A Beautiful Day

Yay, I played chamber music (string quartets) today for the first time in about 3 months and it was just glorious. Not that we sounded glorious, exactly, but it was so much fun. And we did have some pretty good moments. Even imperfectly played, the second movement of Dvorak's American gives me chills. My calluses are almost completely gone, and my fingers were the first to give out (cello strings are much bigger than violin strings!) I've got to get practicing again. And, a new violinist sat in for our second violinist who is out of town, and she was wonderful to play with. She is looking for a regular group and is wanting to play piano trios, so I'm going to try to set something up with her, me, and a really wonderful pianist I worked on the Schumann quintet with a couple of years ago. I'm not sure how to squeeze it in, but I've just got find a way. I've improved a lot in the upper registers in the past 5-10 years, and I don't want to lose what I've gained.

My husband and I also played some fiddle-guitar stuff that sounded not too bad, considering I'm a cellist and not a violinist and don't have a very good violin. A little screechy and out of tune on my part, but we had a great time, anyway.

The kids and I cleaned the house like crazy this morning--skipped church to do it. Since we usually have people over every week or so, we manage to clean it about every week, but we haven't had anyone over for several weeks and things were looking pretty bad. This was one of those perfect days when I had time to do all the things that I really wanted to do--played music, worked in the yard, cleaned the house, finished our read-aloud sitting outside in the shade on the trampoline, had a delicious dinner. I guess we didn't get any schoolwork done, but it still felt like a productive and good day.