cellio | Entries tagged with on the mark

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.

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

There was also an interesting question at Torah study on Saturday, but that'll have to wait for another time.

We had an On the Mark practice today. It went well. Some of the songs that I remembered as being in not-so-good shape last practice worked well today. If we can keep this up, we're going to sound great at Darkover (Thanksgiving weekend).

I'd like to try to add a couple more new songs to the repertoire, just to keep our performances fresh for that audience. (This will be our twelfth year there, I think.) We have some possibilities for that. We've also been re-working some older songs ("Black Widows in the Privy" as ska is something I never would have thought of, but it sounds great!). And, of course, we do have the talents of two new members to show off, so that alone will make us different from last year.

Jenn asked me if I would sing at their wedding. I'm flattered. She specifically asked if I could sing any psalms in Hebrew, so I sang something for her today that she liked. Maybe the muse will strike and I will actually compose something for the occasion, but if not I have something to fall back on.

Friday night at services Rabbi Freedman talked about lashon hara -- usually translated as gossip, but it's really a more general form of hurtful speech. (The phrase literally means "evil language".) He spoke well. This is something I have tried to pay attention to over the last few years (not always successfully), but it's rare that I hear about it from the pulpit. I don't know why that is.

I have finally gotten to the end of a Shabbat with the melody for a particular song still intact. Now I can write it down. It's a lovely "Hashiveinu" that I've heard perhaps half a dozen times over the last few years. Not that I have real occasion to sing it (other than at my synagogue when it's being led), but I still wanted to get it recorded somehow just so I wouldn't lose it.

Tomorrow afternoon I will rebuild the piece of the sukkah that went missing. (I went to Home Depot Thursday for parts.) I think I have a better way to build it than what I did before; we'll see. Then later we'll have dinner with friends before sundown, and then it will be Yom Kippur.

To my Jewish friends: tzom kal (have an easy fast) and g'mar chatima tova (may the final seal be for good).

Yesterday we went shopping for a small couch (loveseat, I guess) for the new TV room. After sitting in every offering at the first store and having reactions ranging from "no" to "this is ok", we walked down a final aisle that had mostly chairs. On a whim we sat in some "rocking chairs" that rock on a stationary base. (These are not the old-fashioned rocking chairs that trap cat tails and scuff floors.) They have matching "ottomans" (sized for a single chair) that also rock; thwy would have to. These chairs are comfortable! We ended up getting a pair of them instead of the loveseat; the cost wasn't all that different. We pick them up later this week.

I asked Dani if we should get several of these for the living room (we've been trying to figure out how to improve seating options; I want smaller, more flexible pieces of furniture than what we currently have). He said he thought it would make him seasick if we have guests over and everyone is rocking. :-)

Later in the afternoon Robert and Kathy came over so the three of us could practice music for that wedding next weekend. I got some insight into how Kathy approaches music for the group. When I'm picking out background music to play, I first eliminate unsuitable pieces and then take the easiest ones from the remainder (so long as they fit together). It's background music, not a concert. (I handle concerts differently.) Kathy, who is in charge of this one, was trying to pick pieces such that everyone gets to play different parts on different pieces, everyone's arrangements are represented (rather than it being, e.g., all Robert's stuff), and stuff like that. She thinks that's more "fair". I don't see why that kind of fairness matters. I can't help thinking that it's part of a broader difference in individual egos or something.

In the evening we had dinner with friends who've been trying to get together with us for a while. I had an odd allergy problem. We'd been there for a few hours when I started sneezing, a lot. (In retrospect, I missed a Detect Obvious roll when, before that, my eyes started itching and watering and I thought it was random fluke. This is not a usual allergy symptom for me, at least with my usual allergens like dust and pollen.) Our hosts were speculating that it was tied to their (window) AC, which they hadn't run for a while; they thought maybe there was some mold or something in it. That AC was running the entire time we were there, though; would something like that really take a few hours to kick in? I couldn't figure out what in the environment might be causing the reaction, but it stopped as soon as we left so it must have been a reaction to something. (No, I don't think it was the food, though Dani speculated about a garlic allergy. :-) )

We played a game that Dani picked up at Origins called "Hack". It's based on the "Knights of the Dinner Table" comic, which I have never read. The game is sort of a cross between Munchkin and Fluxx. We played two games. The first went fairly quickly and was fun; the second was longer and was getting tedius. I think this had to do with the way the map got laid out and one event that forced everyone back to the beginning. It's a fun game, though, and I would happily play again. We shouls remember to take it to Ralph and Lori's sometime.

