New house news

(As promised to 2ndSoprano, this meandering post contains new house pictures.)

Last Saturday night, we visited our new neighbors. They were having people over for a birthday party for their three year old. Yes, these are the same neighbors from whom we'd been anonymously (I hope) siphoning bandwidth. I was so locked into meeting new people, I missed the opportunity to fess up and request forgiveness for tapping permission to tap into their network.

The Comcast guy was scheduled to come hook us up (literally, and, I guess, figuratively as well), on Monday. Sunday evening, after an unsuccessful attempt to cheaply furnish the new house with undervalued treasures from the Kane County Flea Market, I tried to connect again. The network, which had been unsecured for days, was suddenly encrypted. Yikes! We've been detected! There went our last link to the outside world!

(We didn't even know anything about the Bears beating Indianapolis until the next morning.)

This may seem like nothing, but I feel awful about it. We should have gone straight over on day one and asked for permission to connect to their network when we first found it. Anyway, the Comcast guy showed up as promised, and as of Monday afternoon, we are on our own bandwidth. Most of us thought we were missing TV when we lacked it, but now that we have it, we're not watching so much. Not so with Ro', who has resumed ordering us to play her favorite On Demand shows.


"Daddy, come put on Barney!" Is age 2 too early to teach her how a remote works?

Once we closed on the house last week, there were some loose ends to get taken care of. Things that weren't part of the house as delivered by our builder. Minor items, really, like landscaping*, window treatments, furniture, well water treatment, and downspout extensions.

(For some reason, my snarky sarcastic icon is failing me... imagine, if you will, that it worked, and that I placed it here.)

* - Seriously, the yard is so overgrown, the world's largest kindergartner disappears in the weeds when he goes out back chasing butterflies.





Early on, back in the pencil-to-paper stage of our house design process, I had advocated a prairie style design. We eventually eschewed (love that word) most prairie-style influences, in favor of a less horizontal, less formal, more generalized Craftsman-style house. Of course there is some overlap in these styles, and the preponderance of right angles in the house, inside and out, is a testament to this.


Prairie style in some respects... notice how clearly you can see our property line?

As a consolation prize for giving up a prairie-style design, the house came, instead, with a prairie-style yard. Which now needs to be dug up, and replace with copious amounts of grass seed.


Looking out to the back yard.

This process ain't cheap, and will eventually set us back thousands of dollars. Oh, and same could be said for those other items I mentioned a moment ago. They cost money, too. Mucho dinero. Y ya no tenemos much dinero.

Where am I going with this? Good news and bad news. The good news is that there is a really good place for a piano in the dining room.


Yup, right on that wall.

The bad news is that we've spent our piano money, such as it was, on other quite necessary things. So although I miss piano terribly, and though I think Jill and Jay miss it (we haven't talked about it, actually), and although I was sure I'd be playing Nefeli by now, truth is, it could be quite some time before Jillian, Jason, and I can restart our piano adventure.



Nevertheless, I'll keep coming back here, and urge you to do the same. There's more to life than piano, after all. I do promise to let y'all at the Pianoworld and Einaudi forums know when we turn our attention back to piano-related material.

In the meantime, say hello to Baby Joey, almost six weeks old now.

And... we're in!

We've been in the new house, actually, since last Friday night. I think it was Friday night. It's hard to say, actually. Out here in the country, the specific days of the week have less meaning. We go to bed earlier, wake up earlier*, and don't watch nearly as much TV**. I hear something about a Republican convention, and that even the NFL is starting this week. Am I missing anything else?

* - Thank you 6:30 AM sunrise into east-facing windows in the kids' rooms.. whose design idea was THAT?

** - Of course, our significantly reduced TV consumption is due not so much to a new, back-to-the-basics lifestyle we've adopted in our new surroundings. No, it's much less noble than that. It's because WE HAVE NO TV because Comcast is taking ten days to get us hooked up.

Speaking of which, this is us right now:



Yes, we are pirating borrowing our new neighbors' bandwidth. We've been here not even a week, and already, we're bad neighbors.

We have not, however, subjected them to our piano music. Fact is, Ole Bessie has not made the trip to the new house, and in all likelihood, she never will. (Moment of silence... ... thank you.) I'll explain later, but for now, we're piano-less, and too busy opening boxes and figuring out where everything goes to miss it. Once things get settled in, we'll start looking for a teacher for the kids, and maybe for me. We'll also need to replace Bessie with something or other. What blog fodder! (Blodder? If that's not a word, it should be.)

Now, what box has the Mac-N-Cheese...?

It's moving day

Finally.

