Seven Quick Takes - Friday...

After reading the weekly "quick takes" posts from our cyber-friend Jen over at Conversion Diary for quite some time, I thought I'd try it too. So here we go.

1.
This week has been crazy because it seems so short! Sunday and Monday were the end of the Polyphony Jam Session down in Dickinson, Texas. We had a blast, singing a four-voice Mass by William Byrd at two High Masses on Sunday, not to mention the Gregorian High Masses on Friday for St.-Stephen-mas, and St.-John's-mas on Saturday... and then there was the actual jamming until midnight and past every night, and games and skits and a conference... I wish we could have them last a week! Hopefully that will be how these Jams end up...

2.
I'm still trying to make sense of the fact that Lucia, my one and only, awesome big sister, is leaving us on the Feast of the Epiphany; bound to no less fair place than New Zealand, to join the Dominican Teaching Sisters of Wanganui. I guess it'll hit me when it happens.

3.
The above leads to the third thing in my head... that I will be playing Mom to the other nine kids for two weeks when Mom and Lu leave. Help!!! What nineteen-year-old ever had nine kids?! :-)

4.
New Year's Eve and Day were so much fun! We stayed up to welcome the year, of course, and toasted in champagne (if we were old enough) and sparkling cider (if we weren't.) And we played music, music and more music; jazz and blues and classical, arias, folk-songs, you name it! (Even some Byrd polyphony!) And on New Year's Day, we just had a great day as a family, begun with High-Mass of course, and ending with our soon-to-be-postulant giving us an Irish slip-jig (filmed by another sister) as a keepsake.

5.
I'm thinking I really need to practice piano more... I think one of my New Year's resolutions should be to set myself a time to play only scales, and refuse to let myself get out of it! Alas, if only my choleric side would dominate my sanguine side more in this regard!

6.
Mom and Lucia just came home from some last minute shopping for Lu's postulant clothes, and the little boys (ages 7 and 5) promptly put on her brand new black stockings. Bless their hearts... (smack)...

7.
I'm wondering if I'll be able to learn a Prelude and Fugue by Bach in two months. I guess I can. We pianists at college are doing a concert of all the Preludes and Fugues in Book II of the Well-tempered Clavier, and I picked the one in F Major, which I've never even heard before... and I still don't have the score! It should be very... interesting... trying to get it learned and memorized before March, when, I believe, the concert is set to happen...