Catching Breath

I think today will be all about gearing up to face the next week. It's not really work busy, just activity busy. And then I looked at my calendar and realized that my next few weekends are also busy, and then there's lots of work stuff coming up. So, yeah, feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment, so I may take part of today to catch my breath. After taking the weekend to catch my breath. Apparently, I'm going to need a lot of breath.

It didn't help that there was a major television apocalypse on Sunday night, in a good way. There were four hours of PBS programming -- they're rerunning Larkrise to Candleford, which I didn't see the first time around, at 6, then there's Call the Midwife, then Mr. Selfridge on Masterpiece, and then they started a new series in which some of the Bletchley Park codebreakers use their codebreaking skills to solve mysteries after the war. And then there was Once Upon a Time and Game of Thrones. To make things even more fun, they were really late getting the new Doctor Who up OnDemand, so I didn't get that until Sunday night. I still have PBS recordings to watch tonight. I prioritized viewing based on what was most likely to be discussed on the Internet today. It's going to be even worse next week when I'm out on Sunday night.

I got a full test of my ability to sing a capella on Sunday. I was leading the preschool Sunday school singing, and we didn't have a piano player, so I just picked a note to start with and did it unaccompanied. It's a good thing I have good relative pitch -- I can't do the thing where I can name a note or just perfectly sing a particular note without any guide, but once I have a starting point, I can find all the relative pitches to sing a song without help. I didn't realize that not everyone could do this until recently. It became rather obvious on Sunday morning that even with me as a guide, not everyone could follow along without the piano (or maybe they don't even do it with the piano, but the piano is loud enough to drown it out). And then the choir did an a capella piece, an old Sacred Harp style arrangement that got really complex and that was utterly thrilling to do.

So, for this week, lots and lots of singing, some reading and business stuff. Then collapse next Monday.