I need what is lost,
although I love as well
the flow that took it….

Wendell Berry

In this poem, Berry seems to be looking out at a river from a house on stilts. He watches as the river moves and changes the landscape (p. 317 in his collection This Day for those of you following along.)

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I like this phrase and think it applies (for me at least) to a lot of living.

Yesterday ended up being pretty much a work day for me. I got the notion Sunday night that I would experiment with the files my brother gave me. He gave me access to a directory of his with the Anglican Chant Psalter entirely in Jpegs. The psalms in this book are “pointed.” By means of dashes, dots and slashes, this indicates how they can be sung to Anglican Chant.

This is significant because I have spent the last year or so, remaking these silly things by hand in Finale (my music software) with varying degrees of success.

Sunday night I dumped jpegs into a Paint program for editing down. Then dumped them into a Finale doc for next Sunday’s psalm. Then I made a pdf of them. This turned out to be singularly crappy, so I turned off the computer for the evening.

Yesterday I got up with the idea I would consult with the executive administrator who prepares our weekly bulletins. I downloaded Mark’s zipped file onto the church computer and then told Mary (the administrator) to unzip them where she could find them.

I explained the process of preparing Psalms for the bulletin, then emailed her a set of instructions for next Sunday. When I checked with her in person if she understood and felt competent to proceed, she was ready to roll. Very cool. Many thanks to Mark for helping me with this!

This will give me an hour of my time back a week and will probably take Mary all of five minutes to do with her software and it will look better in the bulletin!

I also began organizing my Hymnal Collection yesterday.

I’m have weaned this group of books down a bit. I am putting them in order by title which is kind of arbitrary but at least is some kind of organization. I actually tend to find them by what they look like.

I have finished putting my music books in order in the living room corner. It’s alphabetical mostly by author (sometimes by subject — all the Bach books are together for example). It is through letter M. You can see why I need a new treadmill. It’s only held up by several cords tied on the right there. It was fewer cords until they broke while I was treadmilling the other day. I managed to catch the contraption without killing myself (a miracle) but splashed water every where.

Now I have it rigged up like this. Eileen is not happy with this, but we really aren’t in a position to spend a couple hundred dollars on a new treadmill. Again kudos to my brother Mark (who seems to have a bit more time for helping these days for some reason, heh). He pointed out a local free treadmill listed in Craigslist. O yeah. Craigslist. Good idea Mark! Thanks!

Since I can’t afford/don’t have room for more bookshelves, my strategy is to use every last inch of bookshelves for books. This will probably help a lot.

Some people put this up on Facebooger (it seems to have originated from someone calling themselves the Comical Conservative).

I started poking around to see how true it was. As best I can tell there are not actually statistics on crime just in Kennesaw. But I did find this weird article recently posted on the Daily Mail.

Inside the small Georgia town of Kennesaw, where EVERYONE is armed | Daily Mail

No wonder the Brits think we are a bunch of gun wielding hillbillies, eh?