what I've been up to

For the last two days, I was turning this corner of our lot:



into this:


It amazes me that a project that I predicted would take about 1/2 a day took 2 full days. We now have a great perennial garden though - updated photos to come next spring! Oh, and the answer to "how many conductors does it take to build a garden" is: TWO.

A few weeks before this I was working at a summer choir camp, conducting a youth choir of 40 singers. It was a fantastic experience - a good blogable story there, and I will share soon!

Hope you are enjoying the last few days of preparation before the fun of the school and rehearsal season begins!

What conductors do in the summer.

My wife and I have been spending the last few days in Ottawa, which is suffering from the extreme heat advisory covering much of the north-east of North America. For the past few days we've had air temperature in the mid-30s (95 in F) with the humidex sitting around +45 (around 110 F). Luckily, my parents have a pool.

Yesterday was our or 3rd wedding anniversary - this was the gift I bought Kathleen:

Today's Schedule

Here's what happened today:

6:30 - Wake Up
7:30 - Tee time with my wife and a fellow choral conductor and his father-in-law.
7:30 - 11:30 Golf. Highlight's included:

• Watching my wife out drive all of us on three occasions.
• I shot an 84, one of the best rounds of the year for me

1:45 - took possession of the NEW HOUSE!

All in all, a fantastic day! Looking forward to tomorrow when we go back to the house (which is a one hour round trip), continue cleaning, thinking about where we are going to put our furniture, which cabinets will hold which dishes, and which walls will get repainted.

Official move-in day is July 11th. Lots of packing to do!

Happy July 4th to all my southern friends!

End of Concert Season

That would be a reasonable facsimile of what my piled up tuxedo and fixings might look like after last nights performance. Which was a great success! Choir stayed in tune (which with the level of the heat in the un-airconditioned church, was just short of a miracle), Band was on top of things - and I didn't miss one metre change, of which there were many to miss!

Crowd seemed to enjoy it with a rousing standing O too!

AND - the buyers of our house have just signed off on ALL conditions! So, the house is SOLD! Today, we are going on a marathon of house viewings, our agent has 11 homes to show us - so hopefully one of them will be "the one!"

Off to Ottawa tomorrow night - should be able to blog once in a while while I'm on the road. Perhaps a good examining story or two will come up. the Viva Voce exams always come up with a few good answers. Like this one from last February:

Examiner: "Tell me something about Bach"
Student (while counting points on his fingers): "Well, he was a a guy (one) and he lived way back when (two) and he liked the piano a lot (three!)".

Hope your concerts are winding up, and you can begin to enjoy the Spring and Summer (which for us Edmontonians, is very short, and requires a sense of humour).

In preparation for Summer Checklist

Things I have to do before the end of June:

1. Sing two more concerts.
2. Program the rest of the season for Da Camera (2/3rds done).
3. Find soloists, and substitute organists for 2 more Sundays in August.
4. Start studying Handel's Judas Maccabaeus, and keep searching for reliable scores and parts.
5. Figure out soloists for Judas Maccabaeus.
6. Plan audition dates and times for both Da Camera and RES.
7. Spread top soil along north side of house, regrade, and seed.
8. Plant the flower beds.
9. Try to think of a more interesting blog post

Season winding down

Sorry for the lack of posts as of late - as with most musicians, especially choral musicians, May marks the beginning of the end of the season. Teaching fished up at the start of June, I conducted the last concert of the season with my chamber choir on Saturday- it went very well - and then in about a month, the last concert with the Symphonic choir. So my summer posts will likely deal more with our Sonoma wine trek, and hopefully reports of a decrease in my golf handicap, then they will with choral music.

Someone did forward this video to me today, and I felt I had to share it.

I think that this concert with the Berlin Philharmonic and the classic rock group "Scorpions" just might have been the highlight of the year for the orchestra. Just watching them play puts a smile on my face!