The Best of the New

About this time last year I wrote about how much we were loving our new apartment in Brighton/Pittsford on a beautiful fall morning when we took a walk down to Barnes and Noble. It was on that very trip that we bought George, who is now a year old. (Sorry we missed your birthday, George.)

There's a lot to love about our new house, one year later. I love the smell of the brand new carpet, which we weren't expecting to put in, but which has drastically improved the odor of the downstairs. I don't think you could tell a cat ever lived in this house now, unless you are in one particular corner of the basement.

I love having our own laundry machine downstairs, and not needing to worry about sharing it with the neighbors.

I love going to Home Depot, and knowing that whatever it is we need to pick up is for us and our home, not something we need to haggle about with a landlord.

I love the playground across the street. It has a rock wall (apparently James can climb rock walls), a couple of big slides, and most importantly, a baseball diamond. We went over there for the first time on Sunday night, and as soon as I showed James where the baseball diamond was he took off running the bases...and he didn't stop until I told him we could come back the following day and run them some more. (Maybe I should let him stay up and watch a game of the World Series this week.)

I love gorgeous hardwood floors, and enough storage space in the garage and basement to put our boxes of stuff somewhere out of sight.

Most of all, I love what I'm going to be able to do when James goes to bed tonight...practice in my very own basement without needing to drive to a church or a hall.

J looks pretty pleased as well. She got back yesterday from a checkup with a 3D ultrasound of the new baby. It's really a baby in there, with little fingers and toes and a face. A face that looks EXACTLY like his big brother's. ("It's 'nother one James!")

So right now I'm waiting out a funeral in the sanctuary where I teach lessons in Lima...and once I'm done teaching I can't wait to go home!

Brass or Woodwind?

Every week I ride in a carpool of orchestra musicians from Rochester to Syracuse. Usually the carpool is comprised of brass players, but sometimes there are woodwind players that ride along. Listed below are verbatim quotes from the trip. Test your instrument personality recognition skills to see if you can tell whether a woodwind player or a brass player is responsible for the quote.


"Oh, you eat before you play? I could never blow that into my instrument!"

"Is Ben David asleep? Let's see if we can put this cowboy hat on his head without him waking up..."

"I'm a little worried about the temperature of my instrument, so I think I'll keep it here in the car with me."

"So I bumped into Lisa at a concert the other day, and she mentioned how she had your leiderhosen in her trunk, and I thought, 'gee, I should probably pick those up for you.'"

"You know, when I finished my theory degree, such-and-such a professor gave me a hug as I walked across the stage and it just made me cry."

"I would volunteer to pat you on the hiney, but I don't think your wife would be thrilled about that."

"I'll go as fast as I can, but it takes me a little longer to pack up my instrument than it does for you.

"Laserhosen, I mean leiderhosen. Wait, laser-hosen would be even better. Pew-pew, pew-pew!"

"Would you guys like to come over to my house between rehearsals and watch a foreign film?"

"Nah, we'll just ignore everything she does on the podium and play loud in the concert."

"I try not to eat too many of those cookies they put out at the break. I'm on a diet."

"Is Ben David still asleep? Let's see if we can put this baseball cap on top of the cowboy hat!"'

"I had a really bad reed for that whole first half."

"My beard feels funny today."

"I don't do much during Jurassic Park. I just play whole notes."

"I think the dress is concert black. Semi-formal concert black, casual top. Except the bass trombone is concert plaid."

Blog Prompts, pt. 3

Your best or your most embarrassing date with Julie

The most embarrassing is probably the easiest to come up with. During my last week of undergraduate J and I had been dating for just a few months, and the future was very murky for us. I was going to move to Chicago, she was going to be in Rochester. We had tried to figure out whether we could see much of each other during the summer, and it didn't look good. I needed to work, and the only work I could find was in Rochester, a miserable job doing early drive-thru shifts at a Tim Hortons. J's work was going to be in Pennsylvania, and there wouldn't be much time for either of us to travel. I don't think either of was thinking "this is the end," but much was uncertain.

