Sea Struck-La Cueva Bonita

You would think that having a husband who was raised on an island would mean that when we visit said island some water time would be forthcoming. We have visited the beach a couple of times but really that has been it. We have been running around visiting family members and also visiting friends and their family members, so there hasn’t been as much beach time as I had hoped for. Last week, however, we got the chance to go out on a boat for a trip to a grotto that can only be reached by sea. About four months ago our friend Pedro came to visit us in Rhode Island and we had a great time with him. His brother Ricardo has a scuba diving business in La Palma and Pedro arranged for him to take us out to visit the cave.

I am a pretty strong swimmer and I love swimming, but I am extremely afraid of deep water and scuba diving holds zero attraction for me. This is also why I have never been out on a boat in the ocean, apart from a short day trip on Prince William Sound in Alaska, and that was like being on a lake. So when Pedro offered to take us out on his brother’s boat I thought we were talking about, you know, a boat.  Well, it turns out it was a Zodiac, which looks to me like a glorified blow-up raft with a motor. I was skeptical; this is the Atlantic we are talking about, after all. But it turned out to be completely up to the task.  Some pictures of trip and the cave:   

After we went by the cave Ricardo took us to see Pirate’s Bay, where these dwellings are built into the side of the cliff. There is a gorgeous pool here and someone has actually run electricity down from the top of the cliffs above. Talk about an exclusive community, only reachable by sea!

On our way back Ricardo told us we would have to wait a minute because he had to run an errand on the way back. It turns out that his family keeps wine in a cave under the ocean! Apparently the water pressure and the darkness speed up the aging process of the wine. Who knew? So he strapped on his diving gear and disappeared for about 10 minutes. When he came back he started handing bottles of wine up to us on the boat. As non-wine drinkers we thought this hilarious, but also very cool.

 

 

On the way back we passed the entrance to the Caldera del Taburiente, which forms the northern part of the island of La Palma.  When this volcano collapsed, it must have been quite a show, although I am not sad that I was not there to see it!

On our way back we were going pretty fast and it really felt like we were flying, albeit a bit bumpily! For about fifteen minutes I forgot about everyone and everything and enjoyed the sun and the wind and the water. Now I understand how the ocean can hypnotize you. It was also a huge relief to know that I don’t get seasick, at least for the couple of hours I was out there.

First step, boat trip, next step scuba-diving?

Hm, maybe next year.

Almost A Goal

Being in Spain for the World Cup has been quite an experience! Fortunately for me, Spain won. You may have seen the reactions of the Spanish people on the news; and people were no less excited here. Unfortunately when Spain scored their winning goal I was not filming, as I was jumping up and down screaming with everyone else. However, the Spanish team almost scored many goals during the course of the game. Here is one "almost goal".

Happiness

Need I say more?

Green Things Growing

For people who are planning to be away for a large part of the summer, we sure did plant a lot of stuff.

We planted a lot less this year, but still more than we will be around to use. We planted one tomato plant, one zucchini plant (it’s turning out to be a gorgeous green and yellow striped variety, we love it and are jealous that we will not be eating it) and one pepper plant. We also tried an experiment and planted some potatoes to see if they would grow. Well, they are growing! My friend Evie is taking care of our plot for us and so will reap the culinary benefits. It will be interesting to see what things look like when we get back a month from now.  Since we have our garden plot at the Wheeler community garden, we also planted these purple and gold flowers in honor of Wheeler. I took this picture with my phone so it’s not great, but you get the idea.

It would have been a perfect day if Luna had not decided to run off into the trees and find some other animal’s dung to roll all around in! She came out of the woods completely covered in orange poop. Disgusting creature! I had to go up the hill to the caretaker’s house and ask for some soap to give her a bath before she could get in the car to come home. Then of course when we got home JC had to give her another bath, ‘cause that’s just how he is.

Hopefully in the next month I will have much more fun (and less scatological) things to post about!

