Thank heaven we made it back from our months of afternoon darkness now that daylight saving time is on once again. I can’t remember the time I didn’t hate having to turn the clocks back in the Fall and suddenly there being no late afternoon sun the next day. I’d rather have two hours of extra darkness in the morning than having to endure one less in the afternoon and evening. As much as many want it to stay on all the time, I discovered it has something to do with the school buses picking children up in the dark. Irregardless, I’m exceptionally happy it’s back.
This time around, I didn’t have the slightest of problems getting up an hour earlier this morning, and my first little job was to get ready and drive to St. Paul Lutheran and play their organ and piano for their 8:30 am Service.
When looking for something to wear, I finally decided on my black long-sleeve dress shirt, a black bow-tie, dark khaki dress slacks, and my black cashmere sport coat. I’d never worn that combination before, but when I looked at myself in the mirror, I thought, “Hmm. This combination looks pretty smart.” I don’t know what gave me the inspiration to do black on black with that bow-tie and shirt, but it worked.
I didn’t feel I needed to get St. Paul so early because I’d already practiced, but was beginning to sweat it after noticing they’d added several more pieces to be played. I rushed upstairs and found those sheets of music and ran thru them enough times until comfortable. One of the pieces I’d not heard or played before, forced me to really watch count and time. It sounded a bit quirky at first, but finally got it to flow.
The highlight of my “giving forward” with their delightful community of faith, was doing my absolute best when playing their exceptionally moving entrance hymn called, “If You But Trust in God to Guide You”, which gave me the chills all the while I played it. Believe it or not, I’d never before heard that melody until I played it for the first time at their church many months ago. It was written back in the 1600’s which once again confirms how really great pieces survive centuries. If interested in listening to it, try looking for it on YouTube. I’m sure they’ve got videos of it being played by either piano or organ. I played it on their piano this morning because there was another piece they wanted played immediately afterwards which was more suited for piano. I played all the remaining hymns on their pipe organ which didn’t give me even the slightest of problems this morning.
One of their members baked cinnamon rolls which I got a good whiff of as I was coming down from the gallery. Of course yours truly couldn’t resist going down to their hall and having coffee and a fresh cinnamon roll. Most don’t know that St. Paul has coffee and goodies every Sunday for their members and guests, and believe me, there’s always a good assortment of yummy things to eat. It still surprises me there aren’t more people attending their Services on a regular basis. It makes me sad, but I’m continuing to hope and pray there’ll be a turning back in our society to more traditional forms of Christian worship.
The rest of my day was spent returning phone calls, doing some file arranging, and getting my office in shape for the coming work week. While on the phone today with a client, I couldn’t help but bring up the subject of all the many more “bot” calls I’ve been getting on a daily basis. It’s grown extremely annoying and all the more time consuming to where I think every American should write their Congressmen and insist they pass some sort of legislation to get them stopped. That evil Google “bot” is the one calling the most. It used to always be a woman’s voice calling, but just recently, there’ve been male voices saying, “Don’t hang up! This is an important call!” Really?
I was near ecstatic when finding the temps hovering around freezing after Noon arrived and later seeing all the streams of water from snowmelt running down the streets. I couldn’t believe how quickly the major highways cleared off to where some of them were already dry. Hooray for Spring being in its way!
Since I hadn’t talked to one of my well-knowns for many days, I thought it best to give her a call to see how everything has been on her side of the fence. We ended up chatting about a man we both know and for some reason she asked if I knew his age. I didn’t know exactly, but I did give her an approximate five +- range of years. When I said the number of years she exclaimed, “No way!”, and my knee-jerk reaction was replying, “Ja Way!” She thought me a little to clever with that rebuttal, but I couldn’t help insisting that so many people in this area say “Ja” instead of “Yes” which for me came from my mother and grandmother saying it due to their Germanic heritage. Just so you know, “Ja” means “Yes” in German.
Speaking of German, I read a very scary article today on Spiegel.de which was about a German who spent almost 8 years in a Chinese prison. I was shocked when reading how vivid his account was of the brutality that takes place in their prison systems. Talk about an evil empire! It wasn’t that long ago I read about how the Chinese government is treating those hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions of Uyghur Muslims that live in China’s west and northwest provinces. As far as I’m concerned, the world needs to wake up and realize China’s form of government is far more totalitarian than they’ll ever want to admit. When reading that article, I started recalling some of the inhuman things Stalin did to his own people.
Tonight’s one-liner is: Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology, have been used in this century as brutal instruments of oppression.
If interested, the following link is to that article: Forced Labor and Torture in a Chinese Jail
