Fruit and nuts

You may be familiar with the base level of mess that my house suffers from. Imagine the usual mess compounded by a weekend of rehearsals and performances, meals on the run, and then two days of full-on Christmas baking. Got the picture?

Now, on top of that add 75 bulk boxes of dried fruit, seeds and nuts. Here's Fiona in the midst of the portion that is now in the living room. The remaining two thirds of the order is in the kitchen-dining area. The $10,000 order arrived today, finally, almost two weeks later than we expected, thanks to a series of unfortunate events. But it's here, and the order seems to be complete, and we're thrilled.

It's not all ours, not by any stretch. It's a fund-raiser for the regional Suzuki Assocation. We pre-sell a selection of products in 2- and 5-pound bags, and we order from Rancho Vignola in caselots. Then we pack and weigh the smaller amounts for distribution. That's a job for tomorrow and Thursday. We'll be using "Mr. Scale," an ancient but bombproof hardware store scale (once used for weighing out five-penny nails, I think). Because this year's order is so big, we thought it would be helpful to have another scale. So we borrowed "Baby Scale" from the medical clinic. Baby Scale is meant for weighing babies, but we also think it might be Mr. Scale's baby.

We also pre-sell a lot of whole cases, on which the markup is much smaller, since there's no packing and weighing involved. In this respect we almost operate like a buying club. Several of the return customers have orders over $500. I confess we count our own family amongst this group.

This year our family order consisted of hickory smoked almonds, pistachios, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, dried apricots, dried cranberries, chocolate covered almonds, shredded coconut, walnuts, cashews (all in 5 or 10-pound amounts) and caselots of almonds, lemon pineapple fruit logs and pecans. Last week we took delivery of 80 pounds of fresh citrus fruit, and a week or two before that we got over 100 pounds of grains and beans. Our pantry overfloweth!

I love buying in bulk. It means we never have to worry about having staples around. It means
we can get wholesale pricing, which means fresh delicious organic food that is often cheaper than its grocery store counterpart. And the packaging ... I just love getting 25 pounds of almonds in nothing more than a single cardboard box sealed with two metal staples and a single strip of packing tape.

Winter performance

Gosh, I hope this happens every year. Our community held a dramatic reading of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" on Saturday. Local actors and literati (both defined in typically broad, earthy Slocan way) read the various stages. Some of the readings were truly excellent.

The performance was a fund-raiser for a decrepit community hall that is gradually being renovated and is now somewhat functional. The local Suzuki string ensemble was asked to contribute a little music to open the program. We chose to do an arrangement of two movements of "Winter" from Vivaldi's "The Seasons." We arranged it for soloist, 1st, 2nd & 3rd violin sections, and viola sections, not having any celli or bass players amongst us. The two senior violinists, Erin and her also-unschooled friend J., played the solos for the two movements. In the above photo they're coming forward for a bow. Left to right: Erin, her grandmother, D., Sophie, J., W., Noah and myself. Noah and Sophie are naturally mostly hidden behind their music stands, being the most vertically-challenged of the group.

There was a wild and wooly devolution into a few strange harmonies just before the recapitulation of the Allegro movement due to the 3rd violins skipping a few repeated quarter notes, but I was proud at how everyone, especially my own kids, responded and recovered the required togetherness with total professionalism. We finished with a four-part chorale arrangement of "Lo How a Rose E'er Blooming."

I have a video of a rehearsal which, if I can download the right software, I'll be able to capture, edit, compress and post here.

"A Christmas Carol" was very much enjoyed by my kids. Oddly, though they've seen the Alistair Sim movie version several times, I've never read the story aloud to my kids. They all suggested that it would be nice if the community reading was an annual thing. Here's hoping!

Coloursmiths

You just can't call a kid dressed in a combination of orange, turquoise, gold, green, purple, two shades of pink and navy blue a "blacksmith," now can you? Nor her candy-apple-red sister, for that matter.

It was the kids' day to make twisted-S-hooks in the smithy today. They got to hammer on the anvil, watch the forge heat and re-heat the steel to red-hot, and even do some of the twisting on the vise. My kids are superkids. They can bend steel!

