After church today, standing in the social hall drinking coffee, one of the other pianists came up to me to tell me I'd done well. And then she added with a grin "The rest of us were just glad we weren't you today."

I know exactly what she meant, of course. Today was the day the minister decided to do a thing on the 12 Days of Christmas, which somehow translated into me having to play 11 hymns. Toss in a prelude, a postlude, and an offertory, and I was facing one heck of a lot of songs to muddle through. It didn't help that I was out of town for the past four days and even though I did spend a few hours practicing them before we left, I was sounding a bit rusty as of last night. Toss in the added bonus of finding out that the hymn numbers had been mixed up so I hadn't even practiced one of the ones I was supposed to play, plus oh, did someone forget to mention there was that little song for the lighting of the advent candle, and it was just one big barrel of fun!

Actually, it wasn't as bad as I am making it sound. Sight-reading has never been my strong suit, but oh boy is this accompanist thing forcing me to work on that! I've been picking up on all the little tricks – how if you can't play all the notes, you make sure that you at least play the bass note and the melody, and if you can toss in a few extra harmony notes with the right hand, you're pretty much golden.

It was a pretty musical morning, even without the fact that I was playing the piano for most of it. A friend and I sung a duet (where if the rest of the congregation had no idea just how low I can sing, they got a really great chance to hear it), and then those of us in the choir who were there (which basically was only five of us) did a rather hasty rehearsal before the service in order to prepare for the two songs we did during the 12 Days of Christmas thing. Since the choir accompanist is out of town, that meant we did those acapella, which was actually pretty fun, even if I did have to keep switching between alto and tenor because we didn't have enough people otherwise to cover all the notes.

After the musical interlude that was my morning, Richard and I drove off to Sacramento to go to Fry's. I needed to get an extension USB cable for my dad and Richard wanted a USB hub for his laptop and while we were there we found a birthday present for Richard. On the way home we stopped off at Walmart because someone told me they'd found this thing that I cannot name because I want to get it for my mom for her birthday and she reads this occasionally. But they did not have one, so we settled for toothpaste instead. Plus as we were in the parking lot we saw the cutest little spotted brown owl just sitting happily in one of the little tree islands between the cars, and we also discovered a new Mongolian Barbeque restaurant, to which we promptly went for lunch.

The rest of the day has been lazy, lazy, lazy. We pretty much camped out on the futon downstairs and watched season 5 Buffy, while either knitting (me), poking on the laptop (Richard) or trying very hard to get in the way of either (the cats). Ah, such a nice way to end a weekend.