What do you mean - it's nearly 2014?!

Well how embarrassing - no blogging since early October. And here we are post-Christmas Day and rapidly approaching 2014. 

Since then I've had a '0' birthday, Tyler has finished Year 4 with a very good school report and we've just had a lovely Christmas. 

So here's a few photos to help recap the last few months:

Pedro went from this - 

To this - 

Tyler dressed as Count Dracula for Halloween

I had my '0' birthday

Chris got us a new toy

And Santa visited

So a good ending to the year - although apparently we are doing a repeat of the Nevis trip tomorrow with some friends, one of whom is a rally driver. At least we have a 4-wheel drive this time. I think that helps...!

♫♪ ...when I'm 64 ♪♫

Me, giving Tyler a big hug after coming from work: Do you still love me?

Tyler: Of course, why wouldn't I?

Me, teasingly: Oh I thought you might have forgotten me.

Tyler: Of course not, I'm still young.

Me: What difference does that make?

Tyler: Well when I'm older and you're old and crinkly, I might love you just a wee, wee bit less.

Me: !!!!

In other news, I won some bling at the annual Vocal Competitions recently (I'll blog about it soon over at (A)musings of a Lyric Soprano)

Last weekend I took Tyler and Anton to Riverton for a bit of crab-hunting and ice-cream-devouring.

Happy Holiday

A regular reader (Hi Rosina!) has gently pointed out that I have been very remiss in not posting photos here for some time. So without further ado, here is a traverse through our Gold Coast holiday.

At Dunedin airport

Kookaburra alarm clock

Sea World - we could pat these stingrays.

Pirate ship fun

Dinosaur Island

Pingus!

Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary which we loved. Tyler got to tick two items off his bucket list - hold a koala and hold a snake.

At Movie World, the Harry Potter shop. Tyler now has his own wand.

Wet N Wild - the Green Lantern rollercoaster. That's Chris and Tyler nearly at the top.

Tyler turned 9 while we were away. Cupcakes sufficed for a birthday cake.

One of the four pools at our resort

We had a fabulous time and would like to go back again. Still paying this one off though!

♫♪ We're all going on a ...spring holiday.. ♪♫

A short post - yes I know, I owe all two of you Gentle Readers a long one! But I promise the next one will be long and photo-filled as the Campbell-McLeod family is off for our very first proper family holiday - hooray! We're heading to the Gold Coast for 9 days of theme parks and wildlife encounters and while we are there, Tyler has his 9th birthday. So an extra memory card has been purchased for the camera in anticipation of frenetic photo-taking.

We will be staying at Turtle Beach Resort in Mermaid Beach. We have the Super Pass for Wet 'n' Wild, Movie World and SeaWorld Theme parks and we will be visiting Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary where Tyler is very keen to cuddle a koala. 

See you soon!

What a mother loves to hear

Yes, we love to hear "I love you Mummy". Can never get enough of that one. especially if accompanied by snuggly hugs and kisses. 

But this one of Tyler's has quickly become a favourite of mine: "I'm just going to use my imagination". Accompanied by the turning off of the laptop/tablet/Nintendo and followed by sounds of swishing imaginary swords and cries of "I will defeat you" coming from the bedroom/hallway/back yard.

One of 'those' days

On Sunday I took part in a concert of popular sacred music. We had 7 soloists, a small choir, a chamber orchestra and small children's choir. It was the kind of concert where you recognised the tune even if you didn't know the name of it. Beautiful sacred music abounded, stretching from Charpentier through to Douglas Mews. 

I had three solo(ish) moments - "If God Be For Us" from Messiah, the duet "O Lovely Peace" and the soprano solo for Mozart's 'Laudate Dominum". It was the first time I'd done the Messiah aria and the Mozart with orchestra.

For various reasons I was a bag of nerves leading up to the concert. Not a dainty little jewel-encrusted evening bag of nerves, but a cavernous hold-everything-including-the-kitchen-sink kind of bag. I'm not sure exactly why. Partly because all the other soloists are such excellent singers and I was feeling a bit intimidated. Partly because my voice has been feeling quite tired and out of sorts lately. Suffice it to say, nerves are not a singer's best friends. Shaky legs, shortened breaths and tight muscles are, funnily enough, not conducive to a good sound. 

We had a rehearsal earlier in the afternoon and my bits went ok. But I could feel my voice was not in the greatest shape. And the more I thought about that, the tenser I got. Is it any wonder that 20 minutes before the start of the concert I got a migraine? Fortunately - if you can call getting migraines fortunate - I pretty much only get the visual aura for about 15 minutes or so, and then just a residual ache around my forehead, not the searing pain that so many do. However for the next hour or two afterwards, my brain also feels like it has put on a fluffy pink dressing gown and slippers with bunny ears and has smoked something slightly illegal. You can see where this is going right?

