Words are inadequate

When I got laid off from my previous job seven (!) years ago I took up viola, on the grounds that it was portable, had the same strings as a cello just an octave up, and (most importantly) wasn't a violin. I may still have a chip on my shoulder from years of bad cello parts in junior high orchestra. I never got "good" at viola but I'm good enough to get by. For awhile in Vancouver I was playing fiddle tunes with a weekly group, and that was fun.

In November Erin pointed me at a Facebook post from Vanderhoof, the next town over, where the high school was putting on Sound Of Music and wanted a pit orchestra, and would anyone from around be interested in playing in that? This seemed weird but on reflection it's more that I was spoiled: my high school did a musical most years, with full orchestra, but this is also a high school in a wealthy suburb that gets tons of money shoveled at it. Anyway. I wrote to Russell the music director and said "if you need people i can play viola or cello" and he said "OH GOD YES A VIOLIST". At which point I remembered Tegan my viola teacher pointing out that there's always demand for violists.

So I shrugged and spent the winter driving down to Vanderhoof and back roughly one night every couple of weeks. There was supposed to be rehearsal every week but there was a month break at Xmas, and frequent "yeah we're calling it off due to bad road conditions."

Rehearsals were ... alright. The music tended to be like the dullest cello parts I'd ever played, a lot of rest-bum-bum rest-bum-bum. Occasionally Richard Rogers will take a song that's been quite pleasantly bopping along in a reasonable key like G or D and drop it half a step into Gflat or Dflat. I assume for the vocalists this is just, oh, whatever, modulate a half step, sounds nice. For strings it's "we will now modify five or six of the seven notes that you're playing, have fun with that." So, music that's both dull and difficult, which is not a good combination. And I didn't really break it out to practice at home much, because, well, dull, and even more dull without any melody to play off of.

There's one bit that I regret not having practised: the entr'acte combines Sound Of Music, Sixteen Going On Seventeen, and Goatherd. And the viola part for Goatherd isn't the normal oom-pah-oom-pah, it's ... it's the equivalent of the yodeling, fast eighthnotes dancing between strings. That would have been fun to practise and would have sounded good. Unfortunately we never rehearsed the entr'acte until the tech rehearsal a week before opening, so I didn't realise that it was actually interesting. Oh well.

There was one other violist, an older woman named Thea who I think is actually a violinist but plays viola because someone has to. So that was alright, good to have someone else to keep me on track and vice versa. She and the two cellists and the bassist (and, come performance time, the guitarist who got moved over next to us) were friendly and chatty, a bit more than I was really up for but not too bad.

The thing is... the thing is. Only once did one of the cast show up to rehearse with us: Maria came in one evening, so we played through all her songs. And that made just such a huge difference, it was no longer playing harmony to other harmonies with no real melody, it was actually harmonizing against something. Still somewhat dull but not pointless. And then we did tech rehearsal all day Saturday before opening, and while it was A Mess it did give that feeling of making music instead of just noise.

And the show itself ... "by thursday it'll be art," as my theatre ex Steph said. And it was. It came together, it worked. It was fun, an energy I've not really felt in ages. Show energy, performance energy. I got bits of it when I did Orpheus several years ago but that's a different thing altogether.

... and this has sat half-finished for so long I should just wrap it and backdate it. So.

Current state: being extremely stressed out over condo-related program activities.

( stressors )

It's snowing outside, but it wasn't for the two-hour drive home last night. I did catch a few glimpses of an amazing aurora borealis, though, all white-green and swoopy.

I have tea and a chapter of A Night in the Lonesome October, and then probably further into my physically delightful SubPress The Kingdom of Gods. Last night I finished a third reread of The Scholars of Night, at which I got to say GODDAMMIT MIKE. One of the joys of rereading JMF's books is the increasing frequency at which I get to say GODDAMMIT MIKE as I pick up on yet another buried gem. I had pancakes, but they are sadly all gone.

I vacuumed this morning for the first time in weeks. I always forget how much "not walking on dirt / bits of dried mud in bare feet" immediately improves my mood and my quality of life.

Last week I got a small Bluetooth speaker and set it over my stove. It's now playing "Kind of Blue," though I think it's nearly over.

The rain falls down,
The wind blows up,
I've spent all the pennies
In my old tin cup.
--Clyde and/or Wendy Watson, Father Fox's Pennyrhymes

The Kelowna trip had some very good parts and I am still assessing the damage both fiscal and personal/interpersonal. But that's an Afternoon job, at the earliest.

Yesterday: notice the sun swinging around to the front of the apartment, fail to notice the complete lack of breeze despite open windows on two sides. Result: cranky at dinner, lethargy and loginess all evening, stare at various screens, eventually give up and try to sleep but fail until after midnight even with a fan running.

Today: notice sun, remember yesterday's lack of breeze. Close window on the sunny side of the apartment, run fan. Result: sufficient brain functionality to write this post plus not quite an hour of musicking (viola and bass), plus dinner, plus boardgames in a few minutes.

