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.

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!

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?

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.

Daddeeeeeeee

Well, it's been a while since I updated. Mostly because since I've been in Saskatoon I've been sitting around watching movies. The weather has been crap-tastic, overcast and rainy, for almost two weeks. I'm supposed to be doing yard work for my Aunt Margaret, but not much chance of that in this weather. I worked for three days this week at Lorne Calvert's MLA office filling in for the woman who normally works there. I got to deal with lots of annoying people who didn't understand that the provincial and federal governments are different things. Argh. And also people who want you to do things for them, and have you to magically have all the answers for them right then on the phone. So then after they abuse you, and you look into it and find out the answers, they don't say thank you because they're jerks. But it was an interesting learning experience - and I did get to meet most of the Saskatoon MLAs. They all know Cayley because of his position in Regina, and then they started waxing poetic about what a nice young man he is. Right. I could enlighten them on a few things. Anyways, I basically am going to be sitting around for the next week or two till I go to Calgary to rehearse with the quartet, so I most likely won't be updating.

Happy Father's Day!

Back in Black

Well, I'm back in Saskatoon. The recital was Thursday night, and it went good, and then I came back on the bus yesterday. This morning my mom woke me up at 10 and told me that I had to not only pick up my brother Cayley at the bus station at 11, but that he was taking me to the neighbourhood cleanup. So I picked him up, and headed into the 'hood. It's an initiative by the NDP constituency office, because Premier Calvert is our MLA. They told all the home owners, landlords, and tenants that any crap they wanted hauled away (tree branches, old appliances, etc.) to just put them in the alley and we'd come and haul them away. I met Premier Calvert, and Yvonne who I'll be working for at the office in a couple of weeks. However, we really only made an appearance because the whole reason Cayley's in town this week is he has to go to a wedding with his girlfriend Carly. Some friends of hers from the U of S are getting married, and he was her arm candy. Only, he had no idea what time the wedding was. So at about 11:40 he got a call from Carly on his cell saying her hair appointment just finished, and the wedding was at 1, so he had to pick her up from the Midtown Plaza. So we went and picked up Carly, and I dropped them off at her pad, and I returned home. I've just been bumming around this afternoon, unpacking all my boxes so I can organize what I need to take to Vancouver and what I can leave here. Tonight we're going to a Prairie Virtuosi concert - they're a chamber orchestra I used to play in, and they agreed to put inserts for our quartet concert in their programs. Sweet.

OK Fine

So, I take it back. They're not that wierd - they're actually really nice. If a little overly religious, but of course they must find my complete lack of religiousness a little strange also. I had to go and buy a crappy Dan Brown paperback to read, because the only books in the house are religious ones. But other than that, it's all good. We're rehearsing this afternoon at somebody's house who has a grand piano, and since they live near West Edmonton Mall, Matthew and I are going to rehearse the Clarke first and then I'm going shopping!!!! After, I'm going to meet up with my Aunt Elaine who's been in Korea for the past five or six years. So, good work.

Wow

Well, I'm in Edmonton now. Markerville to be more exact. I dropped my bow off to be rehaired at a place in Edmonton, they said they'd put a rush on it and I'd have it by Wed night or Thursday morning. I can't say very much because I'm on the communal computer in the living room, but after meeting only Matthew's mother, I'm surprised he's as normal as he is. Seriously. That and they have bible quotes all over their bathroom.

Home again

Home again, home again, jiggity jig. Well, to be more precise, Ingunn's home. But whatever. Domaine was super awesome AGAIN, and I even enjoyed the retardedly long concert yesterday. It lasted 7 1/2 hours - I went on stage at 2pm with the first group, and the last group finished at 9:30. So then we had to party. Like crazy party, with people peeing in the bushes and everything. We ate a late dinner after the concert, and the best part was as I walked into the room where we ate, one of my chamber coachs, Ian Swensen, handed me a beer. Then after we finished eating, my other chamber coach, Anssi Karttunen, invited all the people from his two groups up to his studio where he produced a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Apparently in the States, teacher aren't allowed to pour liquor down their students throats. Just one more reason to study in Canada. I then proceeded to drink lots, and mix my liquors, which was a very bad idea. As I discovered this morning when I woke up in a room full of stolen pate and cheese, and could not keep anything down for hours. Apparently while very drunk, Carolyn and Catherine thought it would be genius to steal the pate and cheese from the party. But then they just left it sitting out all night. Needless to say, it was very disgusting by the morning.

