the last monday

I have entered the final week before "C-day" (concerto day). After the Easter marathon yesterday I am just not inspired to do anything! Hopefully if I lay around for a few hours...

The bells did ok yesterday - the rehearsal started off in a scary way (at 8am how could it be otherwise??!!) several of my ringers went to sunrise service and were late. It was really annoying as they had assured me they would be there on time, but another ringer told me they had planned to be late! Of course there were millions of things to rehearse - the youth band was playing and had sound checks, they vocal choir had a piece without us, and the tpt (my husband!) had to go through two hymns also - all before church at 9. So I was annoyed, but they kinda held it together on our big piece. The vocal choir did a really easy fun piece with the youth band and the congregation all clapped along - I guess our piece was the contrast (big hymn arrangement of Jesus Shall Reign).

Next week our new pastor comes to take over - I think everyone is holding their breath to find out what he will do with music. The past year and a half has been very hard on the music program at our church - seems like a small group REALLY wants to split the church so they can have a "modern" service and "traditional" service. This seems to me to be a sure way to ruin a church - every church I've gone to with this setup has no real connection between the people in each service. If our church were bigger that might be ok but there aren't enough people to support two services. Also, I enjoy the mixed service, with some old hymns and even some praise songs (mostly I'm not a huge fan, but some are actually good music); and we have participants ranging from oboe and trumpet to cembalo and accordian - quite a few professional musicians attend. So hopefully the new guy (who plays the guitar) will be an advocate of our great music director/organist and will just let her do what she needs to do without any grief.

the calm (clam?) after the storm...

Whenever I write the word "calm" I think of the ad "Keep Clam" the Ivar's Restaurants used to have (acres of clams). And I can't even eat shellfish.
Anyway, I am happy to report I am in a calmer state, focusing on the real issue at hand: I MUST practice at least a couple hours today and I've barely started, *sigh*. The Mozart awaits - now that we've actually had a rehearsal and I survived, I'm finding it hard to get motivated to practice.
Also, other life intrudes; made a trip across town (about an hour each way) to get the stupid G5 bell fixed before the weekend, and it is all good now too. Best of all, it wasn't all in my mind. There really was something wrong, and the Bell Buggy didn't charge for fixing it, even after an hour of tweaking it. Now I can focus on the performance Sunday (although she did say this could happen again at any time -- comforting thought!)