Christmas by the Lake

We were back at Christmas by the Lake today for another quartet performance. Our friend David and his fellow sculptor Peter were putting the finishing touches on their ice sculptures. After the music, the kids and their dad hung out around one of the bonfires while Peter of the Canadian Snow Sculpture Team heated a metal bar to help melt an ice 'weld.'

This culminated in a moment of suspense when they welded the delicate horn to the front angel and we all held our breaths to see if it would fall. It didn't.


It was snowing but not blowing, so it felt like a winter wonderland today. I'm told that the temperature on Friday night was actually minus 12 degrees C (10 F), rather than the minus 7 I reported. Today was a balmy -5C (23 F). Nothing a little hot cocoa, glühwein and music couldn't hold at bay.


The outdoor portion of the Christmas Market is a large circle of huts, tables, bonfires, snow and ice sculptures, and space for wandering around and socializing. The top of the circle is enclosed by the Gallery building. Inside the Gallery (left side of photo above) are the artisans' booths, displaying the amazing handmade wares of a couple of dozen wonderful artists and craftspeople, everything from hand-painted silk to hard-carved wood, copper vases to herbal tinctures, pottery, jewelry, weaving, quilting and felting.

Today being December 2nd, we are two days into our Christmas Family Activity Calendar. Yesterday was (a) first day of being allowed to listen to Christmas CD's (b) starting the Playmobil advent calendar (c) performing our arrangement of Vivaldi's "Winter" at the community hall and, at the same event and (d) listening to a dramatic reading of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". Today we attended the market above, and will be putting up our outdoor lights.

Pastor-r-r-r-r-ale

Erin's student quartet played outdoors tonight, at the opening of the "Christmas by the Lake" German-style Christmas market that our community is hosting. It runs for three days and is brand-new. Tomorrow the indoor venue with be open with the artisans' market in there. Tonight the outdoor venues were open -- 11 wooden huts selling food and souvenirs, four bonfire rings, the snow- and ice-sculpting area and the lighted ice-slide playground. At two of the bonfires there was free food -- roasted chestnuts and bannock to toast on a stick. There were lots of cups of glühwein travelling around warming people's hands and bellies.

The quartet shivered their way through a heroic 15-minute set. The temperature was somewhere at or below minus 12. By the time they were tuned and ready to play their fingers were hurting despite the fingerless gloves they were all wearing. By the time they were playing the Pastorale from the Corelli Christmas Concerto, they could no longer feel enough with their fingertips to know whether they were on the A- string or D-string or goodness knows where. I hate to think the stress their instruments suffered. The only obvious technical difficulty was a huge peg-slip by the cello that resulted in a missing bass note in the final cadence for one of the Christmas carols -- the string suddenly just wouldn't make a sound, having slipped to slack.

But they retuned and soldiered bravely on for another couple of pieces until it became physically painful for them to keep playing. The warm reception they got from the audience provided some small relief from the chill.

Absence makes ....

.... the heart grow fonder. And no, despite the fact that today is my 16th wedding anniversary and Chuck is away for a few days, I'm not blogging about my husband. (I do miss him, though, honest!) I'm blogging about this mysterious box which arrived at the post office today. Looks like it should contain whipping cream, but it's much too light. It's addressed to Chuck but a closer inspection reveals that it's not my Christmas present.

It's from Nikon Canada! It's my digital SLR, clean and with a brand spanking new shutter and aperture control unit. And a little note that says "Remarks: Less than 1 month out of warranty - repair under warranty." Three cheers for Nikon! It's been a long 10 weeks.

Supersonic smartness goggles

Okay, so your dad is away for the weekend, and so the usual 10 p.m. quietness rules don't apply. Your older siblings have just been doing algebra, amidst much hilarity, and are now bouncing on the minitramp with your little sister, making up ridiculous stories and using wacky theatrical voices. You really want to do some math too, but wow, is it ever hard to concentrate! Especially considering that you're doing a section on computing and rounding off repeating decimals from a variety of fractions and mixed numbers. Argghh.

