I have fallen into a routine of preparing a psalm for an upcoming bulletin on Wednesdays in between my 8:30 and 11 AM classes. This means I have to load up some information on my laptop from my exterior hard drive before leaving for work.

And that means less time for reading and blogging. So this will probably be short.

This evening at the Ash Wednesday service I am using some organ music that I use every year for this service. Since the pieces are classics, I think this is a good idea as well as an effort saving device.

The two pieces are “Ich ruf zu dir Herr Jesu Christ” BWV 639 and “Alle Menschen müssen sterben bwv 643 by Bach. They are the prelude and postlude respectively.

I needed to come up with a prelude and postlude for the first Sunday Lent. I thought it would be cool to use pieces based on these same chorales by Buxtehude. Unfortunately I could only find a Buxtehude setting of the first one. But it is lovely.

I did find a nice one for the postlude, “Von Gott will ich nicht lassen.”

This is also one I have performed before.

I am feeling a bit stressed lately and don’t know exactly why. It’s probably burnout. It usually is.  Eileen and I are talking about getting out of town sometime for a few days. Unfortunately, this costs money and it’s a bit tight right now. But we could take off for Thursday and Friday evening somewhere. Maybe that would lower my stress.

Even though I can see that I am stressed, I am filling my time with things I love doing. Weird.

Lesley Gore, Teenage Voice of Heartbreak, Dies at 68 – NYTimes.com

Lesley Gore was gay. I did not know that.

Inequality Has Actually Not Risen Since the Financial Crisis – NYTimes.com

Some counter intuitive information. Not new stats, but new understandings of them. I like that.

George Washington, Slave Catcher – NYTimes.com

For president’s day. While I am in total sympathy with revealing shit like this, it seems to me that many people are incapable of not reading our present morality and understandings into the past. Christopher Columbus is another one who suffers from this. At any rate, in both cases it’s better to have facts straight.

How Brian Eno managed to piss in Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, 1990 | Dangerous Minds

I love this story. I hope it’s true.