Via Sequencia

Where, oh, where has Sequencia gone?

Yes, Via Sequencia is moving. Please visit us by clicking THIS LINK RIGHT HERE.

(And remember to update your blogroll, if you’d be so kind.)

Top o’ the mornin’ to ya, too!

Heard being yelled in my direction from inside a passing car this morning as I made my way through my neighborhood to the train:

Asshole fucking cracker! Fucking cracker! Mother fucking cracker!

Nice.

Pope Benedict lives up to our expectations, Vol. III

Nothing like an official statement from Hell the Vatican and approved by Satan himself the Bishop of Rome (to some, His Holiness the Pope) to get me riled up on a Tuesday morning.

Apparently, nothing new is being said in this document, but it gets my ire up nonetheless. When is this backsliding into ultra-conservatism going to end? Come on people! We’ve got to do something about it. With this idiot Benedict, the Roman Catholic Church is being pulled back into the pre-Vatican II age of the Latin Mass and indulgences. Just like all the damage that Bush has done in his six and a half years in the White House, anything good that has come out of the Church since the 1960s toward ecumenism is being destroyed.

Read here how Benedick-head thinks that no denomination outside the Roman Catholic Church can call itself a Church, because there is no means for its congregants’ salvation.

My work is done for another year

The masterclasses have ended, the musicians have gone home, my pencil has been laid down. The magical fortnight is over. The ending of BPI each summer is always bittersweet, but this year less bitter. It was a wonderful two weeks. It is never perfect, the gods know, but it is always special.

Incontesta and I left Oberlin Sunday at about 1:30 pm, with the Ladies Dundee secured into the back seat, on our way to my Mom’s house about 30 miles south of Indianapolis. We had to make a trip home in order to visit my grandmother who is 93 and dying. The prognosis is a couple days or a couple weeks. As we live four and half hours away from her, it seemed the only way to guarantee that I’d have a chance to see her before she goes home to Bompie.

Sunday evening, when we visited with her, she was especially talkative and alert. There were moments during which it seemed that she knew us, and she perked up when i said who I was. Her hearing is very bad and her sight is almost gone, but she still managed to connect with us on some level. It was very hard for me, but wonderful at the same time. The hardest thing for me, of course, is knowing that I probably will not see her alive again.

She and Bompie were most definitely my favorite people when I was a child. I owe so much to her. It’s terrible when the mind fades. Wow, what an emotional weekend it was! (I love you, Mamaw.)

Half-way

(The Oberlin College Conservatory of Music…where it all happens)

As it always seems to happen, BPI manages to tap all available free time, making it difficult to find the energy (or time) to blog.

It’s been a great first week. The faculty concert on Friday was stunningly beautiful. The marathon (4½ hours!) Saturday student concert was one of the most well-balanced of any for the past 10 years. And my ensemble (three lady singers singing one Haydn song each with me at the fortepiano) did a great job! I was very pleased. So were our coaches.

(The Haydn song trio)

Having said all that, I will add that it has been strange this year for me, too. First, Incontesta is here with me (us) for the whole fortnight, which is highly irregular in the context of the last 7 years or so. He sang in the Friday faculty concert (and will do so again in a week), he was recruited to be the stage manager for the student concert yesterday (his old duty when he was a regular participant here), he was made an auctioneer in the annual auction to raise funds for the high school scholarship program for BPI, and he coached a student ensemble the first week (I assume he will do another this coming week, as well). I love having him here. It’s like old times. Years ago, he would be here while I was at home. Then there were the years of both of us. Then the years of Me. What goes around comes around.

(Penny, Incontesta, Hirsutia, and Mother Maximus in the faculty concert preparing to sing Buxtehude)

Jeffrey (Hirsutia), one of our most long-standing friends we met here, has just left to drive back home to Alabama. He was only able to be here one week, dammit. That’s another thing strange about this year…so few of our favorite BPI friends are not here this year. And Jeffrey’s presence at only one week is bittersweet.

(Jeffrey)

And so…it’s on toward the second week. Right now I’m enjoying the day off from music making to do laundry, blog, scratch my ass, and later to go see a movie with some peeps.

I leave you today with a photo of one of my favorite places in the world, the Conservatory Pond. Cheers!

P.S. If you want to see a lot more pictures from Oberlin this past week, click here.

Why my husband married me

Mine is on the left. Nuff said?

The Eve of the Oberlin Fortnight

Incontesta and I (with the Ladies Dundee in tow) arrived safely in Oberlin, Ohio, where for the next two weeks we’ll engage in music making of the most wonderful kind. Yes, Baroque Performance Institute 2007 is about to begin, and we’re here with bells on (bells tuned to Baroque pitch, of course).

It’s been a long time since both of us were here for both weeks together, and I’m happy he’s here, even though he’s been fussing at me all damn day (he’d say I was fussing at him, but I assure you…that is not the case!).

And so it’s time…get out your powdered wigs and tune the gut down a half step!

P.S. Supremo, I wish you were here! Thank God, Hirsutia is here for the first week.

P.P.S. Come here to see some pictures I took today here in Oberlin.

Oh, no! Tell me it isn’t so!

