No, I have not given up and gone to a corner to curl up and die
I've been busy. Tomorrow is the Loch Lomond games -- at which Emma is not competing becuase she's busy raising funds so the band can go to Hawaii for the King Kamehameha Parade this June. (Kamehameha is almost as difficult, in its way, to spell as piobaireachd is in its way). But I am going to the Loch Lomond Games to raise money for the same trip. I will be selling raffle tickets, ads in the Santa Cruz Band Review program, cute buttons with clan badges and tartans on them, and cuter buttons with the Santa Cruz tartan and a silhouette of a piper and the words "just say piobaireachd!" on them, and we also have this kind of pain in the ass "scratch and help" doohickey that I'm taking along just to fill out the table. I've spent a lot of the week altering uniforms to fit the musicians and the auxiliary members (guard, standards, rifles). Emma's doing the big car wash and rummage sale at the high school. I've been making a display board for the table. It's fun. I have discovered that if you pop for the expensive photo paper for your printer, your artwork looks gorgeous when yopu print it out. But shiny. Ooh, shiny. I have never seen matte photo paper for printers yet, but I guess it probably exists.
We got a new piper, which means that the drummers in the pipe and drum corps will now only slightly outnumber the pipers. He's transferring in from another high school which does not have a marching band, let alone a pipe corps (we're the only school in the county which regularly competes in the marching band circuit -- there's a private school which competes in a couple of reviews -- and definitely the only one with a pipe corps: there are sprinklings of teenaged bagpipers around the county, though, and there hangs a small amount of bitter interpersonal poilitics based on ancient hurt feelings around the subject of who the teacher is. I will not go into more detail, public or private, for these reasons: 1. I don't know the details; 2. I don't know but one of the teachers involved; 3. I can't see how I could do anything but to make matters worse by telling the stories if I did know them; 4. I would like to pretend that all is hunky-dory, friendly, and happy in piobaireachd land). We like having a new piper, it makes the right number of pipers and he's pretty good. But it did mean that the quartermaster mommy was tearing her hair out trying to figure out where his outfit was coming from. She figured it out, though.
It means that I have done next to no writing this week, either on the fluffity fluffity story fragments or on the novel thing. But I have been reprewriting the rest of the Candelario entrance in my head, when I am moving between things.
Another distraction -- racking wine. It's going to be ready any minute, which is way different from the last two years. The secret is to leave the wine on the fruit for much longer than they tell you to, and to go ahead and boldly squish the fruit, damn the sediment and full speed ahead. The last two years I've been futzing around trying to avoid a huge sediment layer in the secondary fermenter, and I've gotten thin, nasty, light-colored wine. And I've still had to deal with a lot of sediment. So this year I've decided that I will cope with the thick sediment, and I've gotten a quicker-maturing (which I don't care about), fuller, nicer, and more deeply colored wine (though I must admit that orange-colored wine was interesting!). Now I need to find more than a dozen wine bottles before Thanksgiving.
Cloud cover every night, but nothing more than drizzles. I'm looking forward to getting that First Big Rain, and getting the First Flush water measurements over with.
We got a new piper, which means that the drummers in the pipe and drum corps will now only slightly outnumber the pipers. He's transferring in from another high school which does not have a marching band, let alone a pipe corps (we're the only school in the county which regularly competes in the marching band circuit -- there's a private school which competes in a couple of reviews -- and definitely the only one with a pipe corps: there are sprinklings of teenaged bagpipers around the county, though, and there hangs a small amount of bitter interpersonal poilitics based on ancient hurt feelings around the subject of who the teacher is. I will not go into more detail, public or private, for these reasons: 1. I don't know the details; 2. I don't know but one of the teachers involved; 3. I can't see how I could do anything but to make matters worse by telling the stories if I did know them; 4. I would like to pretend that all is hunky-dory, friendly, and happy in piobaireachd land). We like having a new piper, it makes the right number of pipers and he's pretty good. But it did mean that the quartermaster mommy was tearing her hair out trying to figure out where his outfit was coming from. She figured it out, though.
It means that I have done next to no writing this week, either on the fluffity fluffity story fragments or on the novel thing. But I have been reprewriting the rest of the Candelario entrance in my head, when I am moving between things.
Another distraction -- racking wine. It's going to be ready any minute, which is way different from the last two years. The secret is to leave the wine on the fruit for much longer than they tell you to, and to go ahead and boldly squish the fruit, damn the sediment and full speed ahead. The last two years I've been futzing around trying to avoid a huge sediment layer in the secondary fermenter, and I've gotten thin, nasty, light-colored wine. And I've still had to deal with a lot of sediment. So this year I've decided that I will cope with the thick sediment, and I've gotten a quicker-maturing (which I don't care about), fuller, nicer, and more deeply colored wine (though I must admit that orange-colored wine was interesting!). Now I need to find more than a dozen wine bottles before Thanksgiving.
Cloud cover every night, but nothing more than drizzles. I'm looking forward to getting that First Big Rain, and getting the First Flush water measurements over with.