cellio | Entries tagged with debatable choir

Sorry; no big weighty thoughts tonight. It's been a randomly-busy week, as opposed to a contemplative one.

Tonight at a board meeting we were looking at some revenue/expense forecasts. I wonder how many people in the room actually read footnotes. (I do, always.) I silently noted, in particular, the entry labelled "SWAG" (actually "swag", but I decided not to correct him :-) ). I contemplated it, decided the number sounded reasonable to me, and concluded that anyone who might have been able to offer a better number had already been involved in the process, so I did not ask him to clarify the "S".

I'm beginning to rethink personal investment strategy. I've always maxed the IRA/401(k), because you just do. The result is that most of my long-term money is in a retirement account that I can't touch, rather than mutual funds that I can. And I'm not convinced that the income tax rate at retirement beats the taxes I would pay now. Hmm. (This thought brought to you, in part, by the annual review of funds with the financial planner on Wednesday.)

Choir practice on Monday was small but functional. For the last few weeks I've been the only one on my part; fortunately, I can handle that. Unfortunately, though, the fact that we have to go to Toronto for Pesach on the Saturday before (not the Sunday before as I had been planning) means that we won't have part coverage for an SCA event we were going to sing at. Mind, the world doesn't end if we don't sing there, but it's still unfortunate.

The latest CD from the Austin Lounge Lizards, from 2003, has a song with the refrain something like "why can't we blow up Saddam?". Some topics are just riskier than others for the songwriter. I hope they got some mileage out of it. :-) (I had forgotten just how much I enjoy having a working source of music in my car.)

It's looking like the D&D group is going to cut over to version 3.5, with some adjustments made to avoid penalizing players too much on things that got drastically changed for the worse. Saturday night we're having a rules discussion before the game.

Hey, LJ finally fixed the bug with ordering of memories. Memories are useful to me again!

Lately, a larger proportion of my spam is about enhancing body parts (primarily one I do not possess). The hot stock tips seem to be on the decline, though the various flavors of the Nigeria spam continue. I guess spammers weren't getting a lot of hits for investments in a shaky economy. I remain glad that I do not use a browser (or equivalent, like Outlook) to read my non-work email; spam is bad enough without flashing "porn porn porn!" in 72-point red letters while playing supposedly-appropriate background music. :-)

On Sunday Dani was arguing that we will have a mild winter because "tomorrow's weather will be basically like today's", iterate until done, and it was about 70 degrees on Sunday. I took the opportunity to mock him for this on Monday, when the temperature dropped nearly 30 degrees in three hours (and the day ultimately ended with snow). He's just got to learn the limits of simplistic logic. :-)

On the Mark is going to sound great at Darkover this weekend. Sunday's practice went very well. We have two surprises for our fans at the con, one positive. (The other is that we'll be taking a year off -- but we'll be back, so I don't want to call that "negative". It's just reality; people get busy and groups need downtime.)

Monday's choir practice was more focused than other recent ones. The director was keeping things on track, and a habitual "problem child" wasn't there (which I'm sure helped the director). I'm skipping the next several practices because I won't be at the next two performances (one in a week and a half and one in mid-January).

We went into last night's D&D game with a disagreement on the table about what to do next. I think one player is still convinced that we can do what three of us think is currently very foolish. The question was deferred last night, though, because one player couldn't make it, and we were not about to do something high-risk without everyone there to steer his own fate. So we got the outcome that I wanted, but not through the means I wanted. Once that was settled the game was a lot of fun. (My fun in the game is augmented by extra-game character-development activities, mostly achieved via email, private geeking with the GM, and the game journal.)

Conversation snippet:
Me: Does tartar-control mouthwash actually do anything useful, or is it just a marketing scam?
My dentist: It makes the tartar softer, which makes [hygenist]'s job easier.
Me: Hey, that's worth something. If [hygenist] is going to poke sharp objects at me, I'd like her to not be frustrated.

The salad bar has returned to the Giant Eagle across the street from where I work. And there was much rejoicing. :-) (Well, some rejoicing. In order to rate full-scale rejoicing they have to restore the yellow hot peppers.)

I almost had a chance to meet sanpaku, before he suffered car failure. Eventually I'd like to meet more of the people whose journals I read.

Welcome to LJ to zachkessin, an SCA friend who moved to Israel this summer. There is now a new SCA group in Jerusalem (he and kmelion are the people I know), and they're having their first feast tomorrow (Thursday). Good luck, guys! The parts of the menu I've seen look great. (No, no turkey, for anyone who was wondering.)

( miscellaneous )

( 5 good questions )

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This is the long Pennsic entry. ( Read more... )

Tonight for the first time the choir sang "Hashkiveinu" all the way through and approximately correctly. Yay! I really like the sound of this piece; the chain of suspensions at the end is especially cool. Rossi had some odd ideas about harmony in places, but this one works.