No fear, though. A solution is close at hand. You only need to don the Super-Sonic Smartness goggles. With them on you will be able to solve any problem.

That is, provided you and your siblings can stop laughing your crazy heads off over your bizzare combination of blue nightgown and ski goggles.

Going, going ...

... almost gone. Some weeds were still waving their seedstalk flags up through the snow in our yard a couple of days ago. Now they're fully covered beneath a delicious snowy carpet.

Kids have been sledding. Skiing. Skating. Winter has come down the mountain.

In the next day or two we'll formulate our Christmas Activity Calendar. This is something we do every year before December 1st. When I read "Unplug the Christmas Machine" a few years ago one idea that really resonated with me was that Christmas can become, rather than a season of joy and celebration, a big build-up to a day or two of over-indulgence, and then a let-down "guess that's it, eh?" feeling. We're striving to find ways to create a season of special rituals and celebrations that fill the month of December, rather than saving everything for the momentous Day Itself.

Our calendar entries usually include things like the following: go to Christmas market, start listening to Christmas music, help decorate Grandma's tree, put up Christmas lights, moonlight walk in the woods, bonfire, skating party, put up garlands, make and hang treats for the birds, visit the lights in the community garden, go to the choir concert, okay to start eating baked treats, jigsaw puzzle and egg nog night, family games festival ... and so on.

Cruising the Aegean

It was Greek Day at Kitchen Club. One of the things I've always liked about unschooling is that it lets my kids be square pegs, in all their odd, angular glory. They don't feel a need to whittle off their sharp bits to fit into anyone's round holes. The flipside of this freedom is that when you get nine unschooled kids together, ranging in age from 3 to 15, boy, is there ever a wide range of personalities, styles, abilities and affinities!

But we seem to manage. In fact we were so efficient today with our cooking that I think some of the kids blinked and missed the entire preparation sequence of certain dishes. The Other Mom (O.M.) and I talked about this afterwards. Do we want to step into the role of drawing the kids' attention to, say, what is getting mixed together to make the tzatziki, so that they learn a bit more about the food we're preparing? We decided we didn't want to. Kitchen Club is about being together, working and enjoying interesting foods. Learning happens as part of that, but to pull the learning to the forefront would risk upsetting the other good things that are going on. It would subtly introduce a parental agenda. These kids have very sensitive antennae when it comes to parental agendas.

So there was a frenzy of food preparation and a meal appeared. It was rather miraculous, actually. In fact, we were so quick that after things were in the oven the kids went outside sledding for the better part of an hour. The O.M. and I happily cleaned up dishes, chatted and revelled in the quiet.

First up this morning was a post-script to last session's New Zealand meal. I had finally managed to track down some Marmite. Not the Kiwi/Oz variety, just the plain old British stuff, but every one of us had the exquisite, likely-once-in-a-lifetime experience of snacking on Marmite on toast.

I had some pita dough rising, so everyone got a blob of dough to roll out. We cooked them
one at a time. We got about "fifty percent puffage" which wasn't bad since we were using the electric frying pan. We didn't need perfect pockets in our pitas since we were just planning to use our pitas for dipping, not stuffing. Each child set theirs aside on a plate for lunch. In one corner we had a workstation going for preparation of a Greek Salad. We omitted the tomatoes since the local specimens were well past their prime. Fiona was thrilled with this because she dislikes fresh tomatoes. In another corner of the kitchen, some people were preparing the filling for Spanakopita. We substituted fresh cow cheese for the feta. In yet another corner, Noah and I did up the tzatziki. When this first phase was finished it was time to assemble the spanakopita and to get to work on the baklava. We had quite the filo pastry assembly-line going for a while. Then the baklava and spanakopita went into the oven and the kids disappeared outside.

Forty minutes later we had a lovely feast.

We decided that our next Kitchen Club will focus on German fare -- especially German Christmas treats. We'll do quadruple batches, share each production run between the families and each go home with lots of Christmas baking.

