Trail des Trappistes Chimay; getting ready for our party; Luxembourg

Maggie at the start

We had a great trail race last weekend!  There were six of us running, and between us we managed to have a runner in each distance category.  Our friend Jan ran the 50km distance, and managed to make a very exciting 5th place; Bryan and I each ran the 29km; Claire and Kiana ran the 22km, and Maggie at the last minute did the 11km.  It was by far her longest ever run, and she did it much faster than anyone anticipated! 

celebrating afterwards with her complimentary Chimay

For me the 29km was also my longest ever run, and we did it in well under three hours.  I found parts of the trail pretty hard; most of it was great, and Bryan and I kept up a steady conversation most of the way, but I had some difficulty on some of the steeper descents on very rocky trails, which is hard on my knees.  But I wasn't in any discomfort over the next couple of days so that tells me I was well trained.  Maggie's hip had been bothering her last week but after her train run, a Zumba dance class and a good yoga class this past week she's feeling much better.

Interestingly enough the official website just published a selection of photos from the race today... the page features the moment when I just finished... honestly I don't remember things being this dramatic!

"¡Qué emoción!"

longest run to date

We haven't seen much of Malcolm these days.  He was home last weekend for a bit, and that was really nice; he surprised us by making an apple pie, with the crust recipe out of Edna Staebler's Food that really schmecks Mennonite cookbook.

He's working away quite enthusiastically in his classes, and seems to be enjoying himself quite a bit.  Most of his free time is being spend doing music: he rehearsed with a hard rock ensemble last weekend, and is feeling good about it; I think that they have a gig coming up next month.  As well he's made friends with a number of people on the violin-building side of ILSA; it turns out that his classical training and discipline has made him a little bit intolerant of disorganised musicians, which a lot of casual rock and rollers at this age seem to be.  He's started playing his sterling silver flute again (good thing we didn't sell it), and is trying out some trios with flute and two violinists from the school.  I think he also might investigate resuming music lessons at the local academy in Laeken, or perhaps at the Conservatory in Brussels, either for flute, or more probably upright bass, or possibly 'cello.

I got a little bit of work done on my guitar on Tuesday morning, drilling holes for the electronics and installing the steel guitar pickup, but frustratingly I have to now put further work on hold, as Ben is leaving for California with a ton of harp guitars to sell, and won't be back until after the 18th of October.  I could do the last bits of work myself but he suggested that I wait, and I am not in a huge hurry to get it finished.  We have discovered that the body/neck joint dimensions that we used will leave the fingerboard a bit too high, so we plan to shave down the heel of the neck so that it sits a little deeper into the body.  This actually will improve the appearance of the guitar, as it will completely hide a flaw on the end of the neck that is minutely visible now.  The disadvantage is that then we'll have to retouch the finish on the heel of the neck, but that's not a big deal.  After that is done we can solder the pickups to the controls, and then after a setup and adjustment, we're done!  I did a little dry assembly though, to see how it will eventually look.

Duncan has had two days off this week because of a francophone holiday, followed by a teacher training day, but he's back at school today.  He has a bit of a cold, but managed to ride the bus into town yesterday and took part in his karate class, so he's not suffering too badly.  I think he's settling into school pretty well.  It's interesting having only one kid in the house; I'm sure that he's enjoying not having to jockey for airtime around the dinner table.

the rosebush from our terrace is flowering again

We've been spending quite a bit of time getting the house ready for our housewarming party this weekend.  It would appear that we have almost 90 people who have confirmed their attendance, which will make feeding and watering them a bit of a challenge!  But I think that we are up for it, and will provide a lot of snacky things, like hummous, crudités, chips, nuts, cheese, charcuterie and things of that nature.  On tuesday I went for a long drive to the Sint-Sixtus Abbey in West Flanders to get two cases of the Westvleteren 8, and afterwards drove down to Lille, where I knew I could stock up on Hecht and Bannier wine for the party.

