I guess one upside of blogging is that there’s no need to string random thoughts into a coherent narrative. Today will just be a miscellany post.
Longtime readers know that I’m listening to “all” (most) of the works of Beethoven over the course of the year. I’m following the calendar set by The Complete Beethoven (very easy to follow!). Unless I have gotten off-pace somewhere, today’s listening is Beethoven’s second symphony. This has been quite a treat to listen to this morning as I’ve been driving around.
Why have I been driving around? Well, kid drop-offs, and also a fun (not really) trip to the dermatologist to get stitches out from an excision two weeks ago. But I bribed myself with good coffee, and the weather is beautiful, and I’m listening to Beethoven’s second (an under-rated symphony…there’s a theory that it’s really difficult to play which is why it’s not performed so often). So that all helped.
Last week I featured Kathy Oneto on the Before Breakfast podcast, and her book, Sustainable Ambition, came out yesterday. So please go check that out!
I went on Facebook for the first time in a while this week for a few reasons. One was to watch the video of my choir performing a world premiere of a Jessica French piece called Glistening Spirit (for Pentecost). Perhaps like Beethoven’s second, this was also an incredibly tricky piece to perform, but very beautiful in places. I really enjoy getting to bring new music to life. I hope it will be performed again, because it deserves to be, and French is an amazing composer.
I was also looking at my niece’s engagement photos! She just successfully defended her doctoral dissertation at Princeton a few weeks ago, and her long-time boyfriend proposed this week. They’ll be moving to NC, where she’ll be teaching engineering at a university next year. I am so excited for them.
However, as tends to happen unnervingly often when I go to Facebook these days, I also saw some sad news. I spent my first two years of high school at Clay High School in South Bend, Indiana. In 1994, my freshman year, the boys basketball team won the Indiana state championship. This was a real life Hoosiers moment, back before schools were split into classes for basketball. Clay was playing Valparaiso for the championship, and Clay had been down by many points in the last minute. They fought back, and then a young man named Jaraan Cornell — only a sophmore! — hit a last second 3-point shot to tie it. Valpo never knew what happened to them and Clay won 93-88 in overtime.
I remember the game so well. I remember that shot so well. And then I saw the news on Facebook that Cornell was found dead in his apartment last week. The news is saying he died of natural causes — all just mystifying for someone who is my age. But so so sad. You can read one of the tributes here.
There’s no good way to segue out of that, so I won’t try.
I didn’t do a post about this weekend earlier this week, but I’m happy to report that the rain held off for my choir picnic on Sunday. We were able to hang out on my patio for 2.5 hours, with the rain only starting at the end. The rain was more disruptive on Saturday, when my husband and 15-year-old were scheduled to go up in a WW2 era bomber as part of the Reading Air Show. They had tickets for 11:45 a.m., but it was raining, and as it turns out, historic planes and rain aren’t a great combo. So they pushed them forward to much later in the day. They did manage to go up and take some pictures out the windows. Sunday night my three middle children all played in a recital — saxophone, trumpet, and trombone. They did really well, but the recital was long and it was freezing — I think the rain dropped the temperature by about 20 degrees suddenly! We went out for ice cream afterwards, as you do, and whoa. I don’t think I’ve been that cold since January. I took the kids out to the hot tub after and I sat on the side in my coat — see the selfie accompanying this post!