My blood pressure has been coming down a bit. I like to think this is related to some ebbing stress. I am anticipating some time away this week. My brother and his wife have gracious consented to Eileen and me coming for another three day visit. These times out of town calm me down. And they fit the criteria that Eileen recently suggested of time together when I’m not engrossed in my work.

Speaking of my work, I nailed the organ music yesterday. My friend Rhonda made a very helpful suggestion that allowed an inner voice more clarity in my Schumann Pedal Piano piece (“No one will mind if you release the upper voices early and allow the moving inner voices to be heard better”) Thank you Rhonda.

And it was kind of fun to connect with Marilyn Biery the composer of the prelude on Facebooger. I put up my order for the day which included compositions by her and Bruce Neswick and then tagged them in the post. They both “liked” the post and Biery even thanked me in a comment. I think that’s fun.

Eileen and Barb took off in the afternoon to visit Barb’s Mom in a nursing home. I used the time alone to relax. I did do some work. I am systematically gathering more descants and choral elaborations based on hymns we sing at Grace. Bruce Neswick has a collection of descants that I can legally reproduce. Yesterday during the homily, I made notes of which hymns his descants were written for. I plan to file each of them in our huge file of descants at church and reproduce them as needed.

I’m also making scores of Willock’s choral elaborations that will be easier for the choir to read. I rationalize this violation of copyrights with the face that we DO own multiple copies of this music.

I’m supposed to be a part time employee, so I thought I would use some of the time I am church doing Eucharist to do this work rather than allocating more of time working on it.

But I did listen to Rev Jen’s sermon despite doing this work. Her closing remarks especially grabbed my attention:

“We are powerless over much of what we watch, most of what we see, much of what we experience. End times are like that. Which is why they are scary and it’s only human to want to turn away. But here’s the thing, we are not helpless, ever.  And our help, our presence matters, to those in Paris, to those in Lebanon, to those refugees who don’t feel like they are anywhere, to those in Chicago.”

There seem to be some typos in her uploaded version. She has dated the sermon for November 5 instead of 15 and the ending passage mistakenly reads “We are powerless but not never helpless.” I think she means “ever”

The phrase “powerless but not helpless” seems to be an addiction recovery phrase that Anne Lammott mentioned in a Facebooger post on Saturday.  I like it.

 Is Facebook Stunting Your Child’s Growth? – Pacific Standard

Another article footnoted by Turkle. The author is a researcher and a Dorm Dad. Haven’t made it all the way through this one yet.