42 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 10-22-15”

  3. Good Morning! It is raining here still….I love the scent of wet pines on these cool autumn mornings. Been up since 2:30 cannot sleep…at least I don’t have to work today…just errands and lunch with my sweet best friend…and I agree Kim….we need a photo of you standing in the doorway of your beautiful southern home… 🙂

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  4. It is a “welcome looking” house.
    Really nice.

    We were having dinner at O’Charley’s last night and it occurred to me, during dinner, that we were3 having the same thing we had last time we were there.
    Then I thought that is common.
    Don’t you usually go to a place because that is what you would like to have?
    If we go to Denny’s or Cracker Barrel, we usually know what we will order before we get there.

    Chuck used to work as a cook at Three Chefs. A local chain in Northern Virginia at the time.
    The pastor of Boulevard BC always came in at the same time every day and ordered the same thing. Chuck said they started fixing when they saw him coming.

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  6. Driving my boss to the airport this morning. Will probably take 3.5 hours round trip depending on traffic. It will give me time to think, which is always good. Unless I call my daughter’s godmother back east and talk all the way home.

    Will resist logical urge to stop and shop on the way home. Tomorrow morning we get three adorable grandchildren for five days followed by a trip to see my niece and play with her two adorables for four days. I should be kidded out by Halloween. Tomorrow after I drop off the older two at school the three year old and I will shop.

    I actually hate to shop but one little one can be entertaining in the store. Last time we shopped together, she wore a long dress that twirled–which she demonstrated while singing in the produce department.

    I just let her go.

    I hate to admit it, but this one may take after her aunt and grandmother. She even looks like her father!

    Ciao!

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  7. Shopping with a young son was not fun. and I gave up shopping for clothes for a few years. I remember that he hid in the middle of one of those round or square clothes rack displays. It was painful when I couldn’t find him. and then it was painful trying to retrieve him. Not one of our better shopping experiences. I did not find anything to buy, but at least I found my son to carry him home.♡

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  9. 1. My mother was asked to take me home, get a baby sitter, then come back to shop once in an exclusive women’s store. She was MORTIFIED. Mortified, I tell you. Of course I could hardly be faulted. All I wanted to do was touch the soft, pretty feathers on the sleeves of the pretty dress.
    2. Once we were in a department store and I slipped into a round rack of clothes. It was one of my favorite games. When I came out I couldn’t find my father. I started crying because I was scared. When I finally found him he had his hand on the sales lady’s arm to keep her from going to me. Never did that again.
    3. You are all welcome when you get this way

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  10. Very nice house. And with all that brick, no one will be able to blow the house down.

    I haven’t heard back from my gardeners on the tree-trimming job. They said they’d get back to me “in a few days” with an estimate & time frame, but it’s been 2 weeks. I’ll wait a little longer, I’m sure they won’t pass up the job as it’ll be a good piece of income for them and they’ve always trimmed my trees in the past (though this time I let it go longer than I should have, it’s been several years).

    Maybe they’re having trouble lining up a crew and figuring out a time when everyone could come, I’m guessing this could be a 2-day job.

    I have to head in early today, I have a 9 a.m. phone interview and going in earlier is always harder because I hit more traffic than I do heading in a bit later. We don’t officially start until 10 usually.

    Last night was the first night in ages that I haven’t had to keep the bedroom fan turned on at least “low.” Maybe fall is finally arriving for us now, too.

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  14. It is, but it should liven up around here when the door bursts open in about forty minutes and the two hungry boys arrive, filled with enthusiasm and exuberance as always. They work in the mornings, go to school in the afternoon, play football in the evening. We don’t see much of them.

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  16. My own little guy will be home from school in about 45 minutes. He will run down the lane with the kids who go to the home daycare next door. Then he will come inside & need a big snack. After sating his appetite, he will want to go outside & ride his bike on the lane. Often two or three kids at the daycare will also be out on their bikes, & he will also play with a little girl named Gabby, who is in his class. (And little Gabby, an extroverted little child, really is “gabby”. 🙂 )

    It’s nice that we live on a private lane with a dead end, with very little car traffic, so the kids can safely ride their bikes on the lane. Forrest is very good about getting off the lane as soon as he sees a car coming.

    So hopefully, the little more than hour & a half that I’ll be babysitting him will go quickly & smoothly. Maybe Lee will get home before Emily does, & we can open the “champagne” (sparkling apple cider) to celebrate the closing.

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  18. 5 hours to the airport and back. I’m bushed.

    THe hard part was getting there–we ended up leaving the freeway when we learned three of the four lanes were closed after four accidents, just north of the exit to Cal. Drove side streets all the way into Oakland with the phone GPS shrieking that I needed to turn around and get back on the freeway.

