2016 Update

Musically, it was a fairly slow year.  Bought a travel fiddle and was able to sit in a couple of Irish sessions in County Mayo in the spring. Went to SCOR again and met more folks that play in my region. Visited the Maine Fiddle Camp again this year for a week of fiddle and a week of cello. Played a little swedish fiddle at the West Virginia International folkdance camp. For something new I went to Fiddle Hell weekend near Boston for my birthday.

Continued to play chamber music with a couple of new friends I met at SCOR 2015.  We decided to do a concert for an ACLF for the holidays.  Here's an excerpt -- a divertimento by Haydn.  We named our group after it "The Baryton Trio".

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Object Lesson on What Happens When You Don't Practice Enough - Recital Horrors

The chamber music recital was moved up two weeks due to various scheduling issues.  I would have preferred to just have the Schubert Quintet deferred until next September but was outvoted.  The cellists didn't get a chance to practice the week before the recital nor warm-up beforehand.  Intonation was very very very bad.    Chamber music teacher said that it was a very ambitious piece for our skill set.  However, the piece was a lot of fun to practice and the moments where it comes together are nice -- too bad they only last a few phrases at a time.  For masochistic and morbid curiosity sake I will post the video.

WARNING: listening to this version of Schubert's Quintet in C will hurt your ears.  

My husband's piece, the Vivaldi Mandolin didn't fare much better.  He decided it was a horse race and took off running.  I did get to play the viola for this piece.

Interestingly enough, it must actually sound like a real musical piece as YouTube sent me this warning "Your video "2012-04-Mandolins.m4v", may have content that is owned or licensed by Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society and The Harry Fox Agency, Inc. (HFA), but it’s still available on YouTube! In some cases, ads may appear next to it."

The guitars memorized their piece.  It's sweet and short.

The Boccherini Sextet wasn't too bad.  I sat out on this one.  Three cellists would have been overkill.
It should have been faster.

Surviving.

Been somewhat overwhelmed this past month.  Earl's mother died and that sort of put school work on hold for a couple of weeks.  She was 95-1/2 so had a good run.  We had an excuse for a nice family reunion in Baltimore.

All my delayed assignments came due at the same time as the final paper for FSU.  Add some heavy tax season work to the mix and I was an unhappy camper for quite a few days.

Did have an exciting thing happen on the home front.  The two remaining burners on our stove blew out the day after Earl's mom passed away.  This gave us a good reason to finally go to Sears and replace the stove and the nonfunctioning dishwasher.

Preparing for the new appliances prompted a whole kitchen re-arrangement and a large donation to goodwill.

Also determined that since we can't afford to move, the next best thing would be to get some breathing room.  So, rented a storage area -- our new attic is 5 x 10 and only 5 minutes away.  It should help us recover some of our apartment.  So far I've done about 20 boxes and still don't have any closet space.  However, I can now open and close the closet doors without having to stuff things that were falling out back in.  Also, there are a few flat surfaces that are seeing the light of day again in our apartment.

Anyway here's a video from tonight's recital. It's sort of blah...not bad enough to be interesting and not good enough to crow about.