These exquisite performances are by theAll Saints’ Episcopal ChurchChamber Choir. Our choir director, Scott Youngs, recently posted them on YouTube. All Saints has three choirs, in addition to a choristers’ program for young singers: a chamber choir consisting of professional singers, a women’s chant choir, and the senior choir for us amateurs who like to sing along with the pro’s.
The church has an astonishing music program. I must confess that what lured me into the place was the music. One day, for reasons unknown, I happened to show up at a Sunday service, and for heaven’s sake here was this incredible music. I thought, “My Lord! It’s a free chamber music concert! All you have to do is throw a few bucks in the plate, sit through the religious palaver, etvoilà!“
Well, from that point of course things grew more complicated, and the next thing you know I’m afflicting Scott with my old-lady voice — much, I imagine, as Hyacinth Bucket harasses her neighbor’s brother Emmet on Keeping Up Appearances. He has the grace to let me join the choir, which he must pray will drown me out. 😉
Listening to and working with these amazing singers every Wednesday evening and Sunday morning surpasses privilege. It’s a constant joy.
And…come to think of it, even the religion has weaseled its way into my heart — singing is, after all, a form of prayer. My father detested organized religion. He wouldn’t allow my mother to take me anywhere near a church. She would sneak me to an Episcopal church in San Francisco while he was at sea, but when he was on shore that was out of the question. He must be vibrating in his funeral urn!
About to fly out the door: tons of work to do, interrupted by a couple of nuisance errands that can’t be put off to another day. But assuming you’d like to be entertained today, 101 Centavos kindly retweeted this rant I published at Writers Plain & Simple about the University of Virginia fiasco.
Drop by and give it a read. If you like it, do a little tweeting and retweeting of your own — I’m really working hard to build readership at that site and will appreciate any visibility you can share.
So, what Thanksgiving remnants are still strewn across the landscape of your life?
Hereabouts: Two pounds gained. Dayum! Now I’ve gotta get rid of that — it took six weeks to drop the two or three pounds gained during the endless stress marathon. Best thing to do, I guess, is just to starve for a couple of days. That was what finally worked to jump-start the weight loss last month.
More to the point: FOOD IN THE FRIDGE!
Holy mackerel, what a lot of Food in the Fridge. None of it is conducive to weight loss. 😀
I came away with half a pan of the (really incredibly delicious!) pan “dressing” we made for the party. It is, of course, mostly bread, the single most inimical foodstuff in the pantheon of delicious foods that loads the pounds on my bod’.
When I went to make this delectable, we were a little short on bread. M’hijito had picked up a couple of nice loaves from Sprouts, but they were focacccia and so not quite large enough to make as much dressing as we needed. I really wanted some cornbread but had neither eggs nor milk in the house and had no intention whatsoEVER of entering a grocery store the day before Thanksgiving. So I made a batch of regular yeast bread and substituted a cup of cornmeal for a cup of wheat flour.
The result was two particularly yummy loaves of cornmeal yeast bread. Put one and a third loaves into the dressing and then had…oh, yes! Bread!
Bread in the morning, bread in the evening, bread all throuuuugggghhhh the dayyyyy…. So good to eat.
Well. So. Bread “stuffing” adorned with leftover incredible turkey gravy for breakfast. Fresh home-made bread with butter on the side with the big noonday meal. Fresh home-made bread with butter, served up with a glass of wine, for evening snack. Oh, what the heck. How’s about another plate of bread and butter? And a splash more wine?
Inimical.
Meanwhile, I’d made a gigantic pot of turkey stock out of the bones from the Butterball pseudoturkey I’d bought and processed into food for the dogs. It made a lot, but it was watery. Like a Butterball itself, pretty flavorless.
But instead of throwing it out, I poured it into a bunch of storage containers and filled up the fridge with the stuff. That of course left no room for much else. Plus I need those containers, because over the next month I’m going to have to make several weeks’ worth of food for the dogs, not knowing how long it’s going to take to recover from the upcoming surgery. Assuming there is an upcoming surgery.
Today I poured all of that into a stock pot and set it on the stove over a low flame, where it’s gently simmering away as we scribble. The plan is to reduce it by about 30% to 50%. The result, I expect, should be pretty tasty, especially if a little wine is added to it. Sure smells nice right now!
Speaking of wine, I’ve developed a fondness for that vinho verde discovered during the search for lower-alcohol wines. Very low-brow, no doubt, what with its tendency to display a little fizziness. But it’s really VERY tasty as a simple white table wine — not too sweet, not too stringent, just a refreshing drink that actually tastes like a halfway decent wine. The price could not be more right — $8.99 at AJ’s, a joint whose wine prices make Whole Foods’ look like a bargain — and some brands are as low as 9% alcohol.
So far I haven’t found a comparable red wine, which is too bad. Some Beaujolais are acceptable, sort of, in terms of flavor, but they’re unpredictable (some are truly awful) and the alcohol content is up around 12%. Personally I tend to prefer reds, but I’m fast cultivating a taste for Portuguese whites.
Well, it’s getting late. Got to make a Costco run, a Home Depot run, and a variety of other runs. Read client copy. Pay subcontractors. Walk dogs. Walk me. And generally carry on. And so, to work…
You have a plan for Thanksgiving? Eating in immoderation, I hope? Preferably with friends or at least relatives who don’t make you too crazy?
