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!