Wow

There’s a woman outside the front of the house yelling at her kid(s) in *exactly* the same accent as Eliza Doolittle has at the beginning of “My Fair Lady”.  Only roughened some by age/drink/smoking (I don’t know which - can’t see the woman).

::smile::

Saint-Saens’ Symphony No. 3 is a wonderful piece to listen to whilst filling in letter of recommendation forms for graduate schools.  Very cheering and encouraging.  (For those who don’t know it by that title, the theme from the final movement was used as the main soundtrack melody for the film “Babe”.  If that helps.)

::sigh::

The job hunt isn’t going too well.  So today I’ve been taking my CV around to places like Starbucks, Gap, Shoon, Laura Ashley…  All I want is some part-time work to keep the bills covered while I work on job applications for other places and also while I work on grad school applications.  It’s quite depressing overall, though - I’ve never had such a bad hit rate, so to speak.  Thus far, I’m batting 0 for 12.  I know that the economy is in major slowdown and all that, but, well, it’s still depressing.  Particularly when I have a £750 visa application to make at the end of this week and only £500 to my name.  I can borrow from A, but, not to repeat myself, it’s still depressing.

New puzzle

Back at the end of August, the Gloucestershire Symphony Orchestra offered me the position of principal violist.  As I accepted it, this means that I’m responsible for attending “as many rehearsals as I can manage,” playing in the concerts (of course, except for the one that conflicts with a CSO concert), and getting the bowings straight for the viola section.  In return, I get paid a small fee for each concert - my first paid musical work (not counting busking at Saturday Market in Portland, although I’m by no means belittling that)!

So the second rehearsal is this evening - in just under three hours, in fact.  I’m sitting here at my desk with the music for Vaughan Williams’ Third Symphony open in front of me, following along as a recording of it plays on my computer, pretending my pencil is my bow.  And it’s really good, for several reasons:

1.) I had never heard this piece before last week’s rehearsal, and it is pleasantly unlike “The Lark Ascending,” a piece of V.W. doggerel that plays about every twenty minutes on Classic FM.

2.) I have a reasonable number of very exposed solos in the piece, so it’s nice to hear what they’re supposed to sound like!

3.) It’s actually a lot of fun trying to figure out the bowings.  I have to balance things like the fact that an up bow (when the strings players push their bow as opposed to pulling it) tends to crescendo, that sometimes the violas need to fall in line with other sections’ bowings, and that occasionally - as is the case for a section of music that prompted this entry - the violas have divisi within the section and the two (or three or four) parts have different numbers of notes, so I have to figure out how to land them all back on the same bow when we finally are tutti again.  It’s a neat sort of puzzle. 

Frankly, though, I’m glad that I’m cutting my teeth on Vaughan Williams rather than, say, Shostakovich or Martinu.  V.W. has significantly fewer notes to resolve. ::grin::

Here we go again…

“—- Félicitations !—-

Vous êtes inscrit(e) à la 33ème édition du Marathon de Paris qui aura lieu le dimanche 5 avril 2009.”

Best go dust off my running shoes, then.

Apparently not front-page news

Link. After my grandfather sent me a link to this article, I went scouting through the BBC webpages.  I already knew that I hadn’t heard it on the radio, so obviously it wasn’t big enough news for BBC to consider spreading it through that highly-accessible medium.  BBC’s coverage was buried in the regional pages for Kent.  Perhaps they are trying to discourage potential protesters from doing anything similar?

::sigh::

Quote from VP-hopeful Palin: “Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we’re going to lay more pipelines, build more nuclear plants, create jobs with clean coal and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative sources.”  Um, “clean coal?”  Oxymoron, anyone?  Nuclear plants?  WhywhywhywhywhywhyWHY do so many people INSIST on suggesting that nuclear power is at ALL a clean power source?  (Note: personal bugbear in play here.)  Any energy that produces waste that lasts tens of thousands of years and that is so destructive to all aspects of life that it has to be locked up in special underground chambers - which it eventually eats through - is not a solution, long-term, short-term, any-term.