The Seven-Year Stitch

In 2003 I began a needlework project that was meant to be a gift for my mother-in-law. It was the most difficult project I had undertaken to date because instead of using cross-stitch fabric I went ahead and used linen, so that I had to count the threads that are woven into the fabric to figure out where each stitch square was supposed to be. It is a lot harder to do this way, but it looks so much prettier than when you do it on cross-stitch fabric that has the holes woven into it. Next time you have a linen shirt on look closely at it and try to count the threads and you will see what I mean. Anyway, it took me awhile to get the hang of it, but I liked how it was turning out. Enter Master’s degree, full-time job, moving to the Northeast, finding and settling into two different teaching positions, and buying our first home. This poor project fell by the wayside many times. Every now and then I would pull it out and go crazy for a few days only to have to put it away for another year (or two L)
Anyway, this year I have been working a little more diligently on it and finally a couple of weeks ago I realized that it was really almost done except for some backstitching. So I finally finished that up during the slumber party I had at my house with the Young Women of my church the other night. And here we are, voilà!

Now I just have to get it washed, ironed, and framed. I was looking through some books to see what I should start on next…I’m definitely crazy. Maybe I’ll see you in another seven years!

Show Me The Music

This year we are going to be traveling for most of the summer so I thought that I might not get to do as much singing out at Tanglewood as I had hoped. Was I ever wrong! I was assigned to 4 concerts, two of which I had to opt out because we will be in Spain visiting Juan Carlos’ family. However, there will be no shortage of music memorizing this summer! I have until August 20th to memorize the following:

Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (Thank heavens I did this last year so it will be just brush up work!)

Poulenc: Gloria

Bach: Jesu, Meine Freude

Holst: The Planets

When I first got the music I was not feeling too happy because I opened up and saw Jesu, Meine Freude, and the German made me have a few moments of panic…not again!!!!!

 

Well, I learned my lesson with the Mendelssohn earlier this year—I need to start memorizing and start memorizing NOW.

Next, the Poulenc Gloria. Now isn’t this beautiful?

Ah, Latin. Lovely, simply pronounced, intelligible Latin. How do I love thee? So very much! It’s about 60 pages long, but what is 60 pages of Latin after 200 pages of German?

And THEN………….

Holst: The Planets

   

Your eyes do not deceive you! There are NO WORDS!!! Now this  is my kind of piece! Plus we only sing about five minute’s worth of music, so I am feeling considerably better.

But still, I have 28 pages of German to memorize. And 28 pages of German is 28 pages of German!!!

Here we go again…

Things I Don't Blog About

This blog is primarily a journal keeping tactic for me. I have always been awful about keeping journals. I just can't think of anything interesting to write about. That must mean that my life is very boring! Anyway, it all started with the first journal that my mom bought me, where I wrote some of the most inane things ever to cross a human's mind. When you get older you think you remember what it was like to be a kid and how you felt about things. Well based on my journal that is a total delusion. It is enough sometimes to make me wonder if that was really me. I kept a journal very sporadically throughout my youth, (i.e., hardly at all) so there is not much for me to look back over and remember about myself. And I have come to the following conclusion:
I am glad I didn't write much down.

I read it all now and my primary thoughts are either about what a brat I was or how embarrassed I am because obviously I have always been a total moron. This always makes me feel like I must still be a total moron, because it is still me, right? Some examples:

• I wrote detailed explanations of daily events when I was little, including all of my siblings bodily functions.
• I wrote about the bugs that I found in the garden and in the window wells. There is even a picture of one insect that I attempted to draw, although I am not sure anyone living could identify it as such.
• I wrote quite a lot about boys. I accept that this is normal, but what a waste of a lot of time, paper and ink. Now there were some very nice boys, don't get me wrong. But there were a lot who simply weren't.
• I wrote about how much my mom hated me, and how much I hated my older sister. (whom I do not hate one bit, actually)
• I wrote a lot about singing--singing with friends, with school groups, with church groups, problems with singing...hm, could I have been a bigger nerd?

There was only one time where I kept a journal reliably, and that was while I was a missionary for my church in France. I was 21 and pretty clueless about things, I have to say. I met a lot of very different people and I wrote about my reactions to them and about living in a place so extremely different from the one I where I grew up. I also had some angry journal entries. I don't get angry very often, but I got pretty angry in those journal pages and it makes me sad to think about it now. I got angry over stupid things.

None of this inspires me to be a better journal keeper; in fact, I never want ANYONE reading what I wrote in those journals. But since blogging has been as close as I have come, I am trying to keep it up. But some things are off limits.

