Adventreats Day 24

Adventreats Day 23

Adventreats Day 22

Adventreats Day 21

Adventreats Day 20

In The bleak mid-winter
Frosty winds made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter,
Long ago.

(Rossetti)

Adventreats Day 19

My home-with-sister-made advent wreath.

Adventreats Day 18

The Mistletoe Bride

Adventreats Day 17

Adventreats Day 16

Teka tries his best to compete with Snowball. (Laura did it. He's been wearing it without complaint for three days now)

Adventreats Day 15

Adventreats Day 14

Adventreats Day 13

Christmas fact:

In 1647, Oliver Cromwell, that all-round-nice-guy, banned Christmas in the UK. It remained illegal to celebrate Christmas until 1660. Phew. Oh, those crazy puritans.

Adventreats Day 12

Adventreats Day 11

Wowee

Adventreats Day 10

Adventreats Day 9

Adventreats Day 8

Adventreats Day 7

A note to event organizers:

We do not charge extra for outdoor gigs in December; however, be warned that the whole quartet will be using their cheap-as-dirt rubbish instruments which take, on average, three times longer to tune than regular performance instruments, thus robbing you of many paid-music minutes. That's the price you pay.

Also, they sound worse.

(Also, it's hard, if not impossible, to shift in chunky fingerless gloves, so our repertoire will be limited to songs that remain in first position. So there.)

Adventreats Day 6

Adventreats Day 5

Adventreats Day 4

Recipe of the Day: Brownies
By Mark Bittman

The first time I made brownies without my mother was in the late 1960’s, using a recipe from Paula Peck, the cookbook writer. Over the years, I tinkered with that and a similar version by Marion Cunningham. As my daughters learned to cook, they experimented a bit further. But we never really strayed from the originals.

Print Recipe
Brownies

Yield About 1 dozen brownies

Time 40 minutes

Mark Bittman
Summary

As long as you keep the flour to a minimum and don't add chemical leavening like baking powder, you will produce a true and beautiful brownie.
Ingredients

* 3 ounces unsweetened chocolate
* 8 tablespoons (1 stick) salted or unsalted butter, more for greasing pan
* 1 cup sugar
* 2 eggs
* 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
* Pinch salt if you use unsalted butter
* 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract, optional

Method

* 1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Combine chocolate and butter in a small saucepan over very low heat, stirring occasionally. When chocolate is just about melted, remove from heat, and continue to stir until mixture is smooth. Meanwhile, grease an 8-inch-square baking pan. If you like, also line it with waxed or parchment paper and grease that.
* 2. Transfer mixture to a bowl, and stir in sugar. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Add flour (and salt and vanilla if you are using them), and stir to incorporate. Stop stirring when no traces of flour remain.
* 3. Pour into pan, and bake 20 to 30 minutes, or until set and barely firm in the middle. Cool on a rack before cutting.

Adventreats Day 3

I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year. ~E.M. Forster

Adventreats Day 2

Adventreats Day 1

People get ready

for advent...so many treats to follow.

Cakes and Clothes for you and yours.

Last night was the Cedar's official album launch for "I'm Always Explaining to Mom How it's Different Here." We made bunting. We made cakes. We (I) made (monogramed) clothes. Oh, and there was music also. And an audience. A real nice, big, I-think-full-even audience.

The cake break-down was as follows:

Neil: Victoria Sponge (with cream and jam)
El: Lemon Cake
Em: Pink Cupcakes and Blue cupcakes
Beth: Vegan (!) cranberry apple "cheese" cake
Ben H: Amazing child-birthday party type cake thing
Ben G: Some biscuits stuck together with chocolate
Tony: Brownies _and_ shortbread.

The official Cedarware break-down was as follows:
(All were items were found at charity shops and then monogrammed. Many sizes, many styles, one great "Cedar" look.)

So I be written in the book of love.

I'm not American, or gay, and yet, this is so very, very relevant.