The four-fold way

On the SuzukiChat e-mail list there's been a recent discussion about the challenges of getting started with productive practicing with young beginners exhibiting resistance to the daily practice routine. Particularly children who haven't yet accrued enough in the way of playing skills to find intrinsic enjoyment in what they can do, particularly children of Suzuki teachers or other accomplished musicians who have fairly sophisticated ideas about what "playing music" really ought to mean.

Someone shared a Four-Fold Way which she's used as a touchstone for many years. I was thrilled to discover it, because it encapsulates in a few simple words the core of what I've gradually come to believe over the years I've been a Suzuki parent.

The Four-Fold Way in Suzuki Parenting:

1. Show up
2. Pay attention to what is good, true and beautiful
3. Speak the truth in love
4. Do not become attached to outcome

Those ideas are pearls of wisdom that I expect will mean different things to parents dealing with different challenges, different stages and different children. Especially to parents new to to Suzuki game, or new to parenting a young Suzuki beginner, these guidelines can seem a little detached from practicality. They beg the question "yeah, but what do you actually do when it's time to practice and your 4-year-old is lying on the floor whining and complaining and refusing to get up?"

From my in-the-trenches perspective as a Suzuki teacher and Suzuki parent to a 4-year-old, here's what the four-fold way means to me:

1. Show up. If you're teaching your own, that means something a little different than cheerfully going to lessons. It means including your child in your community of students. It means making the time each day for practicing to happen. It doesn't mean anything about your child doing anything at all. It just creates the possibility and helps nurture the interest. You just keep creating that nurturing environment. Time works magic.

2. Pay attention to what is good, true and beautiful. One way of putting this into practice is to make it a habit of reflecting on every single practice session with the question "what is one thing that worked well here today?" Become conscious of those things -- you may have to dig deep to find them at first -- and do what you can to allow them to grow. At first the "good, true and beautiful" might just be your child's strong will, or boundless energy ... something in the "mixed blessing" category. But if you can become more aware of it as a potentially positive force, and look for ways to enjoy it and turn it to advantage, you'll gradually get more and more stuff that is true and beautiful. Eventually you'll find more complex stuff that's working well, things like "when I let her choose a legato piece to play after each left hand exercise, she remains happy and focused, and her tone stays good."

3. Speak the truth in love. For me this means relating verbally to my child in ways that are less about instruction and control and more in the style of positive yet honest observations and facilitations ... always spoken in an unaffected, genuine, loving tone. So rather than saying "please try to keep your eyes on your bow" I'd say "Your sound is much more beautiful when you watch and keep your bow on the highway." I would stay clear of praise and positive judgements designed to manipulate my child, because that stuff doesn't feel "true" to me. Encouragement rather than praise. Encouragement rather than criticism, nagging or instruction.

4. Do not become attached to outcome. Oh my, this is the toughest one for parents who are also teachers. We know what children are capable of in an optimal environment. We think we've got a pretty rich environment happening for our own child, so we expect pretty impressive results. We may not have shallow expectations like "Perpetual Motion by age 5" but we have many less tangible ones. We expect our child will become focused, will be motivated and will get some goal-oriented work accomplished, learning at a brisk pace that is right for her. If you figure out how to really let go of your attachment to these outcomes, you'll be three kids further ahead of the game than I am. I am only just beginning to get this down with my fourth child ... and perhaps only because she's making it easy by having a natural affinity for the sorts of outcomes I'm trying to let go of.

When things have gone off track with my young kids, I've always found it helpful to set myself a little Suzuki parenting challenge: that of doing whatever is necessary to end each practice session with my child being happy, for two weeks. And I truly mean "whatever is necessary." Extremely short, extremely silly, unexpected turns of events, doing only things which breed a sense of delight and success. If that means playing a joke on my child where she thinks we are starting practicing, and I help her get into rest position and say "Thank you, we are all done ... isn't that funny? Let's have a bow. Yes, we really are all done. No more for today. Violin needs to be fun, so I decided to surprise you with a crazy nothing-practicing." Two whole weeks of easy fun short sessions that end with a feeling of happiness and delight.

