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Merry Christmas? and happy Yuletide? and happy New Year? As usual for this year, I am way behind, and actually I managed to drop or refuse to play with a number of balls over Christmas -- I think I had a minor case of burnout this year, which I'm sort of bemused by as I had a lot less going on than in previous years. I only had to organize not-all-that-much music for one morning (not two mornings, I did not have to organize the evening music-intensive performance), I didn't have to organize any instrumental rehearsals (Awesome Musical Family Mom: Should we get a bunch of people together to do an instrumental thing? Me: ...I'd be the one coordinating all these rehearsals, wouldn't I. ...no.), we didn't fly anywhere (which, given the weather, I'm rather grateful for). I did a lot of knitting instead of anything any more intensive than that.
Things I did do:
-This was the first year since the pandemic started that we had choir for Christmas! The choir director was unsure of her schedule in November and December (family issues meant she was often out of town) so I got to run choir during this time with (as D likes to say) my tiny iron fist! Which I LOVE! I absolutely love the rush from being able to tell people what to do and then they do it, like one huge organism. Musically speaking, that is :) (To be fair to myself, I also love being able to sing in a choir like this, although this often doesn't happen in church choirs -- it takes a conductor who has experience specifically with ensemble and who can hold multiple lines in one's head at once. Most of my church choir conductors have had more experience with solo work than with ensemble.) We performed in the evening church performance a couple of weeks before Christmas and we were AWESOME. Then a bunch more people joined Christmas morning and I forgot to tell them to WATCH ME (I had trained everyone else over the past month where they always did! I WILL cue you, you don't have to be staring at your music!) and, uh, there were a couple of rough parts which the musician in me was facepalming about. But no one else cared except me, and really the important thing is that everyone had fun and everyone was SO happy about it afterwards and we got to do the traditional Hallelujah Chorus flash choir for the first time since 2019 (I did not conduct that one, there are others who are better at that particular task than I am) and all that makes me happy :) ALSO. I still don't quite believe this, but the choir was asked when they could show up on Christmas morning and they said 9:15! (For a 10am service.) These are people who have families! and people visiting! and small kids! Awesome Musical Family, I found out, didn't even open presents that morning so that they could get there. I love my ward, they are crazy and awesome.
-I finally finished the multi-year task (admittedly, only multi-year because my working on it would often be punctuated by multi-month breaks) of editing my dad's memoirs and they have been ordered! This didn't take that much time in December specifically (in the end the amount of non-email time in December I spent on it was probably about an hour, including ordering the books), but it was hanging over my head because I was supposed to finish it at Thanksgiving. Only my parents kept giving me more stuff to put in, much of which was in the vein of "and we just thought of another terrible thing your step-grandmother did, this needs to go in!" Which would cue my responding that we did actually want that side of the family to keep talking to us (they are getting copies) and while they were adults and could handle factual information, stuff my dad actually saw/was told/experienced, I drew the line at putting in speculation as to their motives or evil actions not actually experienced (e.g., their speculation that step-grandmother could totally have afforded a nursing home for grandfather and didn't put him in one because she was mean, and starved him once he came home -- I mean, they may well be right, but this book is going to their children and grandchildren). Then both my parents and I would get stressed. Anyway, at some point I just said I would wait until after Christmas and then put in whatever edits had come up in the intervening time. This was an unexpectedly genius move on my part, because they got busy with Christmas too, forgot all about it, and forgot they'd told me to put in some of the more dicey edits, so in the end I just did what I wanted to do in the first place and everyone was happy.
-We went skiing, a couple of other families from the kids' school went at the same time, it was great! A. is now good enough that I can ski with him reasonably confidently, whereas last year he was small and unsure enough that D. (who is a significantly better skier than I am) had to be involved. E. started out the trip as not as good a skier as I was, but she went to 5-hour ski school (one thing I've got to say for E, she's not good with social situations -- like, a parent said to me recently, in the nicest possible way, that she was impressed how we dealt with her turning on a dime to a 6-year-old emotional response (she is almost 13) -- but E is totally OK with stuff like being put into 5-hour ski school alone with random other kids she doesn't know, which A. would never consent to, and some of her agemates wouldn't either) and was skiing harder slopes than I was doing with A., and she is now better than I am.