About a week ago Carolyn told Martin Beaver about Steve leaving all these messages on her phone and how he pronounces my name (Kah-tya). Martin thought this was hilarious and proceeded to call me Kah-tya all the time, and got everyone else to do it also. Then he started singing it, while conducting himself like a choral conductor at the same time. It culminated in the moment when I walked back into the room from drinking champagne in Anssi's room, and the entire camp (all the students and all the faculty) erupted into singing. Singing "Kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah-tyaaaaaaaaaaaa". It was pretty awesome, I have to say. I'm thinking of hiring someone to just follow me around all the time singing my name. You should try it.

We set off from Domaine around noonish and got as far as Chez Ginette's, the local greasy spoon at the bottom of the hill. It's a Domaine tradition that you have to eat one last cheeseburger before you leave, but unfortunatly I couldn't stomach more than a few bites of poutine. Happily though, the grease soaked up the rest of the liquor in my stomach, and by Quebec city I was feeling good again. We decided to show Ingunn a bit of Quebec city from the car, as she'd never been there before, but we just ended up getting kind of disoriented and lost and its windy and confusing streets. We finally made it out, and it was clear sailing the rest of the way back to TO. I'm off to Edmonton tomorrow (or rather, later today) - watch out, it should be hilarious. Check my Flickr site for more photo goodness from Domaine.

Flickr

I made a page on Flickr for all of my photos. Check it out. http://www.flickr.com/photos/39938743@N00/
I don`t have much time, as we`re in the middle of the big chamber music marathon. The concert started at 2 pm, and will probably go till about 10 - there`s 12 groups all playing full works. Yeehaw.

It`s Alive!

Well, now here I am at Domaine. I`m in the middle of nowhere, where no one speaks English. It`s totally awesome. It`s wierd though, being disconnected from the world. The internet was down for the whole day here yesterday because it was super stormy, and everybody was really antsy. It wasn`t that we had to really DO anything, but it`s our only connection to the outside world. Just the fact that we couldn`t check our email or read the news was unsettling. It`s been disgusting and rainy ever since we got here on Wednesday, and the sun only came out this afternoon. Praise be. Now I have to go to Chez Ginette`s for a cheeseburger, because both lunch and supper were completely inedible and I haven`t eaten since breakfast........

I aplogize for my wierd apostraphes - it`s a French keyboard, and I have no idea where anything is on it.

It's Art I Swear

So............they just put up a trailer on Apple for the new movie 300 based on a Frank Miller thing about some sort of Greek war or something. I think that it is going to be a cinematic gem to be passed down through the ages, mostly because it seems as though the entire movie is greased up men wearing nothing but metal underwear. As seen is the hot hot hot picture of Gerard Bulter in his metal underwear. I'm thinking that I may just have to see this movie over, and over, and over, and over again. Because I care about art. I swear.

End of an Era

Well, I shipped the last of my boxes today. The Zapfs/Tom have offered to take my furniture off my hands, and so I'm basically moved out. It's so sad! When I cleared all my stuff out of our apartment today, it looked so bare! It's a naked and sad apartment.
When I was driving my stuff down to the Greyhound depot, there was this really wierd low-lying smog over downtown, so I had to take a picture of it. Because what good is a camera phone if you can't take random pictures of smog!

Mostly sleeping

Well, I've been doing a whole lot of nothing lately. We played a gig for the Department of Training, Colleges, and Universities on Thursday night, and then since then I've mostly been sleeping, hanging out, rehearsing, and packing. I scored a bunch of wine boxes from the LCBO, and so far I've packed all my cds, dvds, books, and music. All that's really left is my assorted misc. posessions, clothes (which I still need to use), bedding (which I also still need), and computer (which I'm using right now). I do have this whole plan for how I'm going to pack everything when the time comes. I just really wish I had a laptop, because I don't know how I'm going to survive without my computer. It's my best friend. Well OK, second best after my iPod.

