Grousings:

Being mystified by printer networking

Being exasperated by the non-printability of a document

Between the vet and the printer and research and a bajillion e-mails and QA and rehearsal and yet more e-mails and a monster pile of filing, my total intake for the day consisted of a "tall" (=the "small" at Starbucks) latte, a slice of pumpkin bread, a packet of dried squid, a hasty quarter-plate of leftover rice/onion/tomato/pesto mash, a past-its-date granola bar, two slippery elm lozenges, and two mugs of tea. Not my preferred m.o.

Glad things:

I'm lingering at the office to finish that second mug of tea, along with a Chinese "preserved plum" and a handful of chocolate-covered toffee peanuts. (And to settle down enough so that after the library book drop, I can realistically head to bed sans hamster-wheel brain.)

I keep forgetting that my piano at home is tuned a half-step higher than the one at church. Which means it's a lot easier to hit and sustain high Es away from my living room. *grin*

Joan Szymko's "Illumina le tenebre" is not a piece I'm really connecting to, for the most part, but there's this one soprano phrase at measures 27-29 -- "Dammi senno" (Give me wisdom) -- where the B-G-A-G progression just gets me....

...which puts it in the same group as Verdi's "Ad te omnis caro veniet," the "Adonai roi"s in Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, the part of the Kiddush that soars with the words "kivanu vacharta v'otanu kidashta..."

Speaking of which, I went to kabbalat shabbat for the first time in 2 or 3 years last Friday. It coincided with the eve of a double bar/bat mitzvah, which meant it was held in a larger chapel, with triple the attendance I remember, and the synagogue has a new rabbi and soloist. I hope they haven't done away with the follow-along pamphlets for non-Hebrew readers...

But I did work through a page of Hebrew in 10 minutes a day over my latte and pumpkin bread.

On my car stereo, I've been playing a CD I picked up from Luc Arbogast after hearing him sing and play just outside of a cathedral in Strasbourg. (UbiKann details the disconnect between Luc's appearance and voice quite well. In my case, when I first heard him, I was around the corner, ambling past other buskers and tourists and assuming I was hearing a soprano rehearsing inside the nave. )

Got a fair bit of writing and submitting done over the past couple of weeks, and have already netted two acceptances and a "try again" from the best of the lot, as well as accumulating a heap of false and feeble starts to mash up and recast. But not tonight (unless the demon of stealth lyricism ambushes me on the drive home, because it's inconsiderate like that...).