Holding pattern

Sorry for the radio silence here at AW2PP. Hopefully you haven't gone and become addicted to some other "I'm learning to play piano" blog. There are lots of quality players in the genre, to be sure.

You may recall that we're building a new house, one big enough for Sue's folks and our family of six. (And no more.) You may also recall that for many moons now, we've been targeting August 22 as our closing date. You may then be unpleasantly surprised to hear that August 22 came and went, and we did not close. Two words: lender approvals. It's apparently a bleak new world out there for underwriters, who are just itching to reject applications these days, even those (like ours!) with enthusiastic pre-approvals. Here's hoping that our new target closing date (this Friday, August 29) does not slip.

In between packing boxes watching Sue pack boxes (she's very good at it, takes pride in her skills, and even, egad, seems to enjoy it), I have been:

• Moving packed boxes to our staging area, formerly known as the garage.
• Making meals.
• Turning on new shows for Rowan, who seems to be developing a hearty love for television. She is particularly fond of the Backyardigans, even though she's nowhere near being able to pronounce "Backyardigans". Which, as is often the case for the just-turned-two-year-old, doesn't stop her from trying. Hey, we understand her.
  
• Watching as much Olympics as I possibly can.
  
• Getting updates from our mortgage broker, and providing requested documentation.
• Sitting down at the bench and getting many short, focused repetitions on Ombre.
  

With Ombre, I am roughly at the same place as I was with Limbo when I snatched and posted that clip about a month ago. Which is to say, while I can make it through the whole thing, I consistently struggle with a couple of passages. One in particular is the second instance of the triplet quarter notes (see measure 69)... I've accidentally gotten that right maybe a couple of times, but that's because I wasn't paying attention. I can't do that triplet correctly on purpose. I've yet to make an entirely clean run through Ombre. And I haven't paid as close attention to dynamic and tempo markings as I should. While I tinker with those items, and continue to polish Limbo, my wandering mind has already moved on to the next piece. But which would that be?

The candidates are Stella del Mattino, Tracce, and I Due Fiumi. The first two are pieces that were recommended by Josh, a professional pianist over at the Einaudi forums. They gently introduce techniques and patterns that are reused in other, more sophisticated Einaudi pieces. I Due Fiumi is a very interesting, albeit lengthy piece that our own sawtooth has worked on, and recommended. I played all three of these on the iPod for Sue, and we talked through them.

Tracce first. We decided it was very serious. And in some ways, reminiscent of the first two Einaudi pieces I have learned. I'll probably learn it some day, but it's time to break things up with something lighter. Fortunately enough, Stella fits the bill there nicely, with light, repeating patterns that supposedly sound harder to play than they really are. And while we liked I Due Fiumi too (perhaps that will be next?), Stella won out with its (her?) light, happy mood, and comparative brevity.

So, as is my custom, have a listen for yourself. Go ahead, it's only 2 and a half minutes.

• Jason's update - His teacher (that would be Jillian) graded his exam and recital.
• A comment on Olympic volleyball
• Closing / moving pictures and updates (let's hope)
• More baby pics
• Costco and Digital Pianos
  

Not much going on this week

Baby Joe (trying on new names for the boy, that's the one I am going with right now) is now two and a half weeks old. Like all of us, he wasn't born with an innate sense for day versus night. So we're still working with that. He seems to be growing, though, and that's a good thing.

The (new) house looks great. It seems to be ready for us; we're certainly ready for it. Thing is, our lender is backed up, and because of their slow processing, it appears that our target closing date (um, that would be this Friday) is going to slip. We're real happy about that, as you can guess. Still, we're packing up the current house, in preparation for moving as soon as we're allowed to.

At work, I have been assigned an entirely new set of accounts. This means I have had to gracefully hand over my old customers (a mixed bag there, to be sure, I am glad to be rid of some, sorry to see others go) and begin visiting a whole new set of customers. My new group is called, euphemistically, "General Business". These accounts used to be called SMB ("Small to Medium Business"), but it turns out that no business likes to be called small. Even those that are. And, given the size of my company, what we defined as "small" (you know, companies like, oh, Motorola) was a bit mystifying. Anyway, things have been very busy at work, which, combined with the new baby, moving out of the old house, getting ready for closing on the new one, and living day-to-day life means things seem to be going by very quickly these days.

This leaves very little time for, you know, watching the Olympics, or learning Ombre.

So, since I have very little to offer you from my own experience, let's all appreciate the #2 All Time Muppet, Beaker. I swear, I had a dentist once that was his long-lost identical twin brother.




Now if you'll excuse me, it's garbage day.