Stop. Think.

On my way home from Edinburgh last week I had to change at London, crushing my way through ridiculously busy King's Cross station. Among all the commuters flowing in perpetual motion, in the place where they normally post which lines are delayed, was this:

Machines

An idea I read recently, like the sad, ultra-realist antonym of cartoon belief:

Maybe inanimate objects become much more inanimate at night, when no one's looking at them.

Of course they do. When I'm not there, talking to my bike, it's just a bike. Metal, rubber, cold.

(Phenomenologists among you could expand this idea towards humanity...or just stick with the cartoon idea. Either way.)

Okay...run!

This morning I ran a half-marathon with no training or fore-thought or preparation whatever. Okay, no training is a slight exaggeration, as, yes, I have been doing my regular running routine. But just that, just the regular, no special half training.

But, yesterday, Allan emailed me to say, 'hey, wanna run the Salisbury half tomorrow?'

And I said, "Ok. Why not?"

We were late leaving the house this morning and were filling out our registration forms at 10.58am for an 11am start. We were pinning on our numbers when the gun went, and were officially the very very last starters. The crowd loved us.

And it was great! A race with no time to worry and no expectations. A race really, just for fun. It was great. And I felt strong and fast and smooth. And we were far from the very very last finishers.

Well, have you ever

I told all my students in all my classes yesterday that it was Canadian Thanksgiving. None of them knew. Now they all do.

To celebrate, my one other Canadian friend in this town and I made a pumpkin pie. From scratch. FROM A REAL PUMPKIN!

(You can't get pumpkin pie filling here, it turns out. But you can get pumpkins.)

Amazingly, it tastes JUST LIKE THE REAL THING!

Ahem. The 'real' thing.

Baroque bikes

Generally, I don't like poetry that opens with the line 'Dearest.' Phew. Talk about over-used and cliche. But, I'm going to cut this one some slack, as it so gracefully alignes my musical world with that of all my crazy cyclist friends/relations.

Machines
by Michael Donaghy

Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsicord pavane by Purcell
And the racer's twelve-speed bike.

The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
And in the playing, Purcell's chords are played away.

So this talk, or touch if I were there,
Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,
Like Dante's heaven, and melt into the air.

If it doesn't, of course, I've fallen. So much is chance,
So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsicordists prove

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.



from Shibboleth, 1998
Oxford University Press

S-T-Y-L-O-P-H-O-N-E

Allan got me a

STYLOPHONE!!!!!!!!!

Oh, oh, oh, my heart, be still!

I know you're busy.

We're all busy. I'm pretty busy, I'm sure you are too. But I'm warning you RIGHT NOW so that you have almost a month's notice. I'm warning you that if I hear from any one of you that you were

_too busy to vote_

on

***October 14th, 2008,***

we're no longer friends.

x
Em "ABC" ma.

Culinary solitude

Shopping for one is hard. Harder than I thought. Something I might never get used to. Things I though could never go bad that, in my magical kitchen, have gone bad, include:

-Pesto. (Moldy in the fridge)

-Peanuts. (Hard as rocks in the cupboard)

-Jam. (Also moldy in the fridge)

-Milk. (Okay. I know that milk goes off. But my milk always go off on EXACTLY the day it says it will. Fine the day before. In solid lumps day of)

-Sugar Crisp. (One giant hard, damp, lump in the cupboard)

-Crackers. Crackers?!

Learning to Love you More

Assignments for anyone who is a little bit sad or a little bit happy. My favorites:

Staying awake

or
Crying art


or
friend's friends


or
Trying to be sad

Try it.

Ever so long awaited

Hey, Everyone! The Cedar's newest, best ever, full-length album is, finally, now, officially:

Available!

Hurrah! From CDbaby or gigs or me or itunes (but I don't recommend itunes because then you don't get the lovely hand-made-out-of-William-Morris-Wallpaper-and-twine case, or all the free gifts that go inside it.)