M’hijito and I are going, once again, to the home of his delightful friends, the couple with the twins. 🙂 Better them than me, eh? Seriously, the children are outrageously adorable and really very well behaved. Uhm…at least, they were at the stage they were in the last time we saw them. LOL!
Every year this couple throws a gigantic TG shindig, to which they invite ALL the friends and relatives. This provides an opportunity to trot the old folks around, which is entertaining. Lots of good food and booze are served, children play, dogs oversee, old folks gossip, young adults work their buns off. What could be better? Assuming you’re an old folk or a small child, that is.
I really enjoy my son’s friends. It’s always a delight to have the opportunity to see them in action and talk with them. Wish there were more such opportunities.
Every Thanksgiving, too, I avail myself of the cheap prices on bad turkey, so as to get meat for the dogs, enough to feed them for a month or more. Right now a Butterball is in the oven; it should be ready in another three hours.
At 79 cents a pound, these things are really no bargain. They’re injected with sodium-laced water, so, according to the package, 8% of what you’re paying for is water.
Hm. So this turkey is 11.59 pounds. That means I actually got 10.66 pounds of meat and bone for my $9.15. Sooo…if you divide $9.15 by 10.66 pounds, that should give you the real price per pound, right? $9.15/10.66 = $1.50 a pound. Cripes!
When you consider that maybe half the thing is bones, I could’ve done better buying a boneless pork roast at Costco, and probably gotten better quality meat for the hounds. A LOT better….
Because of Ruby’s allergies, which lead to ear infections, the vet asked me to quit feeding her both beef and pork. She hasn’t had either in weeks, and her big old rabbity ears have pretty well cleared up.
That may have to do with the fact that she stole and ATE the whole tube of ear ointment… Does Otomax work internally? Argh.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure the problem is beef — the quiescent infection flared up when I gave her a rawhide chew toy, which is, of course, a beef product. But still feeling leery, I decided to hold the pork until such time as my health is good enough to allow for wrestling with the dog over her ears again. It’s no fun to treat this dog with ear wash and ointments!
So that’s why I bought a substandard turkey and stuck it in the oven.
Oh well. I hope this one doesn’t taste like factory chemicals, the way the last icky Butterball turkey I bought did. That one, I wouldn’t even feed to the dogs. I’m hoping to get a meal or two for myself, despite the low quality; then cut up the rest for the dogs and use the bones to make broth, which can be frozen for future use.
So the other day I went to open a bottle of cheap wine, the type with the screw-on cap. Naturally, I reached into the kitchen drawer — premium real estate in this house — and quite naturally pulled out a wrench.
Yeah. There’s a wrench in the kitchen drawer, something no woman in my mother’s generation (or in mine, until rather recently) would EVER have allowed to take up space there.
This led me to reflect on the the ubiquity of consumer-proof packaging — almost everything you buy is hermetically sealed in layers of plastic (much of it hard as a football helmet) and cardboard — and how much I hate that kind of waste. And how much I hate the ways it has to be dealt with.
In addition to a wrench, my kitchen drawer contains a pair of pliers (good for pulling off the hated inner paper seals of paper and tinfoil, among other things), a heavy-duty pair of scissors, and an extra-sharp ultra-cheap grocery-store knife that I don’t mind denting or bending. The tin snips won’t fit in there — have to walk out to the garage to get those, whenever I need to hack into one of Costco’s accursed heavy plastic clamshells.
Costco isn’t the only offender. You get impermeable packaging from Fry’s Electronics, Target, Walmart, and even sometimes from Amazon, despite the latter’s policy designed to discourage it.
Also needed:
• A screwdriver and a hammer to break into the adult-proof pill and cleanser bottles • A package of thumbtacks to render the adult-proof bottles openable • A hacksaw, for worst-case scenarios
How can I say how much I resent having to own a tool chest devoted to opening containers? And how can I say how much I hate the amount of useless plastic and cardboard that goes straight to the city landfill, often tainted with a few drops of blood from my fingers?
Am I the only person who is made crazy by the crazy packaging? What tools do you keep in your kitchen drawers these days?
Twenty minutes till time to shoot out the door for the 7:15 ayem meet in Scottsdale. This post is gonna have to be short & fast, because there’ll be no time for blogging frolics between now and the middle of the night.
So, yes, off to the meeting, where thank God all I have to do is preside, not present.
Then shoot back here, part company with carpooling pal, and shoot out to Staples and Michael’s, there to buy supplies for my latest organizational scheme: another whiteboard, this one to keep track, on a monthly basis, of the book-marketing schemes.
Yesterday I got a start on a few of the several strategies that I’ll be trying out on Slave Labor, which as books go comes under the heading of “test run.” I hope to use Slave Labor as a device to learn as much as I can about producing, marketing, and selling self-published opuses, which with any luck can then be applied to the upcoming, better books, two of which I hope to put out shortly.
Then it’s back to the Funny Farm, here to shovel a three-month-old stack of paper off the desk.
Forgive me, Mammon, for I have sinned. I have not reconciled Your bank account statements for the past three or four months; I have not even looked at Your illustrious bills; I have refused to think about the pile of statements from Your engine of money production, Fidelity…
It is going to take the entire day to plow through that stuff. WonderAccountant has been importuning me to haul this stuff over to her and to set up a new billing system in QuickBooks. I’ve resisted personfully, but the work can’t be put off any longer. Student papers were graded yesterday, I’ve almost recovered from the last Adventure in Medical Science, and now I’m out of excuses: it is time.
