Klarinet Archive - Posting 000609.txt from 2003/09

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] storm
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 14:36:47 -0400

David Adlam wrote,
>Well here in the beautiful city of Auckland, New Zealand,
>we did quite well during "the storm". Lots of practice and
>strangely enough, some fine weather, interspersed with
>impressive thunderstorms...:)
>
>Still I hope our American friends have survived and recovered.....

One nice thing about playing the clarinet is that I can play it without
plugging it in. I live in Virginia, across the Potomac River from
Washington, D.C.. What was left of Isabel arrived here as a tropical
storm, not a hurricane. It made an operatic grand entrance at about 10
p.m. on Thursday. Kevin snored right through it, while Shadow Cat and I
sat up in bed and counted the transformer explosions and the tree crashes.
Large trees behaved like Whomping Willows all around here. Power poles
snapped right off at the tops. Naturally, the media reports the most
photogenic catastrophes, but I think my experience was more typical: None
of the worst things happened at my house, where the storm brought only some
temporary inconvenience.

This house was built about 50 years ago, when power supplies were uncertain
here; and since it hasn't been modified drastically since then, we could
live here without power fairly comfortably for a lot longer than the 20
hours when our electricity quit this time. With an accurate weather
forecast and plenty of warning, I put everything that could go airborne in
the garden shed, which fortunately stayed upright. We obeyed the "boil
water" advisory, although it turned out that the water wasn't contaminated
after all. Our trees tossed down a lot of limbs, but they didn't hit
anything important. Kevin and I read by hurricane lamp; he practiced his
violin and I practiced my clarinet; we opened up some of the supply of
home-bottled water and cooked on the camp stove (outdoors--I'm dismayed at
the reports of people getting sick and even dying of carbon monoxide
poisoning when they lit up gas stoves and generators in the house); we took
walks; we listened to the radio reports with gratitude that the worst stuff
hadn't happened to us; we phoned a lot of relatives and friends who'd been
watching TV and imagining us floating down the Potomac; we compared notes
with neighbors and discussed what needed to be done to clean up the street,
etc.. I opened the freezer only once, just long enough to snatch out a
bag of shrimp that we steamed for late lunch or early dinner on Friday
rather than see them go to waste; but then the power came back on that
evening, and the freezer had stayed frozen.

Kevin and I spent most of Saturday and Sunday cutting up the tree debris in
our yard and dragging everything we couldn't mulch or use for firewood out
front to be hauled away. His comment: "The family that chainsaws together
stays together." Yesterday afternoon, we took a break to go hear Bill
Powell give a fine recital on the 1929 Skinner organ at Church of the
Pilgrims (Presbyterian) in downtown D.C., where I greatly enjoyed meeting
resident organist and composer Rob Passow for the first time, after
corresponding with him through an online composers' forum. This morning,
with Kevin back at his office, I cleaned the camp stove, washed the water
storage bottles, re-filled them and stowed them away for next time. And
that's the end of that tune.

Lelia Loban
E-mail: lelialoban@-----.net
Web site (original music scores as audio or print-out):
http://members.sibeliusmusic.com/LeliaLoban

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