It’s been a very busy two weeks of Easter holidays, and this morning the house is suddenly silent again… so time to catch up.
We got an early start on the vacation on Thursday evening prior to the last day of school, by going out to dinner as part of the Tram Experience with Lawrence and Tiffany. This is a multiple-course dinner served on a converted vintage tram car that picks you up at the big courthouse on Rue Royale, takes you for a tour of the city while you dine, and then delivers you back there again after a couple of hours. We'd been wanting to do it for a long time but were lucky to have the schedules meet up, and it was very good.
As well the last week before Easter vacation marked the "one hundred days" left of school for the last-year secondary students, and their tradition includes going to school in disguise. Malcolm made sure to participate...
Early in the first week of vacation Maggie and I went to Namur to check out the fabric expo held there each year, and she purchased many different fabrics for projects.
She has already made three dresses and a t-shirt on this holiday, and cut out two more outfits.
We also bought some new fabric to cover the dining room chairs, and I went to the Brico to get new veneer core plywood for the seats themselves, to replace the very cheap low density fibreboard pieces originally used. Afterwards we also made a trip to the historical water mill in Hollange, which is maybe 150 km straight southeast in the direction of Luxembourg City.
Malcolm and I went wood shopping on the first Monday of the vacation with our friend Benoit the luthier, and assembled some of the components for our matched guitars project. The bodies will be made from the same plank of basswood, and the necks carved from the same plank of maple. The next day we did some cutting and planing of the wood to thickness, and it was great to see the grain and the guitar shapes start to emerge.
Malcolm will be playing a few songs with two other students in his year at the Fête de l’École, so he got in some band practice early that first week, while Duncan spent quite a bit of time with his friends from karate. Near the end of the week, we dog-sat Samosa, our "god-dog" while Kiana took the kids to the Hague for an overnight while Bryan was travelling for work, and I enjoyed taking him out for a fast 10km in the Forest. He also got in a six-km walk/run with Maggie, and multiple walks with Duncan too.
On Friday we all attended the inaugural acoustic string jam session, held at St. Andrew’s church. There has been a folk music night held there infrequently for many years but this event has a slightly different flavour, as it seems to me to be dominated by bluegrass musicians.
A family from the USA have recently joined the congregation, and their two sons are mandolin and banjo players, and very active in the bluegrass scene here in Belgium, so they had the idea to start up a jam session again at the church, and brought along a number of their friends. Malcolm rehearses with the brothers regularly, and there were no other bass players there, so he was busy comping along to jigs and reels on electric bass all night amid a sea of banjos...
Saturday I went on a nice long training run with Lawrence; it was meant to be maybe 18km, but ended up being twenty, my longest run since hurting my ankle last September! Lawrence is getting ready for a 35 km run in Bouillon next weekend, so he needs the longer distances… I’m really happy with how things are going in this hobby, and I’m seeing some good progress on my short run speed as well as slowly increasing distance.
On Palm Sunday the choir director was absent, and the usual organist was away as well, so the music committee had asked me to sing something in the anthem slot… without an accompanist at hand I decided to do something on guitar that involved the support of the two boys, so Duncan played percussion, and Malcolm assisted on guitar while we sang a trio version of a Bruce Cockburn song that I had tweaked with an additional verse of lyrics to help it fit the Palm Sunday theme.
It was a big hit, and I am happy that Duncan in particular got back to singing again; since his voice has started to get deeper he has stopped singing with the junior choir, so this was his debut performance as a baritone, and the first time all three of us sang together in public. Many people in the congregation asked why Maggie didn’t join in also… Perhaps that's another project for the future.
In the afternoon we went over to the Varvuolis household to let Simonas and Malcolm play some loud music in the basement while Gediminas and I went for a short run and then joined them. As well Simonas was celebrating his eighteenth birthday, and he was presented with a Toronto Raptors jersey that I had brought back from Canada. Jonas Valančiūnas is an important player on this team, and of course, he’s Lithuanian!
Maggie has also started running, as I indicated earlier; she usually goes with Julia Gardner, and has been slowly increasing her distance. She got out about three times a week during the two weeks of vacation and along with weekly classes of Yoga and Zumba is feeling much more energetic, and is slimming down quite a bit too. I've gone out with her a couple of times too, and we recently visited the monument built in the Foret de Soignes, behind the old Hippodrome de Boitsfort, to commemorate the thirty-two people killed in the Brussels attacks of last March 22nd.
It's a peaceful and quiet location, with thirty-two blue stones arranged in a circle, with a paper birch tree for each victim planted in a larger circle enclosing the stones.
