which I took two pretty spectacular spills)
-eating FANTASTIC food
-playing dozens of games of cribbage while sitting in the lounge drinking hot chocolate and Bailey's
-driving through our province's beautiful mountain range
-resting, resting, resting

And now we're home, watching the Oscars and looking ahead to this week. The cats seem to be happy to see us, and are ingratiating themselves by sitting in laps, licking fingers and purring.

This afternoon after we got home, we watched The Departed, the movie starring Jack Nicholson, Leo DiCaprio, and Matt Damon, about the mob mole in the Police Force and the undercover cop in the mob. I don't want to spoil endings for anybody who hasn't seen it, but suffice to say that it was very entertaining and very clever. If you don't mind swearing and violence, check it out!

We'll be Comin' 'Round the Mountains...

... 'bout tomorrow mid-afternoon, I figure!

WH and I are taking off tomorrow to spend three nights at a nice luxury hotel in the mountains of Prairie Province. WH has some coupons he earned from a previous stay at this chain of hotels, so our third night is free, and we get a free upgrade to a bigger room. We are looking forward to resting a lot, doing some skating, swimming, walking, and eating nice food together. My brother and sister-in-law will feed Mama Cat and Baby Cat and make sure that their ears are scratched in our absence.

See you all on Sunday! Hope your weekends are restful too.

Looking forward to the Weekend!

Lots of reasons to expect that this weekend will be highly enjoyable!

• The weather is beautiful. The temperature has actually come up above freezing today and the air feels warm. Other than the ice that was encasing my car this morning (we had freezing rain yesterday), this weather is welcome and spirit-lifting.
• Vacation! Today is my last day at work for 10 days! WH and I will be heading off to the mountains starting next Thursday, and in the interim, I'm going to relax, and get some projects around the house done. It's a much needed respite!
• The big concert is finally here. WH is rehearsing this morning with orchestra and soloists, and I'm just sitting here waiting to hear how it went. Tonight is the orchestra and choir rehearsal, and then we have dress rehearsal tomorrow afternoon. The concert is Sunday at 3! WH is ready, the choir is as ready as they will ever be... I think that this will be a highlight of my choral experience!

The only downside is that my health is still not 100%. My speaking voice is back close to normal, but I lose about every third note when I try to sing anything. I should be fine for Sunday, but getting there will require good vocal warm-ups for the rehearsals between now and then, and good rest in the downtime.

What's up for you this weekend?

All is Peace and Quiet

I'm at home today, still trying to get ahead of this miserably cold. My work is actually quite portable, so I should still be able to have a productive day from the dining room table.

Sitting here watching the day break through the front windows, with the cats asleep on the couch and WH working close by, I feel wonderful peace. It's the kind of peace that makes me wish that I worked from home everyday. Everything is calm.

Planning and Goal-Setting

First, the planning. Vacation planning, to be exact! I have five vacation days that need to be used before the end of March, so WH and I had been thinking about the possibilities presented by Las Vegas. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find a good price for a 3 or 4 day trip, and weren't interested in spending a significant portion of our holiday budget on such a short trip. So we've revised that plan, and will spend three nights in the Canadian Rockies, hiking and walking in town and having a relaxing time. This break will fall right after the Handel/Bach concert, so the rest will have been well-earned.

Now, because we've chosen to do a relatively cheap little holiday in February, we are beginning some more significant plans for our summer holidays (all pending my permanent job status which is frustratingly still in the works). The preliminary plan is to fly to San Francisco and spend a couple of days there, and then drive to Sonoma for three or four days of wine-tasting and vineyard tours. We found a neat website that offers walking tours, including wine-tastings, so we might look at that. I think that walking through the Sonoma Valley with a glass of red wine in hand sounds like a pretty amazing way to spend the summer holidays. And the desired timing of the trip is early July, in line with our first anniversary. Tra la la...

