Anyway, my one Thursday ballet class canceled so today should be a bit easier.

I have my weekly meeting with my boss today. And my trio rehearses.

Yesterday I managed to get a solid hour of organ practice in before my day officially began. I find that my skills as a keyboard player are improving as I age. Also I find myself benefiting from better approaches to rehearsing.  Silly old things like doing hands separately and repeating small sections of music numerous times. These techniques that I have known for a long time suddenly seem fresh and helpful again. Go figure.

I am performing two chorale preludes Sunday on hymns we are using in service.  This is my default consideration for choices for this kind of thing. To me it adds a small measure to the coherence of the design of the worship. I find it satisfying when the hymns, anthem and instrumental music all relate to the gospel of the day. This takes a bit of planning.

When I first began this work in the seventies, I began a cross index of my organ music by hymn tune. I now have two boxes of 4×6 cards filed by hymn tune with notations of where I can find organ music in my collection based on them.  I am particularly proud of this because I came up with the idea before I understood much about research. Now I understand such databases as basic to this activity. Interestingly I have never been tempted to convert my little file index into electronic media. Living through the switch from vinyl recordings to tape recordings to CD recordings to digital recordings on a hard drive has led me to understand the ephemeral nature of media choices for retention of information.

I am willing in most cases to convert to the most convenient form of media storage with back-up. I have a new external hard drive sitting in a box and waiting for me to get it up and running to back up my other external hard drive.

But I don’t see any reason to abandon my two little file boxes of information specific to my collection of hymn based organ music.

Since gaining access to the world of online research via my college job, I have been reading articles on my netbook quite a bit.

And now that I am paying customer of the New York Times digital subscription I also downloaded the Times Reader to my netbook so that when I anticipate an extended period without wireless connection (like sitting in some of my Mom’s doctors offices), I can take along the paper. and scholarly articles in PDFs so that I can read without a wifi connection to the net.

And there’s always the multiple books I have on my little netbook.

I envision that it’s possible that my access to emedia could suddenly be curtailed quickly for some reason like when the original Napster stopped. I envision that corporate interests could easily manage to tier the system so that access will be based on enabling consuming (and paying) for what is most popular. This will not be research or even good journalism. My guess is those areas could become even more expensive.

Maybe I sound a bit gloomy, but my thoughts run more like this: I can always survive with my books and my piano even if the wonderful internet becomes too expensive and too much like TV.

Happy thoughts on Thursday.