Sunday dinner featured a small grilled turkey with rosemary and apricot coating. (Ralph says there was also garlic, though I didn't detect it.) This worked really well! I wonder if I can simulate this in an oven, perhaps with chicken. (Though this turkey was small enough that it wouldn't produce ridiculous amounts of leftovers.)

After dinner we played a variant of Carcessan (which I've probably misspelled) called, I think, Hunters and Gatherers. I've only played the original game once, so while I recognized the game system, I didn't really know how to play. I wasn't doing a very good job with long-term strategy, though I was doing ok with short-term tactics.

Sunday afternoon we went shopping to replace the wall-to-wall carpet in the basement guest room that destroyed by the rain invasion a couple weeks ago. First we went to Home Depot, who advertised installation services, but it turns out they don't install indoor-outdoor carpet, only the regular kind. So we ended up at a carpet place, where we ordered the carpet and someone to make it all fit, which is supposed to happen sometime next week. It's an L-shaped room with some cabinets and stuff to work around, so there was no way we were going to do this ourselves. They have a fixed price for carpet plus installation, based on square footage of the piece of carpet you have to buy (which is larger than the space it goes into, especially in this case). Charging for installation for the part of the space they don't install into seems wrong, but they didn't ask about complications like cabinets so it probably works out in the end.

Saturday night we went to a party hosted by friends who had recently returned from a trip through wine country with, shall we say, excess potables. I had a red that I actually liked and that wasn't ridiculously sweet, though I failed to record what it was. (I can find out, though.) There was much good food, including several very nice cheeses. I'm going to have to go in search of good cheese locally. And, of course, much good conversation as well.

I spent some of Saturday afternoon continuing to work through the Torah portion. I'm pretty comfortable with about two thirds of it. I hope to get the rest soon. The rabbi wants to hear me chant it before he leaves for camp and I have an appointment with him next week for study anyway, so that would be an obvious time.

I'm not fluent in Hebrew, but I know some words and of course I read through the portion in English. As it turns out, the trope often provides additional clues for emphasis, significant words, and so on. It's pretty nifty. Not surprising, of course, but this is the clearest example I've seen so far. This is an action sequence, which works better for that sort of thing than the laws of the sabbatical year. :-)

Friday night was the first service with our new cantorial intern. She's good, and very friendly. It sounded like she was a little nervous; I assume that will pass. At the oneg Phyllis (the administrator) introduced us and she recognized my name; fortunately, that was only because she'd been told I was the chair of the worship committee, and not because of some nefarious reason. :-) (We'll be working together on two upcoming services.)

The fireworks were on Friday, but on Shabbat I have other places to be. I would have liked to go to Ray and Jenn's party, but the logistics just didn't work out. Some other time.

Some have the custom of changing batteries in the smoke detectors when they change the clocks twice a year. We don't do that, but last night I inadvertantly tested the batteries, so I know they work. The oven's self-clean isn't all it's cracked up to be; I forgot that opening windows is necessary.

The choir started "Haskiveinu" (Rossi) last night. Yay! This is going to sound good. It's nice to have enough tenors to support two lines.

I've now heard a second recording that seems to use "ushbor" (not a word, near as I can tell) where the modern text uses "haseir". Maybe it's really a word; maybe it's really a scribal error on Rossi's part; maybe it's nonsense but I should go with the majority; maybe it's an error in a secondary source that they're all using. Or maybe I'll just leave it alone. We haven't gotten to that word yet, so I can still change it. (My only source for Rossi's text is a French transcription that had enough oddities and errors in it that I re-typeset it for the choir.)

We went to Dave & Buster's after choir last night, but I didn't stay to play Pump It Up because I still had some Pesach prep to do. Drat. Next time for sure! (I'm guessing that I can catch a ride home from someone if Dani doesn't want to stay.)

Tonight: D&D. My character has learned a new spell that should be loads of fun to play with (polymorph self).

I took Erik back to the vet last night to have more blood drawn. I went armed with questions about the tests (thanks,

spiritdance!), and got lots of information. We will know a lot more when these next results come back, but one of the tests takes a few days so I might not hear until next Monday. With luck, though, this time I'll hear something a little more conclusive than "ok, I know which other test to do now". I hope.

Embla was hiding in the attic this morning. This is unusual; she generally comes running when I get up. When I walked downstairs I realized that the carrier was still out from last night, so I put it away. She was back to normal tonight when I came home from work. I guess she was worried that it might be intended for her. :-)

Choir last night was missing some of the regulars, but we also picked up two new people. One,

ommkarja, has been in the choir before; the other is a member of the choir at Ray and Jenn's church. They're both good; I hope they stay. (And one is an alto! Yay!)

