The Sound of Silence

DH is in Australia this week (and going straight to Washington DC tomorrow for another week). B is on the second day of her three-day field trip. It's not my day to drive the middle-school carpool, so I won't see M for another 4.5 hours. Even the dogs are being quiet today!

I'm working at home, enjoying the quiet, and occasionally moving loads of laundry around. I should probably visit the grocery store this afternoon, as M would like me to make him dinner :-)

I'll enjoy it while it lasts. Tomorrow B comes home, then her Orinda Idol group is rehearsing here at 5:00. Yes, she's been talked into Orinda Idol again. She didn't think it was that exciting last year, but her friends talked her into it. They'll be auditioning on Saturday morning with "The One Feather Tail of Miss Gertrude McFuzz/Amazying Mayzie" from Seussical. S is reprising her role as Gertrude, L is singing Mayzie, and B and K have been recruited as Bird Girls. Should be fun! They've had one rehearsal so far, and they sounded good. I'm going to try to convince them tomorrow that they need to focus more on singing with the mikes (handhelds), and not so much on running around the stage!

I ordered the accompaniment CD from Amazon, and had fun using Garage Band to edit the accompaniment track. Auditions are limited to 2 minutes, and the full piece is 3.5 minutes, so something had to go. Simply cutting them off at two minutes resulted in the Bird Girls getting to sing about three notes, so S's mom and I did some creative editing at the previous rehearsal (while I was sitting at the piano). The intro is gone, several measures of the interlude between the two pieces are gone, and they're only doing the middle third of Mayzie's song. I was impressed with how easy it is to edit this stuff in Garage Band. I had already worked out at the piano the measures to delete (had to do it in a way that made sense harmonically), and DH couldn't tell when I finished the first draft that anything was missing!

Saturday will be crazy. B is going to be dropped off at L's house around 10:00, so L's mom can take then both to their 10:50 audition. I'll be at M's 10:30 fencing class in Richmond. At 12:00, M and I leave fencing class. We drive back home, hastily throw B and Poppy in the car, and go to the 1:00 obedience class in Oakland. At 2:00, I drive home, fling everyone out of the car, grab my concert gear (hopefully not forgetting anything important), and drive back to Oakland for a Voci concert. Call is at 2:30, I'm hoping to be there by 3:00. Come hear a fabulous concert!