My New Year Resolution

Soooooo tomorrow is New Years and what on Earth have I done over the year? 

Well, I got a new job. Two actually. And I still have them both. You can imagine the stress. Especially since the year started in the hospital with our new little girl catching a deadly strain of pneumonia. That was scary. The year has pretty much been kids and work which is not bad because the job has been extremely rewarding and the kids are doing great.

This is the end of the year though and like everyone I feel the need to promise myself next year is going to be better. And maybe I should because other than healthy jobs and cool new work this year has SUCKED!

I could promise to quit smoking or even lose 50 pounds (wouldn't that be nice), but all I really want is to be bloody happy. Even in a new, healthy body would I be happy? Who knows!

But then how do you quantify happiness? How do you know if you are actually working towards happiness unless you are happy. Then you have already achieved it, have you not? And will it last or is simply a burst of serotonin that somehow got away with positive affect. Again, who knows!

So maybe I should just aim to have as many happy little moments as possible, be aware of them when they happen and just enjoy them when they are there in 2012. That's what I'll do.

Happy New Year everyone!

The Beethoven Project – Lessons Learned

This past Thursday was the first time I performed chamber music in front of a live audience in over 10 years. Back in February, I had come up with this idea to have a small Classical concert to highlight some of the local (or semi-local) talent in Gibraltar. At the moment there are two types of Classical Music venues you can attend in Gibraltar. You either have the professional musicians who travel to Gibraltar and are paid for their services or you have recitals of young musicians in the community who are forced to play in concerts set up by their teachers for all parents to come and watch. You don´t see a lot of the teachers themselves perform so I wanted to do something that involved some of the teachers including myself.

The concert had a few hiccups that we dealt with as they came. I think the biggest one was having two pianos as the first one was not playable for the Beethoven. When you´re accompanying 5 year olds I´m sure it´s okay, but when you are trying pull a complicated melody line out of a Beethoven Piano trio, you need something that responds. This led to our pianist insisting on bringing her own electronic piano from home at the dress rehearsal. Understandable.

There are a few things I learned from arranging a concert. I´ve only ever played in them, never arranged and then played. Here are a couple of things to remember for the future and I hope anyone reading this can learn from my experience if they are planning on putting together a concert they are playing:

1. Never arrange a concert that you are playing in! It is too hard. They are two separate jobs and if you are busy doing one (arranging) you are going to be too tired to do the other (play).

2. Never arrange a concert for the same day as the Queen´s birthday in a British Offshore district. Oops! I tried really hard to find the best date and venue for this concert however there were a few things I forgot to look for. Such as, major events and special holidays taking place in Gibraltar.

3. Never arrange a concert on any special religious holidays that may stop potential concert-goers from coming to the concert. In this case a very big Jewish Holiday. Given the appreciation for Classical music by many of the Jewish community in Gibraltar this was a huge oversight on my behalf.

4. Factor in the cost of rehearsals. Have a good idea of the ability of your musicians and how many rehearsals you are going to need. Then calculate how much that is going to cost in travel and the rental of rehearsal space.

All in all it was a good concert. I would have liked for a higher turnout, but we played well despite being completely exhausted from arranging the whole thing as well as moving a bunch of pianos. I think it might be a while before I arrange anything else, and if so I´ll be sure to learn from the major and costly mistakes stated above. For now, I think I´ll stick to relearning a few of the Bach Suites and getting to know my family again. My dad always said “A day without Bach is a day without sunshine”. The same goes for family.

Thank you to all who came to the concert and a special thank you to the Gibraltar Ministry of Culture who financially supported the project.

What do you do with 25,000 square meters of land?