Free gifts?!

Free gifts!

Oh, and music too.

Extreme viola

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely, 100% love, love, love what I do with the Cedar and the Stringbeans etc. But sometimes, I need to live a bit dangerously to get the viola-adrenaline flowing. Sometimes I play with the Mandibles.

This is dangerous because I don't do it often. Not often enough to actually know the set list, which is constantly growing and changing. Just every now and then the oppurtunity presents itself and I get to go pretend I know what's going on onstage in front of audiences. Including taking solos on tunes I've never heard before. Brilliant! That's my kind of adventure sport.

For those interested, the on-stage process I go through goes as follows:

-Find the tonic (that is to say, what key the piece is in)

-Figure out the harmonic structure (does it just go I-V-I? What's up with the minor section in the middle? etc.)

-Figure out the bass-line

-Watch out for the look from one of the others that means Go! Emma! Make up a solo now!

-Smile.

Me too.

(thanks xkcd.com)

Hours and hours

Maybe I should have really expected it, but, wow, critical PhDs sure take a lot of thinking.

It seems quite obvious, but, really, the thought-load is enormous. Which is as opposed to the work-load. Previous degrees I've embroiled myself with have required hours of essay writing, text analysis, teasing of numbers and scripts and scores. But this one is different. I sit down with my tea and my computer and an idea/problem and think. For hours. Burrowing my way into my own tiny theoretical world further and further.

Sometimes I make charts, sometimes I make more tea,

but mostly, I just think until it hurts. At the end of the day I might write down a sentence; if I've done well it might have two clauses.

One day, soon, the dam will break and all the thoughts will come together, pouring out in perfect prose and proofs, one whole thesis' worth. But, until then, I wear my glasses to show I'm serious, and think.

Everybody should have a ukulele

I've been strumming on the roof a lot recently, and have concluded that everybody _should_ have a ukulele:

You see,
-They're super easy to play,
-make the least-annoying sound out of any super-easy-to-play instrument,
-are inexpensive,
-are small enough to carry onto a roof, and,
-are downright lovely.

Curtains

There were over 170,000 people at Glastonbury festival last weekend. Happy. It's hard to hurt at Glastonbury. More detailed stories to follow, but first, this clip from the Elbow concert. The lyrics are:

One day a year like this would see me right, throw those curtains wide.

Sing along, all.

that's entertainment

Some people have stage fright. Thanks to decades of Suzuki recitals and drama lessons this is something I usually overcome. Instead, I seem to have an issue with occasionally being TOO comfortable on stage. Sometimes, like last night, when you've having a bad day/week, and have a microphone in front of you and a crowd of waiting faces looking up at you, you forget that you don't actually KNOW these people, that they're not actually there to hear about your issues, and that you should probably just make a joke and continue with the show.

Right.

Oh well.

Glastonbury this weekend! .

Knees Squeeze

Running has a bad wrap in terms of knees. Like cats and dogs, the stereotype is that they just can't get along, but the truth is that they often do. They're often even the best of friends! When non-runners warn me and worry me again and again about the inevitable demise of my knees due to my little running addiction, I'm always a fast and keen defender of running's pro-knee properties.

And then, I had to go and get a knee injury.

And, humiliatingly, it's nothing fancy, just plain, old, "runner's knee." The name adds insult to injury. Literally.

So, I've taken a week (weak) off. Swimming, cycling, elliptical training, no running. And now, after one "clean" week, I wake up this morning and my OTHER KNEE really hurts.

Oh. I'm not impressed.

Unless this means that non running is worse than running?

I might just try a tiny little 6km tomorrow....

The ducks do it.

I love swimming!

Strange, having grown up in one of the most land-locked places on the entire planet (me, Saskatchewan, and some bits of Russia...), but I really do. Maybe it's because it will always have that holiday flair of the exotic to it.

In any case. I love it.