Now, the goal-setting part. Colourful University sponsors a race on June 1st to benefit children's programming in Prairie City. Participants have the option of running or walking 5km or 10km. Now, I have done very little running since high school, and even less since my left lung collapsed about 5 years ago. But I think that with sufficient will power, I can train to run the 5km between now and then. WH is thinking about whether this is something he wants to tackle as well, and I think that it would be a pretty amazing accomplishment for both of us.

We shall see!

Cooking up a Storm

Absolutely. Lovely. Weekend.

Key elements of the aforementioned ALW:

1) Cooking. I have cooked and cooked and cooked this weekend, and it's been delightful. Saturday morning, I got up and made cheese biscuits for breakfast, baked two batches of cookies (Chocolate Chippers and Meringues, both from the Company's Coming Cookies Book), then made rack of lamb, mashed potatoes and broccoli for Saturday dinner, which we enjoyed with a nice Melbac-Shiraz blend. I didn't spend nearly as much time in the kitchen on Sunday, but I did make a big pot of chili in the slow cooker for lunches and easy dinners this week.

2) Cross-Stitch. A number of years ago, I started a very large cross-stitch project of a woman standing on a bridge in a forest, in a Monet-ish kind of style. I made reasonable progress, and then put it down, and haven't looked at it for a long time. Well, this weekend, I retrieved it, re-framed it, and got back to work! And got a large enough chunk stitched to convince myself that I'll get it finished someday soon! Mama Cat and Baby Cat helped A LOT by playing with the thread as it passed back and forth through the cloth.

3)Laundry. Ok, I know, laundry isn't really on the list of things that make up a great weekend, but I got 10 loads done on Saturday, including sheets and towels and place-mats, and that produced a gratifying sense of accomplishment.

4)Football. Two great conference games yesterday, despite the loss by my beloved Packers. I sat and watched football and cross-stitched and stirred the chili and had a peaceful time.

And now I'm back at work looking ahead to a long to-do list this week and lots of rehearsals (7 hours between now and Thursday), but I feel rested and cheerful. And you can't really ask for more than that on a Monday morning.

Merry Christmas Everybody!

Well, it's 11:00am on Christmas Eve, and WH and I are still in our pajamas. We've had breakfast in bed, watched one entire disc from season 2 of The Office, cleaned the kitchen, pushed the laundry, and now we're sittin'. So far, a great day. Mama Cat and Baby Cat have done a lot of sleeping. The idea is to have as restful a day as possible in preparation for a long night tonight at the church!

Last night was Christmas dinner with my family, shared between our house and my brother's, which is just across the alley. We cooked the turkey and had appetizers here, and then marched the turkey across to their house for dinner. It was a delightful evening all around! We'll have just my mom and eldest brother for a quiet roast beef dinner on Christmas Day.

I wish you all peace and happiness this Christmas season.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Sunshine

Every afternoon, the sun shines in through the windows of my office onto my back. It is lovely, but it makes me want to close my door and lie down on the floor like the cats, with my feet up in the air and the sun toasting my tummy. And my eyes closed... that part is important.

World Series

So, between a particularly busy choral schedule this month and the kitchen renovations, Wonderful Husband and I are starting to run out of steam a little bit. Last night was our first night at home with no other commitments - no rehearsals, no concerts, no pieces of the renovation that absolutely had to get done. Despite the fact that I'm starting to get just a little bit cranky about the state of uncleanliness in the house (pretty much everything, upstairs and down, is covered in plaster dust), we talked ourselves in to having a very quiet evening, sitting on the couch, watching the baseball on TV. It was a very very good choice.

Maternal Unit has a very strong allegiance to Boston, having spent time at Harvard, so I often lean that way too, when the Jays aren't around to cheer for. But this time, I have to say, I can't help but root for the Rockies. I don't think there's anybody out there - no baseball writer, expert, broadcaster, commentator - who predicted that Colorado would be in the World Series, and for that, the team is to be encouraged.

That being said, last night's game was a bit of a bummer.