Church went very well yesterday. I was happy with my playing. It was a little challenging to perform the Handel organ concerto in its entirety. I had it in my fingers a couple weeks ago to perform for the AGO chapter meeting. I didn’t put the same intensive preparation in for yesterday’s performance. However, it went well.

The choir sounded very well on our anthem.

I’m writing in the late afternoon. I went to the eye doctor in the morning and the allergist in the afternoon. My eyes are getting worse. The optometrist told me I was a candidate for cataract surgery whenever it got to the point I judged my eyesight bad enough to do so. It’s not too bad yet. He also drastically changed my prescription for lenses. I ordered two glasses this time. One strictly for driving the other for reading, and conducting.

The allergist had a few more tips about avoiding stuff that might make my rash worse.

Fascinating, eh?

Eileen and i watched half of this video yesterday.

I have read McChesney’s Rich Media Poor Democracy some years back. I learned a great deal from it. .

And we watched all of this one recently

We used Kanopy to watch these. I am finding Netflix and Amazon Prime cater to tastes very different from mine. I think that they have things I would l enjoy viewing. I’m just not in the targeted audience so browsing on them is not all that fruitful. I keep telling myself I’m going to use my laptop to find better stuff to watch on these two but I keep not messing with it. Laziness no doubt.

I haven’t been blogging much. I don’t have anything to report on the health front. Eileen and I walked over to Evergreen Commons yesterday and exercised for the first time in about six months. This hiatus dates back to the beginning of my reaction to a new blood pressure medicine. I did 45 minutes on the treadmill but slowly. Tomorrow I have an eye doctor appointment and an allergist appointment. I don’t think I’ll  have time or energy to exercise but maybe on Tuesday.

On last Friday my visit to my therapist went well. Dr. Birky is a good listener and it was helpful to talk with him. Later that day I received a disturbing picture of an old friend who is also battling cancer. It was disturbing because he looked so ravaged in it. I dreamed about him that night.

This morning my strings and I will perform all of a Handel organ concerto: two movements for the prelude, a slow movement for the beginning of communion and the concluding gavotte for the postlude. That should be fun. The choir has nice anthem ready with added string parts. We will begin our Advent service music and  hymns today.

Yesterday afternoon I noticed that the usual suspended huge Advent wreath had not been hung. I called around and finally connected with Rev Jen. She was surprised and sounded like she would try to get someone to do it. I’m curious to see if they get it hung by this morning’s Eucharist.

I have been playing through pages and pages of Buxtehude on the organ this week. I am going through the scores that I owned in undergraduate school. Once again I am surprised by how much of this music I have learned and performed, some of it in college and some of it in churches.

Buxtehude sits very nicely on the Pasi. Plus I am tapping in to his joie de vivre that pervades his music. It’s fun stuff. We have a little Buxtehude choral adaptation for an upcoming anthem in Advent. I have invited my cello player to play along. She and I will do a Frescobaldi piece for the prelude that day, but I think some Buxtehude on organ is order for the postlude. This is one of the reasons I began looking at Buxtehude this week.

I’m also casting about for a Christmas eve postlude. I think it’s nice to do something a bit more sedate after the late service. I would like to find a killer arrangement of a familiar Christmas Carol. I have been reading through these as well and have a stack of possibilities. It is such a pleasure to have a organ at my disposal that has such beautiful sounds.

I have been sleeping in till 7 AM. This morning I got up early so that I would have time to do some reading before the day begins. I’m working on Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare and Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Singer and Brooking. I ordered copies of these books yesterday. I have found that I do appreciate having hard copies of books I am reading and I read so slowly that I rarely can finish them in the time the library allows.

But I’m not complaining. I love my library!