I don't think I had realized just how much I needed a long weekend. I goofed off and recharged, and caught up on some reading.

Sunday, as I mentioned before, I worked on camp projects and then went to a birthday party in the evening. Monday afternoon we had an On the Mark practice. I am very pleased with how quickly pieces are coming together with the new group. Ray and Jenn both pick stuff up quickly, and Ray was doing some really cool instrumental stuff on some pieces. Give the man a naked set of chords and he makes music! And yay -- we have three strong voices in the group now. We were able to rework "Janet's Ride" as a dialogue song, with one person singing the lines for each speaker and one person (Ray) narrating, and I think it's going to sound really neat. (Ok, there are three speaking parts plus the narrator, so one of us has to double up. Fortunately, there's a pair that never interact with each other.) I'm also glad that Jenn is more of an alto than a soprano; this puts our voices closer together, which will help on some songs. And I like listening to her sing.

Sometime over the weekend I finally got around to watching the season finale of Enterprise. It was good! I'm impressed. That's it for the shows I watch, though the summer reruns of West Wing will be new to us because we only started watching the show recently.

Shabbat was pleasant. It's actually been a few weeks since I've been to my synagogue for Friday night -- last week was the shabbaton, the week before was an SCA event, and the week before that I went to a different synagogue. Saturday morning was its usual fulfilling service. We ended up talking at Torah study about Christian/Jewish differences on the subject of intermediaries, motivated by the discussion in Leviticus about the temple priests making attonement for you after you bring the korban.

Saturday afternoon was an On the Mark practice, the first one with our new members (Ray and Jenn). We had previously had a meeting, but this was the first time we actually made music. I think it's going well; there are all sorts of interesting possibilities with the current members and repertoire. I hope that Ray and Jenn will speak up if there's something in the repertoire that they really don't like; I worry about the steamroller effect. I need to remember to actually send out detailed email with the to-do list for next time; I didn't do that last time and I needed to.

Sad commentary on the technological age: it appears that the most effective way for me to keep the repertoire list up to date is to use index cards. Yes, actual physical paper. I used to keep the list on the computer, but we don't have a computer at practices, so I'd print it out, start scribbling on it, never quite get around to making updates, and then decide that the accumulated scribblings were the permanent record. Which works fine until you've added so much stuff that you no longer have an organized list. (This isn't just a list of titles; it's title, who plays/sings what part, what keyboard settings we use (if the keyboard is involved), what key we do it in, etc.) (No, I don't have a Palm or equivalent yet. I'm waiting for some improvements to the user interface.)

On Saturday we also got a call from Marion, who was in town with her husband Fred at the last minute. We got together on Sunday afternoon. It was good to see them again. Fred is still allergic to cats, but he seemed to be coping pretty well with Erik's desire to curl up on his lap. (Cats always gravitate toward those who least want their presence.) They of course knew about the cats in advance, so maybe this involved drugs.

Fred was delighted that we had a good solid storm while they were visiting. We even went out on the front porch to watch it. He says they don't get real storms in Seattle.

After they left Dani and I headed off to Sunday dinner at Ralph and Lori's. Dinner was tasty and the games afterwards were fun. I would have had more fun if I had realized that my allergies were kicking into gear before we left; I sneezed through dinner and some of the gaming before discovering that Lori and I take the same prescription allergy medicine. Things got better after that.

The allergies are being weird this year, in part due to the random warm days early on and in part due to it never getting and staying cold enough last winter to kill everything off. I have summer allergies, not spring allergies. Except this year. But it's random; I haven't taken any more allergy medicine since last night, and I'm fine.

The folks at Tree of Life would like me to attend their annual meeting next week (even though I'm not a member there). They're doing something to thank their guest cantors and random other people who've helped out over the last year. Cool.

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.

