Quick note: this post is really part 2 of a multi-part post about my experience in the Huntsville Master Chorale. If you haven't read the first post, go do it now. :)

So, I left off at just about the point that I was beginning to believe that I could handle this new music by the time the concert came around.

At this point, I feel like I should stop and say how much fun it is to sing for our director, Tom. A very good friend of mine got in the habit of posting funny things that her choir director said during rehearsals. I remember reading those and being downright jealous not only that she had her own "musical outlet" but also that her director found such joy in the process. After my very first practice, I knew it was going to be that way with Tom. He's funny, he's incredibly patient with us, and it seems obvious to me that he loves doing it.

Side note: I actually started notating "Tom-isms" in my music for later posting, but unfortunately I didn't get around to posting until now... after we turned in our music. Maybe I'll do better over the coming practice cycle.

Anyway, that bit about Tom actually leads into the next part of my story. We were finishing up practice one night, and Tom said that he wanted the various soloists that he had assigned for the Gospel Mass to hang around for a few minutes (as he had asked in an email sent out previously). I was busy shoving my music in my folder and getting ready to walk out, when Tom looked straight at me and said, "Let's go over yours right quick."

I swear that right then and there I had one of those "Who's he looking at behind me?" moments, with the dumb look on my face and everything. I think I even turned around to see who he was talking to. I may have managed to say, "What?" Tom said, "Yeah. Didn't you get the email I sent out?" My response: "Yeah. I remember seeing an email about solos, but I didn't occur to me that I actually needed to read it." Tom (looking at Sharon, our piano accompanist): "Listen to this guy!"

Sure enough, at the bottom of the email I had ignored, Tom had asked if I would look at one of the 7 or 8 measure "mini solos" he had carved out of the Sanctus. He said that he thought the range fit my voice well and that I might enjoy working out how to embellish it. "Dumbfounded" is not a word I often use to describe myself, but there I was. I read it cold once or twice that night, apologized for not paying attention to the email, and told him I would work on it for the next practice.

I poked at it over the next week, and I figured out where it felt like it wanted to go. I can't really tell you from where I drew the inspiration. Honestly, it felt pretty over-the-top to me, but it also felt right. Tom really didn't give any of the soloists any constraints or specific style instructions. I think he really wanted to find out what each of us would do to personalize it.

I unleashed my interpretation on the Chorale at the next practice. I had no clue what everyone was going to think of it, and I was still wondering why it was me and not someone else doing it. Don't get me wrong... I do pretty well, but I'm nowhere close to the best in this group. The initial reaction, I think, was surprise. That could have been either good or bad. I'll skip the dramatics (and also the specifics) and say that from that point all the way through the concert performance on Sunday, I got more compliments and encouragement than I ever expected. Given that even I don't know exactly from whence it came, it was interesting to hear folks ask me specifics about my musical background in response to the solo. I think Sharon was probably on the right track when she said she could hear elements of contemporary Christian music.

I think I'm going to end up with 3 posts out of this. I still want to talk a bit about the literature we performed, but that feels like it needs to be another installment. :)

I said in my previous post on the subject that I would keep everyone posted as the Huntsville Master Chorale's season progressed. I think I've been holding my breath a bit on posting the next installment for much the same reason as the first: I just wasn't sure how well I was going to do. :)

In that first post, I said that I had jumped into the deep end, and I wasn't kidding. It took me approximately half a practice to realize just how much talent I was in the midst of. The Chorale is chock full of music teachers and ministers of music. One of them is our excellent piano accompanist. Another directed our men-only piece for this concert. One gentleman served as our authority on Hebrew pronunciation, because it's only one of several languages he has studied. Another member (if I remember correctly) actually did graduate level research on black gospel music, so Tom tagged out with him on the appropriate piece. Then there are the voices. I think Tom had fun this time finding as many solos as he could, because he has so many excellent voices to choose from.

I haven't even started talking about the literature yet. About half of our program for this concert was Jewish in origin. Several of the pieces were liturgical. Those and more required us to learn to pronounce Hebrew. It was transliterated, thank goodness, but still an additional challenge. As for the music itself, it was definitely the most difficult I've ever had to sing. So, it wasn't much of a comfort to me to hear that the music had been specifically chosen to be not very difficult (since we only had 9 rehearsals before the concert). I distinctly remember leaving the second practice feeling like I was barely keeping my head above water. I was certain that everyone around me could tell just how much I was struggling (and I'm still not sure I was wrong about that feeling).

