So today we have an all-day choir workshop, a shindig that’s fun, tiring, and sometimes challenging, followed by one of our annual potluck dinners. Then tomorrow the regular choir season starts. Hooray! I love it!
Our beloved director is back despite some fairly challenging surgery over the summer. He seems none too much the worse for wear. Two of our other favorites also each enjoy ead their own Adventures in Medical Science over the summer…ain’t life fun? We have eight new people, a passel of professional and near-professional singers, and plenty of younger folks. All of which makes for an awesome group.
The choir is going to perform at Carnegie Hall in the spring. Wish I could go with them. But of course I couldn’t possibly afford a plane trip and several days of food and lodging in New York City. Even if I could, there’s no way on God’s Green Earth that I would subject myself to the bureaucratic bullying required to get on a commercial airliner today.
One elderly woman in the church — a very sweet and nice lady — tried to take a flight across the country. She was in a wheelchair. An obvious terrorist, eh? The TSA singled her out, harassed her mercilessly, would not let her through to her gate, parked her in the middle of a concourse, and left her there. By then I had already decided that I would never ride a commercial plane again; that just confirmed my feeling. If I can’t get there by car, I don’t go.
LOL! And since my car is now too decrepit to leave the city and I’m too lazy to do battle with a rental car company, that means I don’t go much of anywhere.
It’s ironic, because I joined this choir largely because I wanted to travel with them. They regularly do international tours. The year I joined they were slated to go to Italy, and I had a job: I really wanted to go on that trip. That was the year of 9/11. The State Dept was warning Americans to stay out of Italy and the south of France, many of the choir members were nervous about flying,, and the director decided discretion was the better part of valor.
By the time the next opportunity came along, I was unemployed and not about to spend any of my tightly pinched pennies on something that wouldn’t keep the roof over my head.
Oh well. There are better things than gallivanting around a world you’ve already seen several times.
Speaking of gallivanting, now that the oven-like skies are cooling a bit, I’ve GOT to get some exercise. The bike’s tires again dissolved in the garage’s heat, so those will have to be expensively repaired or replaced. Once the thing is working, though, I can get around the North Central district a ways, which burns a few calories. Really should go back to the mountain, but I can’t think of many things that bore me more than trudging up and down a crowded, overused mountain park trail. There are just too many people at North Mountain now. And you can’t get a place to park at Squaw Peak now at any time of day.
SDXB discovered a nice mountain park in Glendale, which seems to be better maintained — or less thumped by crowds — than the Phoenix parks. Trouble is, it’s a bit of a drive. That makes it hard for me to work up the ginger to traipse over there, especially since you have to navigate a freeway to get to the place. Another innocent driver was shot to death on the 51 here — just driving along minding her own business when some shitheads started pursuing her and, when they caught up, shot her in the head. So my feeling is, unless you have bullet-proof glass, stay off the freeways.
Oh well. Time to go! The nice thing about a church is that it leads you to contemplate something more positive than real life. 😉