::shaking herself by the mental scruff of the neck:: Anyway, this was just one quote from a speech that was filled with all sorts of disturbing things.  One little frosting on the cake: weren’t the two main candidates (McCain in particular, as I recall) talking about having a respectful, intelligent, debatory sort of campaign?  Why has it descended into mocking and smear tactics so damn quickly?

Evil is the new good

Link.  Read at your own risk: whether you are liberal, conservative, or “meh,” this article (forwarded to me by my grandfather) is likely to raise your blood pressure a few notches.

::cue “Twilight Zone” theme::

Hee hee hee - I love things like this!

Three facts about me:

1.)  I’m a big “Highlander” fan.  The TV show, not the films, and I’m not as big a fan as some out there, but I will quite happily while away hours - days - watching the series.  I’m such a big fan that I used to date an Adrian Paul look-alike.  (Okay, my fandom and my dating history aren’t actually causally-related, but it’s a nice coincidence.)

2.)  I used to play on Reed’s history department softball team, The Dead White Men, every Renn Fayre.  I always chose Sir Francis Drake as my dead white man - who better than a state-supported pirate?

3.)  When I lived in Boston, I would occasionally help Berklee School of Music students desperately searching for violists to help them record their new compositions.  I helped one student, Lucas Vidal, several times, including the recording of his score for the film “Cathedral Pines.”

Lucas Vidal’s most current composition work, according to his IMDB page, is the score for “The Immortal Voyage of Captain Drake,” a TV movie about - who else? - Sir Francis himself.  And guess who plays Drake?  You got it - Adrian Paul!

Wheeeeee!

Ooooooooo - I just figured out that that means that I’m only three degrees of separation from Adrian Paul!  Huzzah!

Classical music mockery

Link. In watching a couple of clips of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing “Der Lindenbaum” and “Der Erlkonig” (I’d highly recommend listening to them both, particularly the second), I noticed a listing for the linked clip.  Dudley Moore is a genius.

Cutaneous fun

So, I was patting myself on the back for getting through seven weeks in Africa with nothing worse than a cold - no stomach troubles, intestinal troubles, only one sunburn, not getting eaten by hippos…  But something has been bugging me.  Literally, as it turns out.

The second toe on my left foot has been bleeding just under the nail, off and on, and with no apparent trigger (i.e. without me stubbing my toe) for about two and a half weeks now.  There was a small, circular hole just there - I thought I had had a thorn puncture my toe and it was just taking a while to heal, it being Africa and all. 

But this morning, on my way to the shower, it started bleeding again.  After my shower, well, not to be too graphic, I had a look.  Found pus, lots of blood and, um, eggs.  So I went to the doctor this morning.

He said it was likely to be this: cutaneous larva migrans.  Again, wanting to skip the gross stuff (it grossed me out whilst I was doing it), suffice it to say that my “look” of the morning was probably sufficient to get rid of most of the problem, but he also prescribed me a one-off tablet.  He said that his wife has spent a lot of time in Uganda, gets things like this all the time, and generally doesn’t take anything for them.  However, if I start to feel funny later on (can be weeks or months, even), I should come back and get checked.

So, the toll for Africa: 1 hippo attack, 1 bad sunburn, 1 annoying cold, 1 attempted parasite.  Not bad, all in all, and really, what would a trip to Africa be without a little excitement?

Wasn’t squished

I’m writing this from our accomodation in Lusaka on the last day before we head off again.  We’re staying at a place called Nena’s Guest House and Restaurant, which is quite nice, particularly in that their campsite rentals includes a tent, much bigger than the one we’re carrying with us.  We head up to Kapiri Mposhi tomorrow morning early, there to catch the Tazara train to Dar es Salaam.  I’m really looking forward to this train journey - I’ve heard very good things about it.

