We had a new piece for the Chorale last night: A Musicological Journey Through the 12 Days of Christmas. How funny this piece is may depend on how knowledgeable you are about music history. It starts with Gregorian chant about the partridge in the pear tree, moves on through Renaissance arrangement about other birds, brings in some Valkyries for the eighth day, and finishes up with the twelfth day according to Sousa. Some of the pieces are very pretty, it seems to me, though Wagner and Tchaikowsky seemed pretty hilarious. Maybe if I were more knowledgeable I'd be snorting with laughter over the Brahms style and the 19th century French, too.

I got home to find a request to sing "O Master Let Me Walk With Thee," to the tune of deTar at the Presbyterian church this Sunday and agreed, so I guess I'm going to shift. I'll still do the early service with the Methodists.

I was also invited to a special thing with Google. When #2 son gets this sort of invitation, he scoffs and says that everyone gets those and it's no big deal, but I think maybe it is a big deal. This is actually the second thing of its kind that I've been invited to in the past week; the first one is a secret (not Google's secret -- I have a NDA with them) and has a small payment attached to it. I think maybe this suggests that I have a promising website. #2 daughter was also invited to swap posts with a PR7 site, on the strength of her videos at FreshPlans. #1 daughter thinks we should be looking for grants.

My husband returned safely from his Las Vegas jaunt. He won his games, but his teammates did not, so the team didn't win. They had fun, though.

Today is the first day of the 2010 Holiday Grand Plan. The HGP is a simple system. You start now, and each week you have assignments for cleaning your house and making holiday preparations. You spend about 15 minutes a day following orders, and when the holidays come (Hallowe'en, Thanksgiving, Christmas...), you have a tidy house and all your preparations made, without stress. I've done this for years, with a few slacker years here and there, and I can vouch for it.

So this week, List Week, has two things going on. First, you clean your porch. If you don't have a porch, just clean your front door and windows, wash the welcome mat, trim the hedges by the door -- whatever is in the place where your porch would be.

Second, you make a bunch of lists:

• Gifts to be given, amount to spend (include family, friends, school, church, etc)
• Christmas card list (computerize it!) Print list and update it, if needed. Decide how many cards are needed.
• Visits to make
• Parties/Entertaining
• Menus for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, other parties
• Goodies for Sharing/Gifts. Decide how much needs to be made and divide it between the weeks from now through December 1.
• Favorite Meals of Family members for freezing ahead.
• Long-term shopping list divided into: canned foods, perishables for each holiday, linens and dishes, decorations, etc.

Some people find this fun, and spend the whole week getting all excited about it. For others, it's the burst of tedious effort that makes the plan work, so they get it over with. I plan to make it fun. I'm going to get out my holiday books and spend the afternoon on the sofa -- after I go to church and clean the porch, natch -- and make all these lists.

Once you've done this initial thinking, you don't have to think about it any more. As your friends burble on about how they can't believe it's only four months till Christmas and then only two months and then only a week and they just aren't going to be able to send cards this year or they don't know how they're going to find the time to bake those pies for Thanksgiving and they had really meant to do more volunteer work this year, you can enjoy the fall and end up serene on New Year's Eve.

LaBella and I went with another friend to the recital of my old voice teacher and the church organist. The organist is fantastic, both on the organ and the piano, which is what he was playing. The voice teacher is my old voice teacher in the sense that it's been twenty years since I studied with her, but also in simply being an old lady. Her voice sounded old, too, but I hope I can sing that well when I'm that old.

She sang "Come Away, Death" twice, with two different settings. LaBella thinks she was making a point.

It was a nice recital, and they had a standing ovation.

#2 daughter and I also went to put a deposit on an apartment for her. It' very nice, with an office and a balcony and a walk-in closet, and the complex has a "business center" and conference rooms.

Today is going to be a work day for me, and I also have lots of housework to do. It's a lovely day, though.

Yesterday I finished The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. I haven't told you all about it, but there's a lot of important and startling information there. I will tell you that, according to the author, Germans disapprove of men standing up to urinate, while Scandinavians like urinals for women. Women in the court of Marie Antoinette, we're assured, peed standing up all the time, but I find it hard to see the advantage.

While searching for a picture of such a thing to share with you, I found this explanation of how they work: "Basically the urinals featured a protruding narrow bowl that the user was expected to straddle while facing the wall, having first lowered her panties and hiked up her skirt, whereupon she could do her thing. I'm not getting a good picture in my mind of how this was supposed to work, and frankly I don't think I want to."

I did find you a picture, ostensibly from a Texas college.

My understanding is that urinals in men's restrooms speed things up (though I learned in the course of a recent project that modern men's underwear no longer have flies, so the speed may be lessened). Urinals for women were supposed to speed things up in women's restrooms, too.

Women are slower getting in and out of restrooms -- enough so that buildings need to be designed with significantly more space for women's restroom's than for men's. The reason -- apart from having to deal with children and parcels more often than men do -- is that women have to undress further than men. We also have to enter a stall, turn and close the door and figure out what to do with our purses, all of which probably adds up in the course of a day. It seems as though, even with a urinal such as the one pictures, the user would have to remover her underwear or pantyhose, and perhaps her trousers as well, all of which would take more time. What's more, if the urinal is going to be in a stall rather than out in rows the way men's rooms do it, there's no savings in space and still the additional time involved in entering and securing the door.

So, yeah, I guess women and German men can't use urinals. In other news, I went to bells at 6:00 last night, and then on to choir practice at the other church. We're singing an antiphonal "Mirror of St. Anne" by Randall Thompson, some Vaughan Williams, a little Bach, and (by pastoral request, we're told), "Morning Evening" by Steve Swayne.