• Bodily functions-nobody needs to know, and I don't want to remember. I departed from this one a couple of months ago with my sister's foot injury. What can I say, the morbid fascination was too much for me. Sorry.
• Complicated family relationships. They are private and no one needs to know about it but me and them.
• Our childless state. Trust me, it gets talked about all the time, I certainly don't want to write about it.
• Anger. Anger just does not work for me, and it's never worth the embarrassment you feel when you go back and read what you wrote when you were angry. (Although anger does get teenagers to move their backpacks out of the walkway very quickly.)
• My body shape and size. I am what I am. Nobody needs to hear about it; not even I want to hear about it most of the time.
• Work frustrations. Everyone has work frustrations. But they are almost always temporary and it's better to remember that you yourself may be someone's work frustration, so don't write about it for anyone else to read about. Would you want to be written about that way? Besides, it's hard for me to be happy if I am knowingly causing discomfort to someone else. (The exception being giving homework and tests. Discomfort? Yes. Cruelty? No.)

Some people have argued with me that it's good to see where you came from so that you can measure your growth. Maybe one day I will be able to look at it like that. That's probably a much healthier angle. So maybe. But not yet!

School Colors

Every year I make a graduation card for my seniors. Since I teach AP Spanish I almost always have at least one class of seniors, so for the last four years I have kept up the tradition. I don’t have  a lot of graduation paraphernalia, so they almost always look something like this:

Our school colors are purple and gold, and while it’s very festive, it has never been a favorite combination of mine. In the past I have used a paler yellow and hoped everyone would just imagine that it was gold. However, this year I ran out of the pale yellow and the only thing I had was, incidentally, the actual gold that is one of our school colors. So that’s how it went down, although I have to say I am not a fan of how they turned out this year.

School colors are fascinating to me. In junior high and high school my school colors were maroon and gold. Very unattractive--and if you ever saw us in PE class with our gold shirts and maroon shorts you would understand why. I hope you never did. Maroon and gold tend to be very popular with schools. Why, I ask you?

Some schools manage to get school colors right. BYU had the classic combination of blue and white. Now blue and white is nice. It is classic. Blue and white does not cause retinal damage when you look at it. The first school I taught at also had school colors of blue and white. And I might add that any shade of blue goes well with white and looks very nice.

The two Catholic schools where I taught both had school colors of green and gold. I also got my master’s degree from a school whose colors were green and gold. Okay, not fabulous, but at least a combination that you do see in nature, and again, very traditional colors. And green and gold makes a very nice graduation card!

So, I conclude:

1. It it is fun to dress up and even paint your face in purple and gold, and since I am on the purple team, cheer for the purple team in all school events.
2. I like blue and white.
3. For crafty items (and for my optical health) I believe I will be going back to pale yellow. Sorry, gold!

Fun Stuff

I am really bemoaning a good lens these days, since there are so many fun things to take pictures of. And the things always seem to be so far away!!! Why must this be?!?!

On our walk today we noticed that the swans are starting to congregate on Central Pond again:

We have actually seen some swan-on-goose fights over nesting areas. Usually there are tons more geese than swans, but not in the springtime. And swans are mean. I kid you not.

We also saw a turtle party on our walk today. I am sorry the picture is not that great but we thought it was too funny to pass up!

Hope spring is bringing fun stuff to your neck of the woods!

Can You Do This?

Sorry they are a bit blurry, I was quite far away. I was still amazed, though.

I know I sure can’t! In fact, I don’t believe I ever could in my whole life, having always had disproportionately long legs. I was always jealous of flexible people. And guess what?  I still am. But at least I get to take him home with me.

Dogtown

We like dogs in our house. Well, condo, really. And we like big dogs. Really big dogs. Big dogs come with big requirements, though, and we have learned that the hard way. It was pretty overwhelming for us when we got Luna,  and realized that we can’t just go gallivanting off whenever we feel like it. Fortunately we have wonderful friends who also have a big dog and who really like Luna, and they take care of her for us when we have to go away. Luna is big, but these guys make her look petite.

It can be a source of stress, trying to figure out what you are going to do with your dog. All this notwithstanding, we would really love to have another dog. Not realistic while living in a condo, but we can dream, right? Sometimes we do look at each other and remind ourselves what the first year with Luna was like and then we are happy to wait a little bit more. However, opportunities do come along for additional reflection.