This isn´t the lead up to a punch line. We really have 25,000 square meters of land which we have now had for just over 5 years. We pay the mortgage every month (sometimes barely). There is a farm house (not liveable) and even provide a lovely playground for the neighbours free range chickens. We do not however live on or even grow anything on the land.
Our neighbours grow things on the land. We rent it out annually to our neighbour farmer who alternates a crop every year on it. This year is wheat. We rent it for less than one month´s mortgage payment. Why, you ask? He maintains the land which would otherwise be a very large fire hazard come every July and we still get some money out of it as opposed to nothing.
Lately we´ve started asking ourselves what we can do with the land. It´s not an easy question to answer because you´d think that 25,000 square meters is A LOT of land. To live on sure, but to grow things on, it can add up to very little. For example, this same neighbour that we rent the land to has other land. He earns approximately 35,000 to 40,000 euros a year in olives. This is great except these are very mature trees and on a total of 100,000 square meters. This means that in 10 years we could earn about a quarter of that. Not really a motivating goal. So we came up with another idea.
Truffles are like the stinky cheese of fungi. They look gross, they smell weird and quite frankly are an acquired taste. Fortunately I have experience in that area as I love sushi, olives and crazy cheeses. I did some research on truffles as I found out that farmers in Oregon are now growing them. This made me think, “If truffles grow naturally in France and they can make them grow in Oregon, shouldn´t you be able to grow them in Spain? Especially the region where you can grow ANYTHING?” It turns out you can. If you buy a book on Amazon (the only good one in English really), email a truffle enthusiast in England and ask him for a knowledgeable contact person in Spain you´d be me last September.
I ended up getting in contact with a really nice, ridiculously knowledgeable Dr. of Fungus (that´s right you can get a PhD in Fungus) who helped us out. So now after a very positive soil sample and taking an afternoon to plant nine trees infected with fungus (probably the only time you really want your plants infected with anything) we wait to see if they first survive (did I mention I kill plants?) and then produce. It takes three years for the trees to produce truffles which grow in symbiosis (young Skywalker) with the roots.
I´ll be sure let you know the results so make sure you check my blog in three years time.

Be THAT Parent

I nearly lost my little girl. Seven weeks old and fighting to breathe. When she was lying flat on the table, hooked up to about 8 different machines, I could see it. Breathing so hard like she had just run a marathon. Only the right side of her chest was rising. I start to feel panic again when I write this down, which I don´t like feeling, but I have to. I want you to feel some of it too and to know that it is okay to be THAT parent.

Athena caught the cold we all had earlier. It started with our little germ machine JR who brings everything home from nursery. Artwork, toys, fevers, coughs. Everything! I got it briefly, but Miguel had it much worse. He eventually recovered. No big deal. Then Athena caught it. I watched carefully. JR was six weeks old when he caught his first cold. He was miserable, but it went away, but I am wary. I´ve had pneumonia twice in my life and one of those times my left lung collapsed. I know what can happen.
When she got a fever I took her into the emergency clinic near us. He listened to her chest, verified it was not in her lungs and gave me ibuprofen for the fever. If it got worse I was to go to her regular doctor. It got better or what seemed better. The morning she was admitted to hospital she had no fever. It was the first day of no fever since I took her in five days earlier, but her fever had been getting progressively better. I wasn´t convinced though while she improved. Something felt off. I felt bad that she seemed to be suffering so much, but then again babies are miserable when they are sick. JR was and still is when he gets a bad one.
That morning she ate, she had no fever, she was active until about 10:00 am when we went for breakfast. She was sleeping which I suppose is normal, but it seemed a very deep sleep. By noon when we left Toys ´R´Us and were going back to the car, we noticed that her lips were grey. Not rosy. And she was pale. It happened like that.
We didn´t panic, but I didn´t feel right so I suggested that we stop by the health center and see if the paediatrician was available to take a quick look at her. As we did the 30 minute drive I was starting to think about it more and felt a growing urgency. Okay, if he´s not available then we´ll go to the emergency clinic again.
When we got there the paediatrician was there. By the time we got there and he had looked at her she was even paler. He called an ambulance to take her to the hospital. I rode in the front with the driver and two female EMTs had her in the back with an oxygen mask. Miguel followed in the car. Some people are real dicks in front of a wailing ambulance by the way. Don´t be one of them.
When we got to the hospital they took her immediately into the trauma room. I had no idea what was going on. I had no idea how long I was waiting. Not knowing. I called my mom. The doctor came out and asked some questions and told me she was very sick when I asked how bad it was.
In the end my6 six week old daughter got a cold and a week later ended up with a severe case of Streptococcus pyogenes (Wikipedia it). She had a pleural effusion and at one point had 3 IVs, a chest tube which drained a total of 180ml of fluid from her lungs. She had a catheter, a feeding tube and a machine forcing oxygen up her nostrils. She also had a heart monitor and an O2 saturation monitor. All at seven weeks of age.
When she left the hospital this past Wednesday she had spent more than one third of her life in there. Three weeks to be exact. She spent her first Christmas and New Years there. All I can say to other parents is that it is okay to be THAT parent.
Be the parent that is over cautious. The one that brings their kid to the doctor if they sneeze twice in a row. The one that others roll their eyes at and groan about. The parent that makes the doctors and nurses say “here we go again”. All week leading up to this I had it in my head that I didn´t want to be that parent. If I had kept on ignoring my instincts who knows what would have happened. Be THAT parent because the alternative can be more that you want to imagine. You´ve got company now.