Our time in California is drawing to a close. It has been good to see the fam and have some time off. It’s been good to have wifi and a piano to practice on.

I feel a debt of gratitude to Nicholas’s piano teacher. Czerny’s Opus 337 was sitting on the piano when we arrived. There was a little  note to Nicholas from his teacher to do each section 20 times. She was merely repeating Czerny’s instructions.

I waited until everyone was out of the house yesterday and then followed the instructions of Czerny and Nicholas’s piano teacher. Reading in Nicholas’s edition reveals that Czerny was himself a piano teacher of some note and taught 10-12 hours a day if we are to believe the notes in the book.

I found this work online and put it on my tablet. It seems to be something I would like to add to my piano technique rehearsal. Cool. I asked Nicholas if his teacher insists on Czerny’s fingerings which strike me as a bit odd. He said she did. Good enough for me. I also asked him if he had done any of the sections 20 times yet. Nope. I told him when I was his age I didn’t see the sense in the Hanon exercises my piano teacher assigned me. Why do them? I could already pretty much sight read them which is what I did in my weekly lesson. It wasn’t until much later that I began to get more serious about learning to play the piano. Nicholas seems to have tucked a good bit of technique under his belt at this point, certainly more than anything I had before David, his dad, was born.

I finished LeGuin’s little book of poetry I purchased at Farenheit 451 bookstore. It was fun. It reminded me of the verse that sometimes occurs in her novels.

Speaking of poetry, I neglected to mention how fitting Derek Walcott’s Collected Poems were to read sitting by the ocean. He is a poet of craft and uses his Caribbean childhood as a continue wellspring of inspiration.

My sunburn is still itching. It affected my sleep but it wasn’t as bad as it was the first time it went nuts.