Our newspaper delivery has been rather spotty for the last few weeks. (The problem pre-dates the recent weather changes.) The service hasn't been good in a while, really; the carrier seems unable to put the paper on the porch or even, often, on the walkway. I've found papers in bushes, papers on the street in front of the house (that's not even trying), and recently, far too many missing papers.

I think I finally have the attention of someone who might care, though; tonight was the second time in a week that I've gotten a call asking if service has improved. And today I did get a paper on the porch without asking. But it's still annoying. Not quite as annoying as the thought of regularly reading That Other Paper, though. :-)

In the "at least they're making gestures" category, I now have a stack of coupons good for free coffee at 7-11. Maybe one of my local friends would find them useful.

Tonight we watched the first two episodes of a new Tv show, "Mister Sterling". It has real potential! I enjoyed both episodes, and the style is reminiscent of "West Wing" -- fast-paced, crisp dialogue, strong characters, and a sense that things are going to be done a little differently with these folks. I didn't pay attention to the credits, so I don't know if there are any familiar names there. (For the most part, I probably wouldn't notice.) I'm looking forward to seeing more. I wonder how it's been doing in the ratings.

(Next up: "Sports Night".)

I came home today to find that our contractor has finished in one attic room and moved everything into there so he can paint the floor in the other room. Part of "everything" is about 15 bookcases that started out in that room; he moved them with a dolly, books and all. I hope he put them back in the same order; I forgot to check. The floors look good, and he was able to patch the holes and wobbly spots before painting.

Today I pinged half.com, because their rep said (on Saturday) that he was going to poke the seller for me. I actually got a quick reply this time (one person at half.com understands customer service, at least), and he said that after discussing it with their abuse department they had decided to just refund my money and deal with the seller in some appropriate way. Yay! (Apparently the seller hasn't answered their email, either. Unwise move.) So I ordered the DVD from Amazon and had it shipped directly to my father. I tried to leave feedback for the half.com seller, now that the transaction is "complete", and couldn't because he is not a registered user. Good. Pity that I didn't leave feedback while I could affect his score (I assume the suspension is temporary), but oh well. Now what I want to know is: is there some way that I can get this same rep if I ever have to deal with half.com support again? (Derek good, Tracy bad...)

Last night's choir practice had low turnout. We've got to get some altos. (I am looking forward to Jenn's return!) In an odd twist, we're actually strong in tenors, which is a real change from a year ago. The new Rossi piece we're going to start soon is SATTB, because we can. :-) (I gave my transcription and transliteration to Gail to proofread last night. She's got the best Hebrew in the choir.)

Sunday dinner was pleasant. Ralph makes good brownies! (The rest of the food was good too.) Ralph and Lori have the cats confined to a few rooms while they paint upstairs, so we hung out in the family room after dinner and evaluated the effects of kitty drugs (catnip). Their cats are much more entertaining drunks than mine are. (Well, I've never given catnip to Embla; my catnip experiments ended before I got her, when I concluded that Baldur gets mean.)

And now, it is time for me to go take another stab at sorting out who said what about when to say the evening Sh'ma, because my next Talmud session with my rabbi is Thursday.

Friday night was another dinner for the 20s/30s group. Attendance was about the same as last time (around 25), but there were some new faces, including some people who are checking out the congregation. It was a pleasant dinner. This time there was fish in addition to meat, which I appreciated. (They didn't use a kosher caterer, so last time I ate lots of pasta and salad.)

Yesterday after I got home from services we went to kingdom 12th night, about an hour north of here. We got there just as a court was finishing; I hadn't known there would be more than one. There was an artisans' exhibition, but there was very little time to look at anything before I had to go to my first meeting. (I thought the meeting was later. Oops.) This was very much the day of long meetings, and next time I end up with multiple meetings at a single one-day event I will choose one to attend and not attend all of them.

The choir performed before court (the later one, I mean). I could actually hear the tenor parts! (This has sometimes been a problem with our choir, I'm told. I'm usually in the choir, but not for Christmas music.) The altos and sopranos were down in numbers compared to the tenors and basses, and each of the upper parts had one weak singer, so balance was a little off. Aside from that, though, and one piece that really suffered from this week's rehearsal being snowed out, it sounded good. The environment wasn't really all that good for performances, unfortunately. (There was one large room with lots of background noise.)

The site for the event was a little strange. They were using a high school, so most activities took place in one large room (the cafeteria), which was plenty big enough to accommodate that. But changing rooms and meeting rooms were separate, and they were far away. (This event would have benefitted from a published map.) We had to walk quite a way to get to the changing rooms, and had to go to a different building to get to the meeting rooms, yet we walked past many suitable classrooms on the way to those destinations. Was the school unwilling to let the SCA use rooms that were actually close to the cafeteria? How odd. I felt sorry for the people who have trouble getting around. (Oh, and pretty much all of the parking was a good distance from the building, too.)