I had planned a nice date for us before we said good bye for the summer and then possibly much longer afterward. I made a reservation at a nice restaurant down in Henrietta, scrounged through my disheveled apartment (I was moving later in the week) for some dress clothes, and told her I'd pick her up at her dorm for dinner. I wasn't sure what we'd talk about. Would she be weepy about saying good-bye? Would she be all excited to go home and go to the camp where she'd be working? How was I supposed to feel about all this? Would she miss me over the summer? Would I want her to be miserable missing me? Were we really going to try to live like this for the foreseeable future? And where on earth were my truck keys?

Actually, where were my truck keys?

Since campus was just a few hundred yards away I rarely had need to drive my green 97 Ford Ranger, so it had been several days since I'd needed to take it anywhere. I looked at the clock and saw that I should be leaving if I were to pick up J in time. I started rooting through boxes. I looked under the bed. I looked in my coat pockets. Nothing.

I called her once I was a few minutes late, and she walked over to my very messy apartment to help me look. This was not how I'd envisioned the evening going. We moved heaps of dirty laundry, opened up all the boxes I'd taped shut, and found nothing. About a half hour later I called to cancel our reservation.

We ended up walking to the diner down the street. She was in uncomfortable shoes, and I think the weather turned ugly. We played cards there and chit-chatted, but the evening never turned into any except a few hands of Phase 10 while we waited for our soup and me occasionally saying "I wonder if I put them in the desk drawer?" and J telling me that she had looked there.

We don't have many chances nowadays to improve on our "best date" experiences, although I can say that, though further apart, the quality of our dates is much better now that we're married. I think both of us are at a point, what with the house and everything, that our idea of a date night is much more about saving the money that would be spent on a babysitter and dinner out towards a new can of paint or a kitchen island and staying in with brownies and Netflix. It's also become much harder to find a true night free since I've transitioned into full time work with the orchestra. I have a concert at least one night every weekend, and sometimes I'll be booked solid from Thursday-Saturday night, with rehearsals in the other evenings. So "date night" for us is actually usually something along the lines of having a nice conversation in our sweats on a Tuesday at 10:30 AM while James peers into the window of the carwash.

We did have a great date a few months ago, though. I arranged a babysitter, and we both dressed up in our nicest non-concert clothes. (It feels wrong to put on a tux or a plain black suit to go out on a date.) I had bought a very nice ring for J that I knew she was interested in (It ended up not fitting, so we returned it) and we had a fancy dinner overlooking the canal at Aladdin's in Pittsford. We took a nice walk after dinner, then drove out to see a movie in Henrietta. Just dinner and a movie. But it was the only chance we'd had for dinner and a movie since James was born--it was a Tuesday evening, and neither of us had rehearsal--and it was the only dinner and a movie we've done since.

Homeowners

I was working on my third cup of coffee, mostly out of boredom. I drummed my fingers on the table repeatedly, glanced up at the clock again, and then grinned at J.

"I'm feeling very awake," I said "I will definitely not be asleep for this. In fact, I'll have all my best jokes ready."

She grinned back weakly. "How long do you think it will take again?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe an hour? James will be fine, I'm sure"

"Yeah, I'm starting to wish we'd just gotten a babysitter."

It had all started about three months ago when J came into the living room one morning and said "You know, I started to think last night about where we're going to put this new baby when he comes, and I realized that we have absolutely no more room in this apartment. I mean, there's no room for a bassinet in James' room...there's just no space for it. And where would we even put him in our room? Or even let's say he was going to sleep in the living room..look at this!"

The living room was in a state of semi-disaster. The "clean corner" was currently a stack of trumpet cases, and everywhere else was covered in James' mega-blocks.

"It's no big deal," I said, "The baby can sleep down in the storage unit. We'll just use a baby monitor."
"No really, what are we going to do? Should we start looking at larger apartments?"

We did. We were appalled.

"For that much money, we ought to just buy our own place."
We looked at each other.