So, when Erin and Natalya were visiting earlier this month, we chose a sunny day, and rode bikes along gravel paths to a certain place on the Avon river (upstream of town), and jumped in. It was quiet, but we weren't the only ones, there were a few others in the water there; it's something of a small-time local swimming hole.

Except,

when I tell people about this experience, they either: sigh dreamily and say, 'That sounds so nice,' or else: gasp and clutch their mouths or stomachs and say, 'you SWAM in the river?! You're going to die.'

Is river swimming so dangerous now, in this time of pollutants, parasites and oil spills? Or is it really no worse than it ever was, and people are just paranoid (and jealous)?

(For the record, we all survived. Happily.)

Room to beat

Not too long ago, a nice film-maker called Bob offered to make us a music video. His mind works in magical ways, (as does his camera). See evidence below:



It's from a track from our oh-so-soon-to-be-released album. Very exciting.

Derrida and Daisies

Sometimes a life-long goal is achieved not with a bang, but a whisper, slipping by as naturally as any other day.

I may only be an hourly-paid, part-time lecturer at the university, but today, the first lovely, warm, sunny Tuesday of Spring, I became who I always wanted to be.

Today, I taught my class outside: a circle of students in the daisies and dappled shade by the lake.

I always wanted to be that professor when I grew up. 5'2" isn't very tall, but I think I might be just about there.

Gardening gone flat

I grew up in a big country, with a big house, with a big back yard, with a big garden, with raspberries, peas, carrots, saskatoons, lettuce, beans, rhubarb, tomatoes, and even the occasional ambitious asparagus all home-grown. Now I live in a small country, in a small(ish) flat, with no yard, and therefor, no garden, and therefor, no berries.

Well that just won't do.

There's little as satisfying as growing your own produce. And, as every city-scale farmer will attest, it all tastes so much better than the supermarket stuff.

But the waiting list to get an allotment here in Bath is up to ten years long. So. What to do?

Build an indoor garden! I've got lots of sunny windows, and lots of ambition, so this is the season for trying. The 'still alive' list is, currently, as follows:

-3 Strawberry plants

-5 Pepper plants

-2 Tomato plants

-3 pots of spinach

-1 Basil

-1 Coriander

-1 Parsley (flat leaf)

-1 Chives (that s looks wrong, but I think it's right)

-About 1000 aphids, all on the strawberries. What? Huh? These are INDOOR plants! How did the aphids find out about them? Damn well-connected aphids. It a bid to crush their imperialist strawberry-takeover attempt, I've managed to trap and rehome three lady-bugs onto the plants, but they all seem to have disappeared. Talk about ungrateful. Free all you can eat buffet, and nothing, no help at all. More on this battle as it continues.

Unexpected chord.

Did some freelance recording for this nice-guy-nice-music Rob Bray. He made a funny little music video out of it. Don't mind the somewhat startling final chord. Or the are-they-or-aren't-they high bits near the end. Do mind the clip of me finishing a passage and starting to talk the moment my bows leaves the string. And the bird puppet.

a little silhouetto

Just a quick note to say:

Yesterday I recorded in the studio where Bohemian Rhapsody was recorded.

Wow. Powerful stuff.

Pulp non-fiction

I don't like to watch Quentin Tarantino films.

I hear they're good.

I believe they're intelligent.

They have good soundtracks.

But I don't like to watch them.

Because I don't like violence. I don't like watching it, real or fictitious, and, I don't understand society's fascination with it.

Especially random violence. It doesn't make sense, not even evolutionarily. (I could elaborate here, but I won't. You're quick enough to get where I'm coming from, right? Right.)

So, to the random nose-smashers of last night's London, why? Not a despairing, rhetorical, fist-at-the-sky 'Why?', but seriously, why? Couldn't you use that energy climbing, riding, making, finding, learning, writing, growing, teaching, moving, exploring or playing something? Honestly, I want to know, why?