Those who read my blog every day and have total recall will know that I attended a board meeting for the Master Chorale last week, and that I left after only a couple of hours. Apparently, things got weird after I left, because last night the following fundraiser plan was announced:

We, the members of the chorale, will have a potluck dinner. Each of us will bring a gift in the $25 range, enticingly wrapped, and we’ll auction them off to one another. The idea is that we’ll pay $50 or so for an item, sight unseen, which we know cost $25. I guess there is supposed to be a spirit of madcap fun that will cause us to do this obviously silly thing.

I see a couple of problems. For one thing, we’re spending $75 each, plus enticing wrappings and food and drink for the potluck, and the chorale receives only $50. Why wouldn’t we just give $50 to the chorale and avoid having to bid on things we probably don’t want? For another, we’re the only ones invited. It’s like the story of the village where the people make their livings by taking in one another’s washing. The whole point of fundraising is to bring in money from other people, it seems to me.

Fortunately, I am not a member of the board, so I have no responsibility for this idea. However, it has been suggested that those of us with talents should also make things to be auctioned off visibly, so I could do my bit by knitting a scarf. La Bella suggested that I go ahead and do press releases for the upcoming concert, since the board is busy with party planning.

The Chemist and I finished getting the music in the choir room into a database yesterday afternoon. I had taken care of my Aussies, done the day’s blogging, and had a chat with a potential client who needs a website built for him as well as my services, so I volunteered to help finish up this task which we had begun months ago. The pastor asked me if I’d like to chair the worship ministry next year. I also had a request from a company in another state entirely to tutor English for the spouse of a local executive. She’s in the next county, and she wants this tutoring done on the days when I don’t already drive up there, so I declined. I also had another little burst of crises for Client #3, which made me keep La Bella waiting for a few minutes on the way to the rehearsal.

I’d been praying for more work, of course, since I have a slow week, but I guess I should have specified profitable work. Not that this sentence actually reflects my theology, you understand. It was just a little bit of prayer humor.

I am hopeful about the new client, an introduction via #1 daughter, and I’ve continued to apply to things. Today I have a class to teach. We’re getting the whole issue of sources and bibliography tied down. I hope. I also need to call the person on whom I’m doing the encyclopedia entry. My deadline isn’t till December, but now I have the time. If I wait, I might find myself putting it off in favor of more profitable tasks, and I want to do a good job for this lady.

I don’t expect that I’ll ever have an encyclopedia entry, but I think it would be nice. Sort of like a plaque. Hitherto, I’ve written about people who were dead, and about the former Miss America/Playboy bunny who had an affair with the president. That’s not the kind of encyclopedia entry I’d want, and I didn’t ask her for an interview. Maybe I should have.

My current subject, though, I definitely want to interview. I met her when I sang at a luncheon in her honor, and they had a video on her. I don’t look forward to having to watch the video again, but I had a performance coming up and didn’t have the presence of mind to take notes in case I might be writing about her in the future.

The lady in question had very soft hands, which I know because she held my hands in hers for quite a while after the song, and a sweet smile. She didn’t talk much, but I guess it must be hard to think what to say under such circumstances. I’ll have to come up with some good questions to ask her.

That might be a good example for my class today, in fact. You have to get a certain amount of information before you can tell what questions you need to ask to write the thing you’re going to write.

Not like this post, which is all vague ramblings. I’m off to the gym now, before the boys get up and want the car.

Oh — for complete randomness, I’ll also add that my marketing blog, which started up a month ago with PR of zero, as all new sites do, has gone up to PR2.

I tried to get some kind of identifiable picture of the lace scarf for you.

I don’t think I was very successful, but I tried. I think it’ll be nice. Not very lacy, but a little bit. Tailored lace.

I applied for a lot of things yesterday. I have some customer leads, and there are also all kinds of content writer positions being offered all over the place in online want ads. It is fun to apply for positions at Rosetta Stone and Google, though I assume that they will have huge numbers of applicants and I most likely won’t hear from them at all. At least they won’t fire back “rate too high” messages the way oDesk buyers do.