The little man that lives in my brain and gives a running commentary every time I have to sing to an audience had an absolute field day. He revelled in his role, criticising onsets which started with a slight catch, mocking phrase-endings that went wobbly from lack of breath and whispering with vicious gleefulness about upcoming difficulties which, in his opinion, I was unlikely to surmount. Do you get put in jail for stabbing an imaginary little man who makes it his life's mission to tell you how useless you are? Because I would have considered it totally worth it. Especially if the onset to his dying screams was less than perfect.

But hey, first-world problems right? The majority of what I sang was fine. Some of it was actually beautiful. There, I wrote it out loud. Like my little blogger 'About Me' blurb says: I like to sing. Sometimes when I sing, I sound good. I'm working on the other times. 

One of 'those' days

On Sunday I took part in a concert of popular sacred music. We had 7 soloists, a small choir, a chamber orchestra and small children's choir. It was the kind of concert where you recognised the tune even if you didn't know the name of it. Beautiful sacred music abounded, stretching from Charpentier through to Douglas Mews. 

I had three solo(ish) moments - "If God Be For Us" from Messiah, the duet "O Lovely Peace" and the soprano solo for Mozart's 'Laudate Dominum". It was the first time I'd done the Messiah aria and the Mozart with orchestra.

For various reasons I was a bag of nerves leading up to the concert. Not a dainty little jewel-encrusted evening bag of nerves, but a cavernous hold-everything-including-the-kitchen-sink kind of bag. I'm not sure exactly why. Partly because all the other soloists are such excellent singers and I was feeling a bit intimidated. Partly because my voice has been feeling quite tired and out of sorts lately. Suffice it to say, nerves are not a singer's best friends. Shaky legs, shortened breaths and tight muscles are, funnily enough, not conducive to a good sound. 

We had a rehearsal earlier in the afternoon and my bits went ok. But I could feel my voice was not in the greatest shape. And the more I thought about that, the tenser I got. Is it any wonder that 20 minutes before the start of the concert I got a migraine? Fortunately - if you can call getting migraines fortunate - I pretty much only get the visual aura for about 15 minutes or so, and then just a residual ache around my forehead, not the searing pain that so many do. However for the next hour or two afterwards, my brain also feels like it has put on a fluffy pink dressing gown and slippers with bunny ears and has smoked something slightly illegal. You can see where this is going right?

The little man that lives in my brain and gives a running commentary every time I have to sing to an audience had an absolute field day. He revelled in his role, criticising onsets which started with a slight catch, mocking phrase-endings that went wobbly from lack of breath and whispering with vicious gleefulness about upcoming difficulties which, in his opinion, I was unlikely to surmount. Do you get put in jail for stabbing an imaginary little man who makes it his life's mission to tell you how useless you are? Because I would have considered it totally worth it. Especially if the onset to his dying screams was less than perfect.

But hey, first-world problems right? The majority of what I sang was fine. Some of it was actually beautiful. There, I wrote it out loud. Like my little blogger 'About Me' blurb says: I like to sing. Sometimes when I sing, I sound good. I'm working on the other times. 

Why I bake

Time for a photographic update.

Tyler and his best friend Caleb who came for a sleepover. They decided to sleep in the lounge and gathered pretty much every single cushion and pillow in the house and arranged them in a large square which they then covered with blankets. The little rat bags were still chattering away at 2am!

Big bro Anton visited recently before heading off to Christchurch for a new job.

Rosina came and stayed with us for a week. While she was here I managed to scrape the side of her car (which was about to sell) with a loaned car (a Subaru WRX STi). Amazingly enough she got offered the same for her scraped car down here as she did unscraped in Christchurch. Chris reckons the salesman will get a telling-off!  Anyway she's still talking to me :)

Today Tyler asked if we could do some baking and decided on Gingerbread men and chocolate chip muffins. I got the ingredients together for the Gingerbread Men and asked him if he wanted to sift the flour. "No thanks" "But that's what we need to do for baking" With a cheeky grin he said "Oh I just want to EAT the baking!"

Lesson #324 - why singing from memory is a good idea

I got a last minute request to sing at a Registered Music Teacher's concert and my teacher said "Let's do something from your new repertoire, how about 'Kommt ein schlanker'" and I replied "But but but! I haven't learnt the words from memory yet." However she was keen for me to get a performance of this one under my belt so I agreed that I would do it with the music. I did try to stuff all the words into the small walnut that passes for my brain in the intervening couple of days, but you know, that irritating thing called Life got in the way. 

