This week has simultaneously lasted forever and is vanishing far too fast. I mean most weeks recently have felt like that but this one especially.

I am... mostly winning at work? I'm still way behind where I want to be but my job is actually impossible at the moment (no joking) and I feel like I'm still moving forwards so that's a win.

I had a choir rehearsal this evening though and we sang through an anthem I'd never heard before, Ubi Caritas by Ola Gjeilo, and I really loved it. It felt very much like the sort of prayer we need right now too.

What else has happened this week? I accidentally came out as bi to more people than I meant to because I forgot how many people I know offline but follow me on twitter now. I mean I wasn't deliberately not out to them but... yeah. When they started liking the tweet it threw me a little.

Still we're past hump day and on balance it's no a bad/i> week so I'll take that!

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Two evenings of Lessons and Carols done, one as a server and the other in the congregation. They were glorious as always, last night J (aged 8) did one of the readings so perfectly I got quite choked up ♥

Tonight after the service my sister, seiyaharris & I went to a nearby pub and drank Pear & Plum Mulled Cider which was delicious AND as an added bonus there was a pub cat and it came and sat on B quite happily for most of our time there. Lovely end to the evening.

My favourite piece of music from this year's service was Eric Whitacre's Lux Aurumque which I'm going to embed below, I suggest listening too it when you have a moment of peace & quiet this Christmas and bonus points if you can have a candle lit because I think it sounds just like warm candlelight, or sun in the heat of summer or during one of those beautiful and heavy sunsets. Just beautiful all round.

I had a meeting tonight that was almost unnervingly short. It's normally around the 2 hour mark, if it's less we get rewarded with drinks afterwards but that certainly doesn't happen every month. Today it lasted 55 minutes! Everyone was a little concerned we'd missed something...

Still I'm not going to complain about short meetings at this time of year!

In other news apparently I featured in the last 30 seconds of Songs of Praise last night. It's kind of weird getting messages from people saying they saw you when you recorded the hymns MONTHS ago but that's how Songs of Praise works now.

What else? Yuletide still not done but it's progressing. As are Christmas cards. And presents. I mean basically nothing is done except work stuff and Rainbows stuff and Chapter stuff but technically those are priorities so that's probably okay?

I don't really post pictures of the Rainbows online (obviously) but the candlelight & fuzziness of this shot makes them all unrecognisable.

(Christingle was pretty fab this year)

Today has been loooooooong but mostly good? Sang at the service this morning where there were 4 baptisms with some very old fashioned names (one of the babies had Archibald as a middle name <3)

Then it was serving at the next service which involved two very interesting questions. The first was from my 8 year old Boat Girl (carries the incense to go in the thurible) who announced at the end of the service that she had a BIG question... "when exactly is Jesus coming?"

I did try telling her that nobody knows and that's the point but she was fairly certain the Dean must know (sadly he'd gone before I got the chance to watch her ask him)

Then a lady came up to us and asked how long women had been serving at the Abbey and I told her I wasn't sure but about 24-5 years because I've been serving 20 years this year (which is terrifying) and she was so thrilled.

After that we had lunch out and then I switched jumpers for my Guiding hoodie and we survived Christingle with an amount of wax coating hands, trousers, chairs & the floor but no burns and then I found a corner to curl up in with the most recent Temeraire novel and a cup of tea until Evensong.

Four services in one day might be too much even for me but I did get rewarded by the choir singing People Look East (arr. Rose) which is one of my favourite Advent motets.

So a good day all told just long and not to be repeated :-P

I've been doing a journalling exercise (offline) that was meant to take 40 days and I am on day 23 and I started more than 5 months ago... I say this mostly to excuse how terrible I've been at journalling online :-P

Anyway day 22, which I finally wrote about, involved finding things to be thankful for...which might explain why I've found it so difficult recently, not that I don't have things to be thankful for but that it feels wrong to focus on them with so much hatred and death and fear in the world. Though literally as I type that I realise how stupid it sounds, perhaps remembering what I'm thankful for is exactly what I should be doing.