I kept plugging, though, and the long-disused "musical muscles" started flexing again. It had been so long that I had forgotten just how automatic (and how subconscious) music memory is for me. Little by little I started being able to feel my way through the pieces. It gradually got less and less about remembering how to get from one note to the next and more and more about learning and remembering the nuance and style required for every piece. By the last couple of practices, I was really beginning to have fun with it.

In the interest of making sure that I get something posted tonight, I'm going to stop there and continue in the next post. :)

I've been totally sitting on this one for over a week. I wanted to make sure it was going to work out before I announced it, and as of tonight it's official. I'm now a baritone in the Huntsville Master Chorale.

Way back in May, the Chorale had a free concert in the main library. Wendy and Morgan (new friends met through Amy at work) are members of the Chorale, and the combination of supporting friends, good choral music, and... well... free was too much to resist. Amy and I went and thoroughly enjoyed it. The literature performed was quite a varied mix, and it included more than one challenging piece. In the process, I spotted in the group a woman named Linda who is a regular at the local contra dance. After the concert, I walked up and spoke to the folks that I knew, and Linda asked if I sing and read music. When I answered "yes" to both she brightened visibly and said that I should join up. Once Wendy found out I was interested, she started encouraging me as well, and she tipped me off that the fall season started tonight, so I contacted Tom (the director). That was over a week ago. After my email and our brief phone conversation, Tom seemed quite sure that I would fit right in. I was a bit nervous, though. My voice is a bit rusty from lack of use, and I've never been in a formal choir/chorus/chorale or had any formal vocal training.

To shorten the story up a bit, tonight was my audition. Tom seemed very pleased at my abilities. So, I went immediately from my audition straight into the group's first fall practice. :) The music is certainly more challenging than anything I've ever sung before (some of it will involve learning how to pronounce Hebrew, for instance), but that's a good thing! The other members were quite friendly, and I can already tell that Tom is going to be loads of fun as a director.

So, I finally have an outlet for singing. :) I'm very excited. I'll post more details as the season progresses, but I'll go ahead and mention that our first performance this fall will be at Temple B'nai Sholom at 4 PM on Sunday, September 30 (I've chucked myself into the deep end! *grin*)

Cleaning up another promised post, details about why my car was gone so long for those who are mechanically inclined. The following details came from the [very helpful] tech who worked on my car.

It all came down to one bolt.

The two camshafts in my car's engine are driven by a chain. That chain meshes with an "intermediate shaft", which in turn meshes with another chain that completes the mechanical connection down to the crankshaft. That "intermediate shaft" isn't really a shaft. It's the oil pump. At some point, a bolt which holds that oil pump in place sheared in two. This allowed the oil pump to tilt out of position. If this had been allowed to continue for any length of time, the oil pump and the entire cam drive train would have basically come loose and thus caused the pretty complete destruction of the engine from lack of oil pressure and from valves smacking into pistons.

Luckily, the very smart engine computer in the car noticed that the cams were out of position from where they should be and lit up the "check engine" light. I dutifully took the car into VW the next day to see what had happened.

When the local tech called VW to get some advice and described the problem, the guy on the other end of the phone put him on hold, and an engineer came on the line. The engineer told the local tech exactly what to look for and said to basically replace the entire cam drive set (oil pump, chains, gears, etc.). In other words, VW knows about this one. By the way, doing the work involves removing the transmission to get to the appropriate side of the engine.

The tech did as he was told, which required a wait for parts to arrive from Germany. He finally got it back together, cranked it up, and it quit. He tried turning the crank by hand, and it wouldn't budge. More calls to VW. To shorten it up a little bit, the replacement oil pump was defective. Verdict? Replace everything again. More wait for parts from Germany. To his credit, the tech decided to pull the cylinder head and to drop the oil pan to look for signs of internal damage. None found. He finally got all the parts, got everything back together, and I got my car back. Total time: 5 1/2 weeks.

So, I'm not happy that I was without my car for so long, and I'm going to be VERY attentive for future engine problems, but they weren't just sitting on their hands. It was a serious problem. Overall I'm pretty pleased with how it went. I hope it stays that way.

As promised, I'll take a few lines and talk about what made me so happy a week ago Friday.

Take a journey with me in the WABAC machine to a time before there was Internet in people's homes... a time when in order to get our online fix from home, most of us had to point our modems either to a locally-run dial-up BBS or to subscribe to a proprietary online service. About my senior year or so of high school, my Mom bought a surplus PC that came with a modem and the software to connect to one of those services, called Prodigy. I somehow ended up talking her into letting me sign up, and probably several times a night, I used to uncoil a 25-foot phone cord to the nearest jack and dial in.