The actual heat wave was two weekends ago, when I went down to Vancouver for a week. Spending the first of several 35+ (100F+) days in the air-conditioned car worked exceedingly well, as did retrieving my air conditioner from Mya and using it in Zee's townhouse.

There was also a great deal of boardgaming, some erranding, and some socialising. Most notably I had dinner with Julianne, after which we went up to her apartment and she let me try out her amazing new VR rig. Apparently I had a huge grin on my face the entire time I was in the helmet. My previous experience with VR was Jonathan's helmet that would run Quake at 800x600, which as I recall was pretty neat but not a patch on this. It is literally like being inside a video game. I was absolutely gobsmacked. Also I have missed talking with Julianne, a lot. Gonna try a video-chat later this month, I think.

And then I came home and work felt even more pointless than usual. But I think I'm back to an even keel there, at least.

Some months ago my bathroom fan started leaking, a steady stream of water. I called the super[1] and he took a look. Turned out the tub in the upstairs apartment had a leak in the overflow drain. They patched that up and all was well.

[1] Terry refers to himself as the "landlord" but he doesn't own the place, so it feels weird to refer to him as such. He's the guy who handles rent and the maintenance guy, but I pay my rent by bank draft, so I only interact with him for maintenance things. So he feels more like a superintendent from a mid-century book about NYC.

Until a couple of weeks ago, when (shortly after someone moved back in to the upstairs apartment, after it had been vacant for a while) there was a rhythmic thudding coming from the bathroom. It took me longer than it should have to realise that it was water dripping from the ceiling into the tub.

Long story short, Terry had to tear down my entire bathroom ceiling (because it was a sheet of plywood, so cutting a hole in it was Not On) so that the plumber could get at the drain for the bathtub, because he couldn't reach it from its apartment. Still needs to be painted and sealed, and then the bathroom walls need to be repainted because "there's no way we can get a match for that, it's ancient." On the bright side he also replaced my bathroom fan so it no longer sounds like an aircraft carrier.

Meanwhile the bathroom and front hall are full of dust &c and there's a fan going to dry things out, and the smell of paint/plaster faintly permeates everything.

I spent today at Erin's because now that winter's over and it won't matter for my heating bill they've replaced the antique single-pane windows. Erin's making marmalade, with my occasional assistance, and her house is full of the smell of cooking citrus. Or, not a smell exactly, if I had to guess I'd say it's the aerosolized oil from the peel. Sharp and bitter on the back of my nose and throat.

And I've moved things around so they could get at the windows, and taken down the blackout blinds, and I need to fix that, but it just doesn't feel like home at the moment. I hate that. Like, places rarely feel like home but there are degrees, and this is off enough to upset my balance.

I should eat dinner. I have chicken in the fridge but slicing chicken seems like Work so I'll eat it tomorrow. Cereal, I think, unless the milk's gone off, or maybe freezer-waffles.

Bah. I've not been sleeping well since the time change, which corresponds to when the family down the hall moved into the upstairs apartment. I had plenty of complaints about the place in Coal Harbour and in New West, but those were solidly built concrete monstrosities and there was no neighbour noise.

Just reread Robert Asprin's two Phule's Company books, which he describes as "F-Troop In Space". They are not as good as I remember them being (I read them to death in junior high and high school), but they're certainly better than I expected. I am now about to start a reread of Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World, which I read several times in Blacksburg and haven't cracked open since. It's I think the first book that I picked up from the Tech bookstore English section: it had been assigned for a class I wasn't taking, and it looked interesting. Very curious to see what I think of it.

Dinner.

Snow in Vancouver, so of course I came back this week. It's been record-breakingly cold (minus teens, I believe), and the snow from the weekend hadn't melted when it dropped another I'm guessing 15cm last night / this morning. Translink is referring to it as "an extreme travel day" and recommending that people stay home.

I came in to work, mostly because I walked out the door of the coffeeshop where I got breakfast (poached eggs on smoked salmon on toast; not quite an Eggs Halifax but decent) and saw someone getting out of an Evo (Vancouver-based carshare). I was already Not Excited about sitting in my Airbnb and using the work VPN which spent last week being extremely flaky, so I snagged the car and took half an hour to drive the 5km to work.

This is I suppose better than back home, which got ~20cm of snow last Friday morning when we left and was reportedly minus forty degrees this morning.

... and now it's dumping something serious out there, again/still. Definitely time to head for "home".

I was sick right after Xmas and then I moved up here, where instead of biking to yoga and then to work I'm mostly sitting in my apartment. This is decidedly Bad News for my physical state. I currently weigh in at, um, about 5% over my previous maximum, which came in spring 2002 right before I got fired from a job where I was sitting around all day drinking Cokes and being depressed. (Long, long story.) Weight is just a convenient metric, though. More worryingly, I get out of breath climbing a flight of stairs. My lungs have always been crap but not usually /this/ much crap.

