We are home for just four days before we take off again for California and Indiana on Friday. I will be attending a convention for the American Guild of Organists (AGO) in Bakersfield, CA and the national biennial conference of the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians (ALCM) in Valparaiso, IN.

We had just walked in the door after a six-hour flight from Boston to San Francisco, a four hour layover in SFO and a five-hour flight from San Francisco to Honolulu. I couldn’t believe it — when I opened up my email on Monday night, one of the messages was from my Tripit account: Pack your bags! Your trip is starting soon! (Egads!) What I’ve told people is that we are basically home to do the laundry because we can’t pack our bags until we have clean clothes again!

A box had arrived while we were gone, and when I opened it up, this is what I saw:

If you look carefully, you can see a faint outline of the Beckerath organ at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu — the zimbelstern is in Bach’s hair! It’s similar to the image I used for our Bachanalia concert I used a few years ago, but I reworked it slightly. The last time I tried this, the zimbelstern was on Bach’s forehead!

I went to practice yesterday and was very relieved to find that the concert music is still intact. You see, I haven’t touched an organ keyboard since I played for Baccalaureate at Iolani School on May 26th, so that means it’s been over three weeks. In the past I learned that three weeks is about my maximum before my fingers turn to mush, so I’m glad that I won’t have to start from scratch when we get home from our next trip.