Friday, July 28, 2006

I'm Goin' To Iceland

Well, the day has arrived. My car comes in an hour to take me to the airport, and I'm meeting up with the girls in Minneapolis to catch our flight to Keflavik. Woot! I'm so tired and hungry, it's really just unbelievable.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

MONEY!!!!

Well, the tour is going well. We currently have $2100 in the quartet bank account, with another $500 confirmed, and more coming in from our Regina concert tonight. And I got some exciting money news for me - UBC gave me full scholarship plus more! I'm very excited, because I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to afford it..... When I was accepted by the Faculty of Music, they gave me a $1000 scholarship. And when I was origionally accepted by the school they gave me a $500 scholarship. I applied for more, not thinking I'd really get anything, and yesterday my letter came in the mail saying I had been awarded the $5000 Chancellor's Scholarship, and the $2000 President's Scholarship. And my tuition is only about $5100, so they're just going to cut me a cheque for the rest. Yay! I'm thinking of investing in a laptop, because to keep my scholarships I have to keep a pretty high average, and so I think it might be beneficial for my work to have one. But I'll deal with that when it comes. Maybe I should pay off some of my debt too...... Tomorrow we head back to Calgary, and on Friday it's off to Iceland!

Sunday, July 23, 2006

HOT!

Wow, it's hot in Calgary today. It's 11:15 pm and I'm sweating like a pig. Disgusting. Anyways, our tour has basically officially started. We kicked off with a concert at Ingunn's parent's house in Calgary on thursday night, where people were extremely generous and we came away with $815 CND, plus $20 US (we have a stop-over in Minneapolis). We played a concert this afternoon in Sundre AB at the Mountainview Festival's new unfinished concert hall - when it's finished it's going to be pretty sweet. Tomorrow we play at the opening ceremonies of a museum in Markerville, then are on the road for Toon-town. We'll probably get in pretty late, seeing as how I don't think we'll be leaving Markerville before about 4 pm, and it's an approx. 8 hour drive. Yee-haw. And sadly, we have to listen to Ingunn's CD selection, which is odd. I guess she's just older than me though, because alot of her CDs are sort of before my time a little - like by a couple of years, but it's mostly stuff I could care less about, like REM. All their songs sound the same, but in a more depressing way than the way all Britney songs sound the same. But I'm sure we'll survive somehow. Our pieces are going okay, but our intonation is still a little off, due to a number of factors. The biggest being that with the extreme heat, and even high humidity (for the prairies), and the change in humidity for Catherine and Michelle who came directly from humid places (Toronto and California), our instruments don't really stay in tune for the time it takes us to play a whole piece. It's actually super annoying to have to re-tune every couple of minutes. Gah! And it doesn't help that all our locations are churches, not climate-controlled concert halls (which the instruments would react to better). Throughout our concerts the hot locations invariably get hotter, forcing our instruments more and more out of tune. But I'm sure we'll live somehow. Iceland will be nice and cool - I think somewhere around 15 degrees?

Monday, July 17, 2006

Cowtown

I know it's been a while, I'm sorry. My whole stay in Saskatoon was entirely uneventful, except for that I got sick a lot. I got heat stroke one day, and it was not pretty. And then towards the end of my stay I got this really bad fever, and I just thought that I had whatever bug was going around. So I hopped on a bus to Calgary last Friday, and spent 8 1/2 hours popping Tylenol to keep my fever down. The day after I got to Ingunn's, my face and neck swelled up and I got a full body rash. It was very painful, and I also had a dangerously high fever. Turns out I was having an allergic reaction to these antibiotics my doctor had put me on. It was unpleasant, but at least when the doctor asks if I'm allergic to any medicine, I have an answer other than, "I don't think so..." So we've been holed up and rehearsing, but we have to venture out to Canmore today because Catherine's soundpost is fucked up, and Ingunn has an open seam. So we are taking their instruments into Wilder and Davis to get fixed - it's hard to rehearse when nobody can play their instruments. So we have to go do that now.