Canada Day; packing up for the house move; end of year parties and house-sitting

It's been a very busy month.

I was very pleased to sing at the Canada Day celebrations, held this year at the Museum of the Cinquantenaire.  Once again I performed the Belgian Brabançonne in French, Flemish, and German, and the Canadian National Anthem in French and English.  We were happy to see the Ambassador to Belgium, Olivier Nicoloff, and the Canadian Ambassador to the EU, Daniel Costello, once again. 

His Excellency Olivier Nicoloff, with Maggie and Duncan

Canadaman

Both boys did well on their exams, and both have now passed through into their next years.  Duncan will enter into his third year of secondary school (the equivalent of ninth grade in Canada) and won a prize for History.  Malcolm received the equivalent of his secondary school diploma, and won prizes as well, in Religion and in French.

before the ceremony

Malcolm really wasn't feeling at all well on the night of his graduation ceremony, and wasn't even going to attend, but we managed to get some ibuprofen into him and get him there just on time.  They called out the names of the students, based on the last names of their educateur - kind of like a guidance counsellor, who is prime for each group of students throughout their secondary school career - and amazingly, each educateur said a few words about each student just before they received their diploma and any prizes. 

after the brief congratulatory speech by his guidance counsellor

For Malcolm, his educateur said this:

"I always had the impression that you had an air "most British", yet over the last three years, it was more one of "moose and maple syrup".  Your classroom remarks were always pertinent, and you gave the impression of someone who would remain perfectly calm on the road to hell as long as the music was good."

I assume that the last bit is about Malcolm's performance of Highway to Hell at the fête de l'ecole, but perhaps it refers to his religion prize?  Speaking of the Inferno, it was extremely hot in the auditorium, and as we were late we had to stand to one side for almost two hours, and they had only got through perhaps one-third to one-half of the names by the time Malcolm had received his diploma.  Pleading illness, we made our apologies and left.

The next Monday morning we drove up to ILSA, the Lutherie school, to hand over the diploma and confirm his registration.  All was dealt with successfully, with one wrinkle: in order to claim the educational savings plan money that we have put aside in Canada, we had to supply a proof of enrolment in French of English, and as this school is operated in the province of Antwerp, Flemish is the only option.  Can you believe it?  So we have to have his enrolment document translated and certified before we can get back the money we have saved.

successful enrolment

We have been continuing trail running with our group of friends; I have been doing around 35 kilometers per week on average, and recently did a half-marathon distance with Lawrence.  Maggie is really doing well, going out every other day with Tiffany or by herself, and is increasing her distance up into the seven and eight kilometer range.

The first weekend of July we had a party in Bousval ahead of Bryan and Kiana's departure.  I was shopping for produce and snagged an entire flat of strawberries at half-price from our favourite grocer, and Maggie and Kiana hulled them with some help from Duncan, and made a good haul of strawberry jam.

We also had an experiment with cooking a salmon next to the fire... We had to filet the whole salmon, and improvise a stand and a plant for securing the two filets next to a big fire.  It worked out really quite well, and I'm sure this apparatus will get used again.

Cheers

the mantel clock installed in Bousval

Bryan and Kiana left for Iceland and then the USA on the 7th of July, so we've been house-sitting ever since, and have been going back and forth nearly every day to Brussels, to pack up boxes, and take down fixtures, and get the house more or less ready for the move.  That work is essentially done, with a few hours' work needed to dismantle some of the larger items, and restack boxes so that the moving out will go more smoothly.  But we still have lots of time, as the move won't happen until the weekend of the 29th/30th July.  So we have also had some relaxing evenings here in Bousval.

balloon watching

the joys of nine-ball

making caesar salad (note the fresh pasta drying on the counter)

Malcolm has had to go in every Saturday for his woodworking course; it is an introduction to hand tool techniques, and something that we thought would be valuable for him in advance of his lutherie studies in September.  As well he's been doing a little babysitting work; any additional funds he can accumulate are going to be needed next year.

Benoit has been off on holidays so we haven't done any guitar building, but we decided to make some plywood vinyl storage boxes.  One sheet of 8mm plywood costs around 34 EUR, and a box of screws was 6 EUR.  We used an online panel cutting tool to make a cut list with minimal waste, and determined that we could get four boxes out of one panel, so for around 10 EUR per box we have enough space to store all of our records.  Notice the dimensions of the box in centimetres?  I thought it appropriate...