Whenever I've tried this I've found my kids' interest in the instrument bubbles to the surface again -- usually long before the two weeks is up. Young children are so forgiving. By day nine or even sometimes day four I'll hear my child saying "No, I want to do more! Let's do it again!"
It's a detour that turns out to be a short-cut.

Immersion artist at work

Erin has always been one to immerse herself in stuff. Dabbling is not her style. From a very young age she was either into something or not -- there was never any middle ground. This month she's been into three things. Least of all, but still significant, is piano. She's polishing a Chopin Nocturne, learning the Bach Capriccio in B-flat, keeping up a Beethoven Sonata (Op. 10 No. 1), and working on a couple of four-hands duet pieces, including a long and weighty Schubert Fantasie. She's supposed to be adding the Macedonian Mountain Dance by Hovhaness and a Haydn Sonata to her repertoire. Mostly, though, since she's without lessons for a while, she's messing around, reading through reams of things, both old and new, including the last movement of the Bach E Major Concerto (she played the middle movement as a soloist with orchestra a couple of years ago, but that was much less technically demanding).

Then there's violin. She's still practicing a couple of hours a day, plus she's got a quartet, and orchestra, an ensemble, group classes and all the rest. And still she's practicing well. She's no longer loving the actual practicing, but she's loving where it's getting her, so she's pushing herself to do it. The payoff is coming in spades. Her playing has taken a massive leap this fall. The monthly lessons in Calgary seem to be giving her enough of whatever it is she needs right now.

And then, if you think that isn't enough, she's also writing a novel this month. Once she got wind of NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month), she was off and running. She's got about 39,000 words now, she says, despite being sick earlier in the month and getting behind. She's writing 1500 to 2000 words a day.

Next time someone asks whether school is in the cards for this kid, I'll point them to this blog entry and ask them just exactly where she would find the time to go to school.

Look who's skating!

Look who got the hang of skating today! After her hour on the ice on Thursday (half of it on skates, half in boots), she said she had a good time and was enjoying learning to skate. She wobbled and slid and took a few steps by herself with encouragement. I managed to get six or eight feet away from her once, to snap a photo, but that was it. She felt too wobbly and didn't want to relinquish my hand most of the time. She took a few spills, allowed herself to be helped up, and kept smiling. She worked hard and giggled. But she wanted me there, helping.

Today, though, she was off and truckin'. I made a little circuit for her, maybe 30 metres long, drawing it in the dusting of snow on the ice. Round and round she went, getting faster and more reliable with each completed loop. The improvement over Thursday was palpable to her, and even better was the improvement she made over the course of the 45 minutes she skated today. She had cold toes but she didn't want to quit.

We got some snow today. The skating was still lovely, but it won't take much more snow before that's the end of lake skating for us. We're trying to get up there every day while it lasts.

Odds have middles

Generally speaking, we've got a good thing going on with math at our house. We don't have a ton of manipulatives and educational games (cuisenaire rods, base-ten add-ons, and pattern blocks, mostly) but we have kids who, at least through the K-6 levels, enjoy discovering and implementing things about numbers, operations and relationships between them. I don't quite know how we ended up with this lovely math tradition, but we did.

Photo left: the face Fiona gets when she suddenly thinks her way to the solution to an equation using an "easy path," some mental math trick that helps her solve it easily. In this case, 2 x 15 became two 5's plus two 10's, and that was easy.

Fiona's curiosity about math continues to be boundless. I swear, this kid thinks about numbers non-stop. Probably in her sleep. On our trip home from Calgary she awoke from a nap and said "I just figured something out. Nine is half of eighteen."

A couple of nights ago Sophie was doing some multi-step word problems using ratios. She'd sorted out all the conceptual stuff and was down to the final arithmetical step. As often happens once the fun of formulating the equations is done, the arithmetic was less interesting. She needed to find a fifth of ninety, but her attention was wandering. "Use the division the other way around," I prompted her. "Try to figure out how many fives in ninety. You know how many fives are in a hundred."

"That'd be twenty," piped up a little voice beside me. Not Sophie. A littler voice. It was Fiona, delighted to be "helping" Sophie with her math.

Fortunately Sophie found it funny.