The feast was good. Starch-heavy for vegetarians (few veggies), but that's normal. I guess I should start packing raw veggies when going to events. (I am not complaining about the cook here; most feasts have this issue, for various reasons.)

A lot of people took off right after the feast. I had planned to spend that time schmoozing with people I didn't get to see during the day because of meetings, but had limited success. Some of them will be at today's baronial party, for which I'll be leaving soon.

dagonell and Cigfran got snowed in, so they didn't make it down after all. Pity.

I'm working on typesetting and transliterating another Salamone Rossi piece for our SCA choir. I'm almost done with the music, and then I'll start on the text. I'm looking forward to singing this one. No, I'm not working from facsimiles; I wish I had copies of that. I have a modern edition that was published in France, and they transliterated the Hebrew in ways that undoubtedly make sense for French speakers, but (1) that set does not include me and (2) I have discovered errors in the transliterations (ones that have nothing to do with French vowels). So I'm redoing it, but the easiest way to do that is to typeset the music myself and then add lyrics. (Besides, the music typesetting in this book wouldn't cope easily with a couple more passes through a photocopier.)

It's funny: I'm using their transliteration to figure out what they probably meant, and then going back to the text (psalms, prayer book, etc) to get the actual Hebrew, and then transliterating that for the choir members who don't read Hebrew. Kind of round-about, but it works.

Saturday is (SCA) kingdom 12th night and it's nearby, so we'll be going (after I get home from Shabbat services). Sunday we are having a local 12th-night party, just down the road at CMU. The latter is free and pot-luck food, so tonight I made a couple of cheese/onion tarts to take because I don't want to deal with it late Saturday night. I want to bring something that can be served cold and that doesn't require me to provide non-disposable containers and utensils, so I don't have to deal with kashrut issues. So much as I would have otherwise made something more substantial (maybe even meat), I don't want to deal with trying to take my crock pot to keep something warm. Too much risk of contamination.

Saturday night

dagonell and Cigfran will be crashing with us. It'll be nice to see them again. They get to inaugurate the new version of the guest room.

The cable reception is much better with the fancy digital setup than with what we had before. We watched West Wing tonight (from tape, obviously) and the picture was crisp and clear -- best I've seen from a videotape on this TV so far. But I still don't think it's worth an extra $35 a month. We just don't watch that much TV.

The DVD is still AWOL. I sent half.com a polite letter of complaint today for their part in this; I wonder if I will get a reply.

Today's mail brought a lovely card from

browngirl (the "happy everything" card), along with a completely-unexpected card from

lyev. Thanks, guys! (In case you hadn't figured it out, I use "guys" in the gender-neutral sense. :-) )

Today's mail did not yet bring a couple of DVDs I ordered nearly two weeks ago. Sigh. Fortunately, we are getting together with my family the weekend after Christmas, not the weekend before, so there's plenty of time yet.

The choir dinner was tonight. Wonderful food and pleasant company, and I left with fewer cookies than I arrived with. I brought home some assorted dairy cookies that I couldn't eat tonight with the meat; I'll ration them over the next few days. :-)

Fran roasted a turkey. They were away for Thanksgiving, and apparently she missed doing it. The turkey was good; the stuffing was wonderful. I'll have to get her recipe at some point. It included apples, raisins, and chestnuts; I've never cooked with chestnuts before (or knowingly eaten them, actually).

It's enough that Fran and Alan let us invade their house every week when neither of them is even in the choir. And then they feed us in grand fashion once a year. I guess we don't sound too bad. :-)

Current Mood: full

Working backwards...

It looks like we're going to go see Harry Potter tonight. I'm not an adict or anything (haven't read the books), but I do want to see it and it's probably in my best interest to see it before Thanksgiving (fanatic family member on Thursday, then an SF convention for the weekend).

Last night was the D&D game. I thought my character might advance to 7th level last night, but we came up about 300 points short (target was 21,000). Oh well. Next time for sure. :-) (Well, nothing is ever sure; she could die or lose a level or something annoying like that. But I really hope not.)

Monday night the SCA choir started doing Christmas music, so I'll be taking a break until after the performance at 12th Night. I actually enjoy the little break each year; I think some people in the choir worry that it inconveniences me (and the two other people who are reluctant to do that kind of music), but sitting out one batch of music per year doesn't bother me at all. Monday we spent half the time on "regular" music and half on the seasonal stuff, and that might even continue for a little while (didn't ask), but it's more of a pain to attend half a practice, and it's not like I'm going to be behind, or behind for long, on any regular material they cover in the next month and a half. I'm pretty good at learning and/or sight-reading parts.