We might need to build some more boxes though, because Jean-Claude, our Bousval neighbour, saw our collection, and decided to give us a nice big collection of vinyl records that he's been storing for about twenty years.  He hasn't had a turn-table in years, and there are some really nice classic rock, psychedelia, Verve Jazz and other records in there, all in very good condition.  He very generously will let us have them under the condition that we inventory them, and find some way to ensure that he gets digital copies of the ones he wants to keep.  Bonus!  So I've set up our computer in the extra bedroom downstairs here at Bousval, and after I'm done writing this blog, Malcolm will get to work inventorying the records.

On Monday just past we formally bought the house in Wavre.  Having purchased property twice before, Maggie and I assumed it would be a pretty quick in-and-out at the lawyer's office.  In fact I don't remember even seeing the lawyer when we bought the Toronto house; all of it was handled by our realtor.  But things are different in Belgium...

You know that Gilbert and Sullivan song from HMS Pinafore about 'all of my sisters and my cousins and my aunts'?  Well, that is who is invited to the closing ceremony for real estate purchases in this country.  We showed up to sign 'The Act' (as it is called) at 3:30 in the afternoon, only to meet our banker in the reception room.   It seems that because his bank was the one that approved our mortgage he had to be there, to initial and sign on every page of the legal agreement for the mortgage.

But that was only act one of the drama; exit the banker, and after a brief pause the vendor of the house showed up with her lawyer, and her real estate agent, and her god-mother... if our banker had stuck around we could have had two eucre games going.

The short story is: it's a done deal. We are technically poorer but now have a European house to call our own... We don't get occupancy until 10 AM on Monday the 24th July, when we'll start doing some painting and planning out where everything will go.  Then the truck rental starts on July 28th at noon.  I expect that I'll do a delivery of the large furniture that is here at Bousval first, as much of it will be going into the basement, and then we'll move the armoire, beds, and other large pieces from Avenue de Visé in one go, and start setting those up in the new place.  The boxes can come last.  In the intervening days we're going to make a run to Aachen; Bryan and Kiana have discovered that buying items like paint or plaster, or other building materials and tools are much, much cheaper in Germany than they are in Belgium, so we hope to do that on Friday.  It is the Belgian Fête Nationale so nothing much will be open anyway, and likely traffic around Brussels will be particularly thick.

Oh yes, one last footnote: as a nice gesture the lawyer offered to have one of his staff translate and certify the enrolment letter for Malcolm... yippee!

Heatwave; North Sea sailing; Carmina Burana; exams are over; housewarming plans; short trip to London

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Luilekkerland" (The Land of Cockaigne), 1567

It has been really hot this last week: the temperatures in Brussels began to rise on Saturday, which meant that I had the top down nearly all the way to Maastricht to sing my Carmina Burana concert.  That was a pretty big success.  No photographs yet but I am sure I saw a pro photographer snapping shots from the edge of the stage, so I am sure some of my antics were captured for posterity.  Some of the musical directions for the baritone soloists include con comica esagerazione, which translates to "with comic exaggeration", libero improvvisando "freely improvising", and gesticolando e beffardo assai "gesturing and mocking very much".  I did my best not to disappoint.

It got even hotter on Sunday, hitting 27 degrees, and then the mercury continued to climb: Monday 31, Tuesday 30, Wednesday 32... this morning it's 10:00 and it's already almost 30 degrees.  We've kept the drapes drawn during the sunny hours to try to keep the apartment cool, and run the fan.  It helps that there are many chances for cross-ventilation, so it's not so bad, but the plants on the terrace require lots of water and as it hasn't rained for a long time our cistern is almost empty, an unusual thing in Belgium.

Zeebrugge to Cadzand

The warm weather was very nice for our sailing day on Sunday.  Maggie and I left early with Gediminas and Rasa to drive to Zeebrugge, and left on a high tide in Tyfoon.  Gediminas was our skipper and Frank stayed home; the boys were finishing up preparations for their last couple of exams, and Simonas was rehearsing with his school rock band, so it was just the four of us.  There was no appreciable swell and only gentle wind, which made Rasa and Maggie comfortable, and we snacked and sipped our way to Cadzand, a few kilometres inside the Netherlands border, where a lovely marina has been constructed over the last couple of years.  Here are some photos of our day...

raising sail

 stopping for a swim (taking this photo required some long-dormant waterpolo skills)

steady as she goes

keeping cool

On Monday I went in early and completed work on my guitar neck, starting with the last few tasks of laying out and rasping away the maple on the back of the neck.  Then more scraping and sanding, and a couple of coats of shellac.

 

I am very happy with how the neck feels, and am eager to continue work, but now have very little to do until Malcolm catches up with me.  Because of his exams he is three or four days' work behind me, and so I have to wait until he is at the same stage of readiness so that we can spray paint the two guitars at the same time.  It makes it easier to get a good colour match, and also the cleanup of the equipment can be done all at once.

