I realized late last night that I had not done everything I intended to do yesterday; the main forgotten item being arranging the next few songs for the recorder group. So this morning I got up at my usual early time and after feeding the cats (so they would thus leave me alone), spent the next hour or two at my computer, painstakingly entering three songs in three-part harmony, one single note at a time.

The software I use was probably top of the line at one point, but that was at least a version or two of Windows ago. Now, it's kind of clunky and has an exciting tendency to, occasionally and without warning, freeze up and then shut down. Since the tendency for the program to do this seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of time it has been since I last save whatever it is I happened to be working on at the time, I have learned (the hard way) to save my files often. One of these days, however, I really need to find a new music writing software - something that doesn't require a separate piano keyboard hook-up and that also does not cost a lot. I'm not a composer - I just need something that will let me transcribe songs, change the key and time signature, and perhaps most useful of all, provide the abilty to enter such items as song title, page number, and those little curvy lines to tie notes together that I currently have to do all by hand.

But I digress. I got the songs set up and printed and the program only shut down on me unexpectedly once during the entire session, which is actually quite good, all things considered, and still had plenty of time to shower and dress and eat breakfast, and then poke around at a website that we are hopefully going to be able to fix for a friend, before I had to gather everything together and zip off to the church for the recorder group practice.

We were a very small group today - only three of us out of the usual five, and alas, none of the three of us present plays an alto - but we managed to muddle through half a dozen songs and pick out four that we swore to practice in time to play at the Open House next weekend. I am crossing my fingers that at least one of our alto players can be there next weekend, if only because I do not relish trying to learn how to play a new instrument in one week. Not, mind you, that I have not already determined I probably need to just break down and learn the alto anyway, because the hallmark of a good group leader is the abilty to be flexible, and thus to be able to cover all the parts. Now if I can just track down an alto recorder to actually learn on, I'll be all set.

There was choir practice and then there was church, and in between I gulped down my only coffee of the day in order to wash down what has recently become my daily decongestant. The winter cold seems to have mercifully gone away without doing much damage at all, but my sinuses still hate me. And after all, there is something to be said about having to rely on medication that, according to a fairly new law, requires proof of identification and signature before it can be purchased (apparently pseudoephedrine can be used to make meth. Or something. Go figure). We met my parents for lunch and talked about local politics, because the side effect of living in a somewhat small town where the prime industry wears wool is that there is always something interesting (and usually stupid) going on. And then we came back home, where I snagged thisIrish Diamond Shawl I made during the Knitting Olympics this past winter, and headed off to the new yarn store in Davis to pick up the thing I have been trying to pick up for the past few days.

I left the shawl there, because the other one on display was actually being used by its creator and since I never wear mine (I love knitting lace but I most assuredly do not love wearing it) I figured it could be put to better use selling yarn. There was a small group of knitters at the store, amid a clutter of boxes and we all had fun taking my new knitting design equipment (ha) out of its box and trying to figure out the name of all its parts. I should note that it actually was never meant to have anything to do with knitting, and I suspect that its designers would be quite dumbfounded to learn what I intend to use it for (a use that I cannot mention until after Christmas, because the recipeint of the item I intend to make reads this). They also helped me pick out a few balls of feltable wool in just the right colors so I can start poking at designing a pattern, and then one of them mentioned that they needed someone to do another sample hat for the store, and so I came home with pattern and yarn, and the intent to make a very adorable pineapple hat by the time the store has its grand opening on Wednesday.

This is a NaBloPoMo entry