Speaking of music, On the Mark is getting ready for our performances at the previously-mentioned SF convention (Darkover, in Timonium MD). This will be the 12th year for some instantiation of the group (wow), though the first for our new members fiannaharpar and lrstrobel. Should be fun! Ray is also starting to write songs for the group, which is very cool. Up until now we've had a bunch of people who can write music (to varying degrees), but we've been weak on writing words. (We had a past member who could write words, and we were able to turn one of her poems into a song before she ended up moving to a different city and thus leaving the group. With luck, Ray and Jenn aren't about to move to DC. :-) )

Sunday we got to see dr4b and eub at Sunday lunch, which replaced Sunday dinner so they could make their plane back to Seattle. Seeing them again was nice!

The beta release did go out on Friday (after I left). My manager seems to be pleased with the results. I am spending this week doing damage control -- finding all the spots where we crammed in something quickly and inelegantly, and fixing them.

If you're in the SCA and interested in persona development, check out

sca_persona. It's an interesting experiment.

Tonight was fiannaharpar and lrstrobel's wedding. The local SCA choir was doing processional and recessional pieces, combined with their church choir. It went well, and all reports are that we sounded good. The accoustics of the place helped; so did having about 30 singers. (Our choir has around a dozen; the rest were from their church.)

Ray and Jenn had asked me to sing a psalm (in Hebrew). I ended up doing Psalm 29 ("Havu l-Adonai...") I was worried that the melody I know (which seems to be pretty common around here) would be too boring/repetitive, but when I tried it out on Ray and Jenn they liked it so we went with it. It went well, and I got a lot of compliments at the reception. I am also pleased that I did not need to use a microphone to make myself heard in the largish room. (Accoustics, support, and, um, natural loudness at work...)

Dani helpfully pointed out that most of the people there didn't actually know Hebrew, so I could have sung anything I wanted and no one would be the wiser (except lefkowitzga, I pointed out). Don't worry, Ray and Jenn; I didn't listen to him. :-) (Actually, we had this conversation at the reception.)

I got to meet celebrin at the reception. It's always nice to put faces and names together! I also got to meet Alper, finally. (I hope we didn't scare him off.) I also saw sk4p there; he read Psalm 27 (in English) during the ceremony. I don't think I've seen him since Don's new year's party last year, so it was nice to see him again. rani23 seemed to have the food under control. (Thanks for the fruit and veggies to offset the sugar!)

Wednesday my rabbi and I started on Tractate B'rachot. It was great! My rabbi absolutely rocks. Maybe I'll write more about that later. Anyway, partly because of this tractate, I decided that it was time to re-read Donin's To Pray as a Jew (well, reread some and skim other parts), so I started to do that this afternoon. My rabbi is right: the part about the evening (ma'ariv) service originally being optional, and never requiring a chazan's repetition of the Amidah, is in there. I missed it when I first read the book about four years ago.

My rabbi is on his way to Jerusalem for some sort of solidarity mission. I pray he returns safely. I'm somewhat saddened to realize that if he were going to DC a week ago, I wouldn't have made that comment.

Very quick. But I have a few minutes before Shabbat due to making unexpectedly-good time home.

At choir on Monday we had two new people. I hope they both stay; they are both nice people, and near as I can tell they are both good. One came out for dinner with us afterward, which is a good sign. The new alto was picking things up very quickly; I infer sight-reading skill.

Tuesday Dani and I went to the first meeting of a group of SCA dancers who are going to get together a couple times a month and work on harder stuff. I stopped going to dance practice years ago, in part because we never did harder stuff, so this is appealing. We spent about two hours working on one dance (Gracca Amorosa, 16th-century Italian) and had it in decent shape by the end. (Part of this time went to learning 16th-century Italian steps, which were unfamiliar to many of us.) We need to work on it more, but after a little more practice (and some memorization work) I could dance this at an event. Neat. We had seven people, which was about right (I think).

I don't know if I'm going to go to all of the meetings -- I don't want to constrain my schedule too much. However, if I skip all the ones that are going to focus on English country dances (which are pretty uninteresting to me), that will probably be about right.

Enterprise Wednesday: what was that tripe? The actors should sue for being forced to associate their names with such drivel. Porthos (the dog) was the only redeeming feature. I want my 53 minutes back. (West Wing was kind of "eh", which for that show is disappointing. At least one of the Twilight Zone episodes was very good.)

Last night I went to part of the choir practice for Ray and Jenn's church group, because the SCA choir is joining them on songs for R&J's wedding. (Aleluia Psallat, Deo Gracias (not Deo Gracias Anglia!), and Exultate Deo.) Their choir has about 20 people, I think, so with our dozen this should make for an impressive sound.

