Friday, January 14, 2011

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-Jog

After a very long hiatus, I am back in PEI. Christmas was Christmas, spent down in Massachusetts with the various extended family. It was, as always, good to see everyone again. Then I was in Montreal for a week and had a thoroughly good time. I actually had more friends left there than I thought! (har har) In fact, I had such a good time that I'll be going back for two weeks next time, in early February. That way, hopefully, I'll have enough time to see everyone AND go visit all of my favorite pubs!

But I'm in PEI for now, and very happy to be sleeping again at night. And, miraculously, my allergies have not yet kicked in. At least not with a vengeance. So I decided to take advantage of that and get some singing in. I basically haven't sung in six months, since my last voice lesson in July. My vocal chords and surrounding muscles are out of shape, which is to be expected, but not nearly as much as I thought they would be. I still have my full upper range from before and nearly all of my lower, though I decided not to push it too much and just did exercises for about 15 minutes to get them used to moving in that way again. I'm hoping to get a lesson or two when I go back in February, since the place where I'm staying is actually a 10-minute walk from my voice teacher's condo!

The next step is to find my music binder. My dad was the last person to be picking through it, back in October, but he says he doesn't know where it is. But once I find it I can practice actual music again.

And the point of this post: Puzzle, our baby cat (she's only 2 - she came with the house because the owners didn't want to keep her) is usually not very affectionate. Well, when she's outside, she's super affectionate, but inside the house she growls and bites if you try to pet her more than one or two strokes. Well wouldn't you know, she thought that me doing vocal exercises was absolutely the best thing ever! And the higher and louder the better! I was singing and doing all sorts of weird voice manipulations that normally piss off humans and send animals running for cover. But Puzzle was wrapping herself around my legs, climbing on tables so she could get closer to my face, meowing for me to pet her, and getting me to follow her all over the house like this. And if I was petting her and stopped singing for a second to think of a new exercise or adjust something in my technique, she would start growling and getting cranky until I started singing again, and then she was Princess Affectionate.

Weird, weird, weird.

2 comments:

  1. hahaha re: the cat. Maybe she's actually a human under a curse who will be freed if you hit a certain note..........

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lol, I guess she's determined that nothing's wrong with me, because now when I sing she asks to be let out on the porch! In fact, yesterday she went out twice: I guess she got too cold, so she came back in, but then my singing drove her out again about five minutes later. Poor thing.

    ReplyDelete