I have received another offer to sing a Johannespassion in March, this time to do both the arias and the Christus part, which is an awful lot of singing... but it will be a good fee and of course I have to prepare the Johannespassion anyway.  So now the 2018 Passion season looks like this for me:

• rehearse Johannespassion (arias, Christus) March 20th, Brasschaat, BE
• Johannespassion (arias, Christus) March 23rd, Brasschaat, BE
• rehearse Johannespassion March 24th
• Johannespassion (arias) March 25th, deSingel Antwerp, BE
• Johannespassion (arias) March 26th, Sint-Carolus Borromeuskerk, Antwerp, BE
• rehearse Matthäuspassion (Christus) March 29th, Sint Werenfriduskerk, Zieuwent, NL
• Matthäuspassion (Christus) March 30th, Zieuwent, NL
• Johannespassion (arias) March 31st, Concertgebouw Brugge, BE

As well I have been asked to do some more Matthäuspassion performances during that same period but I'm not sure if the dates are going to work; we'll have to see.  I know some singers who get onto the "Passion circuit" in the Netherlands who regularly sing something like twenty performances on tour over the few weeks leading up to Easter.  I'm not at that point yet, but it's great to have many chances to interpret this music.

The boys have finished their examinations... Duncan has gone over to his friend Arthur's house to play.  Malcolm is at Ben's shop continuing his work, and then he will go to his school this afternoon to pick up the envelope that says whether or not he passed his subjects.  Duncan gets his notification on Monday, and then the complete bulletins arrive a few days later.  We are very confident that both will receive a good result.  Tonight we will celebrate the end of exams by going out to BE Burger, a relatively new "boutique" hamburger shop in Brussels on the Luxembourgplein.

This afternoon I am meeting with my friend Marie-Claude Roy to run through the Belgian and Canadian National anthems.  We perform at the Canada 150 celebration at the Cinquantenaire next Tuesday evening and I need to practice my flemish words a bit.  Then later on this afternoon I need to spend some more time rehearsing my own opera repertoire for next week's audition for La Monnaie...

We haven't any huge plans to go anywhere for the holidays, and instead will be occupied with house-sitting for the Hammers, and packing and moving house ourselves.  We've picked a date for the housewarming party: the 5th of August (a Saturday) and hope to have things ship-shape enough to welcome guests.  Then the week following the party we're taking a short three-night trip to London.  Maggie and Duncan will take advantage to the offer for a free under-16 ticket go to see Wicked in the West End, and I think Malcolm and I will head to the Royal Albert Hall and line up for Proms tickets, like Maggie and I did a few years ago.  There is a big Star Wars Identities exhibition in London while we are there, so I think Duncan will go to that. 

The Dulwich Picture Gallery is hosting a large exhibition of John Singer Sargent watercolours, the first UK exhibition dedicated to his work in nearly a century, so I will try to take the tube out to Dulwich and check out both the exhibition and the permanent collections.  Sargent's portrait in oils of Lady Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth was on display as part of the AGO's Drama and Desire exhibition that we visited in Toronto in 2010, and it completely blew my mind.  It has become my favourite painting; I will be sure to go to the Tate Gallery, as Lady Macbeth is on display there again; "she" was in storage or on tour when Maggie and I visited and I absolutely have to go see "her" again...

Prague rock(s); guitar building continues; running is going well; Carmina Burana this weekend

I don't have a lot of time this afternoon, as I am off to Maastricht shortly for the dress rehearsal for Carmina Burana with the Maastricht University Choir.  But I will try to catch up on last weekend's events, mostly by way of photos....

From last Thursday to Sunday Maggie and I were in Prague; she had a three day / four night teacher training conference, and I bought an additional ticket to tag along.

Prague is a beautiful city; it has a wonderful mass transit network and is easy to walk around in.  Czech is a slavic language and so our experiences in Croatia made it a little easier to understand signs and descriptions of things, but fortunately the second language on pretty much everything is English, so that made things very easy.  While she was in her training sessions I enjoyed exploring the city, checking out the historic theatres, running a bit in a nature park, visiting some monastic breweries, and even enjoying a cigar on a patio.  Here are some photos of the things we did and saw on the trip...

outside the Estates Theatre where Mozart conducted the premiere of Don Giovanni in 1787, with a statue of the Commendatore (a role I have played twice)

At the Brevnon monastery brewery

a cigar on the patio at the Bodeguita

poster advertising the opera Lohengrin; this production was a recreation of the 1967 Wolfgang Wagner staging from Bayreuth... a bit of significant stage history!

the interior of the famous Church of Our Lady before Týn

in the National Theatre for Lohengrin (8 EUR standing room tickets!)

