Although I have been pretty diligent in studying Spanish and continuing to sew masks, lately my mantra has been “Oh, I think I’ll practice the organ … tomorrow!” And tomorrow gets put off until the next day … and the next!

The same excuse goes for doing housework. Unfortunately I can’t say that I don’t have the time!

[Speaking of studying Spanish, I now have a 402-day streak in Duolingo; I attend a daily online class #CadaDiaSpanish; I have a daily Spanish tutoring session with Vreni Griffith; I watch two telenovelas daily; I listen to 2 Spanish podcasts daily; I practice 30 minutes with Pimmsleur audio lessons, and I attend a weekly Zoom “Spanglish” meetup! Vreni calls me loca!]

And since Nuuanu Congregational Church (my new church job) is having virtual services only, it means that I record my prelude and postlude on Mondays and send the links to Russell Ishida, the music director, for inclusion in the prerecorded services. That means on Sunday mornings, I find myself sitting at home watching my performance instead of sitting at the organ in church.

This afternoon I was surfing through new Facebook posts and found this new directive from the Office of the Mayor of Honolulu:

The island of Oahu has recorded triple-digit numbers of cases in the last three weeks, prompting the two week lockdown, similar to what we experienced in March.

A few minutes ago we received confirmation from Scott Fikse and Ian Capps of Early Music Hawaii that this will definitely impact our rehearsals for the opening concerts. It looks like we will be postponing our performances until a later date—we will keep you informed.

This means that my in-person organ lessons will need to go on hiatus as well.

Here’s a video I was sent of the Göttinger Symphonie Orchester of their recent performance of Dvorak’s “Aus der Neuen Welt.” The daughter of organbuilder Hans-Ulrich Erbslöh is one of the violinists!

UPDATE: I just received this note from Friederike Erbslöh about the “socially distant” orchestra: Thank you for sharing our video It was recorded in July though, after three months of basically doing nothing. Next week, we‘ll start again. If things don‘t get worse, we can allow up to 500 people into the hall which is huge: normally, we can fit 3000 people in there. The orchestra will sit as far apart as shown in the video. Keeping my fingers crossed for as short a lockdown as possible!

Enjoy!