It isn't clear to me that hardship makes you stronger. It is clear however that if you are weak, hardship kills you. Ice storms in Georgia sculpt our landscape. Weak limbs come crashing down; pine trees bend near double and then snap in two. Some trees uproot and crash down. The birds are in trouble. The frozen ground makes it difficult to feed. All their water is frozen. Our wild cats have been off seeking shelter from the sleet and one is missing. Hopefully she's holed up somewhere dry.

It's warming up today. 34 degrees. So the ice is cascading from the treetops and raining down exploding brusts of ice on the little birds in the hedges and shrubs.

A little difficulty in life may help you learn to cope. You may become anured to hardship. I was reading about salt miners in Pakistan. They struggle in lifethreatening, backbreaking work for $2 a day. There have been no advances in their mining technology in the past 50 years. Isn't that impossible to fathom. The photos of the men showed tired weathered faces. The newspaper showed the a little black lady in La Grange. She is about to lose her 1000 sq. ft. house. She's been paying on the mortgage for 28 years but has fallen behind, and in Georgia banks can forclose on your house in 37 days, sell it on the courthouse steps and you are out and gone.
Her husband became ill with cancer at 50 and died. She was disabled when poor circulation caused her to have her leg amputated. She gets $994 a month in social security and her house payment is $459. I don't know what will become of her. But hey. Bank profits are up.

Hardships kill the weak. The problem with the Republican party is that their answer to hardship is "Be strong like me." God help them if they ever need compassion, mercy, or help."

I have cardinals, house finches, brown thrashers, sparrows, tufted titmouses, and bluejays at the feeder this morning. Everyone is hungry.

When you are working on a project, driving hard with your head down, it's sometimes difficult to see where you are in relationship to the project. As you approach the deadline, you hope that the amount of work left will squeeze into the amount of time remaining. Today I more or less ran out of things to do on this project. My girls sang their program in a big way. Beautiful sounds, dramatic expressiveness, for memory, spectacular solo work. There are places where they sing and you hear the sounds and see them singing but you have to think, "How are they doing that?" It was a very satisfying performance, worthy of a national convention performance. And, they have 4 more rehearsals. We got where I want to be before we reached the deadline. Whew. Now we have 4 more chances to run repetitions of the entire performance to solidify our feel for the real performances next Friday and Saturday in Los Angeles.

You remember the saying "Practice makes perfect!" A nice idea, but incorrect, or incomplete. It's "perfect practice" that makes perfect. Once you get it well in hand, then you must repeat and repeat and repeat. Nothing left to chance. This bunch has worked like salt miners all year. Slaving away. They are not emotional about it. No hysteria. No butterflies. They just work the same everyday, from the beginning to the end of the class. Their performance will seem passionate and emotional, but they will fool the audience. Their craft is so good that the audience will read their practiced nuances as emotion. They are musicians.

It is difficult to blog when you get consumed with yourself. Life can be overwhelming. Traveling to L.A. with 56 people next week is crazy. There are four performances for national audiences, also a rehearsal. Who knows what the acoustics will do to my girls' sound? Then how do I keep them happy for 5 days? Finding my way in a strange city bothers me too. I'll see people I've not seen for years I'm sure. That will be nice. I've been working on a T-Shirt for them, the program, photographs for the program, program notes for the program, goodie bags to to recognize the girls on the day before we leave, the itinerary, airline tickets, collecting money. Then because the opportunity arose and it is just what we wanted, we bought a house. It is a sweet house, but I can't believe I'm moving. Oh and I am sponsoring a choral festival the week after the house closes. Ha Ha Ha!

Anyway with all this happening to me at once, it is difficult to think about anything else. Suddenly it will be April and L.A. and moving will just be a memory. Hey, it's only two months.

This summer should be nice.

