cindy's world

At my parents’ house yesterday, I sat at the baby grand and tried to compose a piano accompaniment to one of Daughter’s songs, but soon found that I can’t hear her song in my head when I’m playing; the piano drowns her out. It’d be easier if I had sheet music for her song to follow, but she doesn’t write things down. I’m not even sure that she knows how. So I put that project aside and picked up some old music written by the boys who really knew how. The classical composer Muzio Clementi flowed the most naturally through me that day, and I fell in love with his Sonatinas again, re-exploring them one by one. I mostly sight-read but would love to really familiarize myself with them again, play them as I used to. As I used to — when was that? I looked closely at old notations and dates. 1986. Good lord, I aced exams, recitals and competitions playing this stuff when I was ten and am now struggling through the trills and turns and hitting the right key without looking down?! =P

I need to get a piano. But first I’d need a bigger house.

Today was an eventful day, filled with friends and food. It started with my meeting Ann for brunch, but the area is so new my car’s navigation couldn’t map it so I ended up lost and late. =P I’d post the picture of her sitting in the outdoor dining patio, but she probably wouldn’t appreciate it. =) Beautiful day, though.

My second and final meal of the day was in Laguna Beach with Lily & Arnold, and Mr. W. We had a great time chatting, and ever the entertainer with my elephant memory, I quoted things Lily wrote to me in a Christmas card years ago when she was plotting to make Arnold propose. Arnold got a huge kick out of her mindset at the time, having never known of it before now.

It was uncomfortable to be stared at like a freakshow at brunch.
I wish I weren’t so often insecure and jealous.

Elements of a great morning:
* being greeted by a furry miniature cow
* seeing abs through a sweater (it’s a thin fitted sweater and the right angle and lighting is required, but STILL.)
* having to change skirts because the first one has become way too roomy
* having a GREAT drive to work in my 300+hp car that I’ve greatly missed driving
* GREAT commercial-free music bumpin’ on the drive
* getting 30 mpg this trip
* leaving 15 mins later than usual and STILL getting in 90 minutes earlier than I need to.

We had a very exciting Sunday! We (Mr. W, his daughter, and I) went to James‘ home studio to play with and record one of the stepkidlet’s original songs. This is her first studio session ever, and the first she’s heard other instruments added to her music. First, Daughter did her scratch track by playing the acoustic part and then singing over it.

James did his technical magic.

James then composed and added drums. I can’t remember why Daughter would be singing as he’s doing bass, and he doesn’t, either. Weird. Maybe he’s just using her voice as a guide.

Check this stuff out. Virtual percussion!

After the drums were added, James picked up his bass guitar. An awed Daughter looks on.

James composed a kick-ass bass line. I still hear it in my head when I’m trying to go to sleep.

James had to pick up Daughter’s chords to match up his accompaniment. It was amazing to watch this exchange happen. They were like two Palm Pilots lined up on their infrared ports to sync.

Strum strum.

And THEN, after recording the bass guitar line, James ran over and picked up his electric guitar and composed another dimension on the song!

The finished product was FREAKIN’ AWESOME. I’ve had it stuck in my head all weekend. The song was already catchy as is, and now it’s just unforgettable. James is now thinking, forget American Idol, we’re looking at a future Grammy. After the song is copyrighted, depending on how Daughter feels, we may put this song for sale with iTunes to get her name out there. What an amazing thing for Daughter and James to have hooked up this past weekend. We’re just watching doors open everywhere.

We got home yesterday at about 6pm, and the neighborhood seemed darker than usual. I didn’t think too much of it beyond that as I was on the phone with a friend having a heated discussion about rental contracts and cheating contractors. I was also having a text message conversation with another friend. My phone was looking low on battery but I figured I’d just plug it in when I got inside. Still deep in the phone conversation, I stepped into the house and popped on light switches. Nothing happened. I tried other switches. Then I walked back out to the driveway. “Um…the electricity’s out,” I announced.
“WHAT?!”
Right then our neighbor walked down the driveway to greet Mr. W. I went back in the house and made some attempts to light candles with one hand while gabbing on the phone with the other. Mr. W entered soon thereafter and said that according to the neighbor, the electricity’s been out for an hour and the electric company may take till 9:30p to fix it. Right then, in mid-sentence, my cell phone died. And I effectively hung up on my friend. Crap! Of course I can’t charge it without electricity.