It's too bad that there is no convenient distributor here in Belgium, but it is important for us to share this special wine.  As I have explained before Gregory Hecht is a friend of ours, who was introduced to us many years ago by our late friend Phil Kaegi.  We first enjoyed the H&B rosé wine in Toronto, on Endean Avenue, and I recall that Phil walked that first case over to our place himself.  It was so good that it didn't last very long, so we ordered more, delivered to Collingwood, where we were house-sitting near the beach that summer.  As well I met Gregory at a big Halpern wine-tasting festival that autumn, and we've kept in touch over the years.  I went by their offices on an audition tour back in 2008 when they were located in Bouzigues, before they moved to Aix-en-Provence, and when we were holidaying at the Bastide de Richaume last summer, Maggie and Bruce and I had an epic wine-tasting at their new offices.  So it has kind of become a multi-part history of its own, and every time we open a bottle or share it with friends we remember how it has intersected with our own story.  Now the latest chapter will be written as we share it at our open house...

This week has been pretty nice, with temperatures in the high teens/low twenties, but the long-range forecast unfortunately predicts rain... I am hoping that it will be delayed slightly; that would be far more convenient so that we can have people outside in the back garden as well as inside the house.

It will be a pretty busy weekend I should think: on Saturday I sing a concert with classical guitarist Ayman Jarjour in Brussels, in aid of displaced persons in Syria.  Sunday afternoon/evening is the party, and then on Monday I will meet with my pianist friend Marie-Claude, and we will drive to Luxembourg City, where we will perform at the Canadian consulate there.  It's the same gig that Marie-Claude and I did in Brussels in June, but this time I have to learn the Luxembourg National Anthem.  I've been listening to the text, and trying to get my mouth around the sounds of the Luxembourgish language.  It is actually pretty close to German, with some Flemish-sounding sounds in there, so I hope to be ok.  I met a number of Luxemburgers while on tour in China and so I'm going to record myself speaking and singing it and send it to them for a critique.

P.S. Belgian solutions (good ones for a change):

I am reminded of the story of how during the space race the USA spent 40,000 USD developing the space bullet pen, with a pressurized CO2 cartridge that allowed the pen to write in zero gravity, or underwater... and the Russians spent ten cents and used a pencil.

We read back in 2014 that the installation of smart meters by Ontario Hydro cost about 1.9 billion CAD.  Then they had to remove a bunch of them for safety concerns; then they had issues with the meters not sending wireless signals effectively, so they needed to send people out to read about 40,000 of the meters personally.

This week we received this pink card in the mail.  We are supposed to write in the numbers of our electricity meter, and tape it up to the inside of our window.  The meter reader will come by and record the numbers, and then leave us a slip in the mailbox to say that we can take it down.  Simple, and cheap.  Sometimes the lo-tech option is the better one...

Bread, stew, guitars, and Bach...

After a very rainy couple of weeks it's been quite sunny here, although colder: this morning the thermometer on the back terrace read eight degrees.  By midafternoon it's now up to 17 and sunny, which is really pleasant after last week's cold and wind and rain.  We have been resisting the impulse to turn on the central heating, and instead have been making do with dressing a little more warmly, and choosing to cook things that use the oven for longer periods.

Yesterday for example I made up two loaves of my no-knead bread, which bakes inside a cast-iron dutch oven at the hottest temperature that a standard oven can produce, which is around 550 degrees F / 285 degrees C.  It takes half an hour for the pots to heat up, and then the oven is on for around 45 minutes in total while the bread is baking.  As well, I made oven fried potatoes, and a flemish beef stew that used three bottles of Chimay Bleu, onions, garlic, bouquet garni, brown sugar, and red wine vinegar, finished up with dijon mustard and a few pieces of spice cake that thickens the gravy... after the initial sear on the stovetop, the stew sat in a 300 degree oven for a couple of hours, so that did something to take the chill off the house, and when it came to the table it warmed us up also.