One of the things about self-employment is that you have to be continually looking for work. This takes a lot of time, and is of course not billable. I also got my new contract from the encyclopedia, and my current topic is apparently less valuable than hookworm. It is almost in the “unbillable” category. I also have a long list of things like getting the state history books into shape and uploaded at Lulu.com, increasing my skills at various technical things, following through with the evaluation process at the college, doing SEO for my own site, and volunteer work I’ve agreed to. Since I only have about ten hours of billable work scheduled this week, my plan is to do all that other stuff that has been waiting, and try not to panic about not having more hours than I do.

I’m also planning to get to the gym earlier. I’ve been trying to go at my usual time (if I can say that when I only manage it once a week), and then one of the boys needs the car then, so I tell myself I’ll walk later, and then of course I’m working and I don’t walk later. So, since neither boy needs me to make his breakfast any more, I plan to go earlier, before I really begin my work day.

Except that I woke up at 3:00 a.m. with a great idea for a post at my marketing blog, and had to write that first thing this morning, so it is already later than I had planned to leave and I haven’t so much as had breakfast yet.

Yesterday during coffee time at church, a woman whom I know slightly came up to tell me she had enjoyed the duet, and burst into tears. She was just feeling overwhelmed, she said. Work and her family, and her house was a mess and she wasn’t eating right…. She just couldn’t get her life back to normal.

I don’t feel like bursting into tears over it, but I do sometimes feel that way. I’d like to get over feeling that way.

#2 daughter has all As, and both the boys are also doing well in school. #2 son got an AP scholar award and first place at a climbing competition (he refused the prize he won on the grounds that it wasn’t fair for him to win again, which made his brother feel pretty sick, since he’d have really liked the very luxurious prize himself if #2 son was determined to be noble and give it away). #1 son is ignoring my frequent reminders to him that he needs to get a job and my husband looks at the reports from our retirement plans and gets deeply depressed about how much money we’ve lost. I tell him that it doesn’t matter, since we won’t be retiring soon, and will probably die before we get to retire anyway. For some reason, he doesn’t find this cheering.

Lentil soup from yesterday– a bowl for me and a container full for the freezer. This is a slight nod to the HGP, whihc I have almost completely ignored this year.

I’ll be sorry, I’m sure.

Right now, I’m trying to wake up enough to sing a duet. I have fourty-four minutes to accomplish this. We’re singing “Noah’s Weary Dove,” and you can hear a few seconds’ worth of it if you click that link. You can read the words here, but we’re using the tune Anonymous 4 put with it.

I cleaned and scrubbed yesterday, and decorated for Hallowe’en. #2 son put our weird lighted ghoul outside with his rope of lighted bones. The front garden is so overgrown and messy that it should be quite scary with the ghoul appearing to rise out of it.

In my recent discussions and thoughts on 20th century skills, one interesting recurrent theme has been the need for survival skills. That is, people who write about 21st century skills mostly are thinking about the ability not only to use current technology but to keep up with unforeseeable new kinds of technology as well, and to work well with the human beings all over the world who will be taking part in the changes with us.

People who don’t write about 21st century skills but are rather thinking about what people need now in the way of skills, or what the next generation will need, tend to think that we may be doing problem solving with new kinds of technology, but we may also be growing our own food and providing ad hoc first aid to our neighbors.

So yesterday, with cabbage and peppers from the garden and home cooking and baking and knitting, combined of course with computer access, might have been a new century kind of day.

After a day spent in linkbuilding and blogging, I ended the work week yesterday evening.

I helped #1 son get into his tuxedo and forced him to have his picture taken. He didn’t want us to go to the concert and told us that he intended to lip-sync and to leave as soon as his choir was through with their two songs, so we decided not to spend the money on  tickets. I regret this a little bit, actually. It seems sad that he sang in a concert with no family there to admire how sharp he looked, even if he was refusing to sing. We have a concert together in two weeks, though.

He’s a rotten chorister. He has excellent pitch, and a nice voice, too, so he has no excuse. Still, that meant that I was home instead of out at his concert.

 So I spent a bit of time cleaning up files. Deleting things. Moving archives to a jump drive. Organizing the desktop. I put on a desktop image to match my website and a new screensaver that rotates family photos.

I put the work from my workspace into its file folders, filed it, and closed the file box.

Having doen these things, I watched a DVD and knitted. The DVD was called “Romance on the High Seas.” I had it in my mind that this movie had Ginger Rogers in it. I was surprised that she didn’t dance, but I was mightily impressed with how much better she sang.