Mmmm...Sunny

Well, it's been an exciting couple of days. We flew in on Monday, and seeing as how it was Catherine's 21st birthday we decided to do something exciting, like a BBQ. So I made home-made burgers and we ate at a picnic table in Michelle's back yard. Then we went and picked Ingunn up from the airport (she was on a later flight, it's a long story), and sat down and wrote our grant proposal for the school, and all the thank you notes to people that we've been putting off. Then we went to bed. Party animals, I know. On Tuesday I got up at about 10:30, and puttered around the house until about 11:45, when I left for school. I ran through the Clarke with Matthew in the concert hall from 12:30-1, then I bummed around at school, and then went on a chase for new headphones. I then hung out at Ingunn's until my Mozart trio rehearsal at 5. This clarinettist at school asked me to play the Mozart Kegelstadtt trio in his recital, and he was so desperate I couldn't say no. Anyways, it's not too hard, although there's this one chord that has a b natural instead of a b flat, and it keeps messing with my head! But I digress. After the Mozart rehearsal I headed home, and picked up a box at the LCBO on my way home. They only had one, but they said they'd have more later in the week. So I sat up until 12 pseudo-cleaning my apartment, and I packed up all my dvds and books. Almost. I have a lot of crap.

Today I got up at 10:30 and puttered around the house until 12 when I went to school and practiced before my rehearsal with Matthew at 2. After that I went to the Starbucks on Yorkville Ave, right smack dab in the middle of trendy Yorkville, and I sat outside on their 'patio' with my venti green tea and people watched until my gig at the Four Seasons at 4:30. It was one of the most annoying gigs ever, for Manulife Financial's Board of Directors dinner. It's one of those gigs where no one pays the slightest bit of attention to you, you can't hear the other people in the quartet, and then to top it all off they gypped us and paid us each $75 less then they said they would. I was so angry, I stole Diet Coke (it was the only thing convenient enough to take. The desserts would have just made my purse a mess). Anyways, it was arranged through our assistant dean at school, so we're going to see if he can rectify the situation for us. The moral is though, don't trust Manulife Financial. They can't count.

Sleep Now

Well, I'm back from Manitoba. It was pretty good, if a little cold and rainy. We flew in on Friday morning, and we had enough time to get to Ruben's house where we were staying, and eat something, and look over the Communist songs before we headed off to the mini-reunion at the Fort Garry Hotel. We played a montage of Communist songs while they played a retrospective video, and then we ate. We went back to Ruben's place and folded down the sofa bed, and blew up the air mattress, and crashed for the night. On Saturday we got up and I made Catherine and Ingunn go running with me - we left Michelle behind to make breakfast. We went down by the river, but the problem with Winnipeg is that the riverfront is mostly private property, so they don't have nice trails like there are in Saskatoon. They did it wrong. Then we went back to Ruben's and had breakfast. After that Michelle's parents took off for a tour of the printing press, while we stayed behind to rehearse. Then we got all dolled up, and went off to the big May Day banquet. It was good times, we danced the night away until about 10:30, then we went back to our uncomfortable beds and slept.

Sunday was our very exciting trip to Gimli. Our ride picked us up at 10:30 and drove us to Gimli and dropped us off at the hall we were playing in so we could rehearse. We warmed up, and had some coffee and scones at the tea room downstairs, then we played our concert at 2. There was about 40 people there, and they loved us. And I love people who love me, so I had a good time. Afterwards, the woman who drove us out there wanted to take us out to eat in Gimli, but first showed us the sights. This consisted of a giant cartoonish statue of a Viking, and driving us through all the residential streets and talking about who might live there. "I think Hallgrim lived there." "No, they moved two years ago and sold it to Gudrun and, the Bjarnssons moved down the road." "I thought they lived over on the next street." "No, that's the Gunnarssons." And etc. I gotta tell you, it was gripping. Then we finally arrived at the fish and chip place where they wanted to take us, and it was closed. So we ended up at some random place down the road. But hey, who doesn't love free food! Then we got back to Ruben's at about 7:30 and decided we should get some food because we had cleaned Ruben out. There were three grocery stores within walking distance of his house, but being a Sunday night in Winnipeg, they were closed. So we ended up at 7-11 where we went for the healthy choice of Slurpees and candy. We then went back to Ruben's and set up shop on the couch. We watched Grey's Anatomy, then Forrest Gump on TBS. By the time it ended at 1 am, we were all exhausted and crashing from the sugar, so we sat there for the last 20 minutes of it and cried. Forrest's so sweet!!! And then Jenny died!!!