That conversation had taken place many times before. Our current rent payment was already about what we'd expect to pay for a mortgage and other home-ownership expenses. We'd talked about the benefits of buying a place, and even did some preliminary looking. The first time we visited our bank we got laughed out when I tried to explain what my "primary" job was. ("Well, I don't really have a primary source of income, per se...")

"You know, I'm sure that our total income qualifies for a reasonable interest rate, and it's been consistent for a few years now."
"We could leave town at any time though, if you win an audition somewhere else."
"That's true, but that's just going to be the way it is until I either win one or we get some job here that rules out looking elsewhere."
"I sure wish we hadn't just spent (obscenely large amount of money) buying two cars...but we might be able to scrape together a down payment."
"It couldn't hurt to ask, right?"

So we asked.

"Yes, with your current income you would qualify. Now, tell me what you do for work?"

"Sure, I play second trumpet with the S Orchestra."
"Okay, anything else."
"Yes, I also play with the R Orchestra and the B Orchestra. And I teach at a local Christian school. And I teach at the local community music school. And I teach at H college. And I have a church job."
"....oh. And do you have paystubs from the last 60 days for all these jobs?"
"Not at all."

And so began our education of the mortgage process. I checked out a bunch of books from the local library with titles like "Mortgages for Dummies" and "How to Buy Your First Home" and "The Cambridge History of the Ancient World, Volume III: The Assyrian Empire." We also talked to lots of our similar-aged friends who had recently gone through the process, and some of our older friends who had been telling us to save our paystubs for years. We learned the meanings of words like "escrow" (somebody takes your money) and "PMI" (an insurance company takes your money) and "title insurance" (a different insurance company takes more of your money) and "origination fees" (a guy at a desk with a calculator takes your money) and "closing costs." (the bank takes whatever is left of your money.)

We sort of accidentally stumbled onto our Realtor in the early part of the process. J found a program online that offered rebates to teachers who are looking to buy houses ("I teach sometimes, if it's not an orchestra week and my students haven't cancelled!") and we were connected to a local Realtor who I will not name. She did not make a favorable impression. She had a distinctly unrefined manner. She showed up to viewings in flip flops and an oversized bermuda shirt with her tiny dog yapping in the back of her SUV. She didn't take particularly special care to pronounce her consonants, and we both had some serious doubts about whether she'd be able to decipher the enormous stacks of legal documents that were puzzling us at the first paragraph.

She was great. She brutally honest with us and with everyone we interacted with, and she asked all the rude questions to selling and listing agents that we would have been to polite to raise. She gave us candid evaluations of what she thought each place was worth when we finished looking at them, and she put us in touch with a good lawyer and a good inspector.

There were a lot of dud houses in between, though. We didn't exactly know what we were looking for, so when someone would ask us what we thought of the house we'd just visited, we'd stammer out something along the lines of. "Well, it definitely had walls...and a ceiling. I think there was a basement...funny smell...green paint?"

J found our house late one night while the baby was kicking her and keeping her awake. It was a brand new listing, and she loved the hardwood floors and the bright photos of the inside. She immediately emailed it to our Realtor. An hour later, when she still hadn't fallen asleep, she emailed her again. "We really REALLY want to look at this one as soon as possible."

12 hours later we made an offer, which was accepted later that night.

It was about here that we switched over from our bank to an independent mortgage broker. It was a good move. The bank was slow and unhelpful. Our agent at the broker was great...he worked a couple of long nights at the end to get everything ready, and he was always on top of getting us in. It was the end of August when we had our big first meeting with him.

"It looks like you should be able to hit the number that we're going to need for closing" he said "but you may need to eat peanut butter and jelly for a while. You're going to need X amount of dollars by Y date."

Thus began the daily process of checking our bank account, watching the expenses trickle out through the week, and then the paychecks replenishing on Friday. Then there were the big expenses at the beginning of the month, and we'd be two thousand short again...and then it would go back up.

