By yesterday afternoon, I found myself a bit off balance mentally…. grumpy. It would be good if I could take Monday off, since Sunday is a day of exertion and effort. Eileen got up and decided to go exercise. After breakfast she was just about ready to leave and suddenly could not find her keys. She needed the handy dandy whatsit attached to her key ring to get in to her class. We ransacked the house together. Finally she found them, but she would be late for the exercise session if she walked as usual, so I offered to drive her over. I threw an overcoat over my shorts and grabbed my flip flops and drove her over. She got there in time.

I hadn’t noticed it but in the afternoon, stuff started piling up on me. In an effort to help my congregation appreciate and enjoy the music at Eucharist I have been thinking of writing bulletin articles. Next Sunday the piano trio is playing, so I thought this would be a good Sunday for an article. Unfortunately, it was like pulling teeth to get it going. First I researched the hymns and the composers of the piano trio pieces. Often when I do this, some interesting correlations and facts leap out at me. Yesterday, not so much.

After several hours of flopping around and writing, I printed up a few paragraphs for Eileen to read and proof.

In between doing this, I had emails from a prof at Hope encouraging me to attend an upcoming (first annual) jazz organ summit.

This threw me off balance. From what I can tell, Hope has been hosting jazz organists for a few years. They come and give master classes and then play a couple of gigs. Although, I have owned a Hammond organ in my life time and done my share of playing of this style, it’s not one that interests me that much. It’s slightly frustrating only to be included as a participant in a three day workshop. I know the prof means well and thinks I would enjoy it. Maybe he’s right. By the time I have emailed him info that he asked for about the local AGO chapter, I am feeling a bit frazzled.

Then I had an email from my sub organist asking to get together this week as we had talked about. In order to facilitate this I had to nail down everything for the service a week from this Sunday. That took a little doing, logging on to the Rite Song web subscription and realizing that many of the downloads do not have the accompaniment in them (which my sub will definitely need). I figured out that I can just loan her a Hymnal 1982 at our meeting this week and that this would be fair to her, since I won’t put her on the spot to sight read hymns, only talk about service order (she’s not done liturgy as far as I know) and hymn intros and stuff.

By the time I had figured all this out, I was definitely mentally off balance for a Monday. Maybe I do need a shrink.

 Spanish Archive Raises Franco-Era Ghosts and Shadows of a New Chasm – The New York Times

Review: Dave Eggers’s New Novel, ‘Heroes of the Frontier’ – The New York Times

I don’t think I’ve read any Eggers all the way through. This review makes me think it might be a good idea.