What a fun and full day! At church, today is Pentecost. Part of some traditions are to dress in Red and decorate in Red, to signify the "tongues of fire" reported to have descended on the heads of the apostles on the day we now call Pentecost. Also, "speaking in tongues" occured at this incident—where Jews of all different backgrounds and languages were in town for the Festival of Booths, and they heard the apostles all speaking in their native language. I suppose this was a cross between the Tower of Babel gone good and the earpieces at the United Nations.

To simulate the experience, our pastor asked the church email list if anyone was a speaker of a non-English language, to bring a copy of the 3rd scripture reading in that other language so we could have more than one language being spoken at once. Can I just say how much I love the internet? *hee hee* I had researched the Mandarin Chinese earlier in the week, since I studied that in college and could still read aloud if I had the Pinyin transliteration. I got carried away this morning and transcribed several languages, just in case there were others who might be free to read aloud in languages they may have studied in high school or college. And the Bible is one of the most translated works around, so it was easy to find English/Other translations online and just hand-write them before heading off to church. The one person I knew spoke Norwegian wasn't there this morning, but we were able to have a reading that included (all at once) English, German, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, and Mandarin Chinese. It was pretty wild—although I had to concentrate so hard on the tones that I really couldn't hear anyone else while I was reciting the Chinese.

I dropped the car off again before church, for the squealing belt issue, and after church and lunch with Donna, the car was all repaired, all for free! It seems they'd only been tightening one belt, when it was a second belt that had been the problem all along. Every time I'd complained that it wasn't fixed, they were perplexed because there was nothing wrong with the first belt. They were a little embarassed to tell me they had been missing the second belt in their checks before, and they were happy to fix it for free. I love my car guys!

Oh, and I'm incredibly thankful to Dayle and Ken for having an extra PC keyboard in their Mac household, since my laptop is having massive keyboard issues. (sigh)

Let's see, to round out my day—Donna and I spent a little time hanging out before chorus, chatting with the pastor, chatting about sign language, our personal learning goals, and how we'll study together. Then when chorus got together for rehearsal, we spent most of the first hour talking about what we want out of the experience, where we want to go, and how we want to schedule things. We're going to take some time off this summer, get together for two planning meetings, and start true rehearsals again this fall. We want to write a mission statement, work on recruiting singers from the community, and really organize ourselves. It's hard to believe I may actually be co-directing a fledgling start-up Community Choir, but it sure looks like that's what's happening. It's quite exciting, and I think I'm going to look into studying how to be a better conductor and how to hold effective warm-ups and rehearsals. Wow.

And to round out the evening—two of the ladies who helped start the chorus in the first place—they went out to dinner with me. We finally got to tell each other long stories about our backgrounds, college, employment, goals, relationships, stuff—it was really fun. Both of them are my Mom's age, but we get along like a bunch of school chums, and I have a blast with them. It was nice to finally get to swap stories for hours on end, and I was just buzzing with energy by the end of the day. Of course, the nice thing was this made it easier to finish the long drive home. I'm really looking forward to launching this chorus with Susan and with Julia, more than ever before.

Good night folks! Time to get some sleep!