We had a new piece for the Chorale last night: A Musicological Journey Through the 12 Days of Christmas. How funny this piece is may depend on how knowledgeable you are about music history. It starts with Gregorian chant about the partridge in the pear tree, moves on through Renaissance arrangement about other birds, brings […]
Today is the first day of the 2010 Holiday Grand Plan. The HGP is a simple system. You start now, and each week you have assignments for cleaning your house and making holiday preparations. You spend about 15 minutes a day following orders, and when the holidays come (Hallowe’en, Thanksgiving, Christmas…), you have a tidy […]
LaBella and I went with another friend to the recital of my old voice teacher and the church organist. The organist is fantastic, both on the organ and the piano, which is what he was playing. The voice teacher is my old voice teacher in the sense that it’s been twenty years since I studied […]
Yesterday I finished The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. I haven’t told you all about it, but there’s a lot of important and startling information there. I will tell you that, according to the author, Germans disapprove of men standing up to urinate, while Scandinavians like urinals for […]
Last night the Master Choral started up again. We’re singing Praetorius, the Bass Gloria, a few Bach chorales, and William Grant Still’s Christmas piece. Good stuff. I’m reading another of Mark Schweizer’s Liturgical Mysteries, The Baritone Wore Chiffon . There are some authors, like Edmund Crispin in his Holy Disorders, who make an effort to […]
Yesterday I went and sang Brahms at my old church. People were very welcoming — I was really surprised. Not that I thought I wouldn’t be welcome, but I didn’t expect people to notice. In the afternoon, La Bella and I went to the church picnic. It was lovely, sitting out under the trees overlooking […]
I got quite a bit of knitting done yesterday, as well as a lot of light reading and family conversation. I did the grocery shopping, made a proper dinner and scrubbed the bathroom. I hardly did any work at all. While I haven’t worked much, I have been keeping an eye on my websites. The […]
I’ve been invited back to my old church tomorrow to sing “How Lovely Is They Dwelling Place” Obviously, I’m going. The YouTube I’ve linked you to here has a little error in the singing, but it’s still beautiful. You can’t turn down Brahms in the summer. It is the last weekend of the summer, in […]
How beautiful are these pages from the new project at FreshPlans? In case I haven’t told you (because I recognize that I’ve been a terrible blogger lately and might not have mentioned any of this), I won a credit at oDesk and spent it on the design services of Jay Jaro, one of my favorite […]
I’m reading a book called The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. This global history of toilets begins with shocking data about sanitation worldwide. It continues with engineering and environmental stuff, and goes on to the political and charitable action currently being taken in an attempt to get some […]