There were some tense moments. The selling agent pulled some dirty tricks to try to get the process moving faster, and the date (Y) by which we needed to have X dollars got moved up by a few weeks. We saved harder. I took some extra gigs. Then we found out that the X dollars would actually need to be a higher number than we thought. So we saved even harder. Then we found out that out of my seven jobs and J's three, only five would count. This made our monthly debt to income ratio slightly outside the acceptable margin. So we called in a favor (which we won't name, but which was very generous) and we wiped out one of our small debts with a gift.

There was so much paperwork. There were paystubs to be tracked down, tax forms to be printed, waivers to be signed, inspections to be approved, and all of it had to be scanned and sent back into the office as soon as possible. I don't know how this process worked before iPhones, but the scanner feature on my phone was a life saver. There were a few times when J found something in the mail and scanned something while I was in rehearsal. We ended up making five trips to the bank to print out copies of ATM deposits we'd made over the last two months to prove that our gig checks weren't for drug money. All of the sorts of tasks that I'd have put off until an evening off were rushed through breathlessly between lessons and before dinner so we could get them in on time.

And then there were the temptations. We've never been really big spenders, as a family, but I think we all felt the belt tighten as we cut down on any frivolous expense. There was no ordering out a pizza when we were too tired to cook. We stopped buying at Wegmans what we could get at Aldi's. The iPhone 6 came out, and I could have traded mine in if I fronted $200, but I chose not to. We packed peanut butter and jelly for lunch

And then, we were down to the wire and we were cleared to close. We waited to hear from our attorney about what the closing date might be. I got a voicemail on Wednesday from him: "Hi Mr. Smith, this is John Staples from the law office of Mitch Vericello. We've set a closing date for Friday, October 17th, and Mr. Vericello himself is going to be present for your closing paperwork. You'll need a cashier's check in the amount of X dollars."

At 1:00 today I drove to the bank and got a cashier's check drawn up in the largest amount of money that's ever been in my hands. We drove (with James, and fully caffeinated) to the law offices of Mitch Vericello, where Mr. Vericello himself gave us a terse greeting and escorted us back into a non-child-friendly room and gave us a mountain of papers to sign. His shirt was tucked into his underwear.

And then, an hour later, we emerged as homeowners. The sellers are still in the property for the next two days, and then I have a week of Die Fledermaus in Syracuse with rehearsals every single night...we're hoping we can scrounge together enough of a crew to move on Saturday. The new place still smells like the seller's cats, but we're hoping that the removal of their junk will help with that a good deal. Either way, we'll be over there during the days this week unloading books and scrubbing.

At this point, I feel surprisingly calm about the whole thing. There were some really tense moments in there. Last Friday was the day that we needed to hit our minimum amount in the account to get cleared to close, and it was a lot closer than I'd care to admit. That whole day I walked around looking worried and checking my phone every five minutes. But today, as it all wraps up, I just feel happy and relaxed. J is going to have her very own house, in which she can decorate it as she sees fit, so long as it costs less than $10. James is going to have a backyard, which is basically the best thing an almost-three-year old could ask for.

And the new baby won't have to sleep in the storage unit.

Coda: James spent most of this evening dragging his most valuable possessions (George, Steven, his toy vacuum, and a large stick) to the front door and informing us that he was ready to move to the new house. This is significant progress from the child who refused to let George and Steven leave the apartment all week after seeing the new house for the first time. We're pretty sure he was convinced that as long as they were in the apartment we couldn't move anywhere. We've had several chats since about how Mommy and Daddy and George and Steven and all of our toys are going to the new house together. This seems to have helped.

The process of getting to closing this afternoon was a roller coaster unlike anything I'd previously experienced. If we hadn't put down $X in earnest money at the very beginning I'm not sure we would have held out to the end. But hold out we did, and major kudos to our realtor, who ended up not being nearly as scary as her SUV dog would have indicated, our family, and friends who helped educate us in the process. And to the author of this blog, who truly shouldered the vast majority of the paperwork/scanning/phone calling/money making burden himself--may this house be a sweet haven of rest and provide you with a dwelling to practice in without serving as the inspiration for new apartment-complex noise regulations.