Mid-week we went out to Bryan and Kiana’s to borrow some power tools to cut out those dining room chair seats, and Bryan and I got in a fast 8km run together. Then Maggie I continued our road trip, and went to look at a number of houses for sale a little to the south-east of where we live. We’ve been hemming and hawing about what to do with the proceeds of our Toronto house sale from several years ago, and had looked a quite a few Brussels houses over the last few months. Unfortunately the real estate market in the capital region is highly inflated, and while we loved one of the houses in our current neighbourhood, it wasn’t really in our price range, so we were looking out a bit towards Waterloo to be close to her work, but still close to the city.
After seeing three houses, and making appointments to visit more, we headed home. That evening I took advantage of a colleague’s complimentary ticket offer, and drove up to Ghent on my own to see a performance of the Bach St. Matthew Passion.
Over the last several years I’ve performed the St. Matthew ten times and the St. John three, and last year I had to turn down three or four performances as my schedule was too full. But this spring, I had no Passions to sing at all! But it was still very interesting to experience Bach’s masterwork from the audience point of view. I knew the orchestra members, and many of them greeted me warmly; I was happy for my colleagues (I had sung as a soloist with all but one of them in other projects) and also was glad to meet and renew acquaintance with several conductors from Flanders who were there. I hope that next spring will see a resurgence of contracts to sing more contracts during Passion season.
The rest of the week was taken up with medical/dental appointments, more house viewings, and social engagements. Of course we did the usual family cooking; a few high spots over the holidays were pan-seared seared scallops in a sauternes reduction with capellini, a truly epic club-sandwich, maple-bourbon-mint ribs, and also homemade hot cross buns on Good Friday morning...
More news as it develops, but it seems that if all goes well we should be moving in by late July. The house is serviceable and has a lot of good amenities; we want to do some work on it, to insulate and replace the roof, and most probably renovate the quite large attic space to make it into one or two rooms, and do something with the bathroom upstairs.
It was followed by a wonderful big dinner, with many delicious courses and of course many nice wines, and some caviar and vodka. I guess caviar qualifies as eggs for Easter dinner?
We didn’t stay over, but came home and got up in time for the Sunday morning service. Then in the afternoon Lawrence Edwards and I did an exploratory dry run for a walking tour of the Brussels downtown, starting at the Mont des Arts, then passing down into the Jardin du Petit Sablon, the Notre Dame du Sablon church and square, and from there down eventually past the Manneken Pis (and the new museum that houses his many costumes, pictured below), the Grand’Place, Place de la Bourse and so on.
In two weeks we’ll take a dozen people for on this route, and encourage them to sample artisanal chocolates, cookies, and rare beers from the establishments along the route, while taking in the sights, and getting to know some local lore.
Lawrence is quite well-informed about the history of that part of the Brussels, but I have some contributions to make from the memory bank as well, so we are looking forward to it.
We invited Lawrence and Tiffany and their kids over for a raclette dinner afterwards. Malcolm regularly babysits their three kids, but he was out with friends for a birthday party instead, and Duncan was good enough to pay attention to their kids while the adults were dining. Still we were all pretty tired and ended up making it a relatively early night.
Easter Monday was fairly quiet: Duncan was catching up on his reading and breaking down and rebuilding his many LEGO sets, and Malcolm was finishing up the last touches on his big latin essay that he’s been writing during the holiday. Maggie wrapped up her current sewing project in progress until her next chunk of free time, and got her stuff together for the first day of school.
I was occupied most of the day Sunday in rehearsing for this weekend’s Bach concert… it’s a fill-in for me, as the original bass singer backed out of the project a couple of weeks ago. It’s quite a challenging programme, very rangy (i.e. high and low), and one of the three cantatas (BWV 158: “Der Friede sei mit dir”) is essentially a solo cantata for bass, with some help from soprano chorus, and a final four-part chorale. I spent a couple of hours working on it by myself yesterday afternoon, and then sang through all three cantatas with the cellist for two hours, followed by more rehearsing in the later evening, near the end of orchestral rehearsal. So all in all it was a good long day of singing, and I was pretty worn out.
This week will involve more rehearsing, and I have to deal with a number of things for the house in Wavre. I have to secure a notary to help us process the offer of sale and eventually the final sale transaction, and then we have to talk to a few bankers and try to get them to compete to give us the best interest rate… lots of phone calls and meetings in the forecast!
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1 comment:
Good luck with the house! It looks great!
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