It’s 5:20 am and I’ve already been up and about for an hour, packing last-minute items into my suitcase. As I have done for the last few years, I am going away to be with my family for my birthday. I had made the reservation a few months ago, and of course, I didn’t think that I would have a second church job.

Yesterday was my first official day as Organist of St. Mark’s and thankfully I can say that there were no train wrecks and no disasters. BUT—I came to practice four times during the week and was especially glad that I came Saturday morning for a final session since I found a number of registration boo boos.

Because I will be away this week and to get a jump start on the upcoming services, I wanted to prepare in advance some of the works that have a more complicated choice of stops, and set them up in advance. St. Mark’s fortunately has multiple memory levels but instead of numbers, they are letters of the alphabet. Naturally I put my hymn registrations on level K for Kathy!

I needed more levels so I registered Dieu Parmi nous on level M (for Messiaen!) and I started to use level D for Marcel Dupré’s Cortège et litanie but then thought it would be easier to get to if I used level J, which is adjacent to my home level of K. Alas, I messed up some of my level K pistons so it was a good thing I rechecked them on Saturday.

I’ll be leaving for the airport in a couple of hours and I am weighed down with more baggage than is usual for a 5-day trip because I am taking my sewing machine! Yes, it’s okay to take a sewing machine in either your carryon or checked luggage!

The reason for this is that my daughter-in-law is making a Halloween costume for my grandson and needed a sewing machine. And hey, my Kenmore sewing machine is about 15 pounds and fits in my suitcase.

Another project I’m bringing is my next door neighbor’s songbook which I wrote about last January in a post called “Overheard” (https://insanityblog.online/2023/01/03/overheard/). Bonnie Moore is an attorney who has written over 150 songs of a religious nature but doesn’t know how to notate music. 15 of the songs she sang into her phone and sent me the recording, requiring me to take musical dictation to notate the music and add chord symbols for the harmonies. Some of the songs required slightly different rhythms for the different verses. In some cases she had written as many as 8 verses to a song! I looked back at my timesheet and it dates back to November of 2022—almost a year of my life on this project!

As of July I had converted most of her piano arrangements done by someone else to lead sheets only and had the majority of the book finished when she decided to change the order of songs in the book and I had to completely change the table of contents to reflect the new order. That was Round 1.

Then she decided to change the capitalization and punctuation of the lyrics on every single song. That was Round 2.

Now we’re in Round 3 because she decided to change the title of every single song as well as some of the notes and rhythms. We’ve also discovered that the Finale music software program I’m using had substituted the Times New Roman font for something called Finale Lyrics font which looked slightly smaller and incongruent with the rest of the book. By checking online, I was not the only person this had happened to, so I had to reinstall the font and revise all the affected songs.

I am closing in on finally wrapping up this project after spending nearly 200 hours on it!

So this trip to California will be a working vacation after all, not really a birthday respite!