It’s amazing what exercise can do for you.  After making my Most-depressing-post-ever™, I decided to take the bike out and ride the crap out of it.  For me that means doing 11 miles at an average speed of 13.5 miles per hour, with a couple small hills but mostly flat terrain.  I feel much better now, and might actually get a good night’s sleep.

A couple of addition thoughts about some news tidbits from the musical world.  About the Seattle Symphony’s Four Concertmaster thingamabob: well, my mother told me if I had nothing good to say, then say nothing at all.  When I first read the story from the online version of the Seattle P.I., I stared at the computer screen for about 30 seconds with my mouth hanging open and small, high-pitched whimpering sounds coming out every few seconds.

Anyway, are any of you planning on coming to one of our two outdoor parks concerts in the coming week?  They’re both free, so you really have no excuse not to come by!  The first is a Arbor Lodge Park on Saturday, August 25th at 7:00 p.m.  Get more info here.  Why not make an evening of it? Stop by the Arbor Lodge New Seasons Market, pick up some fixings for a nice evening’s picnic, and enjoy the show!  The second free concert is at Waterfront Park (just south of the Hawthorne Bridge) on Thursday, August 30th at 7:00 p.m. (but come at 5:30 to hear the Portland Youth Philharmonic and claim a good spot on the lawn).  If it rains, the concert will take place at the same time, but on the following evening, Friday, August 31st.  I hope to see you there, it should be a fun and interesting program, plus it ends with the obligatory 1812 Overture complete with cannons!

Yep, it’s that time of year again.  When the schedule starts back up and all the old habits and fears and regrets come out of that hiding place in the back of the closet or under the bed.  It’s hard to deal with.  We just got back from Sunriver, where we played in a chamber orchestra for two weeks.  It’s such a lovely place.  We don’t have a laptop, so no email, no web news, nothing to really connect us to the normal demands of day to day living at home.  So it’s always a shock to come back and read hundreds of emails (half of which are spam), riffle through the mounds of mail that come avalanching out of the post box, and deal with the fact that the season is starting up in a few short days.

This year there are additional factors that make life more difficult.

My father is having a health crisis and the overall outlook probably isn’t great - he’s in his 80’s and even things that would just set us back have become serious challenges.  He spend a few days in the hospital and then a few more in a nursing facility, and now he’s at home but not moving around too much, except with the PT person comes by for a session.

The health of the orchestra continues to worry me.  I wish I could go more than a season or two without wondering if it will be the last one with the orchestra in it’s current form.  There are so many unknowns, and there are factors which make me more skeptical than usual about the future, so while I’m happy to be going back to work, I’m worried about how long things will remain the same as they have been.

My wife has been one of the first call substitutes in the cello section for nearly a decade, and this year she’s gotten only one call for one series so far.  She’s taken work with the opera (Carmen) in September, but it’s not boding well for the amount of work that she’ll get this year, which makes up nearly all of her income.  She does some private teaching and work at Pacific University, but she’s a performer at heart and doesn’t want to get trapped into teaching a large studio just to make ends meet.

All this makes me wonder how long we’ll continue to stay in Portland.  We love it here, but need to have some stability and enough income to seriously think about buying a place and having some real roots.  I’ll keep you posted.