Music!

The holiday concert went pretty well, I think. The overwrought soprano was quite good (not her fault that the vocal arrangement was overwrought in places), and did a bonus a cappela bit after we finished the suite. The HS bari player has apparently been paying attention, and didn't stomp all over the places where we're supposed to be light and bouncy. She neglected to mark a few places where DC dropped us a couple of dynamic levels, though. :( She's playing a kind of junky marching sax which doesn't do well with "high" notes nor soft, so that doesn't help. I think she's also fallen victim to the HS reed player conceit that playing a harder reed means that you're a better player. (It doesn't. It usually makes you sound worse than playing a softer reed.)

New music for the Handbell Choir for Christmas eve - easier than the first bit we played, but I've been swapped down a few notes so I have to pay attention to different dots. There's been no choir since DS left (the "choir" is functionally a duet (+ pastor if he has time) at this point), and while J and I have been asked to resurrect it after Christmas, I dunno. We'll see how the search for a new Music Director goes before we commit.

There is a squirrel wandering across the frozen over pond looking for open water. Sorry, dude, all we've got is the birdbath. The pond froze over sometime in the middle of last week, and by Friday even the rill had a solid layer of ice on it -- the deeper pools at the top still had open water, but that was it. J pulled the pump out on Saturday, needing to come in for a pitcher of hot water to melt the power cord out of the rocks at the edge.

DB said that Nutcracker went pretty well. A flashpot didn't go off on Friday night, but that was user error, not a hang fire; nobody got hurt, nothing broke. They had to pack the set up three times, the last two times into the same truck, and somehow it only took half the space the last time. No one is really sure how that happened (magic, no doubt).