Okay. I got up and wrote a bitter little blog full of whining. I decided that I would delete all the prose and just leave the pics. I’m sure if you read this blog at all  you can fill in all the bitterness yourself.

I kept having trouble getting started on things yesterday. The asbestos man came twenty minutes early (7:10 AM!). I was hoping he could sort of sneak in the basement and do his thing. Nope. He began covering grates on the first floor. Eventually I understood that he would have to cover every grate in the entire house. He was surprised when I told him the previous asbestos person had not taken these extensive precautions. I also told him that my wife was asleep upstairs and that we had a cat.

Eventually we got all the grates covered, the cat safely sequestered on the porch for the day, and Eileen up and at ’em so the asbestos guy could go upstairs and cover the grates.

This of course stopped me from finishing my blog yesterday.

Eileen and I went out for breakfast, since not only was the asbestos guy there, but Chris the worker also showed up do some more stuff our contractor told him he had to finish.

So it was a day of disruption.

I decided to walk over to the college and sit and pick hymns while I waited to meet with Rhonda and Aaron.

This also didn’t work out so good. It turned out that Hope had changed its wifi campus connection (or as a student called it “The Internet”).  This caused my laptop to forget the profile. It seemed to be asking for the same kind of security key code password. I then spent the next forty minutes trying to find the stored wifi connection profiles on my laptop. No luck.

Aaron showed up and gave me the code. Then we had our meeting. Then I listened to Rhonda play a fugue on Ernst Pepping on BACH. She is preparing a program of fugues and asked me to listen to this one.

After that I walked home, grabbed lunch and then drove to the church to work on picking hymns. I took a break from that to meet and rehearse with my piano trio.

Then back to picking hymns. Around 3 PM I stopped and practiced organ. By this time I was pretty frazzled.

But my organ practice went better than expected.

This morning I got up and drove to Spectrum Health for a blood draw.

No record of my urologist ordering one.

I just called his office and left a message.

I have to pick up my Mom in forty minute and take her to her psychiatrist appointment. Eileen’s Mom and sisters are coming today to look at our toilet.

And I still don’t have all my hymns picked out for the next  year. Nor do I have the choral anthems chosen. Nor do I have the choir room catastrophe sorted. Nor do I have all of the choir room stuff moved back into the renovated choir room. All of this must happen in the next week.

Despite all of this, I am feeling a tad less stressed than I have been.

Go figure.

Church planning is on my mind. Yesterday I spent a lot of the day choosing hymns. I managed to get all the way through Christ the King which is the last Sunday before Advent. At the same time I looked at possible choral anthems for each Sunday. I took some time in the afternoon and chose a postlude for this Sunday. I landed on “Grand Choeur” by Theodore Dubois.

It’s a goofy loud piece which I have performed at least twice before in church, once in September of 1991 and again in November of 2008.

Dubois is one of those dang French romantic type guys. I think that even organists enamored of the Romantic school (of which I am not one) think Dubois a bit goofy. Nevertheless Wayne Leupold put it in his anthology of Romantic Flourishes which is the edition I am playing from.

So today I continue on and try to plan. I would like to pick hymns for the entire church year, but plan at least to get through Christmas this week. My first official choir rehearsal is not until Wednesday Sept 11 so I have a bit of time. But I also have a ton of work to do before then. The basement at the church is still full of all the stuff that has to go into the new choir room. I have delayed sorting this week to spend my time on planning.

As I am writing, the USA is considering another war, this time with Syria.

I cannot believe this is happening again. I know there is such a thing as realpolitik  but when humans consider more killing to stop killing I find myself worn down and discouraged.

I’ll end with a couple of pertinent allusions from my reading this morning. The first is about terrorism. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman teaches quite a bit about the current field of decision making. One of the things he talks about is how we weigh probabilities and possibilities. He specifically talks about living in Israel at a time when suicide bombings in buses were proliferating (Dec 2001 – Sept 2004). During this time there were 23 bombings and 236 deaths as a result. Despite this, the likelihood of being directly involved was minuscule. Later in the book he compares it to buying a lottery ticket. In both cases the probability was low, the outcomes (being involved with a terrorist bomb or winning the lottery) were also unlikely.

