Overnight, Windows did an update and automatically attempted to restart.  Whenever Finale asks me if it should autosave I always say yes. Apparently it hadn’t asked me about that and I neglected to manually save a bunch of work before giving up last night.

So this morning I got up to find my desktop stalled in an attempt to restart. It had, however, managed to shut-down Finale where my work had not been saved. So about an hour lost.

Lots of “user-friendly” features defeat me.

Finale itself had defeated me earlier. I was unable to create multiple measure number areas in a single doc. I know this probably sounds like gobbledy-gook, never the less the dang program purports to do something (and in all likelihood DOES do this).  But the way I was doing it didn’t work.

Of course, with Finale there’s always a “workaround” solution. And I figured out one. Just not as elegant as it could have been.

I had a nice chat with my bud, Jordan VanHemert. He is a musician friend of mine who continues to kindly reach out to me when he’s in town.  He is a senior at Central Mich University where he studies music. Yesterday when he said to me that he was finds it exhausting, I misunderstood him for a minute and thought he meant our conversations when he meant student teaching multiple grade levels.  Amusing.

Anyway, he saw my Ive’s Concord Sonata score sitting on my piano and started talking about Ives and his first exposure to Ives. He was visiting a university, I believe, and heard a wind instrument ensemble transcription of the third movement (III. “The Alcotts”) of this piece which he instantly liked.

Jordan also mentioned Mozart’s Bassoon concerto as one that a roommate had performed which he also liked.

After he left, I purchased mp3s online of the lovely Mozart concerto.

Also, throughout the rest of the day, I carried around the Ives score and when I got a minute (of which I had very few for myself yesterday), I played through it several times.

I have always seen the Ives Concord sonata as an impossible mountain to climb as player. Ives wrote music that was complex and idiosyncratic. I like his music very much, but haven’t learned much of it. Interestingly I found “The Alcotts” easier than the other movements. Not sure I have ever played through it all the way before. Probably have but just don’t remember.

I found the 2.5 hours of ballet class yesterday a bit exhausting. I fear part of it was the impending Worship Commission meeting I had to attend afterwards. By the time of the meeting I was pretty punchy. I try to sort of “co-teach” these meetings with my boss as she and I try to help this community take “next steps” in its evolving choices about how it prays.

I know the liturgical theology pretty thoroughly and have had years of experience of helping lay people think about what their ritual prayer actually is saying and how it compares to what they intend and the design of the prayer.

I think I was helpful last night. But as I say, I was punchy.