The con was fun in many ways, but kind of different from what I expected. It seemed to me that there was kind of a mismatch between our music and what the people attending the con are into; our audience was much smaller than we expected, though I gather that we were being heard out in the lobby and stuff because we got compliments later from people we never saw there. It was kind of frustrating during the show, but nice to hear after the fact that people did like us. This seemed to be much more of a rock-and-roll crowd, though; the dances with the DJs both nights were much more popular.

This was a Trek con, and mainly a Klingon con. Yes, there is Klingon fandom that is only loosely tied to Trek fandom. I've never seen so many Klingons in one place. They were pretty cool, though.

The folks down there were very hospitable. They also like to flirt. I assume that it was meant to be harmless flirting, rather than that we were dashing anyone's expectations. This was the first time I felt compelled to work "my husband" into casual conversation, though.

Sometimes it seemed like everyone in Chattanooga smokes. The con did have non-smoking space, but I still reeked of smoke each night. I actually double-bagged the dirty clothes in plastic bags so the smoke wouldn't contaminate my backpack.

Another cultural difference: I heard, for the first time, Cajun jokes. It makes sense; Canada has Newfie jokes, the south has Cajun jokes. They're the same jokes, for the most part. :-)

Speaking of culture shock: upon entering the Chattanooga airport, the first sign you see (other than the "airport" sign, I mean) says, in large letters, "no guns". The second, much smaller, sign says "no smoking". I don't think I've ever seen a "no guns" sign on a public building before.

The Chattanooga airport is small, comfortable, very clean, and well-maintained. Best I've seen anywhere.

One leg of the flight down (Comair) had a kick-ass flight attendant. I must find out where at Comair to direct an appropriate letter.

The Cincinnati airport is in two buildings, with a shuttle bus between them. On the way out, our plane was 20 minutes late taking off, which made a serious dent in my 59-minute layover. And, of course, the connecting flight was in the other building, on the other side of the not-very-fast shuttle bus. If I'd known where to go, I might have done an OJ and run for it. As it turned out, though, I got to the gate just as they started boardnig, so all was fine. Other than that, all flights were on time and the last leg coming back actually landed 20 minutes early. I don't know how they did that, given that we took off on time. Favorable winds? But that's still something like a 25% gain, so that can't be all from wind. Shrug; I don't fly nearly enough to have instincts for things like this.

We had an On the Mark practice this afternoon. I think we're in good shape for the con in two weeks. Now as soon as they tell us whether we're doing one long concert or two shorter ones, I can finalize the set list.

Soon we have to actually have a discussion with our prospective new members, and I have to photocopy music and stuff for them.

Dani is a sweetie. He had already agreed (a while back) to pick me up at the airport Sunday afternoon/evening when my plane gets in from the con. Tonight I asked him if he would take me to the airport Friday morning before he goes to work, and he agreed. That saves me either $45 or a lot of time mucking with public transit. (My plane leaves at 10:30, which means I'm supposed to be there at 8:30.)

Passover is in a few weeks, which means we'll be in Toronto for several days. I wonder if Dani's relatives have figured out who's doing the seders yet. I need to remember to contact my cat-sitter.

I really enjoyed Ralph's D&D game on Wednesday. It started off light and kind of silly but ended with Plot Development that involves my character's home town. I've commented on this game in Ralph's journal because he wrote about it, but I hadn't gotten around to mentioning it here yet. I still have to produce the Larissa's-eye view of recent events for the game log.

The observation (from Ralph) that characters can cooperate in creating magic items has opened up all sorts of possibilities. I wasn't going to take item-creation feats; as a sorceress I don't get that many spells, so these feats seem limited. But if someone else can supply the spell... so I took Craft Wondrous Item and am now trying to figure out what things are useful, available, and affordable with my current level and resources. Aside from my familiar's mage-armor gadget, which was my top priority.

Next weekend Seth and Karen come to visit. Yay! I am looking forward to this.

I had a mostly lazy weekend, which I needed. I got some reading done, and did some boring chores today. I also caught up on taped TV over the last several days (well, except for the Earth: Final Conflict episode that should have finished taping 10 minutes ago). Shabbat services were pleasant, and Rabbi Gibson actually chanted the Torah portion instead of his usual reading, because it's a special portion (Shabbat Shira, the song at the sea of reeds).