    After dropping of J, I stopped at Starbucks to get a drink and use the rest room. Line was so long when I came out of the restroom, I decided to walk down to Jamba Juice. (I actually hate to misuse someone’s restroom like that, but I didn’t really want coffee and the line was at least 20 minutes).

    On my way to Jamba Juice, I was stopped by a homeless man who wanted food. I invited him to join me at Jamba Juice, where I would buy him whatever he wanted.

    I had a small Mango Mega, he had a large orange juice drink and a pastry of some sort. While we waited in line there, we had a conversation.

    Scott worked as a union plumber until 2 years ago and has work has now been priced out of the market. He’s from Sacramento. I mentioned the Valley fire house we had sifted last weekend, he said his brother was a firefighter and we had a nice conversation until our drinks were ready.

    I shook his hand, he blessed me and I got back in the car for a straight shot home, thanks be to God.

    I even chatted with my 88 year old CT friend on the way home. He was just back from driving to Colorado to visit his daughter with another 88 year old retired Navy guy. “Between us, 176 years of life, but we drove just fine,” in three days!

    Not a bad day, just a tiring one. And I have lots to do to finish my list before tomorrow.

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  19. And I do get horribly motion sick and sea sickness goes right along with it. But I have been sailing out of Marina Del Rey before, and did not have any problems.

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  21. Cheryl, my husband is working in west Texas. He told me about seeing monarchs migrating through that area a week or so ago. They were just everywhere in the air. He said no birds were around. They would also be flying in clumps. Thought of you as he was telling his story.

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  22. Hi, all. I sent AJ’s mailing address to RKessler, and I know she received it. 🙂

    Beautiful home, Kim. Now you can come up and make the outside of my house look like that. 😉 The inside is slowly getting better, but I struggle with the outside. No skill whatsoever in that department!

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  24. That was great watching the split screen on Wachet auf, seeing the organist’s hands and feet simultaneously. That’s physically and mentally demanding, coordinating that.

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  26. So today is supposed to be my media fast day, and I was doing well until I started preparing for a student’s piano lesson tonight and realized I’d forgotten some key information I’d learned back in college that I haven’t had to use for a while.

    My student is working on a piece for an area piano contest this winter, and I want her to sing the melody line while practicing the lyrical section of her piece, using solfege syllables (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do), so she’s more aware of how the melody intersperses with the harmony notes in the same hand.

    I had to come online to review how those solfege syllable names change when the scale notes get altered up or down a half step, which happens in her piece.

    (“Do” — pronounced doh — raised becomes “di” — pronounced dee; “fa” raised becomes “fi”; etc.)

    Eyes glazing over for all but the musicians here, I suspect… 😉

    Anyway, it has been entertaining to read about the controversies between the “Fixed Do” method of reading, and the “Movable Do.” One commenter likened it to discussions on politics or religion — sometimes rather vigorous and heated. 🙂

    Then there’s the issue of, when the key signature is minor (as my student’s piece is) rather than major, do you use Do-based minor or La-based minor?

    LOL.

    It will be an interesting discussion I’ll have with my student tonight to see what (if any) solfege she’s had in her school music studies. I will probably go with teaching the way I’d been taught it, unless she’s gotten very accustomed to a different method (she’s in high school and plays in the band — maybe sings in choir, too, where solfege is more likely to be used — so she’s been musically active for many years, any may have had exposure to solfege in the elementary grades, and possibly even middle school and high school). She’s the student who enjoys studying composition and music theory, so even if she’s not at all familiar with singing solfege, the system undergirding “Movable Do” could be quite fascinating for her.

    I love musical challenges, and finding out how my students “tick.” 🙂

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  27. 6 Arrows, I learned to read music using the alphabet names – A, B, C, D, E, F, G – for the notes and keys. When I was in Africa, I taught a Brazilian child the violin, and she had learned the solfeggio names for the notes. I had learned the solfeggio hand signs as a child, and knew the song “Do, A Deer” very well; but it was a learning curve for me to switch. I didn’t know what to call the chromatic note changes, so I used combination names like “Fa sharp” (F#). I was teaching her to read music, so hopefully she was able to understand the notation despite my limited knowledge of solfeggio.

    It would have been interesting using the solfeggio name changes at the same time I learned Wolof. In Wolof, to say “She is here” is Mung fi with ‘fi’ meaning ‘here’, while “She is there” is Mung fa, with ‘fa’ meaning ‘there’. Articles change in a similar way – it is a very alliterative language.

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  35. That’s neat to hear, Janice. I love hearing about adults of any age, who may be occupied with many non-musical activities in their busy lives, taking out the instruments they used to play (or sitting down at them 😉 ) for the sheer enjoyment of it.