#1 son came in and informed me that the actress in question was Doris Day, not Ginger Rogers.

He was kind about it.

The DVD also included a cartoon and a singalong section. I love the idea of people in the theaters singing along together to the words on the screen. I think that I have a vague memory of this. Maybe when I was child people did it. I think there was a bouncing ball, and someone said, “Follow the bouncing ball.” It would make going to the movies seem like more of a corporate (that is, group) event. Maybe that would be good.

 I knitted the brown lace scarf. I’ve decided to add a Peacock’s Tail motif. You have to take my word for it, because this is lace, and therefore you can’t see anything.

Knitting lace is a matter of wrapping yarn around space in innovative ways. While you’re knitting, you only see the yarn. When you’re through, you stretch it out so that the space is visible,a nd it’s lovely. Till then, it’s a matter of faith.

I slept in this morning till nearly 8:00, a sure sign of exhaustion. However, any minute now I’ll wake up. As far as I know (I mislaid my calendar) I have no apppointments or meetings or anything like that today, and I am just in the mood to clean house. Which is a very good thing.

I asked my students yesterday about 21st century skills. We were working on how to find sources for a research paper, so I said that would be our hypothetical topic.  They had never heard the phrase, so I asked them to write down five things that they thought would be useful skills for working in the current century.

They listed first aid and gardening, computer skills, a good work ethic, tolerance, languages, communication skills, financial management skills. They seem to think it’s a tossup whether they will be on space stations or grubbing about in the aftermath of a total collapse of civilization. Ozarque had also emailed to suggest that survival skills were what was really going to be needed.

Then I got the projector going and showed them how to get articles from the library database and how to search effectively at Google. Things began to deteriorate. I had them practice doing citations. They started talking in little clots. One put his head down on the table. One got up and left. I said, “I know this isn’t thrilling, but the faster we get it done the faster we can move on to something more interesting.”

There were mutterings. I was very glad I had been observed on Tuesday instead of on Thursday as planned. I may have said so.

I called out, “You all understand the assignment for Tuesday, right?” over the hubbub as they left.

The projector. It was all the fault of the projector.

My Aussies left me some terrific feedback at oDesk, mentioning that I had done their job in 1/5 the time other providers had estimated. I’m thinking that it may just be that people who are willing to work for very low wages don’t feel any great need to work fast. They know they’re being exploited, so why should they make big efforts for their exploiters?

On the other hand, it is conceivable that I’m special in the sense that Friedman uses for the word. Not unique, but being able to write SEO copy both well and fast could be a special skill. When we were talking about 21st century skills, I showed the students The World Is Flat as an example of a physical book we could use for our imaginary paper, so they could practice citing a book. I told them about Friedman’s idea of the three kinds of workers who would have jobs in the 21st century.

“We can’t be the cheapest,” I pointed out. “We live in the United States, so we can never compete on price. So the three kinds of American workers who’ll survive, according to this book, are workers who have to be physically present, very special workers, and workers who can be very flexible.”

They had trouble grasping the idea of in situ workers. “Like manual laborers?” one asked. I agreed, but also pointed out that personal services and health care required physical proximity. One came up with resort management, which seemed like a good example. The idea of being especially good at something seemed to depress them. I shared Friedman’s example of Michael Jordan, but that distracted them. I will be happy to share all their random thoughts on Michael Jordan with you some time. It was like the children’s sermon at church.

It does seem as though being special is unattainable. It is like the advice in Do You Matter? about not allowing yourself to be commoditized. At oDesk, people are looking for human workers as commodities. They aren’t looking for the one special person for the job, but for quick turnaround at low prices. It is possible that being really fast is special enough for me to be competitive there. It’s also possible that my willingness to work in a place that is perceived as an electronic slave market makes me look like more of a commodity to private clients.

Still, adaptability is available to us all. The students perked up at the thought of being really flexible. Not enough that they managed to come up with good examples of thesis statements for the topic, but they did learn MLA style citations, and we all survived, so I’m not complaining.

I spent all day yesterday at Client #3′s office. If I were being paid for all these hours, I’d be sitting pretty this month. Instead, I just thought of all those hours I wasn’t spending working for someone else, promoting my site, or looking for more clients.