One more thing I did (a more conventional reveal post here):
This fall I reread The Perilous Gard, a kidlit/YA-ish (Newbery Honor) book from 1974 about a young woman who, in the last days of Mary Tudor's reign, gets sent to an out-of-the-way castle that may or may not be associated with the Fair Folk. This book I adore to little bits and pieces. I love everything about it, although on this reread I was amused to find that I have read the last third or so so many times that I basically have large portions of it memorized, and then the first two-thirds I only remembered rather vaguely. (although I really enjoyed rereading it! It's just that those parts are in a lot of ways setting up the last third, that was and is super iddy for me.) That is to say, I am a total sucker for Kate and Christopher and their night meetings under the Hill, and that last amazing scene with the Lady and with Christopher, and based on how much of those scenes are stuck in my brain, I must have reread those a bunch of times!
All the characters are just wonderful, even the ones who have only very slight appearances. Kate's father shows up for... maybe a few paragraphs?? ...and he is delightful; you can totally see how important he is to Kate, and how important Kate is to him, and how Kate turned out the way she did <3 Sir Geoffrey has a fairly minor part in the story but he's also fully-formed and totally great! And the young future Elizabeth I has a single scene, but I've been imprinted with her and that's how I've thought of young Elizabeth ever since. And I love Alicia too! And as for the Lady, and the worldbuilding of the People Under the Hill, and Kate and Christopher... well, as I said to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selenak, I suppose one can't assign to this book all my love of over-the-top all-but-adversarial banter to signify a close/other-self relationship, nor all my love of bowing/kneeling/curtseying to signify things that can't be said in words, but it certainly was, shall we say, formative :D And the fairies here are other enough that I cannot read any current fairy YA these days, all of which seem to have fairies who act mostly like immature adolescents. (looking at you, Holly Black! Sorry!)
I've always loved that Kate gets to save the day, and she gets to save it rather a lot; one of the things that struck me in this reread was how many times Kate's brain saves the day, but not in any way that feels overtly 21st-century (though her father clearly is progressive for his time in the way he teaches her, and Kate clearly is extremely intelligent and thoughtful). There are several things about her that save the day, of course, not just her intelligence -- also her stubbornness, also her ability to value what is real, also her compassion, also her sense of what's right -- but it was interesting to me on this read that it's also in large part her intelligence and extreme dose of common sense, which leads her to realize e.g. that something's wrong with Christopher's story in the beginning, how to find Christopher under the Hill, how to get out near the end.
Another thing I loved was how Kate's and Christopher's rationality complement each other. Kate: asskygiants said in her awesome review, Kate Sutton has no TIME for your manpain. She will call Christopher out every time he's being Super Drama Emo Boy! Which is, admittedly, a lot of times! (also I ABSOLUTELY 100% LOVE that this is (yet another) major quality of hers that saves the day!) But then there's also the part where Christopher will also counter Kate's subconscious assumptions that he's Super Dramatic Romance Knight with things like, but what about worrying about cleaning out the drains!
Basically I love these two a lot. Kate in particular is just really an awesome heroine -- she's so individualistic that I felt it was hard for me to extrapolate what she'd think about a situation that wasn't in the book, which I feel I don't usually have a problem with. With Christopher, I did feel like I had a much better idea how he would respond.he would talk about drainage, probably
This was also the only example in my childhood that I can think of where, in the boy-girl romance, it is the boy who is described as extremely conventionally attractive and not the girl! I also love about their romance that Christopher seems to take Kate's ability to memorize THE ENTIRE LAYOUT OF THE MANOR sort of for granted, only we find out he's not actually taking it for granted, he knows Kate is special! Relatedly, his response to Kate thinking that he was in love with Alicia -- which, Christopher, is a perfectly valid assumption for her to make given that you NEVER TALKED TO HER ABOUT THIS WHOLE GETTING MARRIED THING, EXCUSE ME -- is that he immediately is shocked and horrified and actually thinks it's unkind for her to try to pair him up with Alicia because he's self-aware enough to know that him marrying Alicia would be an utter disaster, whereas of course he must marry Kate!! and, okay, I just love that to bits and pieces :D (It's interesting thinking about Sir Thomas, Kate's father, though -- because he clearly did make the decision to marry, well, the equivalent of Alicia! But Sir Thomas is also far more like Kate than he is like Christopher. Hm.)