I rehearsed for the Christmas Oratorio last weekend, and it went very well.  That performance isn't until December 9th, but our rehearsal time with the soprano soloist Fiona Hick will be abbreviated, as she lives in Toulouse and won't be coming until shortly before the concert, so she wanted to do a little work with the conductor while she was in town.  Joris Vershueren is a former counter-tenor who conducts and teaches in the Brussels area, and he knows the work and is a sympathetic colleague.  We  all got on very well, and I am confident that we'll have a good time.

at the market of Tervuren

After the rehearsal I met up with Lawrence and ran from his home out through the Foret des Soignes, and around the park of Tervuren, logging around 17km.  We stopped at the market square of Tervuren, where the Chefs on Wheels food truck festival was taking place... Maggie and Tiffany and the Edwards children met up with us and we sampled some nice beer on tap and tried out some of the food on offer.  Since then I haven't run at all, but have been resting up for the Chimay Trail des Trappistes that happens this Saturday.  I hope that will go well... Maggie isn't signed up but I'm encouraging her to try the 11km trail, and she can make a day registration if she wants to.

Yesterday morning I had my first look at the score for Wouter Dekoninck's transcription of Bach's Dritter Teil der Clavier-übung, an organ mass of Bach's first published in 1739.  Bach wrote four of these keyboard exercises: the other three of the group are for harpsichord, with the last one more commonly referred to as the Goldberg Variations.  Wouter has transcribed this work for singers and baroque orchestra, and named it the Grosse Messe 1739 für Bach und Luther.  This mass is meant to be a counterpart to the famous Mass in B-minor, but in this case the text is in German, not Latin.  We perform it in the 15th-century Sint Geertruikerk in Leuven, and then in the Church of the Dominicans in Brussels.

It will be an interesting project to present, and will tick another box in my checklist of Bach repertoire... I am running out of the big Bach pieces to premiere (a great problem to have).  This season is Bach-heavy for sure: in March I will for the first time sing both the bass arias and the Christus part in the Johannespassion in Brasschaat, near Antwerp.

the Kasteel of Brasschaat

The same week I will do the bass arias, Petrus, Judas, and Pilatus in deSingel Antwerp, Sint Carolus Borromeus Antwerp, and Concertgebouw Brugge.  Lastly I will make my debut as Christus in the Matthäuspassion in Zieuwent, NL, which will check off the last part of the Passions from my to-do list.  That means that with the exception of the Easter Oratorio (BWV 249) all I really have left is the regular Cantatas; there is no danger in me singing all of those, however; so far I have done only about twenty-four, and that comprises only about 10% of the Cantatas written by this amazing artist!

In house news, we made the down payments for the installation of our wood stove (scheduled for mid-October) and the replacement of our roof (scheduled for the end of October).  It's expensive to do the roof in particular, but we need to get that done and insulated, as there is currently nothing keeping the heat in at all!  The clay tiles are from the time of the initial construction (c. 1936) so they are still holding up but needing a fix, and the chimneys are in very poor shape (as you can see in the photographs below).

street side chimney

garden side chimney

I am sure that we will begin to see a benefit immediately in the feeling of warmth in the house, and avoid wasting money on heating costs, and also that we can get the attic rooms ready to accommodate guests as soon as possible.  Right now Malcolm is staying most of the time in his student room in Laeken, so the upper floor is empty, but there will be periods that he needs to stay here.  I have found a hotel-style fold-out cot that can be placed in Duncan's room when his friend Arthur stays over, and that may have to do for Malcolm as well while renovations are ongoing.

We have transplanted pretty much every thing that we brought from the allotment or our terrace garden.  The five rhubarb plants were beaten up pretty badly but they all have new leaves, and the red, black and white currant bushes haven't lost leaves, although there is some tip yellowing.  The raspberries seem to have been hardest hit but we'll have to see how they come back next year.  For the front garden we've planted our wisteria, a hortensia, a rosebush (which was very tired looking but is now showing buds!), a blue spruce, a number of lavender plants, a flowering laurier, and a regular bay laurel (the leaves of which I used in the flemish beef stew, btw).   I expect we'll be planting some iris corms and tulip bulbs as the season progresses so there is something colourful next spring.  Keeping the weeds down is a weekly chore, as the front was really left to go wild for many years and the weeds are well established.  The same is true for the back garden, which has a terrible infestation of stinging nettles which is a challenge to keep up with.