Don’t quite know what’s come over me, but… Yesterday I deleted (for all intents and purposes) ALL of my gathered-up-from-around-the-internet pictures that I’d uploaded to my flickr® account. Because most of my photostream had been made up of lusciously beautiful eye candy (pictures, of course, that I had not taken myself), flickr staff had taken it upon themselves to flag me as being outside of their guidelines, which state that flickr is intended for sharing one’s own photographic work. Also, in light of the fact that I have a new and wonderful Canon® point-and-shoot, I’m kinda happy about the prospect of filling up my photostream with my own fantabulous pics.

And here’s to the honorable flickr staff who so graciously have reinstated my status as a good flickr citizen.

This thing of ours…

…is over. Did you see the final episode of the Sopranos? Can I please just say, “What the fuck?” I was all in knots for the entire show. Then nothing. And now it’s over. Fuggettaboutit.

A command performance

My mother made me promise that I’d never show my organ on my blog. But due to all the many email requests I have received, I’ve decided to give my readers what they want. (Sorry, Mom. This is what you get for reading my blog!)

Wha?

I did a big double-take when I saw this storefront in Crouch End, London, just down the street from our friends’ house. Talk about designer hair product!

Loving my new Canon (and working downtown again)

I spent my lunch hour yesterday strolling through Millennium Park, which is between Michigan Avenue and Lake Michigan in Chicago, and snapping pictures with my brand new Canon® PowerShot SD800 IS. It is also just across the street from where I work. It was hot and sunny, and I got myself a little sunburn on the top of my head. Next time I’ll be sure to wear a hat!

Here are the best of the pics:

The tall building with all the vertical lines is Big Stan (originally called the Standard Oil Building). It’s the third tallest in Chicago. I have no idea what its name is now (the Amoco Building? the BP Building? Who knows?).

I took this standing on the BP Bridge (the winding footbridge that passes over Columbus Avenue) facing northwest. The odd (but very cool) structure on the other side of the trees is the new bandshell.

This is the Bean. Nuff said.

Random skin-bearing eye candy sitting in the shade (and busting me!).

If you’d like to see more of my pictures, please go here.

Puppy raspberries

Coffee House Blues

I popped into a great little coffee shop tonight that’s on my walk home from the train. I thought I’d check my email and blog a little on their free wireless. So, here I am…finishing off my first cup of coffee. I go to the counter to get the promised refill only to find out that they are closing at 7 pm (3 minutes from right now). Rats! More from home…

The 17-year party guest

What’s all this hype about the once-every-17-year invasion of cicadas? Here in Evanston, I haven’t seen one! It took my going to a BBQ this afternoon in the south west suburbs to see my first of the season. And here she is. Pretty, ain’t she?

Ever felt a little like a paparazzo?

Here’s a clandestine shot I took through a 3-inch wide opening in my back door with my new camera zoomed in at 15x of my often-stoned, occasionally horny, somewhat sexy, bisexual neighbor. Stay tuned for more.

Faulty technique

Overheard Incontesta saying these words to Lyla in her singing lesson:

You’ll never be heard in the back of a 3000 seat house if you don’t overcome that tongue tension!

Why I’m happy we’re heading into Memorial Weekend: a list

• No more Sunday morning Masses to play till September (unless I’m subbing at some parish other than my own)
• An extra day out of the office next week/the longer weekend
• Annual IML event in Chicago (Never been to any of the festivities, but it’s nice to know it’s here if I ever decide to start)
• Spring finally sprungs in Chicagoland about now
• Chicagoland men are shedding more and more clothing in public
• BPI is just around the corner
• No more Sunday service booklets/bulletins to proof for the parish administrator, who ignores my corrections after I do her the favor of checking her work (can you say ‘furious?’)
• Enjoying the fact that for the first time in four years, I don’t have to prepare an entire institution for its graduation service or shepherd visiting church dignitaries (although it would have been fun to be involved with Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori’s visit this year)
• Sleeping in and watching movies on Monday, because…
• Tommy G is visiting!

Overheard on the dementia ward

Mom was sitting with Mamaw (my grandmother) this week in her room at her old folks home. Mom noticed Mamaw was becoming a little restless and agitated. Mom stood up and got Mamaw’s Cabbage Patch Kid and handed her to Mamaw. Mamaw, who is most of the time now pretty out of it, calmed down and began holding the doll like a baby and rocking it a little. Their conversation continued as follows:

Mamaw, looking up at Mom: “He’s really hung.”

Mom, wondering if she heard right: “What?”

Mamaw: “He’s really hung.”

(beat, beat, beat)

Mom: “Well, that’s good.”

In Memoriam: Counter/Point 3.0

Miserere Dominus, miserere Dominus. Blogis mortus est. An era has ended. I am very, very sad. My dear, dearer, and dearest friend, Il Supremo, has decided to stop blogging. He has killed dead his formerly fabulous blog, Counter/Point 3.0, and the blogosphere has officially entered a period of mourning.

GP, my darling, enjoy your rest now from blogging. We hope you will come back one day. If it weren’t for you, I’d have never started blogging myself. And for that, I’m sure the world is forever in your debt.