President’s Day weekend was spent with Noah. Steve and I drove to St. Louis Friday night, we went to the temple, and then we spent the night with Emily, Joe, and Noah. Saturday morning, we loaded up the pack and play, the diapers and p.j.s, the smarter-than-grandparents car seat, and, of course, Noah and took him back to Columbia so his mom and dad could enjoy a small get-away at a bed and breakfast in Rocheport. Yea, they were practically around the corner from us and so on Sunday, they joined us for the afternoon and dinner before they drove back to St. Louis. Noah was just great at our house.
He ate well, went to sleep when he needed to, let me wash his hair Saturday night and comb it Sunday morning for church (it tickled Emily that I actually wet down and parted his hair, keeping it in place with spray gel) Here is grandpa helping Noah brush his teeth.
I WISH I had pulled my camera out when those two baked mint brownies together…..
And now this weekend is over and I have been relieved of two big burdens. The string quartet had a wedding Saturday afternoon at 4:00 and then the Civic Orchestra had a concert at 7:00 and I spent every spare minute last week preparing for both events. BIG sigh of relief when the last note was played in the Missouri Theater last night! First, the wedding was booked by a coordinator whose business I want to keep so, even though Siri and Julia, the amazing violinists in the Prairie String Quartet could not take part in this wedding due to a run-through of the CCO concert for that night, I said we would take the job. It took some looking but I finally found two violinists not involved with CCO. OK. Whew. But then I learned the bride’s music selections. She wanted “All I Ask Of You” (which we did not have), “Hallelujah” by Cohen (did not have), and, for her recessional, “Be My Baby” (the old 50’s song – definitely didn’t have that). Add to the mix a tenor who couldn’t sing the “Lord’s Prayer” in C (the key we had) but it needed to be in B-flat. How hard is it to sing just one step higher??? So, I set to work to get the music lined up. I found an arrangement of All I Ask Of You in both C and D (the original is in D-flat) and I bought it! The organist for the wedding gave me piano versions of Hallelujah and Be My Baby and I decided that the first was pretty enough to make a simple string quartet version so I spent some time in front of Finale to do that. Be My Baby was hopefully going to be dumped if parents could talk some sense into the bride and groom so I just decided we would hack our way through a piano copy as best we could. Turned out, it was scratched and the normal Wedding March was put in its place. Hooray. Finally, I decided that having the Lord’s Prayer in B-flat was probably a good idea for future requests so I wrestled with Finale yet again. And this one WAS a tussle because I have a watered-down version of the program and it does not like multi-meter. And the song starts in 4/4, goes to 9/8, spends four measures in 12/8, and ends back in 9/8. Yikes! I did a LOT of cutting a pasting. Then, I had to deliver all this music to the substitute violinists after organizing their gig notebooks with all the music in order. Whew, this is a really long description but now you know why my life leading up to this wedding was so crazy. When the big event actually arrived, things went fairly smoothly except for the fact that the first violinist – a masters student in violin performance – hadn’t even looked at his music for the week he had it! He sight read and did that rather poorly when he had to do some serious counting! The prelude was thirty minutes of ulcer, wondering when he was going to miss-count a rhythmic passage again. That kid is NOT going to get hired by us again, that is for sure. The second violinist, bless her perfectionist freshman heart, DID practice and she was solid as a rock. Yea, Tamara. Wedding over and I drove over to the theater for the CCO concert. It was an all-21st century composer night which meant much of the music was difficult – to play and even to listen to. When I wasn’t working on wedding, I was practicing my cello. There was one number that I really liked – written by John Cheetham, my former theory prof at MU – and I wanted to play it my very best. When he came to a rehearsal two weeks ago, he sat right behind the cello section and, because I had not practiced it very well, I stank. I was so ashamed to have him hear me play so poorly that I worked and worked on his runs and tricky syncopated rhythms in three flats. And, in the Dark Knight piece, I wanted to get the cool sixteenth note that went really fast. Lots of practice. I am happy to say the work paid off. The concert went well. And, best part was that I had four people in the audience: Steve, Steven, Jason Bell, and Melanie.
Final note (no pun intended) - We had a snow on Thursday that was just beautiful. I couldn’t stop taking photos.
Notice how the snow stuck to everything like there was glue. I call the photo below Trissy's water bowl margarita.....
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