However, it was fun to work with someone else. I mean, we were both sitting in the office, working, at the same time. The closest I usually get to this is IM with Chanthaboune or The Computer Guy, or fusillades of emails back and forth to Australia, the Philippines, and Albuquerque. Good, but not the same.

So we were talking about all kinds of things, from our daughters’ beaus to Sarah Palin, and the conversation turned to the idea of 21st Century Skills.

Have you heard about this? The claim is that our kids need to learn critical thinking, creativity, communication, and entreprenuerial skills. And perhaps a little geography, too.

This is of course in direct conflict with No Child Left Behind.

“No Child Left Behind is my bread and butter,” Client #3 observed.
“Maybe the new administration can continue funding the worthwhile aspects of it, like yours, and not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” I suggested.

But I have been present at several conferences over the past few years, listening to someone speak stirringly about the importance of 21st Century Skills. I can pretty much also always hear all the teachers saying, “Yes, well, that’s all good, but it’s not on the test, so forget it.”

Or even, “How long has it been since this guy was in a classroom?”

I had recently also read a blog talking about the importance of teaching telecommuting skills, since that’ll be the future.

If that will indeed be the future, then Former Princess Designs should get going on a line of really stylish pajamas, the sort of thing that you can answer the door in if you forget to get dressed before you start working.  Maybe some version of scrubs, since that is the other kind of worker our aging nation will need.

I had also just read, as I tried to find inspiration for teaching forty-five minutes’ worth of literary analysis to a bunch of people who plan to go into fields like competitive fishing and forensic nursing, a blog saying the only reason anyone teaches literary analysis nowadays is because they like to talk about literature for fun. And then in yesterday’s study group we had the question, “How can we prepare our kids for the future?”

So all this was making me think about what skills will actually be useful in the future.

Friedman says that the people who will have work in the coming century will be those who are special, those who do their work in situ, and those who are adaptable. Massage therapists, hairdressers, housepainters, and domestic servants might be examples of the in situ kind. The rest of us have to strive to be either special or adaptable. Probably both.

We’ve raised a generation of children to believe that they’re special merely because they exist. Everyone, we’ve told them in song and story, is special.

That’s not what Friedman meant. He meant so special that it flat doesn’t matter where you live, people will find you and hire you. His examples, if I remember correctly, were Barbra Streisand and Michael Jordan. Our kids haven’t felt the need to aspire to that. They’re special just for being themselves.

We also haven’t taught them to be adaptable. They are supposed to stand on their rights, own their feelings, follow their bliss, and stuff like that. Not adapt.

Maybe we’ve been making a mistake.

I was observed in class yesterday. It wasn’t exactly a surprise visit, but mostly it was. We had arranged that I would be observed on Thursday. I had therefore just told the handful of students who showed up yesterday to help get the word out for everyone to show up on Thursday for the observation, when the dept. chair strolled in. 

This is not a problem. I wouldn’t do a better job for an observer than for my students. However, this was the day when I was supposed to teach literary analysis. I went ahead and told the students that I didn’t intend for them to write any literary analysis. First, it isn’t something you can get good at in 45 minutes. Second, it isn’t something they’ll all use in their future lives. So we were just doing a glance at it to make sure they understood what it was. I did a fun lesson on the subject with picture books, which Ill describe over at my education blog. Then we moved on to plan their upcoming research papers. So it might not have been the most cohesive and observable lesson I’ve ever done.

However, I had a good report from the chair. She mentioned fulltime. She also told me I should take advantage of the technology in the room.

The word “technology” is, in education, a synonym for “computer.” And I have a computer in the room. It is attached to a projector.

I had to admit that I didn’t know how to use the projector. I explained that I always relied on tech guys to do that part, which is true, even though it is always the tech guys who initiate the use of these projectors, and I just ignore them and sing or speak or whatever task brought me into the room.

You know how I feel about Power Point.

She assured me that it was simple, and then went through the usual sort of thing that follows that claim: pushing buttons that don’t do what you expect and climbing up on the table to turn on the projector and then explaining what was supposed to have happened and pushing some more buttons and saying, “Oh! There! It’s doing it!” with an air of surprise.

I’m a computer guy of a sort, and I work with highly skilled tech people in a country full of hi-tech machinery and a high level of comfort with electronic stuff. Nonetheless, I don’t think that I have ever seen the audiovisual component of any public event accomplished without this little ritual, which takes from 25 to 30% of the available time.

