Monday, December 29, 2008

Winding down, winding up


It's been a luxurious several days of no schoolwork, seeing relatives, hanging around with my kids, thinking about things other than schoolwork...nice. Baking. Made our own version of the Odwalla "strawberry c monster" with youngest, then we concocted our own blueberry-banana-blackcurrant smoothie thing. Fun!

Today, I got around to digging up the tax records and puzzling out what I need to do about estimated payments before the 31st, and also did some charitable contributions that I've been meaning to get around to. It feels rawther productive.

And in the morning, we start the intensive rehearsals before opening of The Tempest. It's at a point where it looks like a show, and I'm floored by how lovely it is. This play has more songs written into it than any other Shakespeare piece, and we're doing it with lots and lots of live singing and instruments and oooo it's great. Come see it! You'll be glad you did.

The weather is plain weird. We got 2 feet of snow; now it's melted away. Go figure. One week ago, I could barely walk through the blizzard; now it feels like spring. The plants and birds are getting confused. I know we're going to hammered with a lot more snow before this winter thing lets go of us, so I'm hesitant to even feel comfortable in the non-freezingness.

Sigh. New year's coming up; least favorite holiday; must find something just right to do with youngest. Good night, Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice and Welcome Yule.

4 Comments:

Blogger Lucia said...

Only 27 days till St. Brigid's! With more snow coming, I'm holding that thought.

5:32 PM  
Blogger Lucia said...

Hey, are you still there? (says she who hasn't blogged in nearly two weeks...)

4:07 PM  
Blogger Christina said...

Liz, who wrote the music for The Tempest? I keep meaning to ask someone and keep forgetting. It was lovely--and such a great part of the performance.

(Christina, aka Fiddler)

10:06 PM  
Blogger Liz said...

Mary Kate found most of it. It was a mixture of stuff, actually - we adapted a version of "Full Fathom Five" recorded by an Irish musician named Maere? I think? The sea chanty at the beginning, MK rewrote words and arranged for the voices from what I think was a traditional South Carolina ship's chanty. We struggled with a couple of crappy tunes for "where the bee sucks" and Sara combined them into something listenable that was in her range. I grafted a version of Amanda Palmer's "Astronaut" onto the goddesses song lyrics. And our brilliant violinist, harpist, and cellist wrote their own accompaniment to play - I was literally saying things like, can you do something here that sort of echoes the music in the other scene? can the cello just pick up bits of the harp here with some long somber lullaby type notes?

11:28 PM  

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