So here's what I've been thankful for in the last week (and I'm sorry I'm still not doing proper theatre reviews)

• This time last week I was thankful for my brilliant goddaughter who turned 7 and had her first communion on the same day (and her last Church Parade as a Rainbow Last monday I was (with quite a lot of effort) thankful that we have a planning department who are determined to protect our heritage.... but more thankful that we have councillors who know when to ignore their officers and allow through a really important project (the Cathedral HLF project has planning permission just in time for the next HLF funding stage <3
  
• I'm so thankful for the Rainbows. Even when I'm stressed because we can't take enough or because I want to strangle my fellow leaders I am ALWAYS thankful for my ridiculous Rainbows who burst into song at the slightest thing and love playing In and Out the Dusty Bluebells and who can spend huge amounts of time just picking their favourite badges on the leaders' camp blankets <3 We had four leavers this term and none of them were girls I was really ready to say goodbye to. But I'm thankful for them all the same and I can't wait to see who they become as they grow up.
  
• Well THAT got emotional. So I'm also thankful for musicals and strippers and musicals about strippers set in a gay club and put on in London's only LGBT theatre AND I'm especially thankful to friends who think that such musicals (Get 'Em Off at Above the Stag FYI) are the perfect birthday present for me <3 Even if it does amuse me endlessly that the first show I saw with my newly ordained friend now he's an actual priest was about gay strippers <333 (ps. go see Get 'Em Off, it's so much fun and secretly covers a bunch of issues and also the cast is SO HOT and adorable)
  
• And then I'm also thankful for living near enough to London that late night gigs on the Southbank are possible even if they aren't wise and Joe Stilgoe might not have started on time but he was SO worth the late night and lack of sleep with his nostalgia and films and cartoons and the best Rhythm of Life I've ever heard.
  
• I'm thankful for nights in too incidentally even when I was meant to be out but I'm thankful I have a home that's comfortable with a family I love and full of books (and also alcohol) :-P
  
• I'm thankful for The Sixteen's education programme and Sounds Sublime festival and the chance to sing Charles Wood's settings of Shakespeare even if I could only hear through one ear. I'm thankful for the tips I learned and the chance to sing inside St Clement Danes.
  
• And I think I have to finish with the fact that I'm thankful for the Tour de France and all the riders in it and all the people I can share watching it with from my Dad who started my love to all the people who love the same riders I do to the ones I endlessly disagree with but are willing to talk to me about them <3 and I'm thankful for the ITV4 crew and their skill and insight and the fact that they quite clearly love what they're doing and care for each other (particulary obvious today with Chris Boardman's sudden absence and the sad news of his mother's death).

Of course I'm also HUGELY thankful for every one of you who reads these posts whether you comment or not ♥

And now that's enough Pollyanna rubbish :-P Tomorrow is Monday and probably I will mostly be thankful for the saving magic that is a good cup of tea!

There's been a little flurry of people talking about posting more so I'm going to try again because it makes me sad that I'm not posting right now.

I mean how will future!Sarah remember the absolute glee of Mark Cavendish drawing level with Bernard Hinault on stage wins? ♥ quite apart from the utter joy of seeing Mark, Mark & Bernie back together again!

(I really need a few more pictures of the boys in their Team Dimenson Data so I can update my icons but at least ( I have a picture of him in Yellow now!Collapse )

This weekend was the weekend of ALL the church. Which is a little hilarious just a fortnight after St Albans Day and another weekend of ALL the church. This weekend actually won on service numbers.

1. Saturday afternoon was my friend David's ordination as a priest at Holy Trinity Eltham, beautiful service and I got more emotional than I expected especially after he started talking about how long this journey had been and how he had always assumed the church didn't call people like him (especially poignant standing in Jeffrey John's old parish church)
   
2. Sunday morning was baptisms, 6 of them! Plus we got to sing Parry's My soul, there is a country which might be my absolute favourite anthem to sing (so far)
   
3. Slightly later on Sunday morning 16 Deacons were ordained and I was clerk for the first time at an ordination (nominally in charge of the team of servers but we had such a great little team I didn't really need to lead). Main issue was nobody quite expected such a huge congregation- around 13-1400 people seems to be the current estimate! Not a bad problem to have.
   
4. Finally on Sunday afternoon (after a lot of rehearsal with a one off scratch choir) was David's first Eucharist (well first time presiding at the Eucharist, not quite sure of the proper terminology). There were LOTS of priests and some rather involved choreography and a piece of "tradition" that involved presenting flowers to the Virgin that I am a little dubious about but the whole thing was so incredibly David that it was perfect anyway and afterwards his parish laid on the most spectacular feast <3

So a fairly intense weekend but a good one.

