Tidbits

All Washed Up
It's getting busier around here just before the Thanksgiving lull. I know because I finished a concert set tonight with the DSO (refreshingly near my house) and when I got home I went straight to the laundry room, stripped off the concert tux and threw everything (sans jacket) in the wash to pack up for a week of rehearsals, teaching and concerts in Des Moines starting Monday. This was slightly different than my usual behavior after the end of a concert set: falling asleep on the couch in said concert tux (sans jacket) trying to pound through my netflix backlog.

You Can Kiss My Asst., Principal!
Boy it sure felt good to get done with this week. I like Shostakovich a lot, but if I don't play his tenth symphony again until his 125th birthday it'll be fine by me. And I'm ecstatic to officially have no more assistant horn obligations on my calendar. This time I had to do all the heavy lifting (and a good bunch of the light stuff too), usually alone, while getting that silent left-hand-signal advice from the principal: louder, softer, longer... louder! He's a nice guy but it was definitely much more work than I've become accustomed to when playing assistant.

Something Old, Somethings New
Now on to my main money maker, the DMS. I get to play that Tchaik warhorse, R & J, for the second time in three weeks. It's fun to watch women swoon in the audience at the appropriate spots. Okay, I'll admit it. I swoon too. And I get to play Dvorak 8 for the first time. Just my luck, though. I've always wanted to play those trills in the last movement, then I go and win the fourth spot just before that piece comes up on the docket and now I don't get to play them. Maybe I'll sneak a couple in during a rehearsal just for fun.

Something else new: I just got a real haircut. (That is, I paid another person, with the appropriate skills, to cut my hair. Usually I just do it myself every few months.) First one in, oh... 7 years. And only the second one in probably twenty. My impression? I've been walking around with a hack job on my head for two decades. How come I didn't notice? I'm firing all my DIY-haircut enabling friends and family. If you really loved me you all would have tackled me, thrown a bag over my head and dragged me to the nearest barber. Or at least organized an intervention. It is still a degrading experience though, but I have a fun, new technique for getting through things like that. I just ask myself, "What would Larry David do?" and I act accordingly. Perhaps I'll blog about it in detail.

That's all for now. I've got to get to sleep and give the house mice some alone time. Just remember the deal, guys: I promise to use only live-traps and you promise not to gnaw through my toes at night.