Once again I am harvesting and storing the junk of my parents. In order to clear my Mom’s old room, Eileen and I sorted out what she needs now in her new smaller room and discarded some stuff she will probably never need. The remaining stuff is sitting in my house (and temporarily in my car).
This is the third time I have brought my parents extra stuff to my house. I think this will inoculate me so that if I don’t die a sudden death or become an invalid I will probably divest myself of a lot of my own junk before death.
It could happen.
warning… remainder of post boring church stuff, no pics, no fam stuff
Anxiety at church is rising. Since we have the Vigil on Saturday, I have asked the choir to come out for all three days of the Triduum (Maundy Thurs, Good Fri, Sat Vigil) plus Sun Morning. Most of them are okay. One is skipping services. One is angry and thinks this is not a privilege but too much to ask of the choir. I have been repeatedly turned down when I have asked for help for Holy Week from the many instrumentalists at my church. I do think I will probably have enough people for a string trio on Maundy Thurs and a solo violist on Good Fri and an obbligato Violin at the Vigil. I plan to invite an excellent pianist to slip in and play the piano on the anthem for Easter Sunday. Also I have a bass player who is up for anything.
Service went pretty well yesterday as will all the upcoming ones. I especially enjoyed working with the kids. The children’s choir director has given notice that this will be her last year as director. I have told my boss that I am willing to take on this duty with a slight increase pay. I am getting sucking in more than I originally intended I know, but I would like to see what would happen to this struggling group if I was the director.
The three kids from the children’s choir who showed up yesterday responded very well to my leadership and seem to have a good time. Basically all I did was teach them handbell technique and then have them do a very simple ring on the Hosanna.
I enjoyed playing the little Bach postlude. Once again I’m pretty sure this stuff falls on deaf ears. I understand the design of the Palm Sunday service to be one of moving from triumph to the solemn. So I accompanied the last two hymns pretty quietly. Then played a medium loud but solemn postlude. The music was there to frame the prayer if the congregation chose to use it.
I asked my choir to rehearse in the basement after church since that is where we have most of the Maundy Thursday service and where we will perform our anthem. I think it might have helped their blending possibilities for the Thursday anthem. Like most church basements our basement is pretty forbidding to music: carpet, low ceilings, long room. I will have them perform in a circle and try to get some kind of choral blend. Silly me.
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Dr. John’s New Album ‘Locked Down’ and BAM Residency – NYTimes.com
New album at 72. Wow. I love this guy.
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Fatal Car Crash in Brazil Spotlights Class Division – NYTimes.com
I have trouble believing that Brazil had 40,600 traffic deaths in 2010. That can’t be right.
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Where Have All the Neurotics Gone? – NYTimes.com
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A Sontag Sampler – NYTimes.com
Excerpts from upcoming Sontag published journals and diaries.
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A Native Caste Society – NYTimes.com
Blacks are the target of the highest number of hate crimes in the United States, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation — higher by a wide margin than any another group of Americans by race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or disability. While blacks make up 12.6 percent of the country’s population, they were 70 percent of the victims of racial hate crimes in 2010.
from the linked article
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About All That War Buzz – NYTimes.com
Many American professors of politics and history (most notably Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, an expert on Shiite Islam) could disabuse your readers of their constant diet of misinformation relating to Iran having hostile intentions (it has not started an aggressive war in two centuries) and threatening to “wipe Israel off the face of the map” (the original Persian of that oft-cited phrase related to time not place — “the Zionist regime would pass” — and was expressed in the passive voice, implying no agency on the part of Iran in bringing that about).
Occasionally consulting a Persian-speaking source like Professor Cole could help you a lot.from the linked article
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