feels like the first time

Tomorrow night the opera opens. Yeoman of the Guard is the most serious of Gilbert & Sullivan's operas, which might be why ticket sales are a little slow this year. No matter, we'll play and sing and act our hearts out for whomever is in the audience.

There have been some changes this year that make things less fun. For example, the orchestra is now being streamed on screen to the audience during the overture. G&S overtures are normally pretty nasty. This one is next to unplayable. I have a recording of it by the Royal Philharmonic, so I know it is actually playable by some musicians. Just not us (yet. I'll add the qualifier. There's still time to practice tomorrow). Anyway, having the camera there adds some nerves that I don't normally have. And we have to wear all black. The other 9 or so years I've done this, we can wear whatever we want, but now that we're being seen (which is nice, in theory, for the audience to know there's a live orchestra back stage), we have to look presentable. I have to buy some more black.

But that's not the big change. There are some new rules with the theater and church and school complex we're in, and because the cast has to warm up on stage, if we lowly orchestra folks want to warm up, we have to do it in the bathroom. Right. Like I'm going to sit on the toilet while warming up with my rather pricey instrument. I'd rather start cold. The stage managers said they're going to try to find a solution that doesn't involve toilets. I'll hope for that.

a new plan

I am having a really hard time dealing with my current leg pain and the impact it is having on my running training. I was supposed to run the Virginia Beach full marathon, but it took me 5 months to get up to running 30 mile weeks, so that wasn't going to happen. I switched to the half and soon developed hip pain. It is bad enough that I limp after running. It's not good, whatever it is. I've seen a chiropractor/pt doc and it hasn't gotten better so she thinks I should either see another kind of doc or just go ahead for an MRI. I have an MRI scheduled for March 4. I am certain they are going to find something terrible like bone cancer and a broken hip. Probably a labral tear too. And maybe bursitis to top it off. In the mean time, doc Jenna said to just keep running unless it got worse, which it hasn't, so I keep running.

All this, though, has made training difficult. My May marathon is now out the window, and I'll just hope I can hang in there to complete the half iron. My running buds think I should bag the year, and maybe set a goal race at a shorter distance, focus on getting and staying healthy and maybe get faster at a shorter distance. This is not what I want to do, but they are right. So instead of signing up for the Chicago marathon today, I decided to make the TC 10 mile my fall goal race. And plan to kill a spring 2014 marathon.

This doesn't make me happy, but it is the right thing to do. I hate doing the right thing.

for better or worse, this about sums up my valentine's day date.

another one in the books

We had our second concert of the season last night, rescheduled from Sunday. We had a small but enthusiastic audience, and the concert went really well. We opened with Verdi's La Forza del Destino, which honestly was hard and didn't go as well as we'd hoped, but the concert went up from there. I ended up really liking the music from this concert, even though I was not at all excited about it at the start of the cycle. I should remember this, because this is how it almost always is.

Before the concert, I tweeted a pic of one of our pieces and the scroll of my violin. The music was for Lizst's Les Preludes, a very challenging piece that requires the first violin section to do things that are near impossible. A friend replied, "Someone should have told Franz [Lizst] that he didn't need to use ALL the notes." I am glad I read the tweet text before leaving the concert, because I shared her nerdy wit with the rest of the firsts, and we all had a good laugh.

what goes around

A couple years ago, I was pretty ballsy and turned down a job offer without having a fall-back. It worked out ok, as I got the job I had been holding out for, but it was still kinda stupid. The interview was awful though, one for the record books really. But then yesterday I found out that one of my former grad school colleagues was offered a job at that same institution. And at her interview, she was in a major car accident on the drive to her teaching demo. The faculty member driving her was t-boned. Everyone was fine, but that could also go down in the records for bad interview experiences. It seems this department is somewhat cursed for putting together a decent interview for a candidate. She, at least according to FB, is excitedly celebrating the offer. I am glad it worked out for her!

ms. independent

Shortly after I bought my house 10.5 years ago, I started dating a guy who had a lot of girl friends who had all been in relationships for pretty much their entire lives. They went from their childhood homes, to roommates in college, to getting married (maybe with a few years in an apartment with a roommate in there too), but never having lived alone a day in their life.

The girl friends of my boyfriend would constantly ask me about whether I was scared all the time living by myself, if I did anything to keep myself safe. No, the answer to these questions was, and is, no. I mean, I keep my doors locked, and have a crafty plastic lattice thingy on my front and back doors so that even if someone broke the window they couldn't open the door. But I have about two dozen other windows that don't have the fancy lattice thingy and really, if someone wants to break into a house, it doesn't matter what kind of fortress it is.

But back to the story, said boyfriend was also freaked out that I lived by myself in a house that was all on one floor, and made me keep a baseball bat in my bedroom. I can guarantee that if someone were to break into my house, I will a) forget that the baseball bat is there, or b) the baseball bat will be used as a weapon against me. But the baseball bat is still in the corner of my room. Mostly because I don't really have anywhere else to put it.

There have been a handful of nights that I hear a weird noise or I have a nightmare or I hear something like this, and I end up having a sleepless night convinced that someone is about to break into my house and I worry about my poor parents having to clean up the mess when I'm found murdered and half eaten by wild dogs. But these nights are few and far between.

Tonight as I was finally getting around to clearing the last of the snow from my front sidewalk, my dear neighbor came out to tell me a story. It turns out my two-doors-down neighbor had gotten up in the middle of the night for a drink of water and noticed, at 4 am, a car inching down the road alongside a man walking up to every house on the street to look into the windows. This is the kind of story I don't like to hear because, like when my garage was set on fire, it is violating and personal. I am hoping I get at least a little sleep tonight.

foiled again.

It seems as though MVO is not meant to have February concerts. Two years ago, we had a major snowstorm and postponed. That was a bummer, since we were playing the Khachaturian violin concerto with a MN Orch superstar and the change in date made for a small audience. We had a snowstorm last year, but persevered with a very tiny audience. Then yesterday, we postponed our Feb concert once again, this time to Tuesday night which is our normal rehearsal night. This is a bummer because as with many orchestras, our audience is older and do not like to venture out at night. We will likely have a small audience once again. The only thing that might save us is that we have two choirs participating, so they might bring in a few extra people.

I suppose it was for the best. I'm sorry it means we'll have one fewer rehearsal for our next concert. We're playing Shostakovich Symphony #5, which is awesome but also a beast, and we could use all the rehearsals we can get. I guess it just means I'll have to practice more.

throwback

I'm teaching a Young Adult Lit class this term, and I'm way way more excited about teaching it this year than last year. I have a whopping 9 students in the class this year (as opposed to 3 last year), and the class is hybrid - half face-to-face, half online. I don't love the hybrid part exactly, but it means that the class is only an hour and 40 minutes long instead of 3.5 hours. Which was torture with only 3 students. So I like the 9 students part.

Anyway, last night I had the "80s Pop" Pandora station playing as students were coming into class. The song "Faithfully" by Journey came on. I haven't heard that song in years and years, but it is the song that I danced with the guy I had a major crush on at the Homecoming dance my junior year. I have not thought about that for probably 20 years, but that speaks to the power of music. I was instantly transported back to my high school cafeteria, lights out, dancing 90s sway style to Journey in my favorite purple shirt.

Isn't it amazing how a smell, image, song, voice, can transport you to another time and place, even when standing in front of a new crew of students?