Ramblings of a rural(ish) geek

Maybe I should have worried a bit more about the bell choir thing. The 'taster' during the church service went pretty well, other than one person completely missing their note, every time. To be fair, zie was playing a bell out of zir usual range, and in the 'heat of performance' forgot to read the staff for notes (zie usually plays notes between the staffs, but there was some shuffling of bell assignments for this piece). The lady next to me has forgotten how to properly ring a bell (she never was very good at the wrist snap anyway), and her bells do not sound consistently -- sometimes they're late, sometimes not at all, sometimes very quiet, etc. Ringing handbells isn't as easy as it looks....

The performance afterwards, though. oy. We screwed up the finale so badly that we called a mulligan and did it over again. It was better, but still not very good. Too many people relying on someone else (the director, me, the person next to them) to count. The director(!) got lost somewhere and that didn't help a bit when it came to the 3 - 4 - 2 - 3 beats per measure bit at the end.

We will be playing on Christmas Eve, so hopefully we'll get *that* piece figured out. This service should be "interesting", because the new pastor has decided to do just one service. Church Council has told her that we usually fill the church twice (and often the overflow space as well) on Christmas Eve (mod weather, except for PT's last year), but she thinks we'll only need one this year. Many of us have doubts about that. J has been recruited by the IT team to help set up a live-stream for both the overflow and the other building as well as the FBLive thing.

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).

Tuesday was a special election -- schools -- so I trundled off to the township hall at 5:45 am. After we got set up but before we had any voters (DN is a very efficient deputy clerk, so all we had to do was turn things on and make sure they worked correctly), the clerk handed out schedules for the next two elections (August and November). I noted that I was on the floor for November (rather than on the Absentee Voter board), and the clerk said that I had been requested for the floor because I knew how to print/send reports. Um.err.OK? And then we get to close of day, and I've been shifted to receiving board and can't actually *do* anything (state requirement), and after I walked DN through printing from the electronic poll book I discovered that nobody else knows how to close the program and unmount a flash drive (!?!). So I had to hang over MJ's shoulder and tell her 'click that triangle, now that green icon, now uninstall the stow&go, now you can take it out and slide it closed'. (It's slightly disconcerting when I'm the computer 'expert' in the room.)

Wednesday AM I went to sort books at the K-2 library, and when I got back there was a call from the clerk 'can you chair the AV board in November? There's been some concern about the people I had scheduled for it, and with you in charge they won't slack off.' (nothing that would affect the integrity of the election, or they wouldn't be asked to work!) As AV Chair, I will be on the floor when they're closing, so I still get to deal with printing/sending. whee?

Sunday was the FCB spring concert. There were a *lot* of notes in it. I heard from people in the audience that it was very good. The local public access station recorded it (actual concert begins around 3 min). Monday we started working on things for the Orchestra Hall Concert (June 26, tickets at dso.org). There's going to be a lot of notes in that, too.

In garden news, the red species tulips are blooming, as are the little tete-a-tete daffodils in the same bed, which only emphasise how desperately I need to weed that. But it's either been too dry or too wet, or I've been gone; so there's a lot to be done. The oaks and the tupelo have finally budded, and the leaves on the crab apple popped on Tuesday while I was gone. The big white daffs in the NE flowerbed have bloomed. I can finally plant out the lily and daff that came home at Easter. Today will be busy....

And looming in the not-too-distant future, a funeral meal. I haven't heard anything official, but the lady in charge of usables called me today to find out what my plans were WRT to silverware/plates/napkins/cups. And we chatted about how many funerals we'd be doing this year. It may be a lot -- we ran down a list of about 6 church members who are visibly declining (in a congregation of about 120); and there are community members as well. The new pastor may have a rude welcome -- 'hi, welcome to your new church. have a funeral'.

There's a special farewell potluck and performance for the outgoing minister (who has accepted a posting to a Korean congregation in Troy) coming up as well, so there's rehearsals and the like for that.

The cabinet is finally done, other than the doors which will take about 5 minutes once I find the screws, and it's usable without them. J installed the countertop and attached the upper cabinet last Sunday, so I spent Monday figuring out where things would go in the cabinet. Saturday, I installed three more sliding baskets, which make the cabinet more useful. I lose some space to the runners, but the baskets go all the way to the back of the cabinet so I can stash stuff in the back of the shelves and still get to it. I figure it's a fair trade. There's still trim work to be installed (toe kicks, some base molding for the outside edge), but there's a lot of that to be done in the kitchen. (I need to remember to get some quarter-round for the island the next time I get to Menard's.)

I wrote an actual letter to the local lumberyard, and got a (somewhat badly written) email back, which essentially said 'yeah, we screwed up. This is why, but we can't blame you for going elsewhere in the future.' The writer did actually look at the orders and figured out where the mistakes occurred, so there's that.

We finally got the tree decorated on Sunday. It's been up since the day after Thanksgiving, but we've not had everyone in the house at the same time since then. The kids decided we should do a 'no flying ornaments' tree this year, so all the birds and such were left in the boxes. The only flying ornament on the tree this year is an old Happy Meal Max-as-Reindeer ornament. Even the glass swan that's been on every tree for the last 30 years was left off.

SR will be singing with the choir on Xmas Eve. DB will not -- he's working sound. The other college kids who said they'd sing with us are apparently not (G was at church on Sunday, but skipped rehearsal; N won't be back in town until tomorrow), and the other alto decided that she was going to sing after waffling for a couple of weeks, so SR isn't as critical to balance as she could have been, but we're still only at 3 S:2 A:4 TB (one of the Sops is a trained sop; two of the men are, to be polite, not good).