And now it's time to turn down the oven and light candles.

Sunday morning the Pennsic camp met for the annual post-mortem. Things actually went pretty well this year, so while there were issues to discuss, it wasn't all that long and involved. And everyone there agreed that there would be no problem with my leaving on the final Friday next year to avoid the Shabbat problems, which is good to hear.

Sunday evening we had dinner with Ralph, Lori, and Mike. It was a fairly normal dinner until the plumbing rebelled. Fortunately, Ralph has plumbing clues and was able to take the kitchen sink apart and find the clog. (Diagnosis: the disposal wasn't.) Unfortunately, that can't have been a pleasant way to spend the last part of the evening. I hope they're able to get it fixed fairly easily.

Last night at choir practice we went through the repertoire, deciding what to remove from the active repertoire and what to bring back (from previous culls). I was surprised by some of the choices; I didn't know anybody actually liked "Pastime with Good Company" or "Belle Qui". No accounting for taste, I suppose. :-) But *whimper*, people wanted to kill one of my favorites, "In Pace", a lovely three-part piece that just flows wonderfully. Oh well; maybe it'll come back in a year or two. Or maybe there'll be an opportunity for a subset of us to perform it at some point.

It sounds like the choir is going to do its usual concert of Christmas music for the 12th Night event, so I get to take a couple months off again. This is fine; I don't mind the break at all.

A couple of the non-Christmas songs that are coming back, and one new one that a group member is proposing, are problematic for me. I'll continue to just sit those out. Fortunately, the choir director understands the issues and is very accommodating -- much moreso than a previous director was. I'll never understand people who say "it doesn't matter what the words are if the music is pretty". (What this usually means, in my experience, is that their own sensitivities just haven't been bumped into, and they can't appreciate other peoples'.)

Last night after rehearsal some of us went to Dave & Buster's for dinner, which meant we got to watch Chris do impressive things with Pump It Up. One song in particular was quite impressive (level 5 and fast), but I didn't note its name.

I had fun at Pennsic. It was relaxing -- I spent a lot of time just visiting with folks instead of doing stuff -- but I needed that.

The weather was fairly cooperative -- a couple storms, but nothing that forced us to pull down the dining flies. It was mostly sunny and dry. I got all the way to Thursday of the second week before I had to start taking my once-a-day allergy pills every 16 hours instead; last year I was having serious problems by Tuesday of the second week, and I even went home for one night just to get away from the allergens for a while. (Today I still apparently have to take the allergy pills more frequently -- residual effects, I guess. With luck, things will be back to normal tomorrow.)

We ended up breaking down the camp yesterday. I'm going to make a separate entry about that, because it had Shabbat implications that make me uncomfortable.

( some stuff I did )

( score! )

( architecture )

( mechanical woes )

Friday night's service was a so-called "adult b'nei mitzvah" service. (Boy, do I hate that term.) Six members of the congregation who'd never had bar/bat-mitzvah ceremonies led the service and read Torah. I participated in this last time around (two years ago) and it was pretty neat. This group did a good job. Tom, the person I studied with at the Shabbaton, did really well; his Hebrew is close to flawless (and was the best of the bunch).

Tom has apparently been telling people that I helped him a lot in understanding the portion. (I draw this conclusion based on the number of random people who approached me about it.) He's giving me too much credit. In one specific area I don't want credit, either: I disagreed somewhat with the spin of his drash (commentary/mini-sermon). It was well-done; I just disagreed with it.

Saturday was a local SCA event.

rani23 cooked a wonderful feast, and there was plenty for vegetarians to eat. The day was hot and humid; fortunately, the hall was air-conditioned. The choir performed and I think we did quite well; I was especially pleased with how "Halleluyah Halleli", the Rossi piece, came out.

The computer saga continues. Everyone local remember this name: A2Z Computers. Do not do business with them. Willie warned me about their business practices, but after Dani had called them for the initial repair. That was unfortunate. This meant that we were in a position to discover their technical deficiencies.

( details )

The only thing I can correlate the errrors with is uptime, and even that is shaky. How would I test whether the fan is operating correctly?

The machine I ordered a week ago should be here any day now. Good; it looks like my current desktop machine is dead and the people who took quite a bit of money to fix it are going to screw us over on that.

Meanwhile, Dani's machine died Sunday. Looks like a hard-drive failure. He took it to CompUSA for diagnosis, so he'll know whether to buy a new hard drive or a new machine.

Last night we decided that we needed to distract ourselves by watching technology go wrong for other people, so we went to see Minority Report.