We got up this morning and packed up our stuff, and flew back to Toronto. We had some excitement boarding the plane, as they absolutely could not let me on with my ginormous instrument. I am so pissed off at Air Canada, and am considering never flying them again. I fly quite a bit, and I've only ever had problems flying Air Canada - I've not just been hassled, but had to deal with openly hostile attendants who belittle me and act like I'm a stupid little girl who has no idea about anything. On Westjet, they're nothing but nice, and even let me pre-board with my instrument. Our union has a deal with all the carriers that violins (and violas) are allowable carry-on even though they're longer than the dimensions allowed, but nobody at Air Canada ever seems to know this, and they all act like it's giant travesty and that I am the stupidest person alive. I hate them, and I hope they all burn.

So now I'm bitter and back in Toronto.

The Peg

Well, we had our marathon o' concerts day yesterday, with our quartet playing at the Shoe Museum at 5:30-6:30, and then rushing down to the brand spanking new opera house for a concert with the COC. It was super fun, and all I can say about the new hall is wow. wowee wow wow wow. It is the most amazing hall! Even playing in the pit, the sound is amazing. They're doing a series of concert this week to test out the acoustics, and experimenting with putting the pit at different levels, and having different amounts of audience in the hall. It's a pretty cool thing really, through our rehearsals and even in the concert there was acoustics people throughout the hall and even in the pit who had microphones attached to their glasses right besides their ears, so it would record what their ears heard. They asked us to play this concert so they could test out the hall with a gigantor Mahler sized orchestra. Oh, and the orchestra pit in that hall is so roomy!!! They made it extra big, with is extra nice, because often when they cram you in the pit it does a number on both your playing and your body, because you have to sit awkwardly to find room to bow. But this was so roomy! Even with a ton of us in it! After Richard Bradshaw invited us all over to a jazz bar down the street - The Rex (you came there Graeme, when you were in town). And then he bought us all free beer. I only had a couple glasses, then at 10:30 I went home like a loser. But also because it had been a crazy and slightly stressful week, and I had to pack for our flight to Winnipeg this morning. Tom will be here shortly to pick us up - mostly because I don't trust Catherine on the subway because she didn't come home until about 7am, and while packing she keeps running off the the bathroom to puke. Not the best conditions for riding the subway to Etobicoke.

We fly to Winnipeg at about 12, then we have a little soiree tonight we have to play at, then tomorrow night we're playing at the big International Workers Day banquet, then on Sunday we're going to Gimli to play a concert there to raise money for our Icelandic trip. It's the largest settlement of Icelanders outside of Iceland I think - it's kind of like those Mennonite communities but more integrated into society. They all speak Icelandic, and keep Icelandic traditions alive, even if they and their parents were all born in Canada. We're off to see the Communists, the wonderful Communists of Winnipeg.

It's The Pleasure Principle

I'm taking a break right now from odious school work. I've already written my paper for Canadian Rep, and prepared my presentation, but I still have to finish my masterclass journal and masterclass essay. It's the most odious thing ever. What teachers did you like and why? Blah de blah de blah. I've been working all day and it's odious. You know what a fun word is? Odious.

I've had this newspaper article in my wallet since Vancouver that I meant to post up here, because it's really funny. "Dutch busker squacks after saxaphone seized. The Hague. Dutch police have confiscated the saxophone of a busker who played so badly that his audience complained. The 43-year-old used to perform at the railway station at Leiden in the west of the country to the dismay of passengers, who found his instrument an ill wind." Man, I wish that cops did that more. Sometime you hear buskers on the street, and you're just like, 'oh, dude, that's disgusting.' At the market when we play at the spot inside, the people who work around there thank us because otherwise they're forced to listen to this really bad guy sing with a guitar all day.

Now I'll leave you with a rejected greeting card idea. "Spread some holiday cheer. (Inside) Or drink alone. Who am I to judge?"

I'm In

So it's official, I got accepted to UBC, and they gave me $1000. Vancouver, here I come.

Test this

Well, it's over. And it was thouroughly depressing. I mean, why would you ever need to know who invented the piano, or whether Phillipe de Vitry wrote Ars Nova or Musiche Gestutche. And my essays comparing theBaroque to the Classical and the Classical to the Romantic were just bad. Between the Baroque and the Classical, people wrote stuff. There were these guys, and they were really bored because their TV was broken, so they just wrote a new cantata every week. I wish that's what I could've said, but no. I had to be all analytical and shit. There was increased dissonance and chromaticism, with more idiomatic compositions and sacred music being written in the vernacular. Cause they were bored.