I'm at home today; every other monday I have a day without classes, because of the way my part-time teaching schedule is organised. Maggie has a full-time contract so she took the car and went in for her classes, and had planned to try to get home promptly after classes, so that I could have driven back to Waterloo for the Grease filming session today. But because of a small accumulation of snow, the school decided to suspend after-school activities today. So that means that I have... a SNOW DAY!
Really it's a bit ridiculous: the roads are clear, and there's a very thin layer of snow on the sidewalks, roofs, and gardens. There is a tiny bit of snow scheduled to fall this late afternoon/evening, perhaps as much as 1mm of accumulation per hour...
This part of Belgium doesn't often get any kind of snowfall, and so they don't have the snowplows or the salt and sand required to handle the kind of weather that we normally experience in the Ardennes, or the Alps, or in our part of Canada.
I don't really mind the cancellation as I have been going at it pretty hard for three weeks, doing classes, private teaching at lunchtimes, and staying at school until at least 19:00 every night. We completed the audio recordings in the last week of January, and started filming on the 29th, but we still have quite a way to go before we're finished video recording.
We hope that this week will see the end of filming; next week is the February "Carnavale" holiday, and after that we are going to have to spend a lot of time editing the video together. I'm really hoping that we don't have to work at editing during the week off.
Then there is the middle school show, "13". We had originally planned to start the auditions this week or last, but that has been delayed a bit because of the COVID restrictions. The new rules for student activities mean that students aged twelve and under can still gather in groups for after-school activities, but in groups of no more than ten at a time. The thirteen-and-older kids can only gather outside, which means that some of the grade sevens and all of the grade eights wouldn't be able to take part in the show, unless we can figure out how to rehearse in a marquee style tent, which we haven't yet acquired. It seems that we're going to have to wait until the second week of March before we have anything resembling a real rehearsal, and even then, we will likely have to have the grade sixes on one day, sevens on another, and eights on a third, or rehearse them in separate groups.
All of these considerations mean that the May performances will likely end up being postponed until next year. In the meantime we will still rehearse parts of the show in music or drama or dance classes, in the different grade levels. We are planning to repeat what we did with "Grease" and do a similar kind of "13" showreel with selected numbers. My grade tens and I have been looking at the scores, and I think having them play the music for those pieces is an achievable goal.
Duncan has been going into school every day for an average of about 4 hours per day, which is unfortunate, as he has to commute back and forth by bus. But at least he has some in-person education, instead of distance learning, which everyone is sick to death of. He has a week off next week, the same as Maggie and I do. While his karate classes have not started up yet, the twelve-and-under karate students can gather in small classes of no more than ten, and the older students like Duncan and his friend Arthur are allowed to help lead those classes, so he's spending about six hours a week doing that. Part of his black belt training involves teaching, ideally at another dojo, but that's not possible right now, so this activity is keeping up his skills. He doesn't have his black belt exam until next spring, so he has time to prepare.
Malcolm's technical classes have continued full-time since September, and he's making progress on his various projects. He has two steel string acoustic guitars on the go: both are commissions but one of the buyers has lost his job and so has put the order on hold. He's going to build both guitars anyway, in the hopes that the original person buys it eventually, or Malcolm can sell it to someone else. He's also working on my archtop guitar, and he's doing his restoration work. He's applied for a job doing guitar repairs and setups at a large music store in Brussels, so we have our fingers crossed that he'll get hired there.
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