By the Sea

We spent the day at the beach today. "The Beach," whatever beach it may be, will always be one of my favorite places in the world. It never fails to send me into a variety of moods. For a few minutes, it will make me feel like a little girl, and I'll splash through the waves and run across the sand to find a quiet spot to read or write (I had an obsession with quiet spots and hidey-holes when I was younger... I still do). Then watching the sea from afar will put me in a meditative, somber mood, which is good for journaling and writing poetry.

And then when I'm standing on the shoreline, watching a wave approaching, my mind begins to take a more morbid path. "It's coming to take me," I always think, as the wave gets closer.

It doesn't help at all that in one of my favorite murder mysteries, Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers, a body is discovered at the seaside. (I highly recommend the book, by the way. And the miniseries with Harriet Walter and Edward Petherbridge.) Something about the cry of a sea gull will always be linked in my mind with death.

Highlights of this week...

#4: Playing music from Pride & Prejudice. I get so lost in that music. I start to play, and if everything is quiet and no one disturbs me, I go into a little world of my own. The notes and melodies take on separate personalities, and sort of... talk to each other in my head. Does that sound crazy? Don't answer that.

#3: Watching series two of The Roman Mysteries tv show. It may even warrant a whole blog post of its own.

#2: Catching up with my first ever best friend. I hadn't talked to her in years, because she moved to South Carolina and didn't get any of my emails and lost my phone number (because I also moved). She moved back to CA, and I found her on Facebook last week. It has been so wonderful to talk to her again!

#1: An impromptu concert at an out-of-tune piano. After a music rehearsal for Twelfth Night (at the house of Mrs. V - I've talked about the V's on here before), I sat down at the piano and started playing All I Ask of You, from The Phantom of the Opera. Decently. Little V the Elder came up and began to sing along. This girl is 10 years old and has a VERY strong soprano. She's learning an aria from The Magic Flute in her voice lessons. I absolutely love her, by the way. :D So she was singing, and I kept playing... badly. I get really nervous when people stand over my shoulder while I'm playing. And then this guy, who is, as of that night, our guitarist for Twelfth Night, came up behind me and started singing with Little V. Even worse for my performance at a piano than a sister or friend standing over me, is a perfect stranger. But I decided I didn't care how badly I was playing - as they say, the show must go on. :) Pretty soon even I was singing to my horrible accompaniment, and I was trying not to giggle. There we were: a ten-year-old opera star-to-be, a home-schooled theatre junkie, and a high school guy in a metal band, singing Andrew Lloyd Weber, just... because. Because spontaneity is so lovely.

There was also some rather awful parts of this week, but I won't go into those here. It feels like winter today. I'm even drinking hot cocoa and wearing a sweater... in June...in California!