Maybe Next Year

I won't be attending the National Flute Association 38th Annual Convention next month. I wasn't able to save the money I'd need to fly to Los Angeles and spend almost a week in Anaheim. And last July I spent three weeks in the same hotel for the Episcopal Church's General Convention.

Today Summer 2010 issue of The Flutist Quarterly showed up in my mailbox. The Summer issue always the Schedule of Events for the current year's convention. Of course, I looked. During the first scan, I saw only three workshops I was interested in attending, primarily Zara Lawler's Saturday morning workshop "Interdisciplinary Performance Basics." Zara's workshop at the 2009 convention was a real eye-opener for me, and I regularly read her blog. As much as I like Zara's work and would love to take the workshop, it alone still isn't worth the expense of attending the convention in California.

Each time I looked through the schedule I found something else that interested me. Worth the expense yet? Maybe, but I don't have the money. It took me a long time to get myself out of debt, so I'm not going to participate in something I can't pay for up front. So unless someone hands me a rather large check in the next week, I won't be going to Anaheim.

So, I have some incentive to save for next year's convention, which will be in Charlotte, NC. Is it a coincidence that I'll be in Charlotte in February for network meetings for work and for the National Association for Episcopal Christian Education Directors Annual Conference?

And if I'm going to be down there, maybe I'll rent a car and make the drive west to Asheville and visit Biltmore.

Time to start saving and planning.

New (Sort Of) Food Routine

Since the Eater Hospitalization with diverticulitis, I've been trying to find a fairly simple way to plan meals. Saturday I FINALLY found one: Diabetes Meal Planning Made Easy, 4th ed. by Hope S. Warshaw. I'm now working on eating 1,400-1,600 calories per day. Actually, I think I'll be okay on that. And every couple of weeks I'll jump up to the 1,600-1,900 range so my body doesn't get too used to the minimal amount of calorie intake. That piece of information I remember from the Hilton Head Metabolism Diet that Brian and I did for a while back in the late 1980s.

The hardest part will be 5 oz. of meat. That's not a lot spread out during the day. On the other hand, there's enough on the menu to provide three meals and two snacks (or three, depending on how I shift things around). This evening I still have two starches, a milk, and a fat. That looks like six ginger snaps (woo hoo!), 2/3 of a cup of yogurt, and a tablespoon of peanut butter. Since this was Day 1, I should do better tomorrow.

This evening I fixed tomorrow's lunch and two snacks while fixing dinner. At least it was better than expending all that energy on preparing one meal. It still took a lot. I used almost every measuring cup and measuring spoon in my entire kitchen. And the new scale, which I purchased when I went grocery shopping today.

So I'm relearning a lot of nutritional information that I knew at one time. Actually, it's more reinforcement, because I managed to come pretty close to the calorie range over the past couple of months, even if the nutritional balance was a little off. The other major problem was many days I'd eat one large meal and two small ones.

Little bit, by little bit, I'm getting things back into balance.

Peace,
Jeff

Photographs & Memories

Which was the theme of my Senior Prom, and it is appropriate for this particular blog post.

I don't have a lot of pictures of me playing the flute, but I did find this small handful. Here I am in full Darien High School Marching Band uniform on Memorial Day 1977:


This one was taken during the parade somewhere on the Boston Post Road:

Twelve years later I was playing now and again at Grace Episcopal Church. Here I am just before Christmas Eve services 1990:


In June 1993 I went up to Boston to participate in the Pride celebrations with Lavender Country & Folk Dancers. At LCFD's Pride Dance on June 12th I played with the Contradictions:

Later that same summer, but once again with the Grace Church Choir at our outdoor service with Choir Director Priscilla Carroll:

Priscilla and I again; this time at Grace Church's day at Camp Washington during the Summer of 1994:

And here I am with some friends at the Lavender Country & Folk Dancers February 1998 Dance Camp. This pick up band played for one contra dance at the Saturday night party. I'm the one in the purple shirt in the lower left:



Here ends the trip down memory lane. There may be some other pictures buried someplace in one of my boxes or somewhere at Mom's, but these are the only ones I've found at this point.

Continuing Education

I love my iPod (thanks, Mom!). Obviously, I use it to listen to music and podcasts, and it's a great tool for playing the flute. But those of you who follow my Facebook posts or Twitter tweets know that I'm also listening to lectures and courses from iTunes U. I've listened to lectures about J.R.R. Tolkien and Johnson's Dictionary.

This week I finished a course available from Open Yale Courses, Diana Kleiner's course on Roman Architecture. I listened to it on the train back and forth to work, and then I'd check out the pictures provided as part of the course material online. I enjoyed it so much that I sent Professor Kleiner an email:

Dear Dr. Kleiner,

I've just finished listening to your course on Roman Architecture on my iPod. Thank you for making it available. The lectures have been my commuting companion for the past few weeks, and I found them both enjoyable and informative. Your enthusiasm for the subject comes through quite clearly on the audio versions of the lectures. I also appreciated being able to go online and look at the pictures you discussed, and often I was surprised at how closely I could visualize what you described without the pictures in front of me.

Thank you again for a great experience.

Sincerely,

Jeffri Harre

Much to my surprise, I received a very nice reply from her:

Jeffri--If I may?

Many thanks for your note. And what you say is very high praise--if you can actually visualize what I am talking about without seeing the images! That said, I'm glad you also checked the pictures out online because I think they came out very well and certainly offer an enhancement. And, in any case, as the saying goes: "a picture is worth a thousand words."

