get up. live.



Sunday, the chair of the church vestry approached me at the coffee hour and took my professional temperature. By the time we were done, he had dropped me off at my house and borrowed two books by my dead guru, Ed Friedmann (Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue & Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)

I emailed my boss so she knew I had this conversation.

I spent Sunday afternoon struggling with writing a tool to conduct constructive collaboration meetings at church with the priest and the children’s choir director.

I bogged down pretty quickly. After a few hours I gave up and grilled shrimp and scallops for Eileen and me. Checked on my Mom who is struggling with a bad Urinary Tract Infection. She seemed a bit better.

Yesterday I got up and went back to work on the proposed collaborative tool. I managed to come up with enough for the first meeting to email my boss. It includes three concepts for the first meeting with one pertinent quote each and a couple of discussion questions.

It was like pulling teeth coming up with it. Not sure if my boss will buy it, but what the heck. She has good judgement. She and I are having lunch together today. Our first meeting since Pentecost.

I have also been spending a ton of time putting the first two movements of Fernande Decruck’s lovely saxophone sonata into Finale (the music notation software).

The piano accompaniment has the published solo viola version which differs from the alto sax part. Apparently Decruck adapted her sax piece for viola ostensibly to make it more accessible to more players.  Then the sax piece seems to have been a further revision which included some conciliatory simplifications due to the lack of technique of sax players at the time.

So I have put the viola part to mov 1 & part of mov 2 into the software. Once the original is entered this allows manipulation to other keys and octaves. My sax playing friend, Jordan VanHemert, who introduced me to this piece has been advising and monitoring my work. He and I meet this afternoon for more playing and chatting and probably editing the new sax part.

Eileen has told me I seem a bit obsessed with the church and sax thing.

In the meantime, Mom’s car broke down at the gas station on Sunday. I managed to jump start it and get it home. I need to get it to a garage this morning.

Plus I have been over to see Mom every day for the last couple of weeks.  Yesterday she was in such pain, I wavered about dragging her in to the local ER.  I consulted with the caregiver at Maplewood who called the nurse. We decided she would be okay for the evening and I could contact the doctor if needed this morning. The antibiotics don’t seem to be helping.

Eileen helped her take a shower yesterday and we bought some topical ointment to help relieve some of the burning on her skin. I hope she is better this morning. If not, I will be calling her doctor’s office to try and get her in.

Finished reading Smiley’s People by John Le Carree yesterday.

This is the last of my beloved George Smiley novels by Le Carree. I do enjoy these. I also have begun re-reading Pablo Casal’s ghost written autobio: “Joys and Sorrows.”

In addition, I found a very interesting web site this weekend: http://www.truly-free.org/. The Burgomeister’s Books maintains a free online “lending”  library. The web master says that since he has purchased every book on the site, he feels the right to lend out copies via e-books. Users are limited to 5 books at a time and are asked to delete the books after they read them. I downloaded Ada by Nabakov.

I totally approve of what this guy is doing but fear he will get seriously sued at some point by copyright holders (“thieving publishers” as he calls them).

My daughter Elizabeth joined those who have left Facebook due to privacy concerns. This is discouraging because it will make connecting with her a bit harder, but everyone has to do what they think is right.

I seem to be a bit stressed these days.

It might be the price of consciousness or it might be mental illness. Who knows? Heh.

Last night as we were resting in bed, Eileen asked me what I was going to do today.

I replied: “Get up. Live.”

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0 thoughts on “get up. live.

  1. I am still not sure about the issue with Facebook? It seems to me that if you put it on the internet, then people will know about it. So, maybe personal information should not be put in public view if you want it private.

  2. I think I tend to agree as I mentioned in my response to Elizabeth on a recent post. I don’t think much is truly private these days especially from the government. But that might be just me being a paranoid old hippie who was read too much sci-fi. Heh.

  3. I’m listening to the Meklit Hadero. Nice. I can hear some Annie Defranco influence. I like it.

    Of course you and I connect. I will always connect with you. But I like connecting to a network of friends and family that are on FB, especially my Hatch nieces and nephews whom I rarely see in person.

    But each to their own, of course. No biggie. love from your Dad

  4. Privacy has such an interesting new twist on it, now. There must be some kind of formula to indicate how many people know how much about you. I suppose there must be a simple relationship between how many people who know X about you, how interesting or valuable knowledge of X is and what the connected population size is. One twist is that “interesting or valuable” is almost everything about you since it is so cheap to keep records of it all, and there is some business somewhere interested in, say, what your favorite color is. Another twist is that the connected population is now so large.

    In regard to keeping your information away from business or government (as opposed to friends and family who usually find out the most interesting things about you the old fashioned way), the internet connection is almost irrelevant. If a business or government wanted to know personal stuff about me, it is pretty easy to get without looking for info I’ve volunteered. Obviously, my credit card and phone bills will say a lot, but so does, say, my water usage, if I were to start sharing my apartment with someone. There’s all kinds of data in all kinds of places about me that can tell a determined investigator things I probably wouldn’t guess.

    I’m relying heavily on the fact that I’m boring that no one will care what I’m doing, heh.

  5. I think you are a spy. Heh. Just kidding…. the appearance & emotional area of privacy is very important to me. It’s in the same part of my brain as my need for solitude and silence, but intellectually I’m pretty sure that we are open books to many eyes. I know that sounds paranoid so that’s why I use caution when talking about it.

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