Helping friends move house; Some progress with workers; rehearsals for Paulus; auditions

little red ski jacket

Malcolm came home for the weekend, so we celebrated with a big pizza dinner on Friday night.  He is moving ahead quickly with his own guitar building, and we saw a lot of cool photos of his progress.  As well he was quite interested in my Zadowcaster, as it was the first time he's heard it or played it.  (If you are interested in listening to hear what it sounds like, I made an iphone recording of an impromptu slide piece from my living room; you can listen to it here.)

On Saturday Malcolm and I went to see Lawrence and Tiffany's new house, and helped them move some things in by small trailer and van.  We did the same on Sunday, and Maggie and Duncan joined in as well with lifting and carrying, as well as lots of yard work.  The big move is this coming weekend but I have performances both days and so won't be able to help out, so I wanted to get in some work ahead of time.  Their new home is near Jodoigne, maybe 30km due east from our place in Wavre; it's a lovely big house, along with a nice piece of forested land which the children enjoyed exploring.

Lawrence moving his wine barrel into the bar area

Saturday while Malcolm and I were off at the new house Maggie and Duncan went to the Wavre city centre and picked up a cherry tree; we planted it in the backyard on Sunday.  I will be buying some larger ones from the same supplier that Kiana is using; apparently there are rebates from Wallonie if you plant heirloom varieties, so I am hoping to get some apples and maybe another couple of cherry trees.

four old friends

Saturday night we had a great raclette dinner with our friends Régine and Jean-Luc, the parents of Valentin and Célestine.  As well, mutual friends Matthias and Karin and their son Fritz came, as well as another friend Simon and his mother.  It was a really lovely time and I really enjoyed using my french.  I don't so often use it in social settings these days, but more for business, or practical conversations on the telephone, so it was nice to enjoy conversation with friends.  Maggie also gave her conversational french a good workout.

Christmas cactus is blooming!

The Christmas cactus is blooming!  This makes me very happy.  I received a tiny little slip of it from a friend at church, and I put it in water to root it.  This is the second year that it has bloomed around the beginning of Advent, and it's a sign that some advanced Christmas cooking needs to start. 

Last night I made some of Alton Brown's aged eggnog.  We tried this for the first time last Christmas but it was so good that we didn't let it age.  This time we'll try to hold off on drinking it until the Christmas holidays start.  It is extremely boozy:

Alton Brown’s Aged Eggnog

Ingredients

• 12 large eggs
• 453 g (1 pound) white sugar
• 750 ml of heavy cream
• 750 ml of whole milk
• 236 ml (1 cup) each of Jamaican rum, cognac, and bourbon
• 1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg (plus more for serving)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Instructions

• Separate the eggs and store the whites for another purpose.
• Beat the yolks with the sugar and nutmeg in a large mixing bowl until the mixture lightens in color and falls off the whisk in a solid "ribbon."
• Combine dairy, booze and salt in a second bowl or pitcher and then slowly beat into the egg mixture.
• Move to a large glass jar (or a couple of smaller ones) and store in the fridge for a minimum of 2 weeks. A month would be better, and two better still. In fact, there's nothing that says you couldn't age it a year, but I've just never been able to wait that long. (And yes, you can also drink it right away.)
• Serve in mugs or cups topped with a little extra nutmeg grated right on top.

Maggie decided to make a christmas cake:

Make & mature Christmas cake

Ingredients

• 1kg mixed dried fruit (raisins, sultanas, currants, cherries, cranberries, prunes or figs)
• zest and juice 1 orange and 1 lemon
• 150ml brandy, sherry, whisky, or rum, plus extra for feeding
• 250g pack butter, softened
• 200g light soft brown sugar
• 175g plain flour 
• 100g ground almond 
• ½ tsp baking powder 
• 2 tsp mixed spice
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon 
• ¼ tsp ground cloves 
• 100g flaked almonds
• 4 large eggs 
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Method

• Put the dried fruit, zests and juice, alcohol, butter and sugar in a large pan set over a medium heat. Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 5 mins. 
• Tip the fruit mixture into a large bowl and leave to cool for 30 mins. Heat oven to 150C/130C fan/gas 2. 
• Line a deep 20cm cake tin with a double layer of baking parchment, then wrap a double layer of newspaper around the outside – tie with string to secure. Add the remaining ingredients to the fruit mixture and stir well, making sure there are no pockets of flour. Tip into your prepared tin, level the top with a spatula and bake in the centre of the oven for 2 hrs. 
• Remove the cake from the oven, poke holes in it with a skewer and spoon over 2 tbsp of your chosen alcohol. Leave the cake to cool completely in the tin. To store, peel off the baking parchment, then wrap well in cling film. Feed the cake with 1-2 tbsp alcohol every fortnight, until you ice it. Don’t feed the cake for the final week to give the surface a chance to dry before slicing and serving.

Now for the workers: it's been frustrating waiting for them to get going.  The roofing guy has delayed and delayed; the chimney liner guy also has let very beautiful weather go by without showing up, and the furnace and plumbing guy has been terrible about returning my calls.  But this morning I made a flurry of contacts and it looks like there will actually be something done by the end of the week. 