National Theatre Chandelier

before the performance

Maggie in front of the Alphonse Mucha window at the St. Vitus Cathedral

a cool staircase in the Cathedral

beautiful woodcarving that reminds me of Morris and the pre-raphaelite brotherhood

wooden carved maps in the cathedral

angels holding the curtains

inside the 10th-century St. George's basilica

inside the room of an alchemist/scholar in the Golden Lane, a narrow alley between two sets of fortifications with many small houses

the view from the castle environs

mexican tilework in the bathroom of La Cantina

apparently beer and prosecco are on the breakfast menu in Czechia

"Slavs in their original homeland", the first of twenty huge oil paintings from Alphonse Mucha's magnum opus, The Slav Epic, which usually is displayed in Prague

in the Mucha Museum (which I visited)

having a late mornign pivo outside the Estates Theatre

having a late afternoon pivo at the Brevnon monastery café

the view from most of the way up the trail to one of the high points of Divoká Šárka, a nature preserve to the northwest of the city

view from the top

one Czech beer I really liked; the 24% doesn't actually mean 24% ABV, instead it's around 10.5%, but yummy

flying home on the Rackham, one of Brussels Airlines specially decorated planes, this one to celebrate Tintin

Undoubtedly I have missed describing a lot of things that we did, but you get the general idea.  The hotel restaurant was excellent and served delicious breakfasts and lunches, and we didn't have a bad meal anytime we went out.

The boys were both ok at home while we were away; Duncan told me today that he likes his brother a lot and that they had a good bonding experience while we were away(!).  That's a relief to hear; sometimes having two teenaged boys in the house is a bit challenging.  They are both finished regular classes and so are around the house a lot, except in the early mornings when they are writing exams.  Malcolm is nearly finished, and Duncan too; I think the last one is on Tuesday, so we will celebrate by going out for a movie and something nice to eat, I would expect.

On monday I was itching to get moving, as my short run in Prague on Friday wasn't very satisfying.  I had to drop the car off at the Volkswagen dealer so that they could install the emissions software patch that corrects for the false readings... perhaps you heard about the big Volkswagen emissions scandal?  Fortunately our car has a very small diesel engine that emits very little pollution, so we are not too worried, but there are some municipalities that are talking about banning all diesel engines.  I hope that doesn't meant that we have to replace Schnelli; it's been a great little car.

But about the running: I headed out directly from the garage and picked up on the back section of the Foret des Soignes 20km loop; followed that until it met up with the middle of the 10km look for about 8km, and then ran another section of the 20km loop that ends up emerging from the forest at the maison communale, which is about 2-3 km from the house.  So in all, I ended up doing about 18km and at a pretty fast pace too.  I have started to notice that I run much faster after two or three or more days' rest than if I go after just one rest day.

This morning I did some short fast runs: 3km at 4:50/km, a short walk to rest for 200m and then 500m at 4:19/km.  I've been reading that short sprinting is a good way to reduce your time on longer runs, so we'll give that a try.  I am trying to beat my fastest 5km at 4:55/km set in February in Vancouver, and it's looking like I have a good chance of doing so.  Then the next step will be trying to beat my 10km record, which is a stubborn 5:11/km, set on the Leslie Spit in Toronto.  I will be happy to get the average pace on 10km down to under 5:00/km if I can!

I also managed to get back into the atelier to do some more guitar work.  I have almost finished shaping the neck.  Then the next thing will be to do some spray finishing and then the electronics and hardware and we're done!

the shaped and sanded headstock

rasping away the back of the neck for comfort and playability

cabinet scrapers are amazing

laying out "facets" in pencil to ensure a uniform curve along the length of the back of the neck

Yesterday I also took some time out to go meet Bryan in Wavre, and we went to disassemble a pool table that they had found online.  It's a lovely German-made table, with 3cm thick slates, each section weighing 70 kg!  It was a lot of work to get the thing taken apart, loaded into the van/trailer and then carried in.  Reassembly is still in progress but I expect we'll get some use out of it ourselves in July, when we house-sit for them...

The weather here has been really hot.  After the pool table move Bryan and I also went and disassembled a metal pavilion that I'm going to set up in the back garden in the new house.  It was around 30 degrees while we were taking it down, so we got a little dehydrated.  I came home with Maggie after her Zumba dance class, and we had a lovely salade niçoise on the back terrace with the boys...

dinner on the terrace

Now I'm heading out the door to sing the rehearsal tonight... I'm sorry if this post was a bit of a knowledge dump but I don't have time to proofread... !