Thanks again for writing and all best.--Diana

Now I'm listening to Professor Dale Martin's Introduction to New Testament History and Literature. Although after four years of EfM, I seem to be a bit better informed than some of his students (the lectures were taped during actual classes), I am learning a lot. I recommended it to my current EfM group and will recommend it to next year's group as well. There's also an Introduction to the Old Testament that I plan on listening to next.

One of the nice things about the Open Yale Courses is that they make available some of the supplemental material for the courses. Check them out.

Peace,
Jeff

First Faire Of The Season

Here I am at 9:00 a.m. ready to drive Rachel and myself to Guilford, CT for the first ever Robin Hood Faire. It was on the small side, but if it's successful, it will grow. It's put on by the same people that put on what they're now calling King Arthur's Fall Harvest Faire, so we saw a lot of the same vendors and acts.

But there were some new ones as well. One of our favorites of the new vendors was Jessica Walters' Willowsong Designs. This was her first faire, having appeared exclusively at craft shows before. She does marvelous things with polymer clay, including whimsical dragons. She said she thinks that renaissance faires really are more her target audience. She hopes to be at the Southern Connecticut Renaissance Festival in Danbury next month. She will definitely be at the Fall Faire. We look forward to seeing more of her work.

Among the acts we hadn't seen before was Blackenshear. Here he is with the last bit of his Curious Magic show. Yes, that is a balloon banjo, and yes, it actually plays--even Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

Some of the story line, especially the joust portions. Things should improve as they get more experience under their belts.

Thirteen days and counting to the next faire!

Peace,
Jeff

Nuts Are NOT My Friend

In the months before my diverticulitis attack nuts had become a staple in my diet. They are a great source of protein and "good" fat. Because they take a fair amount of time to digest, they're also good to snack on before going to bed, so you don't wake up ravenously hungry and wondering why your blood sugar plummeted. So when I learned that I had diverticulosus, which is the actual condition, I wondered how I was going to replace the nuts. I was relieved when the doctor told me that current thinking was that nuts weren't a factor in causing diverticulitis. Nor tiny seeds. What I needed to avoid was things like popcorn, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds--all large seeds.

A couple of weeks ago I had painful day and wondered whether or not I was going to have to go back to the hospital. Fortunately, it cleared up. Then Wednesday night I started experiencing the pain--and other symptoms--that felt like what I experienced a couple of days before I went to the hospital. Yesterday, I thought I might end up going to the hospital this morning. Fortunately, the pain started to ease, and this morning I woke up feeling a whole lot better. Some extra fiber and water yesterday and today seems to have cleared it up.

Looking back, the only common link was a snack of nuts a few hours before the symptoms began.

So I guess I'll be eliminating nuts from my diet.

Not a happy camper.

Peace,
Jeff

Be More French

"Be more French," I can still hear Mlle. Ware telling me, as she often did during my years at Rockford College. Sally Lo Ware, one of two french professors, became my unofficial advisor and as much of a friend as a faculty member could become with a student. My official advisor was Dr. James Schmitt, the German professor. I was the only French major AND the only German major in my graduating class. It made for an interesting three years!

What Mlle. Ware was encouraging me to do was to loosen up and enjoy life--be less like my German forebears. "Be more French," she told me just before I left to return home for Grandpa's funeral. Don't be afraid to cry was what she meant.

For the most part, it became a running joke between us. Especially given the focus on literature that makes up most of a modern language major's study. I was not fond of the literature of the Romantic period, either in French or German. From Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther to Bernardin de Saint Pierre's Paul et Virgine, I suffered through my 19th Century lit classes in both languages. I thanked my lucky stars when I was able to take the fall semester of Survey of English Lit, which ended before the Romantic period.

My loathing of things Romantic carried over into music. For the most part, it seemed to me, the Romantic repertoire for flute consisted of arrangements of Franz Schubert's lieder or filling in as birds in the tone poems of the period. Nor was there much written by the more well known composers of the period. What little music from that period that I was exposed to, I disliked intensely. I found myself drawn much more to the Baroque period. One music-major friend referred to Baroque music as "mathematics for musicians." It was not a compliment. All that precision and mathematical exactitude, she moaned. Well, it certainly wasn't the mathematical aspect that drew me, but precision? Maybe it's the German side of me.

The one exception I found was Gabriel Faure of the late French Romantic period. For some reason his music struck a chord. Mlle. Ware would have been pleased to hear me play Sicilenne or the Berceuse (neither of which was originally written for flute but have since become flute standards). "Be more French!"

In an attempt to broaden my horizons, or at least my repertoire, a few months ago I added music from a variety of periods to my Amazon.com Wish List. For Christmas a friend of mine gave me the Music Minus One Romantic Classics for Flute & Piano. Of course, it includes arrangements for three of Schubert's lieder and Faure's Berceuse, but there were a couple of surprises. Two excerpts from Robert Schumann's 3 Romanzes and Johannes Donjon's Pan (Pastorale). I was particularly taken with the Donjon piece, and when I decided to start working on it. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it won't take much work to get it performance ready. I've also played through the Schumann pieces, and although they'll take a little more work than the Donjon, I could have them performance ready within a relatively short period of time.

And I like them.

Mlle. Ware died a few years ago, but I can still hear her.

"Be more French."