And then this morning, fresh out of bed and with her math mind churning, Fiona explained to me that odd numbers are the ones "with middles." I asked her to explain.

"Well, like five," she said. "If you count five things, the 'three' one is in the middle. Same for seven, nine, eleven, thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-one and twenty-three. All odds have middles."

This observation wows me more than any of the other clever math problems she's solved. Why? Because she's observed a property that some numbers have but not others, described it to herself, developed a hypothesis about what is common to all the numbers that have it, tested the hypothesis in her head and correctly generalized and described the pattern.

All while still wearing her favourite long-outgrown size 2T snowflake pyjamas.

Ice magic

For a few years we've had the family tradition of driving to the summit of the pass near our place sometime in November to greet winter and invite him home. Today seemed to be the day. So we donned our snow gear and headed out.

As we drove the fifteen minutes up to the summit we were sad to see that despite the cold temperatures, there's been little snow at higher elevations so far this year. There was certainly some, but not great mounds of the stuff. But as we pulled off beside Fish Lake at the summit, we saw something even more exciting than snow. In the cold weather the lake had become deeply frozen, and the lack of snowfall had kept the surface pristine and glassy.


Lake-skating is a rarity where we live. The big lakes are so deep that they don't freeze, even in minus-twenty temperatures. The smaller, shallower lakes tend to be tucked in little mountain saddles where they get lots of snow and none of the cleansing winds that keep the ice uncovered. We've been lake-skating only a handful of times since moving here in 1994. A glassy frozen lake is a special occurrence indeed, one that demands you drop everything and grab your skates. And so when we saw Fish Lake frozen, we did a U-turn and zipped back home to grab our skates.

Everyone was a bit wobbly at first since last year was a non-skating year, but soon the kids were zipping around, chasing each other, hitching rides and having a blast.

Fiona, who was newly 3 the last time we were at a rink, was pretty much a beginner today. She did pretty well, and had fun. I think she's going to pick it up quickly. She's got a great attitude and is very motivated. This winter we'll do our best to put in our backyard rink. We won't start that for another couple of weeks at least, but we're thrilled to have the chance. The last couple of years we were prevented from backyard skating by the abominable dog. Now that she's been re-homed, we're looking forward to having our own little ice surface at home by the New Year.


Still, for as long as it lasts, this is the type of skating we'll be doing. How can you beat this beauty and freedom?

No need for the rack

Fiona is playing a sixteenth-sized violin. It was once a better-than-average-quality Suzuki Nagoya sixteenth, with a repaired belly crack, but the crack has opened up a bit and some of the tone quality has slipped. The fingerboard alignment and curvature needs an adjustment, as it's too flat (and so the bridge is too). And all told our luthier figures it's hardly worth putting the couple hundred dollars in that would be necessary to fix it up properly, especially since we're hoping she'll outgrow it before too long.

Erin was very petite, even more so than Fiona, and she was 6 1/2 before she moved up a size from this instrument. But even at that age she wasn't quite at the level in the repertoire as Fiona is now at 4 3/4. We're hoping Fiona will grow into the lovely tenth-sized instrument we have waiting for her much sooner than age 6 1/2. I had been jokingly instructed to put her on a rack to stretch her every night so that she could move up around her fifth birthday.

Why the urgency? Well, this teeny violin is really tough to get a decent sound from. It's really difficult to build an instrument this small that has any tone or playability. The upper two strings of a sixteenth-sized violin often sound kind of okay, but when you move to the D and G the physics just doesn't work. The strings are so short that they need to be very slack to make the required pitches. And the result of a fuzzy, inconsistent sound and almost no projection. Fiona's violin works fine for A- and E-string pieces in the first half of Book 1, but gosh, the late Book 1 and Book 2 pieces have been a struggle in terms of tone quality. She's learning quickly and playing well. It seems such a shame that no matter how hard she works, the sound quality is so poor. Even I can't get much decent tone out of it. Full slow bows on the middle strings are the toughest. The only solution seemed to somehow get the kid to grow.