Being of a certain age, I now frequently have to resort to reading glasses which is disconcerting. If I sit them firmly on my nose, the audience looks blurry and I feel as if I have lost connection with them. Sit them further down so I can use normal eyesight for the audience and I look like a caricature of a dragon-lady librarian. Alternatively I could grow my arms another 6 inches and problem solved. So learning things off by heart is definitely the better proposition.

The concert was being held in a large room of our local museum. Carpeted with a lowish ceiling. I figured this would swallow the sound, especially when filled with an audience, but it was actually very nice acoustically. When it was my turn I stepped up to the piano (teacher accompanying) and discovered that a) the lighting was feeble and b) my folder clearly didn't have non-reflective plastic. Nothing to be done but soldier on. 

Fortunately I had the opening couple of pages off pat so things started well. Just as I was mentally patting myself on the back for putting my glottals in the right place and actually making the trill sound like a trill instead of a wobbly vibrato, disaster struck! I glanced down at the page to pick up the next lot of words and couldn't see them properly. Have you ever tried making up something on the spot in a language other than your own? Me either. But I did. It's entirely possible that instead of saying Sollten ja sich Blicke finden (If you should catch his glance) I said something like  Meine Katze sitzt auf einer Keksblume (My cat sits on a biscuit flower).

The rest of the aria passed without incident. So here's what I learnt from that experience:

1. If you're going to make up words, do it in front of an audience that neither knows the language you're singing in nor the aria you are singing.

2. Don't let any flicker of panic cross your features and no one will be any the wiser that your cat sits on a biscuit flower.

3. Avoid having to do 1. by memorising the dang aria!

Lesson #324 - why singing from memory is a good idea

I got a last minute request to sing at a Registered Music Teacher's concert and my teacher said "Let's do something from your new repertoire, how about 'Kommt ein schlanker'" and I replied "But but but! I haven't learnt the words from memory yet." However she was keen for me to get a performance of this one under my belt so I agreed that I would do it with the music. I did try to stuff all the words into the small walnut that passes for my brain in the intervening couple of days, but you know, that irritating thing called Life got in the way. 

Being of a certain age, I now frequently have to resort to reading glasses which is disconcerting. If I sit them firmly on my nose, the audience looks blurry and I feel as if I have lost connection with them. Sit them further down so I can use normal eyesight for the audience and I look like a caricature of a dragon-lady librarian. Alternatively I could grow my arms another 6 inches and problem solved. So learning things off by heart is definitely the better proposition.

The concert was being held in a large room of our local museum. Carpeted with a lowish ceiling. I figured this would swallow the sound, especially when filled with an audience, but it was actually very nice acoustically. When it was my turn I stepped up to the piano (teacher accompanying) and discovered that a) the lighting was feeble and b) my folder clearly didn't have non-reflective plastic. Nothing to be done but soldier on. 

Fortunately I had the opening couple of pages off pat so things started well. Just as I was mentally patting myself on the back for putting my glottals in the right place and actually making the trill sound like a trill instead of a wobbly vibrato, disaster struck! I glanced down at the page to pick up the next lot of words and couldn't see them properly. Have you ever tried making up something on the spot in a language other than your own? Me either. But I did. It's entirely possible that instead of saying Sollten ja sich Blicke finden (If you should catch his glance) I said something like  Meine Katze sitzt auf einer Keksblume (My cat sits on a biscuit flower).

The rest of the aria passed without incident. So here's what I learnt from that experience:

1. If you're going to make up words, do it in front of an audience that neither knows the language you're singing in nor the aria you are singing.

2. Don't let any flicker of panic cross your features and no one will be any the wiser that your cat sits on a biscuit flower.

3. Avoid having to do 1. by memorising the dang aria!

He's Crumpy, I'm Barry

Easter Monday we hopped in the truck for an Adventure Day. We headed up to Garston and then turned off to take the Nevis Road. This involved a steep ascent on a windy, dusty road frequently with 6 inches between us and a swift decent to the bottom of the valley. As Chris' truck is not 4WD he took this road at a fair clip to ensure that we kept moving in a forwards-and-upwards direction rather than a sideways-and-downwards one. There was a lot of bouncing and skidding. But the bouncing, skidding, sheer drops and general scariness of the ascent left Chris unfazed and for some reason unfathomable to me, he felt it was perfectly acceptable driving behaviour to remove one hand from the wheel for the purposes of pointing out various bits of scenery. 