I may be exaggerating. This only happens in church about 15% of the time. The rest of the AV problems — there is nearly always something screwed up — are obvious human error.

I am not exaggerating about climbing up on a table. This is apparently how the projector is turned on at our college. I took the dept. chair’s hand to help her up and down. We did not know that there was a class outside waiting to get in, possibly wondering what the heck we were doing holding hands and climbing on tables.

Anyway, I’ve been told to  use Power Point. We can post them on our Connection, she says, for later reference by our students. #1 son said that if I do that, then my students will just look at the Power Point and not bother to attend class at all.

In any case, I have to add getting to know the Connection and improving my Power Point skills to my to-do list.

Today it is six months since I lost my job at the store. I have earned more since then than I did at the store, I am having fun, and while I am still reluctant and nervous about self-employment, I no longer feel unemployed.

In honor of the day, I want to make a list of the people I’m thankful for:

• my family, including my husband, my children, and my parents, all of whom have been amazingly supportive through my uncertain travels from unemployment to self-employment
• Arkenboy, who originally introduced me to the acronym SEO and the words “keyword,” “link,” and “Dark Art.”
• Janalisa, for sharing her business acumen and bracing good advice
• That Man, who encouraged me to try to find SEO work
• Formerprincess, who was my Client #1
• The Computer Guy, who agreed to meet with me, employed me even though I’m not a 23 year old computer engineer, taught me some useful tech things, and has given me steady work even though he sometimes feels a need to tell me things like, “You know line breaks don’t matter in HTML?” which is the equivalent of “You know you knit with two hands?”
• L. Sandy, who redid my resume for me so it would look modern, and told me to take as much contract work as I could
• The people at SEOmoz, who posted my SEO essays and made me feel as though I could call myself an SEO, not to mention teaching me that term, and also a lot of the other things I know about SEO
• Blessing, without whom I might never have learned how to get paid for my work
• The Big Client, who paid me enough to live on while I recuperated from losing my job, and taught me to track data in an uber-geeky way
• Client #3, who hired me while I still didn’t know what I should charge, and has encouraged me and also refers people to me without telling them how little I charge her
• The people who offered me jobs at startlingly low wages, thus ensuring that I wouldn’t take them
• The people who offered me well-paying jobs, for helping me realize that it wasn’t the money that made me not want to take those jobs
• The people who had me take that psychological test as part of their interminable hiring process, because it actually gave me some good insights
• Sukey, who stared at pictures of writing implements for way more hours than I would have, and was kind and pleasant as I tried to describe the look I wanted on my website in completely abstract terms
• My department chair at the college, who called me at just the right time so I would actually accept a job that has given me up-to-date classroom experience for my education blogs, gas and grocery money, and an .edu link for my wesbite
• #1 daughter, who told me that whether or not I had enough work was up to me, not The Big Client or The Computer Guy
• #2 daughter, who helped me buy clothes and drive on the freeway, both of which are much harder for me than writing websites
• My students, who have provided a good human counterpoint to my tech work and told me I was awesome
• My clients, of course, including both those who say nice things and provide human contact and those who merely pay me

This is Kwik Sew 2000, the pattern for #1 son’s shirt. This somewhat goofy picture shows a fabric very like the Pendleton wool he has chosen from the lengths La Bella gave me, and it ought to be nice if I can do it correctly.

Hancock Fabric had all the Big 4 patterns on sale for almost nothing. #1 son’s choice of an $8.99 Kwik Sew pattern under those circumstances is characteristic. He will also nag me about starting it, complain about everything, and refuse to wear it if it has, say, uneven topstitching or something.

I try not to make things for him. He has been warned that he has to wear it if I make it.

First I have to finish hemming this lovely skirt. This is the flippy circular skirt I’m making from my share of the Pendleton wool. The hem appears to be about three miles long. I’m just estimating, mind you, but I have watched an entire season of 30 Rock while hemming it and it isn’t finished yet.

I like handrolled hems.

I have enough to make a jacket, too. I’m thinking about what shape of jacket will coordinate well with a flippy circular skirt, just in case I ever want to wear them together.