Enter Scout:

Scout belongs to a friend of mine from the chorus who had planned a trip to China and at the last minute the person who was going to keep Scout backed out. So she put out an APB for someone who could keep her for them. It wasn’t very nice of me, but I said we would keep her and then promptly left on a four-day school trip and left my husband alone to deal with two dogs. It’s a good thing he is amazing. Scout is a nice little thing (little=40 lbs.—it’s all relative) and we have enjoyed getting to know her.  She has enjoyed going for walks:

 

Riding in the car: (we think it’s hilarious that she can actually fit on one seat)

 

And snuggling with the girls in bed. (Scout is not as picky as I am about where she rests her head!)

Some things we have noticed about having two dogs around:

1. Twice the dogs means twice the poop, hair, barking, and attention seeking behaviors.

2. An extra dog in the house throws a wrench into the dynamic. Everyone needs to be in their place and I always have to be top dog! This is hard.

3. We are having a great time. Two tails wagging is better than one---it’s a lot of happiness.

So hopefully one day we will be a two-dog family. But in the meantime, we’ll take visitors!

Dank Sei Dir Gott

A few months ago I posted that I would be memorizing 204 pages of German fabulousness in three months. I have to say, this has got to be one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life. 3rd quarter is generally the time that I am the most out of my mind during the school year, and whenever I did have free time, do you think I wanted to spend it memorizing German? Definitely not. Fortunately in February we had a run through rehearsal so that we could hear what the thing sounded like in person and not on a CD. Helpful, but still, one run through? Puuuuhhhhllleeeaaase.
So the middle of March rolled around and I only had about 1/2 the thing memorized. Amidst major panic I started asking around and sure enough the rest of the chorus was feeling overwhelmed, as well. As one person said, “no problem! I will have it memorized for sure by April 6th!” April 6th, of course, was the day AFTER our last performance. I always feel like this, that if I just had one more concert it would for sure be perfect. On the day of the first performance we were not at all solid, and John Oliver (our director) mentioned that we might just use our scores, and we all cheered. We had absolutely forgotten it was April 1st. In the next breath John said “April Fools!”
John’s jokes usually go over well, but I think our silence expressed how unfunny we thought it was.
Anyway, once you don’t have your score and your cheat sheet (this is only one side)…


…it’s surprising how much you do have memorized. That is not to say that the first night was that great. Well, it was, but there were definite scary moments and one awful moment where I came in on a major entrance with the tenors. I did it again the second night! The third night and at Carnegie Hall I finally got my act together.
Since I was in New York less than twenty four hours, I don’t have many impressions of it, other than that there are lots of tall buildings and an excess of taxis. What did strike me as crazy was going through the flooded out portion of Rhode Island on the train. Sometimes the water was actually on the tracks and we had to slow way down. These are not the best pictures, but I was, after all, on a moving train.


The concert at Carnegie was great, what a gorgeous place! While there were a few scary moments due to the really loud organ right behind us that we weren’t expecting, it was a very cool experience. Some people were starting to get sick but there was no way they were skipping the concert after all that memorizing. But after four days in a row we are all pretty vocally exhausted, so perhaps it’s just as well that it was our last performance.  I mentioned that we couldn’t possibly do anything more difficult than this in the chorus, and some of the other ladies just patted me on the back and told me to go on thinking that.
Our New York Times Review (can you find me in the photo?) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/arts/music/07elijah.html

Joe Kohen for The New York Times

It was a marvelous experience, but I am not sorry the memorization is at an end. Now I can actually concentrate on something else, like my day job!!!!
Pages Memorized: 204
Pages to go: 0
Dank, sei dir Gott!

OK, You Got Me

I love singing choral music. I loved it in my elementary school chorus, I loved it in junior high, I loved it in high school, I loved it in college, while I was doing graduate work, etc. It’s just so wonderful to make great music with other people. There is really and truly a physical high that you get when it goes really well. My feeling was who needs drugs when you have choral music? I have been pretty lucky in my choral experience, starting way back in junior high with Mr. Blackburn, who was a stickler for discipline but an absolute genius for teaching not only music but musicality and technique. In high school I worked with a director who taught me what great choral music sounds like and it was in his classes that my addiction for the “good stuff’ in choral works began. Sometimes this nerdy passion of mine did get a little over the top, like scheduling all my classes in college so that they wouldn’t interfere with choir, even though normal classes only  met three times a week and I had to go to choir every single day.