Also also! one of my favorite lines continues to be the one that Kate thinks about the Guardian of the Well: Questions, thought Kate savagely; why even now couldn't the thing tell a plain lie, like an honest man? (It's a line that comes near the climax of the book, in an incredibly tense scene, and yet it always makes me laugh when I come across it. It's so Kate. Kate is just so great.)
Things I did do:
-This was the first year since the pandemic started that we had choir for Christmas! The choir director was unsure of her schedule in November and December (family issues meant she was often out of town) so I got to run choir during this time with (as D likes to say) my tiny iron fist! Which I LOVE! I absolutely love the rush from being able to tell people what to do and then they do it, like one huge organism. Musically speaking, that is :) (To be fair to myself, I also love being able to sing in a choir like this, although this often doesn't happen in church choirs -- it takes a conductor who has experience specifically with ensemble and who can hold multiple lines in one's head at once. Most of my church choir conductors have had more experience with solo work than with ensemble.) We performed in the evening church performance a couple of weeks before Christmas and we were AWESOME. Then a bunch more people joined Christmas morning and I forgot to tell them to WATCH ME (I had trained everyone else over the past month where they always did! I WILL cue you, you don't have to be staring at your music!) and, uh, there were a couple of rough parts which the musician in me was facepalming about. But no one else cared except me, and really the important thing is that everyone had fun and everyone was SO happy about it afterwards and we got to do the traditional Hallelujah Chorus flash choir for the first time since 2019 (I did not conduct that one, there are others who are better at that particular task than I am) and all that makes me happy :) ALSO. I still don't quite believe this, but the choir was asked when they could show up on Christmas morning and they said 9:15! (For a 10am service.) These are people who have families! and people visiting! and small kids! Awesome Musical Family, I found out, didn't even open presents that morning so that they could get there. I love my ward, they are crazy and awesome.
-I finally finished the multi-year task (admittedly, only multi-year because my working on it would often be punctuated by multi-month breaks) of editing my dad's memoirs and they have been ordered! This didn't take that much time in December specifically (in the end the amount of non-email time in December I spent on it was probably about an hour, including ordering the books), but it was hanging over my head because I was supposed to finish it at Thanksgiving. Only my parents kept giving me more stuff to put in, much of which was in the vein of "and we just thought of another terrible thing your step-grandmother did, this needs to go in!" Which would cue my responding that we did actually want that side of the family to keep talking to us (they are getting copies) and while they were adults and could handle factual information, stuff my dad actually saw/was told/experienced, I drew the line at putting in speculation as to their motives or evil actions not actually experienced (e.g., their speculation that step-grandmother could totally have afforded a nursing home for grandfather and didn't put him in one because she was mean, and starved him once he came home -- I mean, they may well be right, but this book is going to their children and grandchildren). Then both my parents and I would get stressed. Anyway, at some point I just said I would wait until after Christmas and then put in whatever edits had come up in the intervening time. This was an unexpectedly genius move on my part, because they got busy with Christmas too, forgot all about it, and forgot they'd told me to put in some of the more dicey edits, so in the end I just did what I wanted to do in the first place and everyone was happy.
-We went skiing, a couple of other families from the kids' school went at the same time, it was great! A. is now good enough that I can ski with him reasonably confidently, whereas last year he was small and unsure enough that D. (who is a significantly better skier than I am) had to be involved. E. started out the trip as not as good a skier as I was, but she went to 5-hour ski school (one thing I've got to say for E, she's not good with social situations -- like, a parent said to me recently, in the nicest possible way, that she was impressed how we dealt with her turning on a dime to a 6-year-old emotional response (she is almost 13) -- but E is totally OK with stuff like being put into 5-hour ski school alone with random other kids she doesn't know, which A. would never consent to, and some of her agemates wouldn't either) and was skiing harder slopes than I was doing with A., and she is now better than I am.