Yesterday I began with further confabulation with Kevin. Yes, that is his real name. I’m almost frustrated enough to give out his last name as well, just as a warning. Kevin is the one who has been trying to install analytics for me for months. He seems like a really nice guy, but he is a thorn in my side. How bad do I look when it takes me months to get things done? My clients figure it’s my ineptitude that keeps these things from being accomplished. I tried to convey the right balance of kindly understanding and furious desperation. I considered mentioning that he still hasn’t corrected the address on the inside pages, but decided not to press it.

Next I did The Computer Guy’s blog post. I had resisted doing it all weekend, on the grounds that I should have A Life even though I know he doesn’t, and felt guilty when I turned it in around 9:00 am. He had it posted in about 20 minutes, giving me the impression that he had been waiting around for it, wondering what happened to my famously fast turnaround.

Next, I went to the gym for treadmill and weight machines.

I then did a couple of hours for the Aussies. I had a couple of phone calls during that from Suwanda, who wanted to chat about hymns. I toggled off, of course, but I was also working with the girl from the Philippines, and it was getting really late for her to be up.

“The ones we came up with yesterday will be fine, I’m sure.” I was probably a bit curt.
“You had another in mind,” she said with a hint of hurt. “If it would work as a Hymn of Invitation…?”
“Ah yes,” I agreed, “I’ll look it up and email it to the office. I’m working for some Australians right now.”

I imagine I sounded harried. My family understand the terms, “I’m Toggled” and “I’m on oDesk,” but Suwanda doesn’t. I thought the mention of Australians might make it sound urgent. She is a retired teacher. Time is different for her. She doesn’t collaborate with people in other hemispheres, either. There’s only this little window of time when both sides of the world are at work, assuming that any of us get to have lives.

“I’m in the office now,” she protested, thinking that perhaps I could discuss the relative merits of varying possible Hymns of Invitation with her so she could pass it along to the secretary. She probably wanted me to come in and sing through them with her.

I was firm. I finished up my time with the Aussies and found another encyclopedia assignment waiting in my inbox, and a message from the guy in Philadelphia for whom I blog, saying he wanted more, and to remind him if he didn’t give me a start date next week. I didn’t forget the hymn in my happiness about this, though, I’m glad to say.

There was also a trio of emails from Client #3 wondering about her nameservers and her search function. I had a look at her website, which was due to go live last night but didn’t, and noticed another couple of things. I sent some messages off to her and to The Computer Guy regarding her and got to work. Then I got an email from The Computer Guy about her empty page.

I believe that he told me she had sent him something for it. Indeed, I know it for a fact, because that’s why I didn’t write it. We had some frenzied emails and even phone calls, culminating in an offer of, “I can put it in a PDF file for download, but making it into real HTML…” from The Computer Guy.

By this time, the online catalog claimed to have 0 items on 0 pages, and all I can say is that better not be true, after four days of typing. I explained that I had a meeting, and could I do it afterwards? He allowed as how he expected to be up late.

I took #1 son to choose a pattern, fed my family, and dashed off, only slightly late for the meeting. By the time I drove all over the place looking for a parking spot, I was actually late, but a friend who happened to be driving by picked me up and drove me to the door of the music building, bless him.

I made it in, having missed only the initial blathering with which all such meetings begin. It was the organizational meeting for the board of a music organization. We went around the circle introducing ourselves. I said firmly that I didn’t intend to serve on the board or sit on committees, but I would write whatever they wanted. We had a clear explanation of the financial circumstances and goals of the group, and then the people who like to be in meetings because it makes them feel important started talking. You know what I mean. Most of the people on that board will be a joy to work with, but there are always exceptions. I am grateful for those people because they are always willing to serve on boards, and I am not.

I gathered my stuff up and asked whether there would be any objection to putting a donations button on the website.

“It depends,” one began ponderously, “how you collect the donations. You have to be very careful –”
“Nothing to do with me,” I said firmly. I am practicing up on firmness, as you can see. “No money actually goes to the machine. What you do with it once they send it in is up to you.”

There were discussions of taxes and line item budgets, but I had put away my notebook. “I have a website going live tonight,” I said, “and the engineer is waiting for me. I believe I understand all the circumstances and I trust the board will let me know what you’d like me to do.”

Just a tip for the future: saying the engineer is waiting for you works much better than saying that your children are hungry or you have to get up early the next day, or even that you have papers to grade. All those things cause others in the group to start saying how they have more children to feed, get up earlier, and have more work to finish than you do. They know, however, that they can’t claim to have two engineers waiting for them, so I escaped.