Every time I buy a new house it costs twice as much as the last one I bought. This has to be the last house I buy. I've signed a contract on a new house. It is our dream house. If all goes according to plan, we will be moving about 7 miles from where we are now. Advantages of the new place: 1) much nearer to work for both of us. Also near retail areas. We might need only one car. A golf cart is in my future. It will add about 45 minutes a day to my life. Putting 45 minutes into your day is a cool thing. Think how much more I can get done . . . or sleep. 2) It will be like living inside an art work. It is a beautiful place with ceramic tile, beautiful cabinetry, wide hallways, a great curved staircase that serves as much as an ornament to the foyer as an access to the loft, bonus room and two bedrooms. 3) Hopefully this property will be a good investment, perhaps earning as much in 10 years as I will pay for the property.

The house is a cluster home in a multi-dimensional community of retail businesses, offices, common areas, and private homes. I've seen these communities before and they are very attractive. Walking trails, parks, sidewalk cafes and specialty shops. The first section of 135 homes is finished and we would be purchasing a resale of the first model home in the area. It is two years old. I'll try to put up some photos tomorrow, (if I can figure out how to put up photos.)

Performance pressure. My guess is that most people don't know about it. But I'll tell you . . . it looms. It's shadowy and grows in the night, surrounding you and blocking out everything else. All other details of life except for the performance become grating irritations, little stones in your shoe. Moments of preparation that are lost because of business details are alarming. Students don't feel the pressure much. If they did they'd be frantic, so I shield them from it with false non chalance. We have four National Convention performances in about 3 weeks. Our audience will have come from Boise and Bangor, Knoxville and Nottingham, Calgary and Charleston, Singapore, Seattle, Sioux City, San Francisco and San Antonio. They are looking for brilliant literature, ideas, and performances to inspire them and help them reinvent themselves. They have heard thousands of performances before. Some have moved them. They are hoping that your performance will move them again. They want to be reminded of forgotten passion. They are numb to good performances. Only impossible things interest them. When they hear you and have no idea what you have done to make that sound, they begin to get interested.

People ask to help you with details, but there seems to be no relief at this point. The weight grows in the darkness. You haven't done this. You should have done that sooner. You better not forget this.

I just keep ticking off the details, one by one, hoping against hope that my efforts will be good enough that I won't fail. Strangely, it's no consolation that I've done it before and come through it just fine.

I first heard this sound in Charleston, SC. (Maybe that was the first time I had the awareness of hearing such a sound.) It was the first ACDA convention that I had attended. I dragged my wife along, post shoulder surgery and she spent long hours sitting in a mechanical chair that we somehow loaded into the car and set up in the hotel room, all for the purpose of rotating her rotater cuff in a way to prevent the creation of scar tissue. Enough about that. Anyway, in some church balcony I crowded into a concert and heard about a dozen singers from Europe. It was 1998. I still remember their Bach Motet VI, Lobe den Herren, and the fabulous Alleluia that closes that impossible work. Ah ah ah ah le heh lu yah. Do you know it? (Aside: Why in the world don't I do the Alleluia with Chamber Choir in the Spring? Second Aside: I wonder if Alan could arrange that for SSAA?) But what I remember the most of the performance was that the singers voices were so carefully matched. There were not sopranos, altos, tenors, nor basses. Rather each voice matched the sound of the person next to them EXACTLY, and each successive voice had a slightly lower range. All in all though, the lowest bass and the highest soprano made the same fundamental sound. Their mental picture of the sound was the same. Therefore, even with so few singers, there were no blend issues. Each sound folded into every other sound.

This year's Singers are making that sound. I can't tell if altos or sopranos are singing. They all make the same sound. I can't tell if anyone is absent. If four first sopranos are missing, the sound does not change. It may be at a smaller dynamic, but the tone remains the same.

Did someone say, "if we have never had hard times then we cannot recognize good times." I remember wondering, years ago, why I was saddled with year after year of wickedly mediocre choirs. (Think silk purse/sow's ear idioms). Perhaps it was in order that I might recognize fully the significance of having a good thing at my advanced age, so that I might be appropriately thankful. It's quite a privilege to direct one of America's most amazing choirs. I have no idea how I came to stand in front of them.

If you have a few minutes and want to read some interesting blogs, try this site to get you started: http://www.dcbloggers.com/ Look Sarah or Carter are going to have to help me learn how to make things into hyperlinks or you'll just have to keep cutting and pasting when you read my blog. dcbloggers has some cool sites though. I especially liked a forward about eating during the holidays that I found at Zippyland. It seemed to be a forward anyway so I have stolen it and include it here.