But in the last couple of weeks, Fiona's managing to get more out of that violin than I thought was possible. She's getting a consistent rich long-bow sound that's mostly free of creaks and squeaks and meandering pitch and timbre. Her "Two Grenadiers" is sounding really polished, and now the tone quality is matching the technical ability much better. Even the nasty finger twister passage in "Gavotte from Mignon" is sounding like it should. Last night at group class she performed a nice clear "Chorus from Judas Maccabaeus" for our local Suzuki community.

Maybe we don't need the rack. Maybe she doesn't need her limbs surgically elongated. Maybe it's not impossible to get a half-decent sound from the lower strings on this tiny instrument. I'm so impressed with what she's doing on it.

History Bites

Thanks to Debbie for turning us onto this show. We're not really a TV family, so we had no hope of catching it on the airwaves. But when the fifth season was released on DVD I decided we had to check it out.

The premise of the show is "what if TV had been around for the great events of history over the past 4,000 years?" Each show examines a historical event or personality by applying the subject matter to the format of modern day ads, talk shows, call-in shows, sitcoms and the like. Some informative background is given, and then the history is realized as comedy through terrific satirical sketches spoofing modern-day television.

Familiarity with television makes it all the funnier; there are spoofs of everything from 20/20 to Seinfeld to All in the Family to Martha Stewart Living. But the comedy stands alone too, so that my kids, who have never seen any of those shows, find it very funny. And if they ever do see Martha Stewart Living, I think they'll recognize it from History Bites.

The intended audience is probably teens on up. There's a fair bit of adult humour in here. But my older three kids are really enjoying it. And so are their parents!

Pursuit of excellence

Today I attended a meeting of regional string teachers with two of the members of the board running the regional Festival of the Arts.

For years I've skirted around becoming involved in the festival. It has a competitive mandate written right into its statement of purpose, and I'd heard stories about kids humiliated by adjudicators and parents and students lording "victories" over others. I've worked very hard to instill in my children and the local violin students the idea that music is a gift performers share with their audience and with fellow performers. It is an art, not a sport, and should not be competitive. Even the hint of a competitive mandate at the music festival was enough to turn me off.

The people running the festival are at a bit of a watershed and want to adapt and re-build the strings division according to what the local string teachers want, which is clearly and resoundingly a non-competitive focus. If this were to take place, I'd feel good about whole-heartedly supporting it.

It was a good meeting and I think our concerns were taken to heart. It looks like changes will be made, and immediately. There were a lot of fairly mundane issues discussed, but the big issue was how to implement a non-competitive focus while still allowing the festival to serve its role in funnelling the students demonstrating exemplary mastery into the Provincial Music Festival.

One of the suggestions floated by a couple of the other teachers was to separate the children who were willing to be considered for recommendations to the Provincials from those who wanted a non-competitive atmosphere. I couldn't figure out why this was sitting wrong with me. Eventually I figured out what didn't jive for me. Being willing to be considered for recommendation to the Provincial Festival does not necessarily mean that one is competing. Competing is a mindset, and it is one I don't want my kids to have in the context of their musical performances until they're well through adolescence. But I'd really have no problem with them accepting an opportunity they're being offered based on the quality of their performances. How does their willingness to accept an honour make them competitive? I don't think it does. Being willing to be recognized for your excellence is very different than "trying to be better than everyone else."

So eventually we hashed out what I think are some excellent solutions. I'm feeling good about supporting the festival.

But the whole discussion made me realize that people often confuse the pursuit of excellence with competitiveness. They're not always the same thing. Sometimes they can be very distinct entities. At this stage in my kids' musical lives I'm trying to encourage their pursuit of excellent, and discourage their competitiveness. The distinction between these two seems very clear to me. I don't think I'm alone in this.

Real Mozart

Noah's string quartet first met, thanks to his persistent requests, last January. In less than a year, with the summer off, they've made a lot of progress. In the past few weeks they've taken on their first non-student edition of a real string quartet -- the first movement of Mozart's Quartet in C Major, K. 157. There are, shall we say, some 'issues' with rhythmic transitions, and some small technical challenges in the violin parts, but overall they're handling the music well, and it's not too much of a stretch, either in terms of technical skill or ensemble-playing ability. The growth in this ensemble is very impressive!