Upon arriving home, I wrote the missing page, talked briefly with #1 daughter about the table of the elements, and called #2 daughter, who was just getting out of her symphony board meeting and obligingly listed the revenue sources of that organization for me, for inspirational purposes.

And so, as Pepys used to say, to bed.

  Here’s the building where we sang yesterday afternoon. Long ago, there was an annual Great Day of Singing. Last year, in order to raise money for a roof on a church built in 1861, the oldest in our town, we reinstituted the custom. This was therefore the Second Re-Annual Great Day of Singing. Our church choir went up on Mt. S to join in.

I think it went well. Hard to say; you never know what your choir sounds like, since you’re standing right in the middle of it, but I was happy with my solo.

There were seven choirs. First was a group that “meets primarily for fellowship.” They had an average age of about ninety, but they also had a fine young soloist who did them proud, singing the melody in a medley of songs while they did the do-wop bits.

The medley focused on songs about how very soon they’d be in heaven. “I’m just traveling through,” they sang, “This world is not my home,” “Soon we’ll reach that further shore.” I wondered if it was really tasteful to have a choir that elderly singing a song like that.

We were next. We sang “Send It On Down” and “Order My Steps.” Our organist practically burnt the piano up. In fact, there were three really fabulous painists there that day, a circumstance which made a big difference. There was also one little lady who entirely lost her place and had to vamp till she could figure out where the choir had gotten to, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

We were followed by the chancel choir of the big downtown Methodist church. They have had some very good music leaders in the past, they have an excellent organist, they have an impressive collection of recording equipment, and they have a lot of young people in the choir. They sang a piece by John Rutter.

You might think I’d be envying them. Not so. Their current director is a nice woman, and fun to watch, but her directing style is bizarre. I saw her last year, and she has improved. She’s keeping the beat now. However, she still does things like pinching her fingers together (as though to end a word) on every beat, throwing her hands up in enthusiasm all of a sudden, and adding strange hula-like movements for no apparent reason. Her choir could have sounded much better than it did.

They were followed by the only children’s choir of the afternoon. I offer this picture, though as you know I generally avoid pictures of humans, because there’s no other way to show the cheerful chaos involved. Getting the children up onto the stage, including the ones who had fallen asleep and had to be awakened, was like any herding activity. But the sound girl crawling around trying to get them all hooked up, the technical difficulties, the discovery that one of their solists was in the bathroom… It was fun, and they were very cute. I don’t think anyone minded the chaos.

Indeed, no one minded anything. The children were followed by a massed choir medley of songs like “There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood” and “Blessed Assurance,” which many of those present rememebered fondly from their childhood camp meetings.

Then the little choirs sang. It always seems odd to me that we’re counted as a big choir, but there are little churches on the edges of the town with choirs of five or six. They invariably sound horrible, just horrible. It’s hard to believe that people are able to worship every week with sounds like that in their buildings. I like the little choir from the historically African-American church, actually. We no longer have any segregated churches in town, praise the Lord, but this church is where the African-American octegenarians go, and they have a different sound. It is possible to listen to them with interest because it is an exotic horrible sound. Their choir director is also their pianist, and directs them from the piano. He’s a white guy, a former actor, very funny in a campy sort of way. He tried to lead the massed choirs in a second medley from the piano, a difficult feat since he was behind most of us.

“You might as well close your eyes,” he shrieked at us. Fortunately, BigSax got up and directed us from the front, which might be less picturesque but worked better.

I tried, after that, to listen to the other tiny choirs with the same level of appreciation, but they were singing things like “And Can It Be,” which is a gorgeous song, and it sounded as though it were being sung by a couple of loud humans at slightly different speeds supported by a collection of barnyard animals.

Here’s the thing: it didn’t matter. It was the experience of the day.

The musicians were sitting together at the reception later, eating brie and fruit, and the director of one of the tiny choirs came up and said, “Did anyone record that?”

There was a moment of silence. Then rueful shakings of the head. Some of the children’s choir parents had recorded their kids’ solos with their cell phones, but that was all.

“I think those things are better as a full experience,” I said. Really, no one would want to hear that. It was only because we were sitting together in the old camp building fanning ourselves and sharing the afternoon that it was great.