Colombia

I just returned from a fantastic week in Colombia. Yes, that Colombia. I participated with a choir from our university in an international festival of sacred music during Holy Week. It was fantastic. I will not give an extensive travelogue at this point - I will only say that there are two Colombias: the one you see on CNN and the one I visited. They hardly resemble one another. The people were completely warm and welcoming, and for most of the journey, I felt completely safe. Also, some of the beautiful Latin people I visited expressed similar sentiments - we as people did not reflect what they knew of the United States as a whole.

All people are children of God, and this was confirmed to me in a land where U.S. government employees are forbidden to ride the bus.

Related article (including a blurry picture with me in the background): http://www.areacucuta.com/?module=news&file=news&news=4428

book review

Over the Christmas weekend, I stumbled upon an unbelieveable book sale. One of the books I grabbed was Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss. I highly recommend it. Truss uses incisive British wit and common sense to defend punctuation. I know that reading about punctuation is not necessarily an exciting prospect to some, but Eats, Shoots and Leaves stands well on its humorous and literary merits. This is not like my high school grammar texts. In the interest of full disclosure, I have been madly in love with the intricacies of punctuation for some time, so I have been wanting to read it since hearing about it on the radio a few years ago. However, I was more than surprised at how enjoyable a read it was, regardless of its content.

http://www.eatsshootsandleaves.com/

fame and fortune

(By fame and fortune, I mean fortune in the sense of good things happening, not in the sense of money in pocket.) It was a good day Friday. I showed the new arrangement of Far, Far Away on Judea's Plains to my choral conducting professor, who is also the director of the Women's Glee Club at the University. He wanted to use it for his women's choir for a concert on December 3rd. Great!

Yes, great. But he wanted an SSAA arrangement with piano accompaniment. No problem. Finished it this morning. Well, actually, I worked from midnight to 5:30, then gave up and finished it at 10:00 after a class. Those easy little projects never are, are they? But I am thrilled that the Women's Glee Club is going to sing this piece, and the annual Christmas concert is a fairly big one. They also rebroadcast it closer to Christmas on KUNC, our local public radio station, where I do my internship. Yes, I'm living high on the hog in the lavish lifestyle of a choral composer. I think we may even move into a place with a bathtub and a dishwasher next year!

Don't take the last part of that last paragraph as whining. I love my life. I love doing what I do. Money means nothing. I just visited some friends whose new baby is having a bit of a rough start. I am reminded once again of the fragile nature of life and the blessing it is simply to breathe. If you are reading this and you are a religious type, a prayer for little Austin couldn't hurt.