Yesterday was the music & dance event. I had lots of fun, and I think things went really well in general.

My class (actually a group-teach with

lrstrobel and Alaric) was in the first time slot and only got one student, but we had a decent discussion. (The topic was organizing/leading music groups -- basically, how to go from "we'd kind of like to do this" to a functional group that performs at events and stuff.) I took several other neat classes, including one on Ars Antiqua vocal music, which is early (medieval, not renaissance) music that sounds really neat. I came away with copies of music that would be suitable for our choir; must remember to make copies for Ray. Ray taught a class on medieval trumpets that was interesting, and at the end he let us try to play the ones he had there. I do not have clues about brass, so it took a while before I could get random things that almost sounded like notes, and none of it was controlled. I was actually doing something different with my lips than I do when I blow a shofar, though the person who explained shofar to me described it as "like brass", so I'm probably doing something wrong there. I can get notes out of a shofar, though. Beginner's luck, I'd bet.

I watched the Caroso-style ball, which is performance-oriented, and enjoyed it. There were some very good dancers there. I especially enjoyed watching Lyev, who does well with flirting and the "story-telling" dances like Gelosia (Jealousy). I bet he'd be a good actor, too. There was a real imbalance of genders, with many more women than men dancing, which is part of why I sat out. There was also some imbalance in who was getting asked to dance and who wasn't, with some people dancing half a dozen times and others dancing once. This might need to be managed more closely when there are significant numbers of non-local dancers. Lia and Fiddle observed that kids are an impediment here; neither of them got asked to dance at all, though at any given point one of them could have easily danced while the other paid attention to the kids (who were behaving).

I thought the choir's performance went pretty well. Most of the pieces went very well; a couple suffered from warts of various degrees of severity. I don't know if the other tenors rely on being able to hear me (I'm in the front row during performances and they're not); there were glitches in places where I'm not used to there being glitches. Of the three of us who were at this performance, I'm probably the strongest on this repertoire currently. Brandon is a strong singer who's still learning the material (he's new to the choir), and Degan lacks both volume and confidence.

After the performance someone in the audience (non-local, and I don't know his name) complimented me on my expression (facial expression, eye contact, mood, whatever). I was glad to hear that, as in the past we've gotten feedback that we don't do well in this area. There was a Pennsic performance where, according to Arianna, the only person seen to be doing this was Roxane, which I found odd as I thought I was doing a good job at that time. So I do what I sometimes worry is too much, but I guess it's ok. And I've learned how to fake eye contact; it's an essential skill for job interviews. :-) (The way my eyes work, if I'm really making eye contact with you you'll see me as staring off into space behind you.)

The food was good. I especially liked the spinach balls, the grape leaves, and the mango lassi (not all at the same time). It turned out that I was unable to shield Dani from the eggplant by eating it all before he got there, because they cooked the eggplant with meat. Oh well.

Robert and Kathy had a post-revel and I got to spend more time talking with some of the out-of-town folks. Avatar came in from Texas with a bunch of instruments. I also got to talk with Phillipia, Mairi, and the Carolingians. Unfortunately I didn't get to talk with Rufina, who drove in from New Jersey. (She taught the Ars Antiqua class.)

Sunday afternoon was Ralph and Lori's bunny melt. It was lots of fun! Think "high tea" combined with the ritual sacrifice of post-Easter half-price chocolate bunnies. (They don't taste the same if you pay full price.) After they are dispatched, they go into the fondue pot. Yum! Laura tried to decapitate some peeps, but peeps don't cut, they just slosh aside. I think she ended up just tearing them apart.

Sunday evening the two newest members of On the Mark, Ray and Jenn, joined us for dinner and discussion. We didn't actually play any music; we went through some of the current repertoire and discussed how we can change things around to best use Ray and Jenn (and fill holes left by Andrea). Both of them have good solid voices (altoish and baritone), and Jenn plays flute, and Ray plays lots of things. I'm excited about all the new possibilities and am looking forward to actually playing! (And discussing the rest of the repertoire over time.)

The reason that Andrea has left the group is that she's been commuting from 4 hours away for this academic year and that's too much of a strain. She expects to keep working there; this started out as a one-year gig but it's working well for her so she's going to stay. We also just learned a few days ago that she's now engaged to someone out there, and they plan to get married later this summer. I'm happy for her! (I've met him and he seems like a nice guy, though I didn't know at the time that it was more than a casual friendship.)

So I guess we probably won't be doing that local concert in July after all; the plan had been for Andrea to return to Pittsburgh for June and July and do that show with us before leaving for good.

Last night's choir practice went well. I was nervous about having, effectively, lost last week due to various people being unavailable, but I think we'll do a decent job at the performance in a week and a half. We have one more rehearsal. "Halleluyah Halleli" is sounding pretty good, which pleases me because it's fairly new and it's one of my favorites. (I've been wanting to do Rossi for a while and finally got the book.)

