Panda swam!

The title says it all, really. Tonight we went down to the pool on the third floor, I put on a pair of goggles, and I swam. Six or seven times. I took a deep breath, kicked forward, and did a very enthusiastic freestyle stroke for about twenty feet on that breath, before either righting myself or pointing upwards with extreme urgency, the signal to Sarah to come get me.

I even managed to keep my eyes open behind the goggles, most times. Didn't manage to figure out how to take a breath, so there was a limit to how far I could go, and I tried front crawl once and got nowhere, but: I swam! I SWAM!!!

And I can't wait to do it again.

In other news:

ITEM! Susan from High Spirits came round this afternoon and we demonstrated our music collection and sang a bit. Fun! I burned a CD of modern musicals for her - the Falsettos crusade continues - she couldn't believe there's a song called 4 Jews In A Room Bitching. Well, it's unique...

ITEM! Sarah goes to New York tomorrow. How will I survive without her for over a week? Hookers! Er, I mean, fortunately we have pre-arranged various evening events to occupy my time: a tenor section rehearsal on Tuesday, High Spirits on Wednesday, possibly acquiring a couple of mirrors on Thursday, maybe a meal out on Friday, a pub crawl with James The God on Saturday, and recovering from a pub crawl with James The God on Sunday...

ITEM! We built our third bookcase tonight and unpacked a further six boxes of stuff. We're down to about twenty-five boxes now, but it's getting tough to figure out what to do with them as these are the densely-packed boxes of books and 'stuff which goes in sideboards' and suchlike, and currently we're all out of bookshelves and we have no (and want no) sideboard. If we get a desk then I can probably set up the computer, which will account for another three or four boxes, and the PlayStation is occupying another box but is useless without a television and another power adapter. So, we still look like we've only just moved in, but at least all our visitors are wowed by the place. Eavesdropping on conversations at work, I've established that we are indeed paying a lot for rent compared to most people, but most people live in the sticks, and we're two minutes from the Vancouver equivalent of Oxford Street, in a swanky building with a pool and hot tub. Worth it for the year, therefore.

ITEM! We're figuring out how to record music so it doesn't sound awful. With a piece of software called Reason we can record MIDI from Sarah's new keyboard pretty faithfully - this means we can then fix up individual notes, adjust their volume, add in extra notes, multi-track it, and make it sound like a grand piano or indeed like a Hammond organ should we wish... plus, we can add drum tracks and a bassline. The biggest problem is the single thing we have to record live with a microphone: our voices. We made initial recordings of our two new 'big' songs, All You Have To Say and When You Smile, and by the time I've processed them for volume and de-hissing, they sound very mechanical and the piano accompaniment is somewhat blurry, so we won't be posting them! (Burge got to hear them and agreed that they sound robotic with all that noise reduction; plus he misses the detail in the piano line!) On the other hand, a quick test revealed that recording a vocal line while listening to the piano playback should give us a much nicer sound. I'm getting really into EQs and frequency analysis. It's truly impressive (and a little scary) how you can alter the tone of a recording by adjusting the frequency curve. The upshot is that, although it's too late to do much now before Sarah goes away, we'll spend some time the weekend after next on this, and then we should have something for people to hear.

ITEM! After being introduced to meat souvlaki skewers at the post-choir drinking sessions at The Main, and then eating them so often at Kalypso round the corner on Robson, we experimented with buying frozen souvlaki and cooking it ourselves. Sarah quite likes chicken souvlaki; I'm considering this a definite win in terms of finding a new foodstuff which she can tolerate, let alone enjoy.

ITEM! God, how could I have forgotten this? Or rather, I'm not surprised I've suppressed the memory of this so quickly. And I was only ranting about it to Susan earlier this afternoon. What am I talking about, you ask? We went to see the fourth in the Black Box series of dance shows at the Shadbolt Centre on Saturday night. And, god, it was the worst thing ever. I'll have to try to not swear while I describe it. The first half was thirty minutes long and featured almost exactly one minute of actual dance. What we were presented with was a pretentious poem intoned over the speakers while people rippled three sheets of silk on the stage floor, followed by (and I wish I could say 'in swift succession') a woman coming in and lying under one of the sheets, rolling around under the sheet, standing up, looking around, deciding it wasn't for her and lying under the sheet again, gathering up the sheet, walking offstage, leaving the stage empty for ten minutes while an incomprehensible set of images flickered on the screen at the back, coming back on, glaring at us all, and then performing some very slow dance steps in imitation of a horse on the movie screen before banging her head against the floor several times (we sympathised) and then making some random movements for thirty seconds before the lights went down. I had been thinking "God, this is rubbish, I hope the interval is soon", but to my horror, the interval was now - that was the piece in its entirety. She got scattered applause from the audience, and I actually said out loud, "That was it?" which got me some looks from people all around. There was a fifteen-minute interval, which I suppose might have been necessary to reset the lighting and movie projector, but I'm pretty sure it was actually so that the woman, who was also dancing in the second piece, had plenty of time to go backstage and laugh hysterically for as long as she needed at how gullible her audience was to have paid money for this tripe. During the interval I had a good look around for someone from the Shadbolt with whom I could make a deal: "Look, give us our money back and I promise we won't tell anyone how dreadful it is." Sadly for their reputation, no-one was available to take me up on this offer, so here I am, telling you all about it. And so to the second half, which did actually feature some dance steps, but not really very many: there were several routines which recurred, with occasional amusing semi-serendipitious intersections with the spoken text, which dealt with these two dancers and how they knew one another and how their lives had coincided. But it wasn't really very good, nor very interesting. We feel that when we go to see a dance show we expect to see dancing, not listen to words. If it isn't necessarily a very intellectual show with great meaning to the dancing, at least let it be very energetic: dancing is the one art form where genius really is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. If you can't be bothered to sweat: the hell with you. So in conclusion: if you ever have the chance to see a show by Andrea Nann or Sarah Chase, don't bother. And now I will end the paragraph and you can breeeeeeeeeathe.

ITEM! To end on an uplifting note (I don't like ranting, it means the world is not good enough, and that's bad) - Sarah's choral piece The Blackbird Of Derrycairn is being rehearsed for performance by My Lady's Chamber, the twelve-voice ensemble organised by James The God. It's an excellent piece of music which she's only ever heard performed by me, when I learned all four parts and overdubbed them for a CD I made for her Christmas present in 2004. She's recently been in touch with the rightsholder of the original poem which she set to music, which is why she's finally been able to give it to a group to perform, and they seem to be enjoying it. I'm very pleased for her and hopefully sometime we'll have a recording for people to hear.

ITEM! Bedtime! Bye for now.