First of all, in response to the last few days that have culminated in Easter weekend, let me just say that if I am forced to either listen to, or sing “Were You There” one more time I may just shoot myself. Or I may shoot someone else. The whole point is that there will likely be shooting of some kind. You have been warned.

It’s a lovely song. I am sure it is. It’s just that there are people out there who feel that it must be sung slowly and with great drama. And the problem is that these same people often do not grasp the distinction between Slow With Drama and So Painfully Slow I Must Claw Out My Own Ears. Five verses, people. No song with five verses should ever be sung in such a manner.

Aside from my whole quirky little slow song issue, it has been a fairly nice Easter. There was the short service on Thursday, which I attended because it was during the normal choir practice time and I forgot there was a service until I showed up, at which point I was drafted into singing with the rest of the choir members who had also shown up thinking it was actually practice. Then there was the Good Friday service on, yes you guessed it, Friday, which I attended for the sole reason that every year my dad and I (and sometimes other people) each show up with a pile of miscellaneous musical instruments and inevitably end up only using the oboe and the recorder and play the ‘which part shall we play next’ game with Taizai songs (which also, amusingly, tend to be slow and dramatic and drag on forever, but I can handle those because I am always busy trying to kill my lips playing a double-reed instrument the entire time). And to top it all off, there was yet more church and more music (of the singing kind) and yes, even another rendition of "Were You There" (gah) this morning – two whole services of it. I wore my pink flowery dress and my lovely pink shoes and was appropriately Easter-ish. I also ran around after each service and tackled people in their 20’s and 30’s in the most gracious way possible to coerce…I mean invite them to come to the event we’ve scheduled for later in the month. Said event will involve chocolate and cheese and long, sharp forks, and promises to be all manner of fun.

Yesterday, in the spirit of Easter, which is all about resurrection, and coming back from the dead, Richard and I decided to go see the most appropriate movie currently in the theaters. Naturally, that would be Dawn of the Dead, because zombies certainly count as coming back from the dead (although they don’t so much save your soul as try to eat your face off, if you really must quibble over that little distinction). As far as horror movies go, it was one of the better ones I have seen in quite some time. The build-up of suspense in the beginning was marvelously done, and the blood and gore was not gratuitously overdone. The characters all seemed quite believable in their reactions and I don’t think there was anything in the entire movie that made me roll my eyes. This is high praise from me for a horror film, in case you hadn’t figured that out already.

We also did other useful things, like eat crepes for breakfast and steak and shrimp for dinner, and go to the fabric store so I could pick out buttons for the almost-completed sweater. Speaking of the sweater, this afternoon I got hasty lesson number who-knows from my knitting enabling friend on how to make buttonholes while knitting, and finally got the chance to return the enabling favor by letting her borrow the book I bought a few weeks ago that is full of lots of gorgeous sweater patterns that I have convinced myself I will make, one of these days. So at this point I have put on both sleeves and tucked in most of the loose ends and sewn and attached the button band to one half of the front and all that is left is to attach the buttons so I know *where* to make the buttonholes, and finish up the button band, and do a little more mattress stitching and then it will be complete.

Easter dinner was with Richard’s parents, which meant that this morning I got up extra early to whip up two batches of apple cinnamon sweet potato muffins to take down with us. My parents came too, so after church we all went home to change and then they came and picked us up and got a chance to walk around the backyard and see all the new flowers and the eight little baby peaches growing on the peach tree (we have peaches!) and then we piled into my dad’s car and joined the throngs of other people all going off to their families’ homes for Easter dinner.

Dinner was ham and pork roast and scalloped potatoes and corn fritters and spinach salad and my muffins and if that wasn’t enough there was cake later for dessert. We did a lot of chatting and didn’t pause the chatting significantly even while doing all the eating. After dinner we all got to view a screening of Richard’s little sister’s television debut, which involved “hot nerd on nerd action” (That probably sounds far more risqué than it really was. Except for maybe the ‘nerd’ part. Um. Never mind). This was naturally followed by much more chatting and raucous laughter and the usual frivolity that ensues when our families get together. Plus there were the very untypical but much appreciated Easter gifts of strawberries and snap peas, and Starbucks gift cards. So while the Easter season never did end up including any Cadbury caramel eggs after all, it had zombies and ham and buttons and family gathering, and best of all, hot nerd on nerd action, right there on the television for all the world to see – all the necessary elements to make this a perfectly marvelous Easter.