This shabbat I realized that our morning minyan's upcoming shabbaton (think retreat) is my "birthday shabbat", so to speak. (That Friday is my "3rd birthday".) I've been learning a little of that parsha anyway so I can chant it at Tree of Life that week (on Thursday morning, and perhaps Monday as well). So I sent email to my rabbi asking if I could chant torah at the shabbaton. I'll be seeing him tomorrow for talmud study (yay!), so maybe he'll have an answer for me then. That would be cool. He's been saying for a while that he wants to train some adults to chant torah, but so far he hasn't done anything (visible) about it. I don't know how much I should push; I've reminded him a couple times that I'm interested. Friday night someone other than the rabbi chanted, but I haven't found out yet how that came about. It does give me a good hook for my request, though.

lrstrobel (Ray) is the director of our local SCA choir. He's out of town, so he asked Arianna (the former director) to run this week's practice. She got sent out of town for work, so she asked me to do it.

It was an amazing choir practice. We kicked butt. We sang Halleluyah Halleli perfectly, and proceeded to ace O Morte Eterno Fin. The pseudo-Spanish in Dindirin wasn't even a minor speed bump. Egged on by this, we sight-read the five-part Byrd Gloria, well. Then we sight-read some new German piece Hilda brought that we'd never seen before. Then we went looking for something challenging.

( Read more... )

I like the web. I don't love the web today, because it only gave me part of what I was looking for, but I still like it.

Our choir is going to do one of the Salamone Rossi pieces from a book I bought recently. I'm re-typesetting the music, though, mainly so I can redo the transliteration. I'm sure the transliteration in the book is perfectly intuitive for a French speaker (it's a French edition), but it's not intuitive to us. And people are intimidated enough by Hebrew without that complication, and I don't want them to be intimidated by Hebrew.

So the problem is that I have this French transliteration, and another ("English") transliteration in a CD booklet, and I can of course listen to the CD. But I'd rather work from the original Hebrew, which I don't quite have. But this particular text is a psalm setting, so I can get that, in theory.

So I searched the web for "psalm 146 Hebrew text" and got a useful hit here. It's a score, but it's not a complete score because it's missing the vowels. (The site's main page is here.)

(Dani actually has a Hebrew-language bible with really teeny tiny type. I wanted to avoid working from that copy as my baseline, but I think I can use it and a good magnifying glass to fill in the vowels on the copy I printed from the web.)

And then, I can do my own transliteration without any risk of compounding someone else's ambiguous Ashkenazi-inspired interpretation, thank you very much. :-)

Current Mood: satisfied

The Salamone Rossi music collections I ordered arrived today. This will be nifty to explore. I love Rossi's liturgical music and am looking forward to singing some of it.

There were some surprises, though. First, I thought (from the catalog description) that I was ordering two books that together make up the set of liturgical music called "Songs of Solomon". (There are 33 pieces in the collection, according to the recordings I have.)

What I actually ended up with was one book containing 30 of these pieces (haven't gone through to identify the missing ones yet) and a book of his *madrigals*. The madrigals are in Italian, not Hebrew, and there are no translations. I'm sure they're musically lovely; I'd like to know what they say. I'm not unhappy to have the music -- more Rossi is good! -- but I'm a bit puzzled by what I'm holding.

The other surprise, though, is that these appear to be reprints of editions originally written in *French*. So while the music itself has transliterated Hebrew (not actual Hebrew), the transliterations have occasional funky accent marks and things that are presumably meaningful to speakers of French. (I can fix this because I know what the texts should be, but I'll probably have to re-type pieces that the choir is going to do.) The other effect of the French edition is that there is a long introduction to the book, including a discussion of notation and (I suspect) a discussion of decisions made by the transcribers, which I would very much like to read, and *it's* in French, too. There are also two pages of material in Hebrew (almost certainly not the same text as the French), but sans vowels. (My odds of comprehension go from slim to very slim when you take away the vowels.) Dani should be able to puzzle that out for me, at least.

I'm still very happy to have the actual music -- or rather, some apparently-scholarly transcription of the music -- but I'm frustrated that I can't read the supporting materials. I'm a music geek; I actually read those parts of books.

Hey Fianna or Ray, how's your French? :-)

Monica

last few days

short takes

weekend

interviewed by tangerinpenguin

Pennsic (long)

last few days

short takes

short takes

short takes, in reverse order

weekend so far (mostly SCA)

short takes

mail call, and food

short takes

misc

quick takes

last few days

Pennsic report

weekend

event

bunnies and music and Torah, oh my

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(no subject)

Rossi music

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