Friday the 13th

 

It's a gorgeous day here in Brussels, sunny and 14 degrees.  I have to go out in a little bit to pick up a few things at the grocery, and so I'm going to profiter de la soleil and make a nice long walk of it.

This past week has been quite a luxury; after a crazy few months I'm happy to have some down time, and have done all sorts of self-indulgent things, like going to the sunday market, noodling about on jazz guitar, reading undemanding and purely entertaining novels, cooking rabbit in cherry beer and spending unstructured time with the family.  Elmore Leonard is part of my summer vacation ritual, and while I don't have any new books by him handy, I've been staying up late watching the third season of his fantastic tv series, Justified.  Timothy Oliphant is awesome as Marshall Raylan Givens.

Duncan has been in a multi-sport stage at Maggie's school all week, which is nice, because he has had a chance to socialize with tons of other kids in English, and Malcolm has been pretty lazy, although I did crack the whip with him in flute practice yesterday.  He pushes back a fair bit in the moment, but then five minutes later asks me to help him solve a problem with something else in the next piece, it's interesting.  As I've said before I think the transverse flute is a lucky choice for him, because of all instruments the support and phrasing is closest to singing, and of course methods of practice and memorization are pretty much the same no matter what instrument you are playing.  He had the chance to see and hear the flute trio in the Haydn Creation last week, which I was very glad of; I hope it inspires him a little.

Maggie has been home as well, and it has been nice to spend time together, although unfortunately she has been fighting a losing battle with the flu, and is currently resting in a darkened room.  I have gotten off fairly easily on the illness front so far, since my symptoms were largely muscle aches and a bit of fatigue, but she is really knocked out, and after fighting her way through all week, she finally gave in today.  She's been working in her classroom most of this week, preparing her history curriculum for the next few months, which begins with the Normal Conquest of 1066 and carries on until the Renaissance.  Quite a chunk of stuff to summarize, I would imagine!

I have also done a few work things; I reviewed and updated my biographies in english, french and flemish, designed some posters and flyers for the upcoming Schubert concert in Brussels, and wrote some thank-you letters for projects already completed.
 
There was also some basic geek work; my main hosting service MobileMe is being discontinued, and being replaced by iCloud.  The upside is that the newer service has additional features, and is free, but the downside is that hosting and photo galleries are no longer supported.  That means exporting all of my webpages to folders, and I must now port them over to another storage location.  I've already got free storage from both Sympatico and Scarlet, our internet providers in Canada and Belgium, so it's unlikely that I'll have to incur any additional cost, but it still takes time.  Then I updated the OS on both of our computers to the newest version, bought some new applications and did some hard drive verification and dumped a bunch of old files.  Now that high-resolution digital photography is so easy to do, and that much of my music library has been digitized (mostly for cross-atlantic portability), it's amazing how much stuff is hanging around on our hard drives... and I don't own a video camera!  If I did I can only imagine how much more storage we'd require.  As it is I have lots of audio recordings of concerts and coachings, and these are valuable to keep, but they are a challenge to manage.

Now I've got to head out and pick up Duncan from his sport stage... here's wishing you a fantastic weekend with lots of good luck...