On Tuesday I went into town on the bus, leaving around 8:00 from the house, and walked to the Wavre Gare to catch the C bus at 8:20, arriving at Ben's shop by 9:05.  I got a lot done on the Zadowcaster, and now have perhaps one good day's work left to finish.  Here are some photos...

pickguard before routing for pickups

sanding and polishing frets

shiny frets!

the neck is attached!

middle p90 pickup routed, and pickguard adjusted

for the large bridge steel guitar pickup

neck bolts, string ferrules

ebony tuner buttons

nearly finished

Busy busy bees

Tuesday September 12th, 2017
It's a changed house this week: everyone is suddenly back to school, and so I got out my Bach score and warmed up for the first time since the end of June.  Happily, I was able to sing through all of my parts for the Christmas Oratorio without any incident.  In fact it felt really good!  I don't have to perform it until the 9th of December, but we have a rehearsal with the soprano and the conductor this coming weekend and I'd like it to be in good shape so am working on it all this week.

Malcolm was staying for the first ten days or so in an Air BNB place that I found.  He's had little luck finding student rooms in the area of his school, as the student residence building is undergoing renovations and so many students are in the same situation.  Tomorrow afternoon we are going to visit three or four furnished student rooms in the northern part of Brussels, where he can leave the house at around 7:20 and still make it to school in time for an 8:30 start.

He is enjoying the classes, which are largely practical ones, and at last account was busy shaping guitar necks with a hand plane.  This past weekend he came home and took his bass guitar parts in to Ben's Guitar Repair Shop, and completed the work.  It's a beautiful instrument with a really lovely maple and ebony fretless neck, and he is really very proud of it.  I haven't had much time myself to go in and finish my Zadowcaster, but there is a chance that I could do that perhaps next week.

All last week Maggie was away sailing in Bretagne with her classes of around 35 students.  With the help of three other teachers and two recently graduated former students, she managed to coordinate a successful trip, although the weather was far worse than last year, and they got rained on nearly every day.  I stayed at home with Duncan for most of the week, which was nice.  On Thursday he went into Brussels to stay with his friend Arthur for a couple of nights, and I met up with Gediminas and five other Lithuanian sailors to go for a four-day sailing trip of my own.

Last year I was a part of a crew of six who sailed to London, and this year we had decided initially to go to Boulogne-sur-mer, but the wind direction and weather forecast argued against such a trip at this time; it would have meant extremely slow going, with tacking for most of the journey.  Instead we decided to retrace and slightly enlarge a previous trip from July 2015, that Malcolm and I took with Gediminas, his son Simonas, Tomas Sikorskis, and his son Jonas.  We began by sailing northeast along the coast from Zeebrugge, passing through the Oosterschelde storm surge barrier, and made our way to Zierikzee for a very rainy overnight.  This is a very nice town, which must have been very prosperous at one time if the luxurious houses are any indication.  It was raining extremely heavily all morning we were there, so there was only a little bit of exploring possible on foot without getting soaked.

Upon leaving Zierikzee, we reefed the mainsail for safety because of the strong winds, gusting to almost 50km/h, and passed under the Zeelandbrug, the longest bridge/viaduct in the Netherlands, and then through another lock into the Veersemeer.  We sailed through the Veersemeer and took the canal Walcheren to Middelburg, where we stopped to pass another night.  The next morning the weather was better, and we continued motoring in the canal, coming out at Vlissingen, and then sailed onward to Cadzand marina for our last night with relatively clear skies and a strong steady wind.  An early start on Sunday brought us home to Zeeland in good time.

a breakfast on the boat

wet weather sailing to Zierikzee

Zierikzee

a door decoration in Zierikzee

introducing the Lithuanians to some oak-aged Sint Bernardus

at De Vliegende Hollander beer cafe in Middelburg

part of the crew in a 16th-century warehouse, now a cafe, in Middelburg

history lessons in Middelburg

sailing out of Middelburg, with Lithuanian and Red Ensign flags

beautiful day, motoring on the Middelburg canal to Vlissingen

good sailing into Cadzand marina on Saturday

the crew of the Tyfoon in Cadzand

This might be the last sailing trip of this crew for a while, as Gediminas is coming to the end of his posting here in Brussels, and we have no idea where he will be going next.