Those of you of a certain vintage will remember a series of Toyota ads involving Barry Crump and his passenger Scotty. This example pretty much sums up both our ascent and the subsequent descent:

The descent was a lot less hairy in terms of steepness but in place of that were the obstacles of stream crossings and large rocks to negotiate. Chris did a great job of picking the right places and only once did he confess that he was unsure if we were going to get through a particularly deep crossing.

See the shadowed side of the hill behind me and Tyler? Chris and his mates rode their dirt bikes up that recently!

We stopped at the Bannockburn pub for lunch in the sun and then went on to Queenstown where we took Tyler up in the gondolas and then did the luge. We followed that up with a round of indoor mini golf. We headed home well satisfied with day's activities.

We had Tyler's parent-teacher interview last Monday. The teacher goes through each subject and Tyler has to say what his current goal is for that subject and the teacher explains what he is working on. We started with reading comprehension and in terms of where he's at, he's way ahead of the standard and she said his results in the PAT test (yes, they still do those!) puts him in the top 10-15% of NZ. He gets that from me. She said everything else he is fine in, no concerns at all. Although he can get distracted sometimes. He get's that from his father. :)

Only a week till the end of school term so Tyler's touch, t-ball and summer soccer have finished. My netball has started and we are yet again going to spend the entire season outside - rain, hail or shine - due to the continued delays with the reconstruction of the Stadium.

We are still dealing with the uncertainties of a potential closure of Tiwai, but life goes on in the meantime and we have a holiday to the Gold Coast to look forward to later this year.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter everyone! We started the Easter break by decorating hard-boiled eggs.

Early this morning was the Easter Egg Hunt, and Tyler was very happy with his haul. After he found the last egg he held up his torch and declared "This case is closed!" and dramatically clicked the torch off.

Yesterday we had an Easter lunch at the Howards and obviously some people ate enough to make them sleepy :)

Aunty Helen made a gorgeous chocolate birds nest cake



And yes, it tasted as good as it looked!

As usual I have been singing since Friday and have one last lot this afternoon. My voice is feeling pretty tired so it will be good to finish. 

We are hoping to get away for a day or day/night trip tomorrow, probably up Central or Te Anau way.

Getting stuck in

Yes, I am still alive. And singing. There was a bit of a lull once Christmas arrived and the country went on summer holiday, and I allowed myself to be lazy and not practice properly. But now we are back into it, indeed we are. I'm talking like the Queen. I shall revert to first-person so you don't have to curtsy while you read this.

I already have several performances lined up for the first half of the year. First up is a Concert South concert on 17 March. You may remember the Concert South concert I was preparing for at about the same time last year and my dalliances with metaphorical rose bushes. There's still a thorn or two lurking to catch me this time too, but my bicycle doesn't wobble as much when it spies a top C or in this case a top C#. I have been asked to sing Les Filles de Cadix as well as be part of a trio for two songs - Lift Thine Eyes from Elijah and Handel's Where E'er You Walk. I'm doing the middle part for the Handel and I'm having to concentrate mightily to fight off the tendency to sing the tune. I also get to repeat Les Filles at Womens Club about 10 days later.

Hard on the heels of that is Easter and a full programme of music starting with a service on Holy Thursday evening and finishing with Easter Vespers on the Sunday afternoon. I've got some nice solos amongst all of that including the Mozart Ora Pro Nobis.

On April 28th as part of the Southland Arts Festival, A Capella Singers is doing a programme of Rutter music with the main work being his Magnificat. It's a very approachable work but, dare I say it, could do with a little editing here and there. Is that heresy? If this blog post stops abruptly at some later point, with little whisps of black smoke curling up from the last few words, you can assume I have been smote. Or should that be smitten? Either way it ended badly. 

But despite this potentially terrible fate awaiting me, I shall bravely soldier on. The work calls for a soprano soloist and our director decided that she would divvy up the three solo bits amongst choir members. We were asked to audition, preparing one of the three solos. I worked on the Misericordiae, which is the hardest of the 3 (for me anyway) but, fortunately as it turns out, also had a look over Esurientes. I turned up for my audition and the director said "Right let's do Esurientes!" I got through alright - it's a piece that lies nicely and suits my voice. The director apparently agrees with me as that's what I have been given.

And finally in June there are two concerts with a mixture of choir work and solos. So plenty to work on, and I'm right into singing lessons again picking up new repertoire. I'm doing a gorgeously lush-almost-to-the-point-of-corny French song Les Chemins de l'Amour by Poulenc. Listen to this version by Veronique Gens. This is very different from the Poulenc I know! 

