Pondering

Well, it's a cold and sunny Monday morning here in Germany, I am drinking coffee and listening to Liszt - I found a wonderful rendition of the Etudes transcendante played by Claudio Arrau (in his seventies at the time) which has exactly the romantic brightness and thundering emotion that I found missing in Cziffra's performance - and generally avoiding both work and several significant issues which I really should blog about.

I spent the weekend in the Black Forest at G's father's 80th birthday celebrations, where a fine time was had by all. I have been adopted into the family, to my pleasure and be-flatteredness, and am often invited to such events. G's father is doing quite well, with a little attention to his diet and blood pressure he could enjoy many more years of health. I met G's extended family for the first time at this party, they are an amusing bunch and have lived through interesting times (in the sense of the old Chinese curse). Proof of the power of the genes is that G's mother and her sister both have gold-crowned incisors, Parkinson's and hip replacements.

My sister and I started to talk about my summer memories posts, and proved the subjectivity and partiality of memory. She says that I am entirely wrong about the Saskatchewan summers, many things that I wrote never happened (or not as described) and that I omitted many significant events. Unfortunately we were interrupted by the arrival of a Person from Porlock Saskatoon and never resumed the conversation, which is a pity because I would have loved to hear her version of what happened then. I planned the holiday very badly, I could have used another week in the West to talk more with Sis and Favourite Cousin. Should have flown earlier; I cannot now remember why I didn't move the starting date further back. Must have been drunk when I booked the flight (says the nearly-nondrinker - one glass of Sekt, two beers and a glass of red wine in the course of a nine-hour celebration).

I dreamed this morning that I met the girl from high school whom I had thought was the fourth trumpet at the Ring Cycle, who contacted me after she recognized herself from the description in that post. She had had a mirror-image crush on me, but hadn't spoken because she thought she wasn't in my (intellectual, musical, early-adopter computerist) league. File under "wish fulfilment."

In other news Dale has quit his job, and has written movingly about the process and its aftermath. Read the comments too.