Kahneman’s studies reveal that in this case, we unreasonably assume risk. He talked about avoiding buses at stoplights even though he knew rationally (and was actually studying the fact) that he was more likely to be involved in a car accident than a terrorist event.

Terrorism counts on people not acting or thinking rationally. Our System 1 (the quick glib surface intuitive response) cannot be turned off. However we can decide to live life as normally as possible and not buy a lottery ticket expecting anything like a chance to be killed by a terrorist or win the lottery.

Later I was reading Auden’s beautiful poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” I am reading Auden’s work that he did during WWII. Living in England must have been very traumatic at that time. But Auden makes some beautiful poetry at this point in his life. I have even read critics who say it was the war years during which Auden began a new level of work.

At any rate, Yeats died in 1939 and Auden wrote these words with the sounds of the destruction of his country in his ears.

“In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;”

This makes me think of the wars going on in the world right now. We have the “dogs” of the world not just Europe barking in our ears. Auden continues later in this poem with this:

“Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice…”

My software seems to have gone a bit  berserk and moved stuff around on my web site. I fucked around with it a bit yesterday and couldn’t quite figure it out. I’m hoping it will fix itself as I move on and put up more posts. I also get mysterious emails asking me to update this or that. I attempt to do so, but have no confidence in succeeding.

Yesterday was my last Monday off for a while. I drove over to Grand Rapids in the morning and saw my eye guy. He says the torn retina is healing nicely. I go back in a year. I came back and used the rest of the day to grocery shop, meet with my friend Rhonda to talk about AGO stuff, move stuff around in the room Eileen wants to paint soon, and exercise. By the end of the day I was pretty tired.

Today I have to begin some serious planning for the upcoming church season.

I have no heart for it, I’m afraid. But I will muster the will to do it.

I’m hoping that Tuesdays and Thursdays will be days I can set aside time to composer. But not this week.

Anyway, that’s about all I have this morning.

I did run across a couple of new tech news web sites yesterday.

http://pandodaily.com/

http://valleywag.gawker.com/

I’m curtailing my morning reading a bit so that I have time to post here. I have a 9:30 AM appointment in Grand Rapids this morning for a follow-up on my eye surgery at the beginning of the summer. So I have less of my morning than usual.

Church went okay yesterday. I didn’t play as well as I would have liked (prelude and postlude). But I guess the postlude went better than it would have had I not practiced at the cottage.

I came home and attempted to balance the checkbook. I failed. Then Eileen took over but she couldn’t find the error either. In the end we just believed the bank and adjusted our ledger balance.

By this time I had sunk into a weird funk. Not sure exactly why. It wasn’t one thing particularly but more like a culmination of little things plus my physical/mental state. At least that’s my best guess.

There were a couple things at church that depressed me. I guess it’s best not to air them here.

At any rate I spent the rest of the day trying not to be a complete downer for Eileen. I don’t think I succeeded. She, of course, was sympathetic and patient. As usual.

By evening the mood had mostly dissipated.

Even in the midst of my bad mood, I continue to remember that my life is good. And it is.

1.Exploring Saline’s Secret Costs – NYTimes.com

Another article about how the complexities and veil of secrecy of billing in hospitals contribute to unfairly high prices, this time about saline IV bags.

2.I’m Thinking. Please. Be Quiet. – NYTimes.com

Everyone knows it’s hard to concentrate when it’s noisy. The writer quotes Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter: “The men whose labors brought forth the Constitution of the United States had the street outside Independence Hall covered with earth so that their deliberations might not be disturbed by passing traffic.”

3.Confused by How YouTube Assigns Dates, Russians Cite False Claim on Syria

Amusing.