Now if only I could get up some sense of urgency about everything on my to do list... urgency and/or time management are proving a little challenging at the moment.

How come I've got loads done today and yet don't feel any better?

(oh, right, it's because I looked at the Rainbow waiting list and wanted to cry because OMG so many children and not enough places BUT we do have a potential new leader so maybe we can fix this?)

ANYWAY I'll probably feel better tomorrow when I look at my to-do list and it's half the length it has been recently so there's that.

Yesterday was so much fun too. The Sixteen do these workshops at various places during their Choral Pilgrimage tours and you get to sing some of the music that's going to be in the concert and they talk about the composers and the history of the pieces and lots about technique and particularly how to sing this amazing polyphonic music that they do.

( Flight of Angels - The Sixteen (workshop & concert)Collapse )

Started learning our Christmas music at choir last night- we're singing No Small Wonder which I absolutely adore but which is (unsurprisingly) quite hard.

( Sight reading irritations leading into a minor choir rantCollapse )

*takes a deep breath*

I have an "empty" evening tonight during which I just need to sort out my christmas card list, present list, work out where I'm going this weekend, write letters to the new Rainbows for next term and hopefully make St Nicholas biscuits... that could wait till tomorrow though so we'll see.

#SeasonsReadings

4. For chilly nights: Well tonight is chilly and I'll be reading Such Darling Dodos but that's just because it's my current book. A more general chilly night recommendation would be Little Women (or any of its sequels) because I find them very cosy and comforting or perhaps Jo of the Chalet School with its descriptions of winter in Innsbruck OH or Little House in the Big Woods! Comfort reading basically.

Earlier this week I was poking around old LJ entries (sometimes I like to look at entries from "this day" going back through the years) and ended up with a whole bunch of feelings about how long I'd know people and how long ago things were but also I had a minor panic attack because in several entries I talk about Christmas preparations like asking for addresses etc. and I am apparently WAY behind this year. OH WELL.

Stir Up Sunday/Christ the King today which meant the lovely Stir Up collect and we sang Parry' My Soul, There Is A Country and also at the Choral Eucharist the boys sang Langlais Messe Solennelle which I love (I'd drop a link in here but I can't find a recording/video that sounds right via google atm). And then next week Advent /o\

Anyway prior to today I've been having a rather lovely weekend- on Friday evening I had supper with my sister & brother-in-law in Cambridge and then went to see a student production of The Mikado starring my friend David (who some of you have met).

( The Mikado @ Robinson College, CambridgeCollapse )

So that was fun! Drive home in the dark and the rain and the mist was less fun but it was totally worth it.

Yesterday wasmore theatre- Henry IV at the Donmar- but I'm falling asleep rn so it'll have to wait!

I was so much better at posting when I "had" to post a poem every day- perhaps I ought to try some other challenges. I've always felt the camera on my phone wasn't really good enough for a photo every day but it isn't AWFUL. Or... I don't know. What else could I challenge myself to do?

I mean I could just challenge myself to POST every day but I fear I'd just fail at that *g*

Anyway this weekend was kind of amazing. Or at least Sunday was completely amazing.

I signed up to take part in the London Community Gospel Choir's 30 Choir Festival in Southbank Centre and it was a very long day but so much fun.

( Gospel workshops and singing with RevCollapse )

The other BIG thing for the day was the Guinness World Record attempt- largest Gospel choir in a concert. We had a rehearsal in the afternoon which was 2 hours long and mostly consisted of getting everyone in the right seats- they had to be in the right places for the count. As an individual (rather than someone who'd come with a choir) I was sitting in a box with three other ladies and we were watching the chaos in the stalls below when suddenly they announced that all of us in the boxes would actually be singing ON STAGE WITH LCGC

*cue minor freak out*

So that was nice. We had to walk down from the boxes together and onto the stage and sort of arrange ourselves around the choir and the 5 conductors *G*

( LCGC Concert & World Record AttemptCollapse )

Here's a video of Oh Happy Day and the announcement- I can see myself in it quite a few times but I doubt anyone else will be able to spot me- my forehead becomes very noticeable round about the 8'20 mark *g*



I really REALLY need to find somewhere I can sing with a gospel choir again though, there's nothing quite like it.