Blog Prompts, Post 2

If James were president.

FIrst off, let me say that this is a TERRIBLE idea. James is not even three, so he should not be entrusted with the highest executive office in the country, let alone the de facto rule of global American interests. He would certainly be an unpopular, one-term president. (Although I'm sure everyone would agree that his presidential portrait is very sweet. He can't even sign his own name, so any legislation that passed through congress would stagnate in a heap on top of the oval office desk. Either that, or he would color on it. He can't read, so he would be unable to deliver any speeches or addresses, and he gets shy in big groups anyway. (Maybe he'd be able to read simple speeches in the style of Dr. Seuss by his third or fourth year in office.) His supreme court nomination (Steven Bear) would certainly be rejected by congress. He would be almost useless in a military situation, and I think that his general interactions with other elected representatives would be characterized by a petty and petulant insistence on doing whatever happened to strike his own momentary interests without any reference to the general good or sense of appropriate civil discourse. So, no big difference there. (ZING!!!)

What would his life look like? He'd probably appoint George chief of staff. They'd have a good working relationship, I'm sure, but George isn't very good at communicating his thoughts except through James. ("George is need to watch a George. He needs to watch his self.")

Most of the time he'd either stand at the oval office window and watch the groundskeepers mow the lawn of the Washington mall, or he'd instruct his secret service agents to drive the presidential motorcade through a carwash over and over again.

His secret service detail would have their hands full, I'm sure. They'd constantly be whispering things into their coms like "The president has just been crouching under the oval office desk, code brown, code brown." Or, "We have a situation in the living quarters, George and Steven are taking a nap. I repeat, George and Steven are taking a nap under the red blanket. No personnel are allowed in. Please instruct the Prime Minister that he'll need to reschedule."

Life for J and I, on the other hand, wouldn't be so bad. We'd hang out in the White House living quarters in our pajamas, and I could practice whenever I wanted in the National Cathedral. With all the free childcare we'd entrust ourselves with diplomatic missions to Key West or to Cancun, or maybe to Paris for a weekend on Air Force One.

The rest of our family would have it pretty good, too. Mom and Dad would come and visit, and the kitchen staff would have to tell Mom repeatedly that she really didn't need to help them with the dishes after supper. Dad would get into the free White House-brewed beer, and then take funny pictures of himself giving the presidential portraits a drink. J's Mom and Dad would come too, and her Dad would linger in the halls reading all of the historical placards very carefully, and perhaps pointing out a spot or two in the hall where the paint on the trim might need some touch-up. Her Mom would probably need to go pick grapes out in the White House garden with the President himself.

"Sir, we're gonna have a situation. The president has just eaten three full clusters of red concords, we are anticipating class 3 diaper, repeat class 3 diaper sometime in the next 48 hours."

"Roger that. We'll see if the Queen can reschedule to next week."

Smith Academy

It's been a longstanding joke between the brothers that we ought to buy houses next to one another and split up the tasks of childcare and education between all six households. That way every set of parents has one busy day and five days off. And the sabbath, I suppose. Our wives all find this to be a hilarious and innately practical idea as well.

I've actually been doing some preparatory reading about homeschooling recently. I found a copy of Susan Bauer's The Well Trained Mind and read it over the summer. It was helpful to see a structured K-12 arrangement of what a classical education might look like for James. I made notes of the resource lists, and nodded in agreement with her curriculum recommendations. I even tried to do a little bit of introductory phonics with James. This is how it went:

"Okay James, if you can tell me what this letter is I'll give you one raisin."
"I want five raisins."
"You can have five raisins if you spell five letters."
"George is wanna eat five raisins, don't you George?"
<George nods>
"Okay, what's this letter right here?"
"ARREE YOUUU WEADDYYY...FOR CHWISTMAS DAY TO COME!!!"
"James, do you want any raisins?"
"I want five raisins."
"Then what's this letter?"
"SIIIING IT WIT MEEEE, OR IF YOU A MONKEY HUMMM!!!!"
"James, what's this letter?"
"George is not wanna look at the letter C."
"That's right! This is the letter C! And what sound does it make?"
"I want five raisins."
"George George George George George."
"What sound does C make? C says...."
"Daddy, you wanna go outside?"
"After you tell me what the letter C says."
"I need FIVE raisins."