I had a stroke of genius and ran upstairs to turn on my laptop. The sucker was fully charged and I could at least shoot an email to both people I was in mid-conversation with to explain things. Except, I soon found out, routers need electricity to work. I had no internet!

I sat down on the floor, defeated. I hate leaving people hanging. I couldn’t even turn my phone on to get phone numbers to call them back on the landline, which probably doesn’t work anyway because they’re all cordless phones that need the electrical base to work. This is why I’d been saying that we need at least one regular plug-in phone in the house, but does anybody listen to me?

Since it was not advisable to open the fridge for fear of letting the remaining cold air out, we walked a few blocks to a local Thai food restaurant for dinner. I was uncomfortable all evening, not being able to call people back, get online, or watch TV. You know how people sometimes assume that someone’s ignoring or flaking out on them, and there’s always somebody else, Ms. Reasonable Doubt, who says, “Maybe they just misplaced your number. Maybe they’re stuck in a meeting that ran late. Maybe they were in a car accident. Maybe a plane fell out of the sky and landed on their house and they’re trying to pick their way through the wreckage to safety but in the meantime had to use their cell phone to throw through the window to break the glass, because every other throwable item in their house is on fire, and the cell phone hit the sidewalk outside and broke, and you’ll get this explanation tomorrow when they’re back at work and can send you an email to explain it all.” Well, that really IS me this time. My cell phone died, the neighborhood is out of electricity so I couldn’t charge it to call back, the laptop works but the router needs electricity, all my phone numbers are stored in my dead cell so I couldn’t call even from a payphone, and electricity wasn’t restored until almost 1am when I was already asleep, so I couldn’t charge and call later in the evening, either. And all the alarm clocks were off when the power came back on so I woke up late this morning, too.

At least I already wrote a quick apology email this morning when I got in to work.

And I now learned that I can not live in colonial times. I missed my TV time.

Mr. W’s daughter came by my work today to visit since she had the day off from school. She also brought her guitar for entertainment. A lot of people at my work know her since she sung at our wedding, but that was before she picked up her first guitar, three and a half months ago. She taught herself to play the instrument with some light instruction by a friend her first few weeks. With a musical instrument to accompany her voice, she has now written eight or ten songs that all sound different, catchy, and amazing. I put her on the witness stand (where there’s a microphone) and had her do a few songs for my staff. The first I requested is probably my favorite that she’s written so far. I don’t think she’s titled it, but she basically used a short tumultuous fling she had recently as inspiration and wrote songs around a drop of emotion or event. The result is something so beautiful, and real. The reason I like this song in particular is because of the buildup of the message. Here’s the song’s turning point, which happens about 1/3 of the way through. She starts off singing about the devastation the guy left her in, and then the lyrics say something like, “This may sound like a sad song to you, but I’m happy as can be, because you won’t believe what I found when you left. I found…me. I found me.” It brings me to tears even thinking about it because it taps into something raw in my history, what I had to go through to stand up and be myself again, and the way she wrote the melody around it, the word “found” is dragged out slightly, as if to build suspense, and then the “me” is sung very emotionally, starting low, almost on a minor key and builds into a strong major key note, and her voice also gains strength, and you can almost see a flower blooming in a shaft of sunlight in the snow. *sniffle*

I wanted to take a cameraphone picture of her up there but my phone died earlier this morning. I wish I could share her songs and lyrics with all of you, but I want her to be discovered first. 🙂 And she’s definitely working on that.

Court reporter: Aww, animals are so precious. They’re like little gifts.
Me: Little fuzzy gifts.
Court reporter: Little fuzzy gifts that throw up.

Aww.

I was convinced to join one of those ubiquitous social networking sites this weekend. I find the damn thing to be one of the most user-unfriendly interfaces ever, as warned by Dwaine. A few minutes ago, I don’t know what the hell I pushed, but apparently it sent out “friend” invitations to everyone in my email address book! That means people who are ALREADY my friend on this site, people who may not know me but who had included me on a forward list, people I’ve responded to in a group response to some email forward, EVERYONE. What.the.fock. I do not want that many people knowing my business!

If you get one of those invitations, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it!

