A nice side effect to having to start over with my blog is no spam.  I was up to over 1,000 spam hits a day on the old blog. So far no spam for the new blog. Of course I have had no comments also. One of my initial attractions to blogging was the possibility of having conversations with people online. Alas, this has happened only sporadically. But what the hell. I discovered that I enjoy a little public diary writing so I persist (so far). 

Yesterday, I performed two organ works by Bach as the prelude and postlude. In both cases, there seemed to be a lot of crowd noise while I was performing. I managed to do a creditable job of executing these pieces despite the usual feeling that I was basically being ignored. After my prelude, my wife whispered good job to me. After the postlude a local music prof told me that the piece I played was divine enough to be a stand alone piece during the service with its due silence.  (This was the famous Adagio in A minor from Bach’s BV 564)  So I guess at least two people noticed I was playing. Heh.

The choir successfully performed a little canon by G. P. Telemann despite the fact that more people show up to perform than rehearse (this is another usual aspect of my working lately at church, oh well). This just means I have to concentrate on drilling the piece instead of polishing it during the pregame. 

I played marimba on the hymn, “If you believe and I believe.” In the course of writing about this hymn for the bulletin I discovered its wonderful background. It started out as an English melody imported into Rhodesia by colonizers. It was taken over by locals and given words that emphasized freedom. I guess it become sort of a freedom anthem and ended up being sung in the prisons of South African before apartheid was ended. How’s that for a pedigree? We did it with marimba, flute and guitar. 

After church, we grabbed some lunch at home and then went out to see if we could get Eileen’s Suzuki started. She had to abandon it in a friend’s driveway on Saturday evening. She was hoping that the people who “helped” her had hooked up the jumper cables incorrectly. Happily this seemed to be the case as the sucker started right up.  We brought it home and put it on a battery charger for the night. Hopefully it will be okay today.

For some reason I sat and played Beethoven piano sonatas last night for an extended period of time. I haven’t had much time for myself the last couple of weeks so this was a welcome return to some of my previoius music making at home. 

Eileen got my Mom back and forth to see Dad at Boersma cottage where he lives now. 

I am planning to take today off and just take Mom back and forth to see Dad when she wants to go. This will be my only task today.