At any rate, Bauer's book confirmed many of the inkling ideas I had about classical education: that the grammar school years should be spent doing, well, grammar. Kindergarten through 4th grade for James (and for any of his cousins who live across the street from us) will be heavy on the reading, spelling, and composition. There will be lots of talk about how to take apart a sentence and put it back together. The mathematics will be about building blocks, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Insofar as there is any foreign language work, it will be more about vocabulary and grammar than spoken fluency or cultural background. There will be very little in the way of tech education, and lots in the way of history and stories. Music lessons will probably be a little heavier on the music theory and a little lighter on the lesson book tunes than a traditional method. Then in 5th through 8th grade or thereabouts the emphasis will shift towards logic and argument in each of the disciplines, ending with rhetoric and specialization in the high school years.

But first I need to buy more raisins.

The preceding blog was brought to you in part by Lucas Smith, who promises to send me a prompt every day for the next thirty days in conjunction with my promise to respond to each prompt with a short blog.

Quick Hitters

I.
"Mommy, I need to read my Greek book."
"What's he talking about?"
James comes back in holding Richard Scarry's Best Big First Book.
"You need to read me my Greek book."

We're not sure where that one came from.

II.
We moved C&B again. They move so often that I end up feeling pretty good about our six places of residence. But now that they've moved, we're next. We'll be inheriting their boxes soon, and then packing up the house again. I'm glad that we had a practice move before starting work on this one. C&B are very efficient packers/planners. They had every box neatly stacked up in the living room, and a good plan for loading the truck. All of my lifting muscles are now in shape, and I have a huge bruise on my right thigh. I'm not looking forward to moving all our junk again, but here are three great parts about moving: 1) When you see all of your books getting packed and unpacked it makes you want to read them, even the books that have been right under your nose for a year and you've had no interest. There's something about changing it up that makes them all seem fresh. 2) A drink of cold beverage is never so refreshing as when you've put in a day of honest manual labor. (I have not done this since the last time we moved.) 3) L's running commentary of the moving process is pretty entertaining. All of his siblings will continue to move periodically just to hear him complain about it.

III.
"Daddy, George wants to go for a tractor ride."
"Can I talk to George?"
"George, you and James can't go for a tractor ride right now because it's raining. So, we need to stay inside. Do you understand? Okay, thanks George."
"Daddy, I wanna talk to George too."
"Okay, here he is."
"George, you wanna go for a tractor ride, George? You do? Daddy, George is wanna go for a tractor ride."

IV.
"Mr. Smith, I practiced my saxophone a lot this week."
"I can tell, you're doing a good job with your notes and your fingers. Don't forget to keep your right hand all the way down at the thumbrest."
"You know, I sound like a fire alarm."
"...Joe, that is exactly what you sound like."

V.
"Yes, could I have a large black coffee, please? And I'm a bottomless mug member."
"Sure, pull up to the window. Oh, hi, how are you?"
"Good, how are you? Have you met my wife, J?"
"Nice to meet you...what are you guys off to tonight?"
"Well, we've dropped off the little boy and we're out on a date."
"Oh, congratulations. What are you going to do?"
"Well, I guess actually I'll be going to work with RPO and J will be way up at the top of the balcony all evening."
"Yeah, I don't think that's actually a date."