That reminds me: Thursday morning I got a copy of the weekday Torah portion for Behar (which I'll be chanting over at Tree of Life in a few months). Now I just need to pester David for a tape. I don't actually know the trope system yet, after all. (He was supposed to make me a tape Thursday evening, but it didn't happen.)

Saturday afternoon was an On the Mark practice. (I prefer that these not happen on Shabbat when we can avoid it, but we couldn't avoid it this time.) This was the only day that worked this month, because Andrea lives 4 hours away and has a job that requires that she be there on alternate weekends. (Two weeks ago Robert and Kathy were away.)

This year On the Mark got one concert instead of our usual two. I figured this was an effort on their part to cut back; I noticed that the total time allocated to concerts was shorter than in the past by a few hours. A bit disappointing, but shrug. And it could be, I figured, that they're trying to tell us something. And one concert is the norm; we've been special that way.

It turns out that it wasn't any of that. They goofed, and didn't realize it until Friday night. And at that point we decided not to try to slap something together, because (1) it would be last-minute; (2) Andrea was sick; and (3) Kathy was heading back to Pittsburgh to work on her thesis.

But next year, they said, we should slap 'em around if they make that mistake. Ok. :-)

Darkover was fun. It felt a little lower key than usual; Jaelle said attendance was down 10% from last year, but it somehow felt like more. I noticed during our concert that the audience wasn't really getting into it and I thought it was a failure on our part, but then the next night people were also mellower than usual for the Clam Chowder concert, and *that* is unusual. I'm not sure what was up. I felt like both we and Chowder gave good performance to polite applause, for the most part. Very weird.

I had Shabbat meals with Yaakov, Rivka, and their 3-year-old Aaron. We never saw some of the other Jewish regulars. I got to talk with Yaakov some, though we haven't had a really good, long conversation at a con or event since Aaron was born. We talked about the Sinai board thing, and his advice amounted to: find out the background to all of this. I still don't have a feel for whether the behavior I'm seeing is considered normal in the Jewish community.

There were some areas of "uncertain practice" involving Yaakov. One occurred when I showed up for lunch on Saturday. He asked if I had made kiddush yet and I said no, and he said he had so I should go ahead. I drifted to a corner of the room and started to sing quietly, but he made it clear that he had intended to listen to me (and he and Rivka said amein at the end). I felt awkward because as I was starting I realized I had no idea what the *Orthodox* practice is, and Reform tends to abbreviate some things, and I suddenly felt self-conscious that I might be making kiddush "wrong" from his point of view. (In fact, the reason I had not done this before going was so I could hear him do it.) I explained this afterwards and there was in fact just one sentence missing from what I know vs. what he knows, and he didn't cons ider it an issue. On a personal level *I* don't consider it an issue; this is the way I make kiddush and that's fine. Being on the spot in front of someone with a potentially different practice, and who comes from a tradition that says theirs is right and mine is wrong, made me feel funny, though.

There were some other awkwardnesses involving the lack of an eiruv and the use of the electronic keys in the hotel, but I won't go into them now. They boil down to this: I am comfortable with my practice, but I am uncomfortable in situations where I feel like I have to justify my practice to Yaakov. Yaakov is my friend and I'm sure he's not judging me negatively -- but it still feels awkward.

After this weekend, I have resolved not to share a hotel room with Kathy again. A year ago she had agreed to get two rooms next time (she snores loudly enough to bother me, and does so at length). Then a couple weeks ago she said she couldn't afford that, so we got one. Maybe my memories were exaggerated, I thought. Well, they weren't. So next time we *will* get two rooms, and if the rest of the group decides that I'm being unreasonable I guess I'll just get a room of my own, though I don't think that would really be fair. It may be the most expedient solution, though. We'll see.

There were some good concerts this year, and there was a jam session on Saturday that was a lot of fun. I'm not all that experienced with jam sessions (we're talking session-style, like you see in Irish pubs, not SCA-style where they hadn out music), but I did ok. We had a couple harps, a fiddle, a larger member of the viol family (might have been a cello), a few recorders, a bowed psaltery, and some percussion.