I'm also learning one of Richard Rodney Bennett's 'Dream Songs' - The Song of Shadows, a lovely atmospheric piece.

I had a session with the voice therapist yesterday, which prompted some interesting thoughts as I drove home. But that's for another blog post.

Getting stuck in

Yes, I am still alive. And singing. There was a bit of a lull once Christmas arrived and the country went on summer holiday, and I allowed myself to be lazy and not practice properly. But now we are back into it, indeed we are. I'm talking like the Queen. I shall revert to first-person so you don't have to curtsy while you read this.

I already have several performances lined up for the first half of the year. First up is a Concert South concert on 17 March. You may remember the Concert South concert I was preparing for at about the same time last year and my dalliances with metaphorical rose bushes. There's still a thorn or two lurking to catch me this time too, but my bicycle doesn't wobble as much when it spies a top C or in this case a top C#. I have been asked to sing Les Filles de Cadix as well as be part of a trio for two songs - Lift Thine Eyes from Elijah and Handel's Where E'er You Walk. I'm doing the middle part for the Handel and I'm having to concentrate mightily to fight off the tendency to sing the tune. I also get to repeat Les Filles at Womens Club about 10 days later.

Hard on the heels of that is Easter and a full programme of music starting with a service on Holy Thursday evening and finishing with Easter Vespers on the Sunday afternoon. I've got some nice solos amongst all of that including the Mozart Ora Pro Nobis.

On April 28th as part of the Southland Arts Festival, A Capella Singers is doing a programme of Rutter music with the main work being his Magnificat. It's a very approachable work but, dare I say it, could do with a little editing here and there. Is that heresy? If this blog post stops abruptly at some later point, with little whisps of black smoke curling up from the last few words, you can assume I have been smote. Or should that be smitten? Either way it ended badly. 

But despite this potentially terrible fate awaiting me, I shall bravely soldier on. The work calls for a soprano soloist and our director decided that she would divvy up the three solo bits amongst choir members. We were asked to audition, preparing one of the three solos. I worked on the Misericordiae, which is the hardest of the 3 (for me anyway) but, fortunately as it turns out, also had a look over Esurientes. I turned up for my audition and the director said "Right let's do Esurientes!" I got through alright - it's a piece that lies nicely and suits my voice. The director apparently agrees with me as that's what I have been given.

And finally in June there are two concerts with a mixture of choir work and solos. So plenty to work on, and I'm right into singing lessons again picking up new repertoire. I'm doing a gorgeously lush-almost-to-the-point-of-corny French song Les Chemins de l'Amour by Poulenc. Listen to this version by Veronique Gens. This is very different from the Poulenc I know! 

I'm also learning one of Richard Rodney Bennett's 'Dream Songs' - The Song of Shadows, a lovely atmospheric piece.

I had a session with the voice therapist yesterday, which prompted some interesting thoughts as I drove home. But that's for another blog post.

Whoosh! That's 2 months of the year gone.

Goodness me where has the year gone? Let's pick up where we left off shall we?

Alright then, vegetables it is! Doing the grocery shopping recently, I stopped at the drink section (not alcohol, we're in a Licencing Trust area, but if there was an alcohol section I would definitely have been perusing it) and had one of Oprah's Aha! moments. OK yes I know that Oprah's Aha! moments are generally about significant things like 'I finally figured out how to cure cancer/make World Peace/be a nicer person' but I'm a simple girl. It was the V8 juice. This is not just your standard apple or orange or mango juice, this is juice which includes vegetables. Juice that doesn't taste as if it has vegetables in it. I hatched a plan that could indeed be called a weasel.

That evening when Tyler asked for a drink I gave him a glass of juice. "What's in it?" he asked with a touch of suspicion. "Oh mostly orange juice, with a bit of apple" I responded airily. He took a cautious sip. "Mmm this is the nicest juice I've ever had!" he said and proceeded to skull the contents of the glass accompanied by much inner celebrating by me.

Later that evening I chanced my arm and said to him "Do you know what else was in that juice? Carrot juice!!"  "What? Really? Wow, now I know how I can eat my vegetables!!" Now I just have to test out the other varieties of juice-with-veges to see what he'll drink.

In other news, we have acquired a pub-size pool table which is ensconced in the man-garage. Chris has bought a slab of some kind of hard board which converts it into a table tennis table. So here's the wee dude taking on the big dude. Big dude is looking intensely competitive.