Good weather is here again. Or was here for a few days, since they promise rain throughout the weekend. Actually, they promised that the rain would start sometime Friday afternoon, but the skies, while cloudy, are still not very rainy-like. Could I extrapolate from it that the entire rain-all-weekend prediction was bogus? Probably not…
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Of all her various endeavors, Becky lately has been concentrating on singing a bit more. She lacks a strong voice, but she definitely has a musical ear and she loves to sing.
It helps the matters that at her school, every Year 7 student has to participate in the choir. Last week the school gave a concert, highlighted by its highly selective Chamber Choir, but with participation of other ensembles, such as the Jazz Band, the (Very) Big Band, the Senior Choir and the Year 7’s.
Becky and her classmates had an unorthodox repertoire of a south-african song and a Hindu hymn, the latter sung with no words. Becky even had the honor of being a soloist on the hymn, which I hear was performed very well. Next year, when the choir will no longer be mandatory, I fear she will be crestfallen if unable to get into one of the selective ensembles.
Meanwhile, she has also been preparing for a classroom presentation. The task is simple: Pick a song, any song, sing it solo, get graded. Becky narrowed down her choices to six pieces: The Star-Spangled Banner, Kiss the Girl (from The Little Mermaid), Ev’rybody Wants To Be a Cat (from The Aristocats), A Dream Is a Wish (from Cinderella), Tomorrow (from Annie) and I Just Can’t Wait To Be King (from The Lion King). She then had Natasha and me to give her marks for performing each one of those, with the notion of combined highest mark identifying her final choice. The esteemed judges attended to the task at hand with all due diligence, and our diva settled on A Dream Is a Wish (with a combined score of 17 on the 10-point scale).
The performance is coming up any day now.
On a totally different note, I’ve been having a small blogging confidence crisis. Even though right from the very beginning, I expected my site to only be of use to my family and best friends (not counting an occasional stray fellow expatriate), I recently fell into the trap of regularly checking visitor statistics and such. It is hardly remarkable, from a handful to a couple of dozen visitors on different days, and seeing that every day, compared with public stats of some other blogs, does become joyless.
I checked a few of the blogs of other American Londoners. Actually, I read one blog, My London Crib, regularly, even since Geo emailed me one day with a question. She similarly got in touch with several other bloggers, and I looked at her friends’ work through the links on her page. What I saw were largely merry and carefree accounts of goings and doings of young American ladies (and their significant others) who immensely enjoy being in the center of the universe that is London. Their writings appear effortless and airy. Geo herself went on a “picture plan”, whereas she almost daily posts a seemingly random picture and writes something about it; it surprisingly provides an excellent composite insight into her everyday life. Another blogger, Heather, works off a full-blown photo-blog approach – she posts many pictures and builds her narration around the images.
Me? I am trying to keep my posts witty (I’d like to label them whimsical), but carefree and effortless they are not. I cannot steer away from serious topics (I actually have a long list of expatriate subjects that I want to address one by one). I don’t even try to project an all-encompassing sunny attitude – yes, we enjoy our life here, but keep no pretense that it is anything like a long vacation. Finally, I am clearly not a young beautiful woman (although my gorgeous muse and spouse should certainly play a more prominent starring role in my narratives).
And what do you know? Realizing all of that gave me a boost of confidence. Maybe I found my niche! Maybe there is an audience somewhere that is interested in musings of a youngish, not young, and intermittently funny American grump, whose limited vocabulary of superlatives demands occasional negativity…
On the other hand, if not, I probably still will be content with the knowledge that a dozen or so people who are truly dear to me get these indirect letters from me once every few days.
In any case, I feel inspiration overtaking me… Unfortunately for my literary career, at the moment, the muse is demanding that I get off the stupid computer and spend some quality time with her and the children…
Our guests have returned home, and we have a brief lull until the next visitors arrive.
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Chronicles, Family & Friends, From Russia, On Current Events
I took a curious personality test at work the other day and figured it’s worth describing in a post.
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The weather turned truly nasty for a couple of days. Nasty with a twist. Mockingly, around 7pm every day, the skies clear, the sun comes out, and our hearts fill up with hopes of nice tomorrow. Alas, the mornings leave a lot to be desired…
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Our best friends from New Jersey have come to visit us for a bit over a week, which means kids are happily playing, beer is freely flowing, fun is being had all around. Notably less sleep can be secured in return, but I managed to catch up on some this Saturday morning.
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As I pass myself off for an expatriate blogger, I guess I should at least occasionally post entries that fellow expatriates could use as empirical advice.
This lengthy entry concerns relocation package negotiation.
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The latest disruption in my posts was caused by a long-weekend excursion to Paris, which was immediately preceded by another round of problems with the website, which hopefully have now been resolved once and for all (but claimed as their victim the recent Tuscany gallery album, which I am yet to restore). Oops, famous last words, “… have been resolved…” – I am in IT, I should know better…
Anyway, what we want to talk about is Paris.
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