VI.
Friday trumpet itinerary:
8:45 Rehearsal with organ (piccolo trumpet) for chapel service
11:00 Chapel service, processional and recessional
12:30 Trumpet lesson
1:30 Call from RPO about emergency subbing. 30 min. of practicing Berlioz
2:00 Trumpet lesson
2:30 Trumpet lesson
4:00 Trumpet lesson
6:15 Soundcheck for Turrin Intrada
7:30 Wind Ensemble piece
7:45 Turrin Intrada
8:15 Finale of Mahler 2

News

Well, the year started again and I got BUSY. It was such a lovely summer. I could blog almost every day, except on the busy days when I might have the incredible imposition of one random lesson to teach, or a single orchestra service out in a field somewhere. And now, work is back. That's really okay, though. I enjoy going to work most of the time. (Strictly, this isn't true--I enjoy BEING at work, but the commuting to work, especially in Buffalo and Syracuse, is kind of a drag.) Here's how everything has been going for the first few weeks.

GPC-
My choir is eager to be back singing again after a long summer off. We hired a new organist who just moved back from NYC with his partner, who is a pro harp player. As is typical, I am missing too much time to take other gigs. Like tonight. Thanks to Pax, who is covering rehearsal for me.

LCS-
Lots of beginner lessons. I'm starting to get half-decent at coaxing sounds out of 4th grade flute and clarinet players. (Interestingly, none of my trombones are every shy about making a sound.) I had a new vocal music teacher in the room for three weeks, who then quit. The new new vocal music teacher starts next week. I am sad that it didn't work out for the first one, and only wonder a little bit if she might have stayed longer had I not been working through the Colin book of Contemporary Atonal Etudes for Trumpet

SSO-
Wizard of Oz, then Beethoven 5. It's been nice to see my carpool again, and to spend the afternoons of the double days stretched out in a sunny lawn next to Wegmans instead of cramped up inside while the snow comes down. The first week we bought a growler and worked through it all afternoon while we waited for the show. I thought that this year the first week of the season might not catch me quite so off guard since I was deliberately practicing loud long tones (why DID that vocal teacher at LCS quit?) and had a quasi-warm up week of BPO playing 4th on some Berlioz. then there was Beethoven 5. It was loud, but absolutely glorious.

RPO-
It's nice to have quite a bit of RPO lined up for the fall...what a nice short commute! In addition to a community concert I did a fanfare with some of the section guys at a school and a phils week next week.

HSM-
"Mr. Smith, I couldn't practice this week because I was really busy."
"Oh? How much tv did you watch this week?"
"Well, also I kind of forgot..."

H. College-
Interestingly, when the students are paying their own tuition (and are college students) they do a much better job of practicing. The commute is killer, but the job has been fun so far. J and I go down this Friday to play a trumpet ditty for the homecoming concert, and I sat in on their Wind Ensemble rehearsal last week. I forget how incredibly LOUD you end up playing in college band. Probably should work on more loud long tones soon. And maybe some shakes and trills on high notes, and some really percussive high register attacks. I wonder what the new vocal music teacher will be like...

BPO-
There were a few services of Berlioz early in the month, and I'm out for a double today playing a Bartok opera. Quote from the trumpet section: "Oh, yes, I was whistling that tune in the shower just this morning."

J-
J is watching three boys under the age of three today. I will get back at 9:30 or so tonight, and I suspect she will not be awake. Aside from the babysitting and church work, though, I think she's having a pretty nice Fall. James is much better behaved in a single-parent situation. When we're both around he's a little tyrant.

James-
James is...looking big. Looking downright, three years old, I'd say. He is routinely offered options by his parents, such as "Your choice is to eat three bites of squash, or to get down without dessert," or "Your choice is to stay up and pick up toys or to go to bed right now." Last night he told us "your choice are to make me a fruit smoothie or to set up the tent." I guess that cuts both ways. He's also started to imbue George with the faculty of speech and reason. He now holds lengthy furtive conversations with George and then emerges to inform us that "George wants to watch a George," or "George wants to watch his-self." When we tell James no, George (not James, mind you) keeps insisting that George really does want to watch a George. J has resorted to picking up George and telling him no in person.