Today is a four-egg day, so I'm happy! The hens were on strike since maybe November, and then about a month ago they gradually started laying one egg every couple of days. The last couple of days it's been three per day, and this morning I found four in the coop. Good work, ladies!
On alternate Wednesdays I have no classes or students or rehearsals, so am at home, and I arranged to start my day with the reception of another load of firewood from a new vendor. He lives less than 20km away and has a smaller trailer, about the size of Bryan and Kiana's, so can't do big deliveries. But that's okay; it's probably best that we try out a smaller amount first and see how it stacks up (haha) against the competition. This stuff is oak and beech and ash, and was cut three years ago so it's dry. I've just lit a fire to see how it burns, and if it's good then we'll go with him for another delivery, instead of our previous vendor who has a larger dumping trailer that drops four times as much per delivery.
We needed the wood because with the unusually cold winter that we've had, we've kept the stove going all the time and have used up all of our previous stores of fuel. It's been our main source of heat as our furnace is so old that it can't be repaired, and needs replacing. I have one estimate already to replace it with an ultra high efficiency condensing furnace, which in addition to the primary heat exchanger on the combustion chamber has a secondary heat exchanger to reclaim heat from the exhaust. I am looking into several other estimates before we make our decision, but this is right time of year to do it as Belgium has special offers in March for home renovation projects. There are "green" rebates from the government available to encourage lower gas consumption, and I have to apply for those. In any case we were going to have to replace the furnace in the next couple of years, as the country is switching from a lower nitrogen gas imported from the Netherlands to a higher nitrogen type that comes from other countries, and so the older furnaces must be retired.
I must say it's nice to have a little extra money in the bank from working at the school, now that we are contemplating big purchases like furnace replacement... while I am mentally exhausted by teaching, the financial benefit is nothing to sneeze at. We also have some other work to do to solve a moisture problem at one corner of the roof, and then there is some masonry repointing that needs doing at the back wall and also the chimneys need some maintenance, and we have bathroom renovations to consider, and the completion of the attic.
On the topic of teaching, it's going well. I realise that now I've been involved in the same project (Grease) since late August, and as a teacher since the end of October, so that's the longest period of time I've worked with just one team since 2007. Usually my collaboration with a group of people lasts a maximum of two and half months (opera) or a couple rehearsals and a few performances (concert), so I'm more of a sprinter than a marathoner when it comes to working in an organisation. But I think I'm getting my second wind.
We are only partway through the video indexing, identifying our "keep" video tracks and synchronising them with the studio audio tracks. Thom has been taking care of the video compositing, and he's completed one song, with two choruses, two solos, and a dance number to go. It's still a long slog ahead.
Meanwhile we have been teaching all of the middle school music students a unit called "Auditioning Skills", which is all about learning music, memorising words, making interpretative decisions, costume, hairstyle, and location and lighting choices. By the end of the week every one of those 100+ students will (hopefully) have video recorded and submitted one of the songs from the musical "13" that we've been teaching them since January.
The idea is that they should get comfortable with the process of rehearsal and preparation, whether they want to take part in the actual musical or not. Then we have a video repository of every music student singing something, and can go through that archive to then select people for call-backs auditions in person.
I must say that it's great to see how the kids have taken to learning these songs... it doesn't hurt that the piece is occupied with adolescent topics like fitting in, being a geek, trying to get up the nerve to kiss in the movie theatre, friends and "frenemys" and so forth. It's awesome to hear the grade eight boys trying to out-sing each other as they walk out of the classroom and down the hall to their next class...
Ok now I've got to get all of that wood inside the basement before it starts to rain...
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