It was a lucky start to the day today as the repair technician for our bathroom hot water boiler actually showed up exactly on time!  Unfortunately the model we have cannot be repaired, so he gave me the name and number of some installers; I managed to reach them this morning and they should arrive on Friday morning.  I also managed to contact the fireplace installer and he assures me that the installation will be going ahead on Thursday, with the chimney liner going in tomorrow, absolutely.  So that's something.  I was on a roll so I gave our original boiler/plumber installer/repairman a call and managed to catch him on the phone as well.  He made some excuses but promised that he will send me his estimate immediately... I have some things happening next week but could be home for three out of the five business days, so I wrote him and email to let him know which days he could come to start work.

As well there are other things to coördinate: after lots of waiting around it's suddenly become a very busy time.  I have rehearsals for Paulus tonight and tomorrow in Brussels, the car to take in for servicing tomorrow prior to the chimney liner installation, performances of Paulus on Friday and Saturday, a solo from the Handel Messiah to sing at church Sunday morning, and the reading to deliver.  Sunday evening I have a rehearsal for the Christmas Oratorio, with further rehearsals later in the week and then the performance on Saturday the 9th.

I also had a bit of good luck yesterday that encourages me artistically.  But a bit of context before I get to the happy news... I studied psychology in university and haven't stopped being interested in the subject.  As a parent of two teenagers I have been reading a good many articles recently about the psychological effects of social media, smartphones, and the "fear of missing out" phenomenon.  Parents today need to keep a close eye on their adolescent children, and talk openly about issues of identity, self-perception, envy, belonging, and so forth, especially as these relate to the new and marvellous technology of the smartphone.

But the same awareness of the psychological effects of social media consumption is important when one is a self-propelled entrepreneurial artist.  With all of the ups and downs that an independent career entails, it is very easy to read the happy social media posts of colleagues and feel envious of their good news.  There are times when I have to take a holiday from reading the glowing words of friends and colleagues who are singing in opera houses that I have yet to perform in, because it's too easy to start feeling negative.

What I have started doing more frequently is to not ignore these posts, but rather use them as a starting point to research new conductors and new performance opportunities.  I make sure that when I work with orchestral musicians or singers whose work I appreciate, I tell them so, ask questions about their instrument; who made it, where they studied etc. and we become engaged in quite interesting artistic conversations.  Frequently these interactions lead to them sending me a friend request, and then we stay in contact through facebook for example.  The upside of this is that I end up cultivating a broader artistic community, and I start to see their posts advertising their new projects.  This leads me to the organisations and conductors who make the hiring decisions, and from there it is a simple enough matter to write them an email asking to audition.  I do this kind of thing pretty much every day; it's kind of like going fishing.  If you don't throw out a line, you are pretty much guaranteed to never catch a fish.

Yesterday two of these "fishing lines" had bites: one was from an experimental theatre company in Antwerp that also performs in Rotterdam, for a reimagining of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte.  That audition will be next Tuesday, a short notice situation, but I will sing arias that I know well.  Interestingly I had email correspondence with this director back in 2010, but it took a reminder email from me to make this audition happen.  The second "bite" came from a prestigious conductor in Amsterdam.  I contacted him because the tenor soloist with whom I have sung many Matthäuspassion performances is working with him on Messiah right now.  I sing a pretty good Messiah, so sent him a note, and he replied back with the offer of an audition near the end of February.  Yahoo!

These kinds of things really give me encouragement to keep hunting for new opportunities, to advance my career and to expand my network of conductors...

Last sailing trip of the season; keeping warm; it's Beaujolais o'clock

The Beaujolais Nouveau 2017

The third Thursday in November is Beaujolais Nouveau day, and so the stores had their big displays out this past week.  The big name of course is Georges Duboeuf, largely credited with globally commercialising what had been a local tradition of a celebratory harvest wine in the Beaujolais region, but there are also other producers, and GB Carrefour and Delhaize have their own bottles.  As you can see in the picture above the prices are quite affordable.  There's no point in buying lots of them though as the wine has a very simple character and is not meant for cellaring, but rather is meant to be drunk right away.  The back verandah of our house is sitting at around 10 degrees Celsius right now, so it's a perfect "walk-out" refrigerator for this type of wine.

It's been colder here but still relatively dry, not too much rain.  On Friday I had a great 11km run in the Foret de Soignes, on my own, as Lawrence is still nursing a calf injury and Tiffany was staying in with their youngest child who was down with a cold.  The colours of the forest are really magical this time of year.  I was running a well-known route and was well-rested, so managed a quite fast 5:26 minutes per kilometre average pace.