Saturday night at midnight was the traditional singing of the Hallelujah Chorus around the swimming pool. The pool is in the lobby area and has a 5-story ceiling and glass walls most of the way up, and the accoustics are pretty good. (Like singing in the shower, but much moreso.) I don't sing this any more, of course; I don't sing explicitly-Christian hymns. But I stood and listened, and it sounded pretty good. A few people asked me why I wasn't singing; that is an awkward question for which they don't really want the real answer, so I mostly just said I didn't feel like it.

Friday night at the filking I sang Michael Greenstein's "9/11" song; I had wanted OTM to learn it but some members thought it was too bloodthirsty. (It's kind of a revenge song, but more on the theme of "we will be united against you".) It went over very well at the filk. I didn't get an opportunity to sing it Saturday night.

The drive back was much longer than usual, but I've already written about that.

Apparently I caused an anthrax scare yesterday. Oops.

So, about a week ago someone contacted me about a possible On the Mark gig, and I promised to send her a demo tape. So I did, a few days ago. (We get few enough of these that I still individually craft the demo tapes based on the type of music the customer appears to want.)

Yesterday there was a message on the machine: "Hi, you sent us something bulky with extra postage, and we don't recognize your name, and we're afraid to open it, so could you call us back and tell us what this is?" This was followed a couple messages later by one that said "oh, oops, you're the music group we talked to!".

Oops.

The postage was AFAIK correct; it's what it takes to mail a cassette in a small padded envelope. I was out of small padded envelopes, so I took a small sheet of foam that had come wrapped around some CDs, wrapped the cassette in that, and put the whole thing in a regular envelope. So maybe I overpaid by an ounce, but I don't think so.

I think I finally have the bowed-psaltery part for a new OTM song down. (This is "Rasputin's HMO", which I'm looking forward to springing on an audience. We stole it; we can't write stuff that funny.) I wrote the line, because I'm the one who's playing it and no one else knows the instrument, so I can write around the hard stuff. :-) I think it'll sound pretty neat with the mix; Robert and Kathy are coming for a min-rehearsal next week and we'll try this out before Andrea's next visit to Pittsburgh.

I hope the sound guys at Darkover are ok with miking a bowed psaltery. We usually have two concerts at that con, one in the large hall (requires amplicification) and one in the smaller room (no sound reinforcement). I usually try to save the weirder stuff for the small room, so Siggy (the sound guy) doesn't lose hair on our account. But this year they just gave us one (longer) concert in the large hall, so we'll see what we can do.

Close-miking us (that is, one mike per thing to be miked -- instrument or voice) is a real pain; we play a lot of instruments and everybody sings. So there's always this huge mass of mike stands and mikes between us and the audience, and it's harder to play that way. It would be great if they could just point a few broader-range mikes at the stage and let us do our own balancing, but I'm told by people who know these things that that trick only works in rooms that are already accoustically decent. (This one definitely is not.) So, for example, when we did our local concert last spring and hired Mike (our engineer for recordings) to tape the show so we could mine it for a live CD, he set up five or six mikes a few feet out across the stage area and that was it. (They were actually on the floor pointing up at the stage, if I recall correctly.) The recording sounded great from a technical perspective. But it was a good room (a concert hall) and he had about three hours available to set it up and test everything. When you've got that luxury, you can get rid of a lot of stuff on stage...

On the Mark had a practice today. (Since Andrea moved to central PA we've been limited to alternate weekends. I prefer Sundays, but that didn't work for someone this time.) We're going to be performing at an SCA event in November (gotta find out how long our slot is -- I think 20 minutes' worth of material is safe but should make sure), and then at an SF convention (Darkover) on Thanksgiving weekend. I've been going to Darkover since, I think, 1984, and OTM has been performing there since 1991. Maybe one of these days I'll actually read a Darkover book. :-)

I try to make sure we always have some new material for Darkover, because most people there are regulars and we actually have a fan base there. Lately we've been working on "Rasputin's HMO" (thanks, Ralph), which is going well. I still have to write (or adapt) a bridge to play on the bowed psaltery; the one the Austin Lounge Lizards do is way too complex for that instrument and my skill level. This'll be fun.

