I made barm brack for breakfast yesterday, and #1 son requested that I do so again today. This is tasty stuff.
Unfortunately, the presence of baked goods does not indicate that the housekeeping has improved chez fibermom. I put rice in the rice machine and steak in a Pyrex pan in the oven last night as I was getting ready to leave for my Wednesday evening musical marathon, thinking that there would be dinner even if it was cold by the time most of us got to it. Then a customer came to finish up her show, and we sat there at the computer for another half hour beyond the time I would normally have left. Having gotten into the habit of being sort of laissez faire about oven times from using baking stones (an extra half hour is no big deal with baking stones), I just sat there at the computer with her as the steak blackened. And then of course I was late, so I did not do any vegetables. I can hardly say that I made dinner last night.
Tonight it will be the slow cooker. I will cook a proper meal (I’m thinking tortellini soup and hot bread) at 5:00 so I can eat before I leave for my adventures in the music library, and then I will put it into the slow cooker to keep warm for the menfolks. If they don’t like it, it will still be better than cold blackened steak and no vegetables.
One of the Booksfree books turned out to be not a novel but a sort of collection of essays, If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother, by Anita Renfroe. I don’t really find clean catches and hissy fits all that amusing, but I did find this comment about TV moms pretty clever: “#1 lesson of the June Cleaver school of motherhood: freshly baked cookies and well-vacuumed carpets make you dress better.”
I had the chance to read it because the weather was so gorgeous yesterday that I took a lunch break and went out and sat on the porch and read for half an hour. It was very nice. It didn’t do anything for my untidy house, but it was good for me.
So I was half an hour late for the study group, but it is not as bad to be late to study group as to be late to bells, and I was on time for that. If you don’t show up for bell practice, the other players have to imagine your notes. I have reached the point of doing reasonably well with Level 1 and Level 2 pieces, and I think the experience is helping me improve my ability to read music.
Following bells and choir, I stayed at the church offending people.
It hadn’t been my intention to offend anyone. I had been planning to check with Bigsax about his preferences regarding the organizing of the music, a project which is scheduled to begin tonight. It is possible that he would rather no one messed with his music, and that nothing would have made that particular conversation any better than it was. However, I managed, in the course of trying to be diplomatic and helpful about the music, to suggest that his filing system was idosyncratic, his hardware obsolete, his ideas on hardware outdated, and his skills at alphabetizing limited. The kids’ choir leader joined us after a bit, and I probably insulted her, too.
Here’s how it went:
“For example, ‘A Mighty Fortress is Our God’ is filed under A.”
“Where else would it be? That’s the name of the song.”
“Someone else would probably look under M. That’s the usual way to file that song.”
“Who else needs to look in the files?”
“We have four musical groups in the church now. I hope we’ll have more in the future. It would be good if everyone could use the music the church owns, instead of making illegal copies.”
“Even with a databse, I would just leaf through the drawers of music till I found something.”
“Then you won’t mind if we reorganize it.”
It probably should have gone like this:
“For example, ‘A Mighty Fortress is Our God’ is filed under A.”
“Where else would it be? That’s the name of the song.”
“Ah, I see. I use a different system. I’ll leave it the way you have it.”
“Good. If you clean it up, it’ll just encourage other people to come in and mess with my stuff.”
By the time I finished, he was saying that records were the coming thing in music technology and I was saying that the church tech guy wasn’t as hip as he thought he was.
I blame this on lack of sleep and not having dinner till 9:30, shortly after the conversation with Bigsax.
It’s Brain Awareness Week. It is almost over. We have only from now till the 16th. My hope is that I will catch up on my sleep before it ends, so my brain will be more functional.
Check the Musicians’ Excuses! I like mine better, though.
It was the same thinking that got me fired for the first time (that whole “let’s really alphabetize this so I can find things too” movement Really didn’t go over well).
Yeah, Stephanie agrees with you about sock heels.
OK, so $3 may not be much, but if they charge you $3 every month, that’s $36 per year, which is still not very much. But they’ll also charge you $3 for something else, and some other company will charge you $2.50 as some imaginary fee, and so on and so on. With an occasional $15 or more penalty or late fee or new phone fee or whatever.
Eventually it adds up to more like hundreds of dollars in a year, and thousands over the space of 10 years, and lets not even think about your lifetime.
Companies like cell phone and cable and internet providers make millions on people who let the $3 charge slide and just pay it.
It’s your money. You can give it away if you want, but if I wanted to give it away, I can think of lots of charities that would be better than the phone company.
@lostarts – I’ll have to read that book!
at our house, all the music that isn’t being played right now it shoved into a drawer in the coffee table. not a very effective way to store music, i’m sure….
@formerprincess – At our house, we put it all into a basket or on a bookshelf, and can never find what we want. At the church (where of course there is a whole lot more music, since we have a couple dozen copies of each piece), it is filed, but it’s done according to a mystical system. And it doesn’t matter to Bigsax, since he just leafs through it all waiting for inspiration to strike, but I can’t help but feel that being able to find things is a Good Thing. I guess I hope that it’s more of a Good than keeping our choir director contented.