Lessons in Oxymorons Presents: an enjoyable forward (holiday-themed)

Holiday Eating Tips

1. Avoid carrot sticks. Anyone who puts carrots on a holiday buffet table knows nothing of the Christmas spirit. In fact, if you see carrots, leave immediately. Go next door, where they're serving rum balls.

2. Drink as much eggnog as you can. And quickly. Like fine single-malt scotch, it's rare. In fact, it's even rarer than single-malt scotch. You can't find it any other time of year but now. So drink up! Who cares that it has 10,000 calories in every sip? It's not as if you're going to turn into an eggnog-aholic or something. It's a treat. Enjoy it. Have one for me. Have two. It's later than you think. It's Christmas!

3. If something comes with gravy, use it. That's the whole point of gravy. Gravy does not stand alone. Pour it on. Make a volcano out of your mashed potatoes. Fill it with gravy. Eat the volcano. Repeat.

4. As for mashed potatoes, always ask if they're made with skim milk or whole milk. If it's skim, pass. Why bother? It's like buying a sports car with an automatic transmission.

5. Do not have a snack before going to a party in an effort to control your eating. The whole point of going to a Christmas party is to eat other people's food for free. Lots of it. Hello?

6. Under no circumstances should you exercise between now and New Year's. You can do that in January when you have nothing else to do. This is the time for long naps, which you'll need after circling the buffet table while carrying a 10-pound plate of food and that vat of eggnog.

7. If you come across something really good at a buffet table, like frosted Christmas cookies in the shape and size of Santa, position yourself near them and don't budge. Have as many as you can before becoming the center of attention. They're like a beautiful pair of shoes. If you leave them behind, you're never going to see them again.

8. Same for pies. Apple. Pumpkin. Mincemeat. Have a slice of each. Or, if you don't like mincemeat, have two apples and one pumpkin. Always have three. When else do you get to have more than one dessert? Labor Day?

9. Did someone mention fruitcake? Granted, it's loaded with the mandatory celebratory calories, but avoid it at all cost. I mean, have some standards.

10. One final tip: If you don't feel terrible when you leave the party or get up from the table, you haven't been paying attention. Reread tips; start over, but hurry, January is just around the corner.

Remember this motto to live by:
"Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, martini in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming, "WOO HOO what a ride!"

Okay back to live action. I'd also like to have a counter on my blog and a way for people to leave comments, but I don't know how to do that either. Yoo hoo. Carter. Sarah.

Each profession has it's own idiosyncrasies. I've taught public high school, been a music minister, built houses, and taught college. Teaching college is rewarding and not too difficult. The students want you to teach them in the music area. Occasionally someone wouldn't work, but you just failed them. Being a music minister is complex, but it is also not difficult most of the time. Building houses is a management problem and scary. Lots can go wrong, and subcontractors are sometimes devious and willful. But teaching public school is a challenge every minute of every day. There are no moments of rest. I see 320 students each day and many of them will call my name. Half their questions are already answered somewhere on the board, but they ask me anyway. It wears you down.

One of the odd things that happens to you is that when there is a substantial break, like two weeks for Christmas holiday, the teachers dread going back. I don't remember anything like this as a student. It is no matter that I thoroughly enjoy my day and my students and their shining faces. It is just one of those things that comes with being a school teacher.

I have to teach for seven and a half more years, or at least for one more year to secure my pension, and then find something else to challenge me. But I also can't imagine myself without choirs to conduct. Could it be as interesting to try and mentor young teachers? I never felt really mentored by my instructors in education. I rather found them out of touch with teaching. There was little of what they talked about that I ever used. Rather I learned to teach in workshops and summer courses, led by other teachers. They told me what they were doing that worked. How to control the choir, how to move them forward, how to motivate them. What will I do after age 60? Can I physically do the work of a high school conductor at that age? As I look around, I don't see any conductors that age. Not a good sign. I guess I'll find my way as time goes on.

I'm back to work tomorrow. Students on Tuesday.