Wednesday to Saturday of this last week was given over to our canoeing safari.  I can’t do justice to how wonderful the trip was in the few minutes I have to update.  Apart from one too-close call with a hippo who took umbrage at our canoe and decided to try to tip us over (it didn’t quite succeed, but I can say with first-hand honesty that a hippo at six feet away is a remarkably large animal), everything was easy and beautiful.  Seeing my first wild elephants was (though it may sound cliched to say so) aboslutely magical.  I had no real conception of how wonderful it would be because I had no real conception of just *how* different elephants in a zoo are from elephants in the wild.  I mean, I knew that they were different, but not how different.  And we saw so many!  One group of five bull elephants cut us off from our canoes during a lunch break and came close to drowning my camera with their splashing around; I wouldn’t really have minded if they had, because it was so incredible to see them so close.

I’m sorry that I can’t give a more complete update right now, but the last few weeks have been too packed to do justice to in a short sitting.  I will write more when we get back, obviously.  Only two or three more countries to go!  Actually, I can’t believe how much time we have left.  I had expected the seven weeks to fly by, but they haven’t.  They’ve progressed at quite a normal rate, possibly because we’ve spent so much time crammed into uncomfortable minibuses.  :-)  Anyway, I hope that everyone is doing well, and I look forward to hearing how your summers have gone when I get back!

P.S.  I haven’t been able to find postcards anywhere except in South Africa, where I only bought two because I thought I’d be able to find them everywhere.  So if you haven’t received one yet, that’s why!  I’m hoping that there will be more to hand in Tanzania.

Still moving

(Copied from an email I sent to my mom.)
—————-
And, as a further update, we’re now in Mozambique.  We arrived in Maputo last night at about 7 p.m. and found a hostel - Fatima’s - where we’re staying tonight as well.  We walked around Maputo this morning and I think I’ll suggest that we go for a wander again this afternoon; I’m trying to work up the courage to use my camera.  It’s hard - I don’t want to feel too much like a tourist or make myself too much of a “mark”, but at the same time, I don’t want to NOT take photos!  ::shrug::

Tomorrow we’re going to get up really early (taxi at about 5:30 a.m.) to go out to the bus station and catch a bus to Vilankulo, a long (12 hour) slog up the coast.  We’ll stay there a couple of nights, hopefully, and get a chance to go snorkeling (maybe) in the Marine Reserve there.  Then it’s onwards, in a series of long days on buses, up to the Ilha de Mocambique, where we’ll stay for a few days, assuming everything goes right!  :-)

It’s good here, but what with sleeping in the dorms and spending days on buses, I’m feeling pretty tired already.  I’m looking forward to getting up to the Ilha and having a few days of down time.  Who knew that traveling was so exhausting?

We’re here!

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we got safely to Africa.  We’ve just spent a lovely down down in Royal Natal Park, hiking to a gorge called Devil’s Tooth Gully, and spent most of today getting back up here to Jo’burg, from where we’ll depart for Mozambique tomorrow, hopefully!

Off we go

Our plane for Africa departs tomorrow evening.  Today I have done the first run of packing.  Keeping in mind that I have never been backpacking before, not really…  Geez, backpacks can be heavy suckers!  And I don’t really know what I could drop to lessen the weight.  The three single-most heavy things in my bag are my sleeping pad (an inflatable one - not even self-inflatable, so no extra weight of foam or anything like that), my camera, and my tripod.  The first I’m not sure that I could sleep without, the second is non-negotiable, and the third, I’m not willing to give up, since I want my photos to turn out!  A is going to carry the tent…  I guess it’s just a matter of getting used to it.

Anyway, other than that, everything is in order.  We took our first malaria tablets this morning and I am glad to report no ill side-effects.  That’s a relief; I had been worried that I might be one of those people for whom taking the tablets is comparable or worse than actually getting malaria!  :-)

Wish us luck, everyone!  I’ll update on here when and if I get the chance, but I doubt it will be anything extended.  So you’ll have to wait until September until the reports start coming back!

I’m off to Africa!