    Roscuro, I learned music with the letter names, too, both piano (from about age 7 or 8) and viola (around age 14). Other than knowing “Doe, a Deer,” I’d never heard of solfege before my university classes as a music major. My undergrad studies didn’t do a whole lot with it, though, and I never taught anything but letter names with my students when I was a public school teacher.

    However, I took some graduate level music studies after I’d resigned from teaching school, to keep up my certification in case I ever returned, and I learned a lot about the “Movable Do” system, which is what I prefer, and what is generally taught in music classrooms in the U.S.

    I enjoy the challenge of singing solfege with movable do, but one thing I found very hard was when my solfege instructor in my grad studies would transpose a piece of music. I could fairly easily sing the correct syllables when I was hearing the same notes I was looking at in the score, but if my professor would, say, transpose from D Major to C Major, I might be looking at an F sharp, but hearing an E and wanting to sing “re” because E is “re” in D Major.

    On the other hand, one benefit I’ve found in singing while the instrumentalist is transposing is that I can sing higher that way. I’m an alto, and when I see anything above a 4th line treble D, I choke and convince myself I can’t sing that high.

    But if an organist transposes up (as a certain guest organist we’ve had a few times has done), the interesting thing is that I can sing higher notes than usual because I don’t have the mental block that’s caused by a note looking too high.

    We were singing a hymn one time that he had transposed up a third, and I knew that when I was seeing a D on the staff, I was actually producing the pitch for F, something that’s virtually impossible for me if I see a note on the top line of the staff! 🙂

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  36. 6 Arrows, from what I’ve heard, the “Moveable Do” kind of transposition drives those with perfect pitch crazy. My friend with a music degree developed perfect pitch from her colour synesthesia – she sees a certain colour with each note. Transposition, say of a hymn in church, would result in her ‘hearing’ different colours than the ones she was ‘seeing’ in the hymnbook. I do not have perfect pitch, so I do not usually notice it if someone has changed the key of a hymn. However, I cannot do transposition by ear if I’m the one playing written music. I have to sit down and rewrite the music in the new key. The only cases where I can manage to transpose without a rewrite are if the key name is the same but the key signature is different – from D flat major to D major, for example; or if I learned the piece by ear, which generally happens with simpler melodies, like folk songs, carols, and the national anthem.

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  37. Eight year old and I went out and dug up her cherry tomato plant and one of her peppers. We put them in pots and will bring them in for the winter. She will have to paint brush pollinate them as we don’t have a lot of honey bees in the house….But she ought to get a lot of cherry tomatoes from it. Outside, she has had to compete with the chickens. Every time one neared ripeness, if she did not get it, the chickens did. Competition should be less indoors. Unless her mom sees it ripening….

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  38. Left a couple updates on the prayer thread. Yes, the papers were signed, but there is disappointment in the amount of money he received after paying off his loan from the company.

    Well, Forrest surprised me by breaking out of his usual after-school routine. He ran down the lane as usual, but when asked if he wanted a yummy snack – I offered him ice cream & cookies (I’m a grandmother, I’m allowed to do that) – he said he just wanted orange juice, at which point I wondered if I’d accidentally brought home the wrong kid.

    Then, instead of going right outside, he wanted to play with his Duplos (the larger-size Legos) with me. After almost an hour of that, we went into the kitchen so I could do something to get ready for dinner, & he realized that the other kids were out riding their bikes, so then we had to hurry out to join them. 🙂

    At one point, little Gabby & her bike fell over (no tears), & Forrest went over to her to help her. That was sweet to see him being nice & helpful.

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  40. Roscuro, I just read at Wikipedia today about Isaac Newton associating the seven solfege syllables with the seven colors of the rainbow, and each color vibrates according to its place on the spectrum, in his thinking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge The author of the article believes that view might be related to the modern view of chromesthesia, which you mentioned above your friend has. There’s a link in the Wikipedia article to information on chromesthesia (or sound-to-color synesthesia) that I skimmed.

    Interesting stuff, how differently individuals can process music.

    I feel your pain with transposing. I’ve had to write things out by hand, too, and struggle with transposing to anything other than the parallel-name key, as you mentioned. I wasn’t expected to transpose until my high school piano teacher started me with it. By that time, I’d been reading music as is for several years, so it was difficult.

    I have my first year students working on transposition now, and the one to whom I introduced it yesterday just ate it right up — he loves it!

    I think I’ve told this story here before, but a former supervising teacher of mine when I was student teaching told me about a student accompanist for a choir who had to transpose on the spot during a performance.

    The choir sang a long a cappella section, and the pianist was to come in well into the piece. She had a great ear, and could tell that the choir’s pitch was slipping as they proceeded through the unaccompanied part. Knowing that the entrance of the piano would make obvious how far out of tune the singers had gotten, when it was her turn to come in, she transposed her music into the key in which the choir was presently singing!

    Boy, talk about talent and dedication, covering for the group! 🙂

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