"Sorry to rain on your cake." I think I laughed out loud in class when my (very Scottish) Philosophy of Time lecturer said that. "Rain on your parade" makes way more sense, but "rain on your cake" makes such a better mental image. Favorite Scottish phrase thus far.
This was a muy exciting week. Classes were whatever. It was all the other stuff that made it. Highlight: Wednesday was my very first harpsichord lesson! It was so so so exciting. After reservation of the harpsichord on campus didn't work, the teacher and I decided to meet at her house. So I walked over there on Wednesday morning - it was about half an hour away. Ironically, I had just had a conversation with someone about how we hadn't been in a really, truly, East St. Louis-esque dodgy part of Edinburgh...the area I walked through wasn't that bad, comparatively, but I don't think I'll do it again. But anyway. The teacher's apartment was delightful, the first real home I've been in since being here. She has two children under 10, so there were Legos everywhere, which made me smile. But back to the real point: the harpsichord. It was beautiful, sitting there in the middle of her...well, I guess it was basically a music room. (I want a music room when I grow up.) And I just got to sit down and play it! Oh, it was fun. After a short tour of the harpsichord, she basically gave me some music and let me have at it, kind of correcting a little along the way. But it was so low-pressure and fabulous.
So, having had my first lesson, let me give you a brief introduction to the harpsichord. It's an early version of the piano - think pre-18th century. The layout is very similar to a modern grand piano, but much smaller. The main difference is that the strings inside are plucked rather than struck. This means that the dynamics are virtually unalterable - whereas on a piano you vary the force of your playing to alter the dynamics, playing more forcefully on a harpsichord just gives you a really ugly sound. So it's played with much more delicacy, and (for the piano players reading this) you don't use the weight of your arm at all, only your hand. Your connection with the inner workings is much more intimate as well - you can literally feel in your fingers when the string is about to be plucked, and the release of pressure as it is.
I came away with three pieces under my sight-reading belt, all preludes: one Jacquet de la Guerre, one Couperin, and one Bach. It was really neat to play them on harpsichord - the Bach is a fairly well-known piece, one that I've heard on piano, but it sounded so much more right on harpsichord. I'm absolutely itching to practice them. (Unfortunately I'm still working things out with the lady in charge of reservations...she asked me if I was a visiting student, I said yes, and she hasn't gotten back to me since. Hmm.)
(Don't worry. Despite the semi-passionate affair I'm having with the harpsichord, the piano remains my first love. There are a number of good reasons the piano took over as the keyboard instrument of choice, variable dynamics not being the least of them, and my appreciation for all those things is only growing.)
Second bit of greatness for the week: I found cornmeal!! I wandered randomly into this great Middle-Eastern-of-some-sort grocery store and, noting their incredible stock of bagged beans, spices, etc., thought, hmm, maybe they have cornmeal. My new keywords, thanks to a Google search on "cornmeal in the UK," were "polenta" and "maize". I wandered down to the end of the bagged-stuff aisle (which had an incredible amount of stuff in it, seriously) and (after slight confusion with a tiny bag of stuff that had pictures of corn all over the front, only Italian writing that included something that looked like it might translate to "corn", and contents that resembled sugar) found an entire section of cornmeal!!!! (Labeled "cornmeal", thank you.) Coarse, fine, white, yellow...so much cornmeal. Happy Melody. So I grabbed the 1.5-kilo bag (it was the smallest they had) of regular yellow, got in line, (found myself to be the only woman without a head covering...awkward...) paid £1.65 for it, and strutted out. (Demurely. The guy behind the counter was already giving me you-dirty-infidel glares. Oops.)
I was, of course, delighted to find out when I got home that the recipe for which I was cornmeal-hunting called for exactly one tablespoonful. Delightful. Oh, well - that tablespoonful of cornmeal made that pizza. No, but really, it was probably the best homemade pizza dough I've ever had, and really easy as well. It's definitely my new standard recipe. The pizza itself, "Pesto Pizza with Butternut Squash," was fully as bizarre as it sounds, and probably will never grace my table again. (Fortunately, but oddly, it's much better either cold or reheated.) Then this morning I made cornmeal pancakes, which were actually really good.
Anyway. My main accomplishment for today was figuring out the library! It was wonderful. I found two of the three books I can't get online, so now I get to read those. (Titles: Time and Space and The Philosophy of Time.) Plus the library seems like a decent place to study, as does the psychology library, so I'll be taking advantage of those in the near future, because all that ever gets accomplished in my room is Friends-watching. Needs to stop.
And finally, tonight is the first Christian Union large group meeting!! I'm so excited. The lack of Overflow-esque-ness in my life has been an issue. I absolutely cannot wait for worship. And fellowship. And really any message at all. I'm so excited. It's kind of lame how excited I am.
Gotta go! Time and Space is due at 10:30 tomorrow morning (because it's a "High-Usage Book"), so I have to see how much of it I can skim before that time. Wish me luck.
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