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- January 30, 2006 So the past week wasn�t very eventful, except for Sunday. Ditha, the daughter of very good friends of ours, visits us regularly to play chamber music with Frank. At the moment she is living fairly close to us in Speyer, where she has been attending courses at an academy for people working for their second state exam in law, but she will be moving back to Freiburg this week. So Frank scheduled a trio get-together with Konrad for the afternoon. Ditha arrived around noon, just in time to help me with dinner. I�m not much of a baker but instead of just buying something at the bakery for afternoon coffee, I bought a package mix for a little cheese cake and Ditha and I made it together. It came with a form to bake it in and when I put it together I thought it was a little flimsy. Ditha got the batter ready while I cooked dinner and then we went to put it in the oven. Disaster! The batter started leaking out of the form. We scooped up what we could and poured it back in while laughing so hard we could hardly see, shoved it in the oven and hoped for the best. I would have transferred it to another form, but I didn�t have anything small enough. While the cake baked the batter slowly oozed out of the form at the bottom and formed a pancake-like appendage that I had to scrape off after a while so that it wouldn�t burn. In the end the cake was even smaller than intended but once I had it out of the oven and cut around the bottom so that it was round again, no one would even have noticed anything was wrong. It tasted pretty good too. We had a schedule conflict though. There was a concert in Wiesbaden that we had planned to go to, especially since our friends from Berlin would be there. So I went alone. I don�t usually like going places alone but I knew there would be people I knew there and I�m glad I went. However, when I arrived and looked at the line for tickets, who should be standing last in line but the one woman in Wiesbaden that I try to avoid. We owe her and her husband an invitation, since we have been invited to their place several times in the past two years. But she is a chain smoker and in general has a very grating manner that really gets on my nerves. We chatted for a few minutes and I managed not to get a ticket next to them because I don�t like to sit at the very front.  This is the concert hall in Wiesbaden during the intermission.The concert though was excellent, one of the best I�ve attended in the past few years. It was devoted entirely to the young Mozart and the Prague Chamber Orchestra played. The conductor was a German who had led the orchestra for many years before politics interfered, or so I was told in the intermission. Anyway, he talked about what made Mozart even as a teenager a great musician. They played four of his earliest symphonies (which are quite short) and he would stop in the middle of a movement and talk about his totally unconventional use of pauses for example, and then play that part again. In one symphony Mozart even changed the key. Or in the second half which was devoted to his dances, he demonstrated how Mozart changed the tact in the middle of a piece. It was very interesting and I came home with a little better understanding of what exactly made Mozart a genius. Paradise Now - February 01, 2006older_entries%% Donating blood - January 31, 2006older_entries%% An Eventful Sunday - January 30, 2006older_entries%% The Broker by John Grisham - January 26, 2006older_entries%% The Winds of Change by Martha Grimes - January 24, 2006older_entries%% 
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