Mr. W and I went to The Melting Pot for a fondue dinner on Sunday night.  As soon as we sat in our booth, we were able to very clearly hear the conversation at another booth diagonally across the aisle from us.  I soon realized this is because an 80+ year old man was having dinner with an early 20s woman, and the man was hard of hearing.  He’d ask her to repeat everything she said, and she spoke loudly and clearly to begin with.  I thought it was very sweet; she never lost patience with him, helped him with his fondue, introduced the various sauces to him, told him about some class she’s taking where she was hoping she could make up some hours for.  It looked like a busy college student took out some time to hang out with her grandfather for dinner.

After appetizers, the girl observed, “You look down today, Bob.  Are you still mad about lunch?  What did you have that was so bad, anyway?”  He replied that lunch was bad, but that wasn’t why he was upset.  He admitted that he was, indeed, upset, but it was because of HER.  She sounded surprised when she said, “Me?  What did I do?”

“You made it clear today that –”  I didn’t hear the rest, either because someone said something (possibly Mr. W, possibly the waitress) or because his voice faded off as he turned his head.  I did hear her response.

“That’s not fair, Bob.  Now I’M upset.”  She sounded indignant.

“Why are YOU upset?” he asked, almost incredulously chuckling.

“Well, because!  You make me think that that’s all a man wants.”  There was some talk that sounded like he wanted to drop it, regretting bringing it up, but she insisted she wanted to talk about it.  She finally agreed to let it go, but then made another comment about it.

“I don’t understand you, and you don’t understand me,” he said calmly but loudly, just because he has no idea how loud he is.  She did, though, as she said something discreetly to him that I couldn’t hear.  He couldn’t hear, either.  “What?  I can’t hear you.  You’re gonna have to speak up.”

She paused, then said more audibly, “Never mind, let’s talk about this later.  Let’s talk about it when we’re back in the car, so you can actually hear me better.”  He agreed, and she went back to helping him cut meat, spear raw food on the fondue picks, and putting them in the pot for him.  She asked him if he’d like some seasoning on his food.

He said suddenly, putting both palms down firmly on the table in front of him, “All I know is, you are the absolute most beautiful thing I had ever –” and his voice faded off again out of my hearing.

She handled it by chuckling and saying, “Now we know who’s blind.”

“WHAT?”

“I said, ‘NOW WE KNOW WHO’S BLIND.‘  Haha.”

The rest of the dinner was pretty peaceful between them, talking mostly of the delicious sauces, food, and her nursing assignment at the hospital for class.  When they were ready to leave, she paid the check (he griped about how much tip she gave and she had to explain that this is 2009, servers make next to nothing and depend on tips to survive, and she ALWAYS tips 20%), handed him his cane, came around his side of the booth, helped him up, let him lean heavily on her shoulder as she helped him walk slowly out of the restaurant.

There’s something oddly impressive about my husband to me.  He can’t remember our first weekend together in the detail I’d like, in his youth he was more interested in ditching class to find chicks, booze and other illegal stuff than in paving the way toward college, but at times like just now, he makes me look at him in scholastic awe.

He laid sunning in his hammock in the back yard, immersed in the shadow of a book he held over his head.  I curled up atop two deeply cushioned patio chairs, shriveling away from the sun toasting my bare leg skin golden brown, reading a book recommended to me by a bloggy friend.  Downing a huge glass of my favorite white wine, Caymus Vineyards’ Conundrum, I attempted to keep my mind in the first chapter of The Rule of Four.  Written by a Princeton University graduate in collaboration with a Harvard University graduate, this book had a few more SAT words in it than my previous reads, the four volumes of Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight.

“What’s a mason?” I asked abruptly.

My husband touched his finger to his place in his book and looked up.  “Mason?  As in the secret society, or as in people who builds brick walls?”

“Oh,” I said, and read on.  And then later, “What’s an albatross?”

“An albatross is a large sea bird,” he said and went on to describe the long beak, its hunting patterns in the sea. 

I watched him patiently.  When he was done, I asked, “Is there a second definition?”

“Yeah,” he said without a beat.  “In Greek mythology an albatross is a large thing hung around a person’s neck, something heavy, that keeps him from being able to move easily, like a punishment…”  He gestured around his neck.

“Like a ball and chain?” I asked.

“Sort of.  Like a burden.  What’s the context?”

I read, ” ‘I have a peculiar middle name, which for parts of my childhood I carred like an albatross around my neck.’ ”

I love walking Wikipedias.