Being from a very rural area my whole life at that point, I loved being able to meet and trade messages with kids in other parts of the country. I even had a map on my wall for a while with a push-pin for each of my new pen-pals. One that I became especially close to was named Catherine and lived out on the west coast. Since Prodigy's mail facility had limits on how much you could write, we ended up trading a lot of snail mail. I shudder to think how many trees we killed sending letters back and forth. At some point, we both ended up dropping the service, and I went off to college. We kept trading mail, though.

In a lot of ways, Catherine and I at the time lived almost in different worlds... geographically, culturally, and to a large extent ideologically. I was learning to "stretch", so to speak, but it was a very slow process. One day Catherine sent me a letter at a pretty vulnerable time in her life that in effect asked me to step outside of my comfort zone. In my defense, it was a pretty big step for me, but I dropped the ball pretty seriously. I was scared, and I planted my feet, to continue the metaphor. I said some pretty nasty things, and she felt very betrayed. Our friendship stopped abruptly and bitterly.

Some years later she emailed me offering an olive branch. By that point, all my rancor over the situation was gone, but I wasn't ready to admit I'd been wrong. I was polite, and we traded a couple of emails, but it was a shell of the former friendship. The emails dropped off pretty quickly.

Those close to me realize that I've been big on introspection and self-understanding the last few years. I've cleared a lot of cobwebs and learned a lot about myself. I ain't perfect, and I'm never going to be, but I like to think I'm improving in a lot of ways. A couple of weeks ago, my mind drifted back to a friendship I had long considered lost. I realized I was finally in a place to let go of a lot of the crap that I had put in the way so many years before. I figured I was too late to salvage anything, and I really didn't know if there was anything to salvage. I decided to give it a try, though. With some creative use of Google and other resources, I managed to find an email address for Catherine. I sent the email on a Thursday night and then figured I was going to be sitting on my hands for a while.

The next morning, a very surprised Catherine sent a quick message (bless you!) saying that she would indeed like to try catching up. It made my day in a way that I felt I had to post about. :) She and I have been catching up for about a week now. Like I said, it's very much still a story in progress. We've both changed a lot over the years, but we're both having a lot of fun filling in the gap.

So... now you know about the mysterious "Cat" who commented on my last post. :)

What started out yesterday as just a good day is turning into a peach of a weekend. The best new news is that the uberwagon is finally home! :) Total time in the shop: 5 and a half weeks. I'll write that up in another post soon. The short story: the long wait was annoying and undesirable but justified.

Amy and I went to pick me up some new pants, and we ended up buying me shirts, ties, shoes, etc. as well. I gotta give Men's Wearhouse props. It wasn't exactly a cheap trip, but the threads look nice, and they were obtained with no fuss whatsoever. I don't like spending time shopping for clothes. If someone can give me some choices to look at and pick from, I'm a happy camper.

The newly-released (in region 1, anyway) DVD set for three of my all-time favorite Dr. Who serials (The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis, and Castrovalva) arrived yesterday. Cool DVD extras, and I get to see them in the best quality I've probably ever seen them in. The only time I've ever seen them is from the original VHS recordings I made *mumblemumble* years ago from PBS.

As for the previous post... Yes, I know it was cryptic and I didn't allow comments so people could ask the obvious question. I wanted to put it out there how happy I was, and I wanted to have it recorded in the context of when it happened. However, doing it justice requires more detail than I'm willing to put on the site right now. I promise I'll write about it once I figure out how I want to write about it. For one thing, it's still very much a story in progress. Just know that it made me very very happy. Amy can confirm that. She saw it.

Remember how I said in my previous post on the subject that there was a pretty good chance the alopecia would manifest in another spot? *sigh* Found it tonight. It's pretty small so far, but it will probably get bigger.

Though it may seem so, I have not dropped off the face of the earth since last Thursday. I had a near data disaster with the house server that morning: the system drive decided it wanted to die. Fortunately, the SMART diagnostics caught it before it went under (yay smartmontools and nightly automated testing!), so I was able to get backups. I had a replacement drive that day, but I'm just tonight getting the system back to about 90% running. Part of what went away while that was happening was my feed reader. It's back up now, but I see I have a LOT of catching up to do (especially since I just added a couple of friends' feeds).

So, bear with me as I catch up. :)

This is a continuation of a story begun in the previous entry. If you're starting here, go back and read the first one first. Otherwise you won't get all that drama I built up for you. :) Come back here when you're done. Read more »

I have several friends that ride motorcycles, and I've been curious about riding for several years now. I finally decided to bite the bullet and see if riding is something I would enjoy and something I would be good at. So, this weekend I participated in a beginning motorcycle rider course. I finished up Sunday afternoon, and this seemed like a good place to let folks know how it went. Fair warning, this one's LONG. :) Read more »