One Out of Three Isn't Great

More Plans Gone Astray

Nice day today with temperatures up in the 40's.  OK. I had plans.  Three, actually.

One, put up the outside Christmas decorations.

Two ride the horses and do a few barn chores, including cleaning the water trough.

Three pump up the lawn tractor tires and mow up the leaves on the lawn.

Well, the morning broke with sunshine and the heavy task of calling my fellow choir members to tell them of Dawn's passing. Once again, somehow complications developed including what we were going to do both in church on Sunday morning and for the evening vespers service.

Eventually, one of the other members and I decided to meet at the church at noon to look through the music we'd been rehearsing to see how we might manage to perform at the vespers service.  We had already decided not to sing our usual anthem at the morning service since our director would not be there and we wanted to honor his request that we offer silence in Dawn's memory.

We manged to get two other choir members there so we had a quartet and soon decided that all but one of the songs we had planned would probably be manageable, if we could find someone to play the piano accompaniment. Soon we were in touch with the choirmaster/organist from the Methodist Church in town--he is a really good friend to our choir director--and he agreed to play for us.  He came over to our church right away and we spent another hour or so going over the music in a little mini-rehearsal.  It's going to work out just fine. Not quite the same as with out director, but our choir is pretty adaptable--small but flexible--so all will go on pretty much as planned.  When I called Don, our director, to tell him of the arrangements, he seemed kind of relieved. I made it a lot easier for him to take some time for himself to think and grieve.

Obviously, at that point, the bulk of the day was gone.  I got home and set to work with the outdoor decorations. It's a fairly straightforward task, but it does take time--especially when a string of lights refused to work and needed to be replaced. That led to a quick and, fortunately successful, shopping trip to get some new lights.

I still need to decorate the barn--no biggie--and put up my fiber optic tree in the living room.  I don't do a decorated tree because my cats think tree ornaments are just tons of fun to play with, so this is a lot easier and looks quite nice in the window.

I did clean and refill the water trough--the hose thawed out enough so I was able to use it, but I never did get to ride. And the leaves are still, well, as thick as leaves on the lawn.

Tomorrow doesn't look too promising either. With church in the morning and an early rehearsal for the 4PM vespers program, my schedule is pretty tight.

But, on the upswing, it's supposed to rain anyhow. So I might not be missing much after all.

At least I finished 1/3 of my plans. That's something.