I am not a great singer and I never will be. But I am good enough for choirs and I am grateful for that because I never get tired of choral singing and it always makes me happy (even if temporarily I have breakdowns because of memorization pitfalls). This past year has been a great year musically. I joined the Tanglewood Festival Chorus last summer and have done a few concerts with them and with the Boston Symphony. From the first time I sang with them (Beethoven’s 9th) out at Tanglewood, I could barely contain my joy. The music is just so incredible, and every time I hear the Boston Symphony play I am astounded  by their skill and I do a yay dance inside (and sometimes outside, too, it’s just what it does to me).
Many people know I have not been extremely thrilled about living in the Northeast. My first few years here were pretty hard. If it hadn't been for my husband and a truly wonderful place to work it would have been a lot harder. A couple of weeks ago I was talking with some friends who just got a teaching job at BYU and so are moving back to Utah. I admit that for a couple of minutes I was a little bit jealous, not because of Utah per se, although I do love Utah, but because family is there and there is a lot of opportunity for great music-making.

Then the following thought popped into my head:
“Wait. If I leave this area it means no more singing with the Boston Symphony.”  And then I thought “There is NO WAY I am leaving this area!”

So it wasn’t the allure of the East Coast that has made this home. It certainly isn’t the best place to live economically speaking. The community where I live has taken some getting used to. I will say that Rhode Islanders are very nice once you get to know them. There are lots of reasons why I have felt that this was a temporary exile for a few years, which I won’t go into here.
But now it IS home, because my husband, my dog, my great job, and my music are here. Never underestimate the music.


boston.com
(of course I am on the back row so I am not in the photo, but two of the most amazing female vocalists I have EVER heard are and so is Rafael Frubeck de Burgos, whom I adore. Christine Brewer, soprano and Stephanie Blythe, mezzo)
http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2010/04/02/mendelssohns_elijah_makes_rare_showing_at_symphony_hall/

How was YOUR Spring Break?

One fun part of mine was spending the day at CCRI with my school’s Academic Decathlon team. We were there last week for an all-day competition that involves a bunch of kids taking 7 different objective tests centered around the main topic of the French Revolution and also competing in Speech, Interview and Impromptu competitions. It does take a special kind of kid to think this is fun, but it really is. Next year we will be studying the Great Depression. An interesting topic, considering the times, wouldn’t you say?

Newport and An Operation

My sister Sue came for a visit this week, and yesterday we went to Newport and walked a big section of the Cliffwalk. The day was beautiful and sunny, which made us very happy because it has been raining non-stop for about a week. It was still windy enough for a jacket, though.

Now, aren’t these in-laws cute?

 

 

 

 

No seashell top and no fins, but Sue definitely wishes she could be part of this world (and has better hair than Ariel, too!)

  

Of course, what is a post without a sexy Spaniard pose?

 

Hm, less sexy, but definitely more romantic!!!

 

DO NOT PROCEED IF YOU HAVE JUST EATEN OR ARE ABOUT TO EAT. OR IF YOU DON’T LIKE GRUESOME SIGHTS.

Some of you know that Sue smashed her toe with the leaf of her table last week. It has been terribly painful for her and when she arrived she had to wear a special boot because it hurt to wear shoes. It was really bothering her, so Juan Carlos, with all his practical medical knowledge, told her she needed to stick herself and let all the blood that was built up under the nail get out and she would feel better. So she did that and some came out and it felt much better!!!!! Unfortunately, she REALLY smashed her toe and there was part of it that she couldn’t get to under the toenail. So JC said he knew how to take care of that. What you do is you heat up a needle or a pin and then burn through the nail and make a hole and then the blood can get out. I was writhing in horror just thinking about this, but apparently not letting it out is super painful so Sue was willing to give it a try. So here is the procedure!

Heating the pin:

Sue had to look away, but she said it really just felt like when you get pricked for a blood test, so not that bad. Luna was very interested in the whole thing. Once the hole was made all the stuff that shouldn’t have been in there came on out and her toe felt better. And she got to wear shoes on both feet today! Juan Carlos is definitely a handy guy to have around, but you can  bet I am going to be careful what I drop on my feet!

Sue went home today and I am sorry to see her go but I am sure her kids, husband and relatives can’t wait for her to get back!!!! Anyone else up for a trip to Rhode Island? I can’t guarantee an operation by Juan Carlos, but I promise it would still be fun.