This particular trip to Portland has been pretty relaxing and easy. I planned a few extra days to be able to hang here with my brother Dan, whose intense library job he’s lucky to get to do at home with the dog handy. Sweet.

I’ve spent my mornings practicing the Bach Brandenburg #5 solo on the instrument which I’ll be using next Tuesday. Practicing seems to go great as long as I’ve slept the night before. If not, I’m not sure yet if I can get lucky, so it’s good to know I’ll need to play it safe. Today was all metronome practice, always enlightening at this stage, and tomorrow the builder & I will move the instrument to the venue in Corvallis. Quiet practice time there, from here on out, may be hit or miss.

If things continue to run smoothly, I’m going to have the time of my life playing this piece next week.

I keep forgetting that I have to play the violin too. I’ll check on that later…

A totally fun PDX adventure today was to meet up (or Tweet-up, as they say) with two very fun, smart, nice, and fascinating gentlemen I would never met had it not been for Twitter. Both of them are involved with the Portland Opera in very interesting ways: Stephen Llewellyn writes their blog and works for the Met telecasts, among other things, and is the famed winner of the #operaplot contest. He’s super fun, loves traveling, knew Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, etc., and I look forward to getting to know him better. And Portland being the most ‘library-friendly’ town I’ve ever seen, I was not surprised to learn that Bob Kingston, aside from being a musicologist, singer, and clarinetist, is also a librarian. Bob gives the pre-opera lectures for Portland Opera, and performs many other intellectual duties. Yeah, I’m impressed with Portland Opera’s smart body of resources. No wonder the company is growing and doing such great things…and apparently the unemployment rate in Oregon is second only to Michigan, wow, 12.4% according to today’s paper.

A two-hour lunch wasn’t nearly enough time to find all our common interests, but at least it was better than 140 characters. I’ll just have to come back.

Here’s the book I mentioned, guys: A History of Performing Pitch: The Story of “A” by Bruce Haynes, available here on Amazon. Enjoy!

My cousin Carolyn just happens to be on her way through town (Oregon is on the way from California to Kentucky, right?), so a dinner is in the works with her and my brother who has never met her.