I was thinking about getting an exercise machine (probably a bike) and doing that in the mornings, maybe while watching an episode of my very large backlog of acquired TV shows. Problems there include cost of machine, time and effort in acquiring machine (might be able to find one in Vanderhoof an hour out; more likely I'd need to go to Prince George two hours out), and willingness to eat an hour out of my morning.

Then a few days ago I remembered something Jmac had posted awhile ago, about a seven-minute workout and how it (among other things) had improved his quality of life immensely. The basic idea is a highly compressed form of interval training: work a set of muscles for thirty seconds, rest for ten seconds, work a different set of muscles for thirty seconds, repeat. The app I'm using gives twelve different exercises.

Seven minutes (even accounting for his "Like all project estimates that cross my desk, I wish to double its budget, and then add a little extra time for slop") is doable much of the time. Perhaps more importantly, it's doable while I'm traveling.

I started yesterday. I collapsed halfway through "Plank". Today I made it through the whole sequence, more or less, despite severe stiffness in my pecs making it hard to keep raising my arms above my head during jumping jacks.

Here's hoping it does some good.

Well. The kitchen's mostly in order. I've decided on a bookshelf arrangement (Erin suggested, and I moved bookcases into position and grumped, and slept on it and decided it was probably the best option): along one wall in the living room, then turning a corner and extending back-to-back to create a partition between the living room and the dining room. Gives me a booknook, which I like; gives me space to put up all my games facing the dining-room table, where they're most likely to get any use; gives me a wall to put the couch against. Unsure where the comfy chair is going, but I'll figure it out. My only complaint is the blocking of sight-lines from the dining room to the living room and to the big window with a view of the lake. Oh well; can't have everything.

The games are, as of tonight, on their shelves, which helps it start to feel like a home, to the extent that a place does. The living room is now only half piled in white boxes, which also helps. Tomorrow evening or Saturday will be books, and then the office, and then I guess I'll be moved in.

So far it's alright. That is: it's somewhat drafty and expensive to heat, and I need a rug or two. I miss the condo kitchen, at least on the occasions when it had a functional dishwasher. I don't know how the office will work out and I need to fiddle with the heat in the bedroom.

It'll do. As I said earlier today, if I'm still here after, say, eighteen months, something has gone Very Wrong Indeed.

So, we're under a wildfire evacuation alert. The smoke cloud is visible from the back deck, and the air's distinctly yellowish this morning.

Informative links: Evac order for the Shovel Lake fire, as of 13 August at nine PM. (If that link's 404'd, click "Home Page" and look for the most recent Shovel Lake fire evac order.) Wildfires of Note page for the Shovel Lake fire. On the map in the evac order link: find the vertical "Highway 27" on the right, and we're just across the highway from the W in "Highway."

Current thinking is that most of the evac order area will be on fire in the next day or two, if it's not already, and the eastern arm of the evac alert will change to an evac order by the weekend. Erin has borrowed a trailer from a coworker, and will be spending much of today modding it to hold a hundred birds. Or perhaps fifty birds, in two trips. Current plan, subject to more or less immediate change, is to leave in the next couple of days, ahead of the crowd, and take everything but me down to her partner Josh's place four hours south. (I get dropped off at the airport on the way.)

It's stressful but it's not the worst stress. On me, anyway; s'not my house. I am mostly trying to hold together in the face of some other unspecified stresses, and otherwise be a reasonable amount of support in the current situation. It's also possible that I will come entirely apart more or less as soon as my brain registers it as being "safe" to do so, which may be "as soon as i'm on an airplane" or "as soon as i'm at home."

Kind of puts my plumbing woes in perspective. Though I still don't want to go through that again either.

Back from up north, where the temperature has been highly swingy. Summery-warm when I got here, and frost the last couple of nights. Seems unusual for, you know, JUNE. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised, there was still four feet of snow on the ground up until six weeks ago.

It's definitely spring according to the free-ranging fowl. At last count there are:

• Two adult geese
  
• Eight two-month-old teenaged geese
  
• Four few-days-old goslings
  
• Six adult ducks
  
• Six month-old teenaged ducks
  
• Ten? week-old ducklings
  
• Twelve? few-days-old ducklings
  
• Nine? chickens
  
• And who knows how many chicks and ducks yet to hatch

There's a lot of cheeping from the yard outside, is what I'm saying. We warned Hazard-cat away from the ducklings early on, and since then he and Whiskey-cat have expressed no interest in any of the fuzzyraptors.

I stayed up there for a little over two weeks, this time. That feels about right. Enough time for rough spots to crop up and settle out, enough time to start to feel like I belong, I think. Enough time to start to work out some of what's going on with me when I'm up here, why it is that aspects of me start to shut down and why I find it harder to take care of myself. Enough time to miss home, and people.

And now I'm back, and have been to yoga which wiped me out. I'm happy to be home and in my space, and I miss Erin and the cats. This all seems appropriate.


... and maybe now I can have some slightly more regular updates.