The new pastor at my current church gives lightweight sermons, though she's a very nice lady. They're always based on a homely incident in her life as a mom, and have valuable though obvious lessons. She's very sweet, though. The new pastor at the other church delivers deep sermons with lots of research. There's also a Sunday school class studying Confessions of St. Augustine.

How bad is it to consider moving back to my old church for this sort of reason?

I got an email from BigSax reminding me of rehearsal at 6 tonight, so I arranged to travel to the other church's choir practice at 7:15.

It has since occurred to me that the 6:00 rehearsal is probably for bells. Choir is probably at 7:00, as usual. I'm not sure what I'll do about that.

I did finally go get my hair cut today. It was the middle of the work day, so I just came home and got back to work, rather than washing my hair. This means that my hair looks like the Little Dutch Boy in the old paint ads.

I'm not sure what I'll do about that, either.

Last night the Master Choral started up again. We're singing Praetorius, the Bass Gloria, a few Bach chorales, and William Grant Still's Christmas piece.  Good stuff.

I'm reading another of Mark Schweizer's Liturgical Mysteries, The Baritone Wore Chiffon . There are some authors, like Edmund Crispin in his Holy Disorders, who make an effort to bring the reader into the somewhat rarified world of church musicians. Mark Schweizer makes no such attempt. I guess his books are read exclusively by organists and choral musicians. They're really funny if you get all the inside jokes, though.

I think that tonight is the beginning of the Tuesday class, where we'll be studying Isaiah, which I get with a complete sound track by Handel.

So I think I'll have plenty of music this term.

Pink Hebe asked what the pink thing I'm knitting is supposed to be, and I tried to find a picture of what it's supposed to end up looking like, but with no luck. I guess I'm the only one in blogland knitting right now. It's a cardigan from Lacy Little Knits. It's modeled in the book by two lovely older ladies having what appears to be a very fun lunch. If I finish it in time, I'll wear it this fall for going out to lunch, and doubtless have the same amount of  fun.

That's the plan.

Today I must try to interview the last doctor. it's very hard to interview doctors -- or, more correctly, to get hold of them so you can interview them. They have people paid to keep interviewers at bay. But they often have very interesting things to say if you can get to them. I'm also doing a complete SEO package for a national corporation with their head offices here in my county. And my online class. So I have plenty to do today.

I think a second cup of tea is called for.

Yesterday I went and sang Brahms at my old church. People were very welcoming -- I was really surprised. Not that I thought I wouldn't be welcome, but I didn't expect people to notice.

In the afternoon, La Bella and I went to the church picnic. It was lovely, sitting out under the trees overlooking the woods, talking with old friends while the children ran around laughing and playing child games like Run up the Steps and Jump Back Down Squealing.

It was very fun.

This morning I started class. When I arrived at the classroom, it was filled with art supplies, folders, piles of cardboard, enormous canvases, and stuff. The furniture was pushed together in the center, and there were gouges and great splodges of paint all over the tables.

The office was empty.

This is not the best way to start the semester.

However, class went reasonably well once I had cleaned up and moved all the furniture.

I got quite a bit of knitting done yesterday, as well as a lot of light reading and family conversation.

I did the grocery shopping,  made a proper dinner and scrubbed the bathroom.  I hardly did any work at all.

While I haven't worked much, I have been keeping an eye on my websites. The traffic at the education site is way down, which seems normal for the season, and accordingly the sales are also down. I mention this for the sake of any readers who are thinking of doing affiliate marketing stuff. We're doing it just as an experiment, with the goal of paying for our hosting. We have professional hosting, for $270 a year, and we've earned about half that much in four months. A definite back to school boom for us, though that boom was 188 products, not the numbers that translate to riches.

I'll keep you posted.

Looking back on the summer, I see that the website launch was a success and business has been pretty good, but I completely failed to make my SWAP and only lost about 8 pounds. Things have been too exciting here this summer for the reaching of personal goals.

I do intend to make my SWAP, though. I have my new fall schedule starting up tomorrow, and I plan to sit down this evening and work out spaces for needlework and gym time and such, as well as room for the HGP. Since I will probably live for another 40 years or so, I can't yet decide that I'm too old to bother with self-discipline and continual striving for betterment, but I'm old enough to get bored with myself when I strive to get back on track. At the very least, I have to recognize that this track of which I speak is a place where I go around three times and then wander off or run into things and career wildly across a field before I get back and go around the track a few more times. With no finish line in sight.

I've been invited back to my old church tomorrow to sing "How Lovely Is They Dwelling Place" Obviously, I'm going. The YouTube I've linked you to here has a little error in the singing, but it's still beautiful. You can't turn down Brahms in the summer.

It is the last weekend of the summer, in the sense of the part of the year when I'm not teaching. True, I have a full time job in addition to teaching, but I still plan to be extra lazy this weekend in preparation for having to leave the house at 7:00 a.m. on Monday. And of course next week is also when all my evening stuff starts up again -- Master Chorale, Tuesday class, women's choirlet rehearsals, et al.

So today I am lolling about. I did the grocery shopping, cleaned up a bit, and am now reading The Alto Wore Tweed. In this story, a church choir director is writing a mystery novel. His novel contains this immortal line:

I don't care whether the book turns out to have a plot or not. It's quiet at my house (#1 son took his dad out to shop, since Dad is heading to Las Vegas for a pool tournament tonight), I have a Caesar salad with grilled chicken for lunch, knitting, and a book with choral music jokes.

What could be nicer?