Duncan and Maggie and I are getting used to being three instead of four, and after having unexpected accumulations of leftovers in the fridge I am trying hard to reduce my food shopping by a quarter.  Certain foods (apples, peanuts, oatmeal) are mainstays of Malcolm's regular diet, but not eaten much by the rest of us, so that has altered my shopping list a bit.  He hasn't been here for a couple of weeks now.  We have received a few reports that things are going well, and he shared a couple of photos of his guitar-making progress, but for the most part he seems to be happily chugging away on his own.

guitar top with bracing installed

shaving the ends of the bracing

Duncan and I have resumed our group reading of the Hobbit in the evenings, him with the facsimile first edition and me with the Folio society edition.  It's great to read books together out loud; I don't know if that is something that the Belgian students do in class.  Certainly when I was an primary school student we read aloud together, taking turns and following along with our own copies of the text.  It was a great way to learn the pronunciation of a word that you might not have heard before, and for teachers I am sure it is a useful tool to identify the different abilities of students.  Most primary students have a much higher level of oral comprehension than reading comprehension, something that according to reading guru Jim Trelease doesn't change until somewhere around the eighth grade, or the age of thirteen or fourteen.  Duncan is in the equivalent of the ninth grade, but of course all of his instruction has been in French with some Flemish since he started school, so it's not clear what his reading level in English is.  Reading English books together is undoubtedly to his benefit.  It's also a nice way to spend time in the evening that doesn't involve a glowing screen.

This past Saturday evening Gediminas and I drove up to Zeebrugge and went for an evening run along the coast for 6km, and then prepared for a final sail of the season on Tyfoon with our friend Frank, the skipper.  He's going to be taking the sails down this week, and making the boat tidy for the winter.  There is a chance that the boat will be sold, so this might be our last sail on Tyfoon.  As well Gediminas will be moving on to another ambassadorial appointment soon, so it is not clear when we will next have a chance to get out on the sea again.

We had an early departure on Sunday morning and made very good time to Oostende for lunch, averaging around 7 knots on the way there and getting up above 8 knots on the way back.  The skies were fortunately free of rain but the wind was cold and I was glad to get home and warm up again.

Today it's more singing of the Mendelssohn Paulus.  My first rehearsal is this weekend, and while it is only a short recitative rehearsal I want it to go well.

I hope that my next report will be a good one that includes a successful fireplace installation.  We are still waiting on the Bulex people to come and repair/replace our bathroom hot water boiler, and I haven't heard anything more from the roofing guy.  Now our clothes washer has just bit the dust.  If it's not one thing it's another!

Fortunately there is a Krëfel store here in Wavre; they will not only deliver and install a large appliance free of charge but will also remove and dispose of the old one.  So unless I can find a really good deal on two-year old washing machines on the for sale websites today, I'll be ordering one from Krëfel...

Still waiting for the workers

The roofing contractor apparently is still laid up from his knee injury, and so we are still waiting for him to recover.  We originally expected him at the beginning of October, and have had multiple delays.  The particularly frustrating thing at this point is that we already paid him 35% of the cost.  Even if we wanted to hire another roofing contractor, the delay before they could begin would likely be several months, so we really have nothing to do but wait.

At least we have a little bit of good news: the wood stove and chimney liner will be installed next week.  The stove contractor had asked a specialist at chimney lining to do the work, but because of the age of the roof tiles he wanted to coördinate with our roofer, just in case any roof tiles were cracked during the installation.  But I have found some replacement tiles upstairs and have told the installers that we want to proceed without any further delay.  We now have confirmation that the stove will be in on Thursday or Friday of next week (November 23 or 24).  I expect that it will make a big difference in our sense of comfort this winter.

Yesterday I had a longer run here in Wavre.  I'm really happy that Maggie discovered these trails very close to our house.  Yesterday morning I set out to run the usual 7km trail but found my way blocked close to the trail start.  Yesterday there was some sort of hunting activity going on, and obviously you don't want people or dogs wandering around the woods in the vicinity of people firing guns.  So instead I set out to run the route backwards, and ended up having to try cutting cross-country, which scratched me up pretty badly with brambles and stinging nettles.  I ended up running to the end of the route and then ran back the way I had come, so managed to get in a fairly quick 14km.  The conditions were cold but but fairly bright, which cleared my head and made me feel much better.  The shorter days in November can be a bit of a drag in Belgium, and our new house is very luminous, which helps a lot, but there's nothing like field and forest time to wake you up.

After the other activities of the day, I managed to meet Maggie after school and do a yoga session with her group, something which always feels great after running.  They say that the more stretching you do after a run, the better it is for preventing injuries and encouraging flexibility and recovery.  Perhaps I'll be able to find a good route to her school from here, and join their yoga class every tuesday... I've only run home from St. John's International School one time, and most of that was unfortunately on tarmac or concrete paths, which are too hard and flat to be much fun, so I need to do some more research.

I've been doing some warming up today already, and will do some rehearsing this afternoon.  I don't have any new material to learn for the Christmas season concerts this year, with the exception of a new recitative and aria for the Bach Cantatas concert on December 17th, but I do have to get the Mendelssohn Paulus and the Christmas Oratorio back into my muscle memory.  Those rehearsals will start next weekend (November 25th) and then I'll have a very busy couple of weeks.

I've been sending out additional requests for auditions, so there's also my opera audition repertoire to maintain and improve.  I sang a ton of auditions with this repertoire last season, so there will be no surprises there either but it makes sense to keep exploring new things.