They're doing an eclectic mix of repertoire, from Beatles to folk tunes to Christmas music to Schubert and Mozart. Noah's sight-reading has really kicked in over the past few months, and he's holding his own well in the group even when he's never seen the music before. His musical instincts are dead-on as always -- the new thing is that he now has the confidence to trust them.

Earlier in the afternoon we rehearsed a couple of movements arranged from Vivaldi's "Winter" from "the Seasons" with a slightly different group of seven mixed-age violinists and violists. The Largo is arranged for soloist and concertante accompaniment by four other players. Noah is playing what is, in the original, the basso continuo line, the foundation of bass notes on which the whole thing rests. He's all alone on that part and he just waltzed in, put it up on the stand, and played it beautifully, with the perfect amount of vibrato, the right bowstroke, and the musical sensitivity required to follow the soloist's rhythmic inaccuracies and complement her dynamics. It's so nice to see his reading skills catching up to all his other musical skills. He's now a very big asset in our student ensembles.

Happy traveller

Proof positive that Fiona doesn't mind all the driving she's being subjected to these days. This photo was taken a little more than 11 hours into the 14 hours of driving we did last Thursday-Friday-Saturday. Still comfortable and still smiling. She likes to be a part of whatever is going on in our family, even if that's interminable driving. She can keep a lively conversation going almost single-handedly. For hours. What a kid.

And yes, I admit I held the camera over my own head, pointing backwards, while driving, to take this shot. You can see through the window, though, that I'm still staying nicely out of the left lane.

Tomorrow morning: Nelson again! Will it ever stop?

Seven hours on the road

I'd love to complain about driving Erin to Calgary for violin lessons every month. I could come up with a lot of reasons to complain -- the time, the money, the environmental cost of all that gas, the white knuckle drives over the Rogers Pass at night in rain or snowstorms. The doughnut and coffee stops that leave us all feeling worse than we did before. The bare bones motel rooms with cinder block walls. The time I left my wallet behind and had to do a 4 and a half hour backtrack to get it, the stress that time I thought we'd missed the last ferry across Upper Arrow Lake.

But the truth is, the trip has a lot to commend it. A couple of days off cooking. Clean rooms and clean sheets, nothing to do before bed but read and watch motel TV. No laundry to be folded, no kitchen disaster zone that ought to be dealt with. When we arrive we are welcomed as if we're family at Erin's teacher's home. There are hugs all around for and from my normally unhuggable kids. There are meals and stories and jokes shared, things shown off and appreciated, and a wonderful sense of connection all around.

And the drive ... well, I think to myself "where else would I rather spend 7 hours driving?" Today we started on the prairie. Cattle, horses, haybales, gold on the ground and a huge blue sky.


As the first hour of the drive ends, this is our view: continental divide -- due west.


And then, before we know it, we're inside the mountains. We pass through Banff National Park, Yoho National Park, Glacier National Park and Mount Revelstoke National Park. In fact, we're inside these parks more than we're outside them on the way home, and the scenery outside them is really not any less spectacular. The highway varies from the tame four-lane valley-bottom driving through Banff NP to the wild and wooly two-lane Rogers Pass section with its avalanche-protection tunnels, claustrophobic gullies and sharp curves.


Today the weather was almost perfect for driving. Partly cloudy, with big snatches of blue sky. Several times we passed through the small clouds that were all that hung between us and the sun. The experience of being inside a small top-lit cloud on a mountain pass is far different from being trapped on a foggy highway somewhere else. The sky is was not overcast above the highway-hugging clouds today, so they were lit up bright, every molecule of water vapour acting like a potent sun-diffuser. Light was everywhere. It wasn't shining from somewhere, it was captured within the cloud, and we were positively drenched in it. Everywhere around us was such brightness that it was almost blinding.


We stopped at the hot springs an hour north of home and rolled in pretty late despite an early start, but what a drive! This was Erin's fourth set of lessons in as many months, and our third drive to Calgary. While I expect it'll all seem a trial before too long, it's not getting old yet.