One more thing I did (a more conventional reveal post here):
This fall I reread The Perilous Gard, a kidlit/YA-ish (Newbery Honor) book from 1974 about a young woman who, in the last days of Mary Tudor's reign, gets sent to an out-of-the-way castle that may or may not be associated with the Fair Folk. This book I adore to little bits and pieces. I love everything about it, although on this reread I was amused to find that I have read the last third or so so many times that I basically have large portions of it memorized, and then the first two-thirds I only remembered rather vaguely. (although I really enjoyed rereading it! It's just that those parts are in a lot of ways setting up the last third, that was and is super iddy for me.) That is to say, I am a total sucker for Kate and Christopher and their night meetings under the Hill, and that last amazing scene with the Lady and with Christopher, and based on how much of those scenes are stuck in my brain, I must have reread those a bunch of times!
All the characters are just wonderful, even the ones who have only very slight appearances. Kate's father shows up for... maybe a few paragraphs?? ...and he is delightful; you can totally see how important he is to Kate, and how important Kate is to him, and how Kate turned out the way she did <3 Sir Geoffrey has a fairly minor part in the story but he's also fully-formed and totally great! And the young future Elizabeth I has a single scene, but I've been imprinted with her and that's how I've thought of young Elizabeth ever since. And I love Alicia too! And as for the Lady, and the worldbuilding of the People Under the Hill, and Kate and Christopher... well, as I said to
selenak, I suppose one can't assign to this book all my love of over-the-top all-but-adversarial banter to signify a close/other-self relationship, nor all my love of bowing/kneeling/curtseying to signify things that can't be said in words, but it certainly was, shall we say, formative :D And the fairies here are other enough that I cannot read any current fairy YA these days, all of which seem to have fairies who act mostly like immature adolescents. (looking at you, Holly Black! Sorry!)I've always loved that Kate gets to save the day, and she gets to save it rather a lot; one of the things that struck me in this reread was how many times Kate's brain saves the day, but not in any way that feels overtly 21st-century (though her father clearly is progressive for his time in the way he teaches her, and Kate clearly is extremely intelligent and thoughtful). There are several things about her that save the day, of course, not just her intelligence -- also her stubbornness, also her ability to value what is real, also her compassion, also her sense of what's right -- but it was interesting to me on this read that it's also in large part her intelligence and extreme dose of common sense, which leads her to realize e.g. that something's wrong with Christopher's story in the beginning, how to find Christopher under the Hill, how to get out near the end.
Another thing I loved was how Kate's and Christopher's rationality complement each other. Kate: as
skygiants said in her awesome review, Kate Sutton has no TIME for your manpain. She will call Christopher out every time he's being Super Drama Emo Boy! Which is, admittedly, a lot of times! (also I ABSOLUTELY 100% LOVE that this is (yet another) major quality of hers that saves the day!) But then there's also the part where Christopher will also counter Kate's subconscious assumptions that he's Super Dramatic Romance Knight with things like, but what about worrying about cleaning out the drains! Basically I love these two a lot. Kate in particular is just really an awesome heroine -- she's so individualistic that I felt it was hard for me to extrapolate what she'd think about a situation that wasn't in the book, which I feel I don't usually have a problem with. With Christopher, I did feel like I had a much better idea how he would respond.
This was also the only example in my childhood that I can think of where, in the boy-girl romance, it is the boy who is described as extremely conventionally attractive and not the girl! I also love about their romance that Christopher seems to take Kate's ability to memorize THE ENTIRE LAYOUT OF THE MANOR sort of for granted, only we find out he's not actually taking it for granted, he knows Kate is special! Relatedly, his response to Kate thinking that he was in love with Alicia -- which, Christopher, is a perfectly valid assumption for her to make given that you NEVER TALKED TO HER ABOUT THIS WHOLE GETTING MARRIED THING, EXCUSE ME -- is that he immediately is shocked and horrified and actually thinks it's unkind for her to try to pair him up with Alicia because he's self-aware enough to know that him marrying Alicia would be an utter disaster, whereas of course he must marry Kate!! and, okay, I just love that to bits and pieces :D (It's interesting thinking about Sir Thomas, Kate's father, though -- because he clearly did make the decision to marry, well, the equivalent of Alicia! But Sir Thomas is also far more like Kate than he is like Christopher. Hm.)
Also also! one of my favorite lines continues to be the one that Kate thinks about the Guardian of the Well: Questions, thought Kate savagely; why even now couldn't the thing tell a plain lie, like an honest man? (It's a line that comes near the climax of the book, in an incredibly tense scene, and yet it always makes me laugh when I come across it. It's so Kate. Kate is just so great.)