Wednesday 13 September
This week everyone has started settling back into the normal routine.  It's taking time for us to get used to the pace of our day, now that we are no longer living in Brussels proper.  Public transit is more complicated, because there are multiple, separate transit systems involved: the STIB (Brussels), TEC (Walloon Region) and De Lijn (Flemish Region).  Each has an online website that can help us purchase tickets but each one seems more confusing than the next...

Today was quite a whirlwind, beginning very early, and I think we used absolutely every form of transit; we left by car, Duncan was dropped off at the TEC bus stop for 7:18, and took the STIB Metro for the last leg of his journey to school.  Maggie and I continued to Brussels by car where she had her routine medical checkups first thing in the morning.  She then took the TEC bus to work in Waterloo.  Malcolm went to the railway station here in Wavre and bought a 10-ride ticket, then took the SNCB train to Boom, a journey of a little less than two hours.  The railway system here is luckily very inexpensive; as an under-26 it only costs him 5,20 EUR per ride anywhere in the country.

After I dropped Maggie off at the hospital, I carried on to one of the kiosk locations where I could sort out the boys' yearly student transit passes.  I knew if I went to Brussels South Station and got there just as it was opening I would be likely to be served quickly by a real live human and get things fixed.  Afterwards I retrieved my car from the parking lot, and drove to meet Lawrence so we could go for a run.

We've been training together up to 25km distances over the last couple of months, to help him prepare for the Medoc Marathon, a fun run that includes themed costumes and lots of stops for wine.  (He ran it last weekend, dressed as Angus Young of AC/DC, and carrying a styrofoam Gibson SG guitar that Malcolm made for him.  Our friend Claire was his running partner, and she went dressed as Cher... they were a big hit!).  I was feeling pretty out of it after a week of no running, so had to work pretty hard to keep a good pace, but we managed around 14km in the forest, which I needed.  I have three trail races of 28-30km coming up in the next month, so I need to get my distance runs back up into the higher 20s to prepare for those.

I got cleaned up afterwards, and went to the bank to get a form so that our rental deposit would be released.  I went to our old house to get it signed by our old landlord, and returned to the bank to submit it, and happily received our entire security deposit back.  Then I dropped by Ben's Guitar Shop to return the template we had borrowed from him to make Lawrence's SG; he told me that I could resume work on my Zadowcaster on Friday, so I should have some more pictures soon.

After that I went to meet Malcolm in Laeken, near the Atomium, at the top of the city.  He took a De Lijn bus down from Boom, and we met for a sandwich lunch and then went to look at student rooms.  After spending all afternoon seeing various places we finally settled on one, a nice furnished room with a large south-facing window, that shares a common living/kitchen/bath with two other students, on the first floor of a house on a fairly quiet street.  It's in the middle of the pack, price-wise, but is just steps from the bus and train station, so he should be able to make it to school in under an hour, or take a train home to Wavre in about the same travel time.  He was hoping to move in right away, but I convinced him to come home for one more night and pack his bag!

Then we went to pick up Duncan after his karate, and then drove to Waterloo to get Maggie from work.  Finally we made it home, and had a nice big dinner composed largely of leftovers, with a big salad, and went to bed tired but very satisfied that everything had been accomplished successfully.

Thursday 14 September
This morning the house is quiet, with just Kiki the cat to keep me company.  I took Malcolm to the train station this morning with a backpack with enough things to see him through until Friday, when I will go into town in the car with his already packed suitcase.  Maggie and Duncan left at the usual time; she has Parent-Teacher night tonight so it's going to be a long day for her, but Duncan should be home around 16:30.

This morning I might do a little bit of gardening, and also will definitely resume practice on my Bach Christmas Oratorio... now that I've got Malcolm's housing settled, it's a real load of worry off my mind.