We also started working today on a new arrangement of an old classic not heard much lately, "Biotech Fantasy". ("We've got an animal liberationist in our lab... in a cage behind the storage shelves in room 117..." :-) ) Heather Rose Jones, the author, used to work in the biotech/pharmacuticals world; can you tell?

A friend of ours wrote a song (on September 12) called "We Stand" that is about sticking together and (secondarily) vengeance. Robert (who is very much the pacificist, BTW) and I really like the song, but one of the other group members vetoed it in its current form. Bummer.

I have got to get around to writing music for Yaakov'e poem "Sisera's Mother". I promised to do that ages ago. (I want to do it. The muse just isn't speaking to me. Grr.)

Services Friday night were packed. There must have been 500 people there. On a normal Shabbat (when no one's celebrating a bar/bat mitzvah), we get around 100. We also got more than normal Saturday morning, though the contrast wasn't as pronounced. (This is the early-morning informal singing minyan, usually around 30-40 people. I'd guess we had 60 yesterday. I almost never go to the later more-formal service.)

After services yesterday Dani and I went to Coronation (SCA event), which was in Jennserstown, about an hour and a half from here. (If that name sounds familiar, that's where early reports were placing the PA crash. We were about 20 miles away from the site, though.) The event went well, except that we missed the bulk of morning court (including the actual coronation ceremony) because the starting time was changed after the newsletter announcement was published. Oh well. Even if I had known, I'm not sure I would have been happy about skipping Shabbat services this particular week in order to go. Among things, we have people who are in need of help and support for reasons completely unrelated to Tuesday's events, and with everyone focusing on that, people like Jan (who just lost her father) can get short shrift, and that's not right. This may sound weird, but I felt like I needed to be there to hug Jan on this particular week. (Jan's not the only one.)

On the Mark had its first practice since before Pennsic today. Andrea took a one-year teaching job out in the middle of the state (about 4 hours by bus), which makes things challenging. She can come back to Pittsburgh every other weekend, so that's when we'll practice. Our next scheduled performance is Thanksgiving weekend, though we jut talked about trying to perform at an SCA event two weeks earlier because we'll all be there anyway.

Sign seen while approaching the Turnpike toll booths last night: "please use all lanes". Terribly sorry, but Dani and I do not own a vehicle with which we could comply. :-) (Maybe they mean over time -- every time we visit that toll booth we should use a different lane until done.) They could clarify their intent by changing the sign to "please use any lane".

I'm looking forward to meeting Ralph and Lori's kittens tonight.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Crossfire (EFC soundtrack)

The nice folks who run Conterpoint (the DC instantiation of the floating east-coast filk convention) sent me some copies of the Conterpoint III CD a few days ago. (On the Mark has one song on it.) It's a good CD, even setting aside that natural inclination to view it favorably. :-)

Our track (We Be Three Poor Mariners) came out pretty well. Kathy is too quiet relative to the rest of us, but Kathy is always too quiet relative to the rest of us, and this wasn't a studio situation where we could each have our own mike. Oh well.

Conterpoint IV was in June; I wonder if any of our songs came out well enough to end up on that eventual CD. (I haven't heard the official tape of the set yet.)

"Ya Done Stomped on my Heart (and mashed that sucker flat)" just went by -- Joe Bethancourt's rendition. I first heard it from Clam Chowder, as a fairly lively country-western piece. Joe did what he described as "honkey-tonk"; I don't know enough about these modern music styles to characterize that. (It was more talky than melodic, but not in the way that blues often is.) I like the Chowder version a lot better, though that could be familiarity. I'll have to listen to this CD 20 or 30 times to see if this one grows on me. :-)

One of the highlights on this CD is Bethancourt's "Unanswered Questions", which starts: "Does anal-retentive have a hyphen or not?" and goes from there. (Yes, Monica interjects, of course a multi-word adjective has a hyphen.)

I see that the CD is going to finish up with Clam Chowder's version of the Agincourt Carol. Think calypso. It's very funny.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Sam's Song, Best of Conterpoint III

Monica

short takes

weekend (yeah, yeah, it's already Tuesday.... cope)

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Sunday

last few days

weekend

bunnies and music and Torah, oh my

Galacticon

misc

weekend

Darkover addendum

con report

mail

On the Mark stuff

music stuff

misc

1:19 minutes of fame

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