Address

22. What? A new address? (Nov '05)

Yes indeedy, I had finally memorized my postcode, so I decided it was time to up stakes and move again. Actually, the reason had something more to do with the fact that the woman I was living with kept a padlock on the front door (I could only come and go through the back door via the kitchen) and she had a tendency to dry her clothes by placing them in the (admittedly quite toasty) closet with the water heater in it; even on the water heater itself; even on the bit that said "do not cover." It turns out that when you put the letters of "fire hazard" and "padlocked front door" into a velvet bag and shake them up a bit you can spill out the phrase "get your arse out as soon as possible. z."

The only reason I was there in the first place was that I was having a hard time finding a flat, and the foreign student department at the college had only her house left as one of their sponsored host dwellings. It took another 2 months to find the flat I'm in now. But at last I am on my own again, in a one-bedroom place just a 10 minute walk from the college (or a 7 minute "Crap! I spent too much time dawdling over the funnies while slurping down porridge" scramble).

The address (you can write it in pen this time... well, maybe erasable ink):

67 Feus Road
Flat #27
Perth
PH1 2AX

+44 1738 447 840

The "flat 27" doesn't signify a huge highrise or vast sprawling complex. It has to do with how the house-sized/shaped buildings were originally numbered when they were built in 1905. There are about five or six rowhouses made of a red/brown sandstone; each with four flats upstairs and four flats downstairs, accessible by a "close" or "alley with stairs" inside each building but seeming more like an external, public accessway. The street was called Closeburn Terrace back then, and each flat was numbered, so mine was 27 Closeburn Terrace. At some point they put a locked front door at the entrance to the close, and changed the name of the street, so the entire building is now 67 Feus Road and the flat is called #27. Clear as mud? I'll borrow a digital camera at some point and take some pictures.

So what have I been doing in the last two months? More of the same, really. Still loving my piano classes, where my confidence rises and falls daily: rises as I discover that bits of theory which had once been laboriously calculated have now become automatic (ask me which minor key has 6 flats, and I can whip out the answer in .156 seconds); falls when I try to keep a Cuban syncopated riff going with my left hand while I improvise in the Locrian mode with my right (almost as hard as patting your head while rubbing your stomach, standing on one leg on a beach ball and spinning a hula hoop around the other ankle, balanced on a tightrope above a pit infested with rabid naked mole rats. But more fun).

Also rewarding and fun is the band I'm in. At the beginning of the year we were assigned to bands on a random basis (with a sensible distribution of singers, guitarists, etc). I panicked at the thought of being trapped in an eardrum-bursting metal death band, and took decisive action. One of the bands had both a drummer and a percussionist (playing congas, timbales, shakers, etc.) so I stole the percussionist on the belief that even if he was a metal death head, he couldn't play it *too* loudly without fracturing the tiny bones in his fingers. We then kidnapped the one saxophonist and one trumpeter on the course, found a female bass player, lured in a singer, and became a jazz band with Latin tendencies.

One of the first pieces we worked on was a song by the jazz-band-with-Latin-tendencies Pink Martini (which I thought was a relatively-obscure-but-talented Portland band, and have since discovered is internationally renowned and even quite hip. Good old Portland!). We're also working on a Cha-Cha version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow that one of the teachers arranged and wanted to hear us do. And an original piece (by one of the members of the band) that switches up and back between 3/4 time and 4/4 time. Fun. And a lot easier when you've got one guy to the do the head-patting, one gal to the hula hoop twirling, and another guy to juggle the naked mole rats.

We had a mid-semester assessment where all the bands (14 in total) performed for all the other bands, and all I can say is "thank god I panicked early." Some of the bands were gentler and more pop-y, but most of them went for noise, power and speed, particularly the band I had originally been assigned to. Needless to say, we were the favorite of the secretaries whose office is down the hall from the theatre in which we performed :).

Other than that, it's a sprinkling of classes in Music History, Music Business, Digital Recording/Mixing and the like. Social life outside of classes has been slow to rev up, but I've been doing touristy things like visiting art museums and local castles to fill the time.

Weather report says that lots of cold and snow is on the way, so I'm buying up cans of soup, hunkering down and settling in (finally!) for a long while.

Love,
Andrea

Andrea Blumberg