Concerts, Cats, Commitments = Crazy week

Monday evening, Steve and I had the opportunity to usher at the Vienna Boy's Choir concert in the Basilica. I have posted about the Basilica before. It is a beautiful Catholic church in downtown St. Louis that is decorated inside with thousands of mosaic tiles. A gorgeous building. Having a concert in this space should be awesome, right?  WRONG! The acoustics have a nine second decay so a performing group has to play/sing with that in mind and the Vienna Boy's Choir, who was created to sing in the boomy cathedral in Vienna, sounded terrible. Weird. I could tell they sang beautifully and maybe if it sat in the premium seats in the front row, I would have heard better. I don't know. I told the volunteer usher organizer that I wasn't interested in ever ushering again. She encouraged me to try again with Stile Antiqa who are performing in mid-November. I guess they compensate for the echo so I will give it one more shot...

It was week of the first concert of the season for the St. Louis Civic Orchestra meaning three nights were involved: regular rehearsal on Tuesday, dress rehearsal on Friday and the performance on Saturday! I think we played well. The winds, brass and percussion are always rock stars but even the strings did exceptionally well on some really tricky passages. We started with Dvorak's Carnival Overture and a United States premier trumpet fantasy followed featuring a German trumpeter. We ended with a ballet suite composed by Rossini and arranged by Respighi. 

Finally, Sunday afternoon, Steve and I attended an interfaith concert that featured Lucy singing in the Rising Generation choir (a regional group featuring teenage Latter-day Saints) and Noah singing in the Sheldon All Star Choir (of which he has been a member for three years). It also featured performances from choirs from local Hindu, Buddha, Bahai, Sikh, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant congregations. It was a great concert!

you can see Noah on the top right

Lucy is third from the left in the front row

here is the Hindu group and the Buddhist group. The Chinese violin player was amazing - professional level playing!

Saturday morning was Steve's and my date with Larkin and we went to a cat cafe called Mauhaus. I thought there would be more cats to interact with and I also thought they admitted too many people for the small space and scarcity of cats but I think Larkin had a great time. There was a pair of young tuxedo cats that definitely pulled at my heartstrings!

Here is Larkin looking at the reclusive long haired orange cat. Notice that she is dressed for the occasion...

Afterwards, we went to the nearby Menards hardware store to let her pick out a cat toy for Fiona 

and to buy some shelled walnuts that were on sale (yes, Menards is a hardware store but they also have a small grocery selection - weird). This particular Menards is two storied and they have an awesome escalator-ramp up to the second floor so Larkin enjoyed going up and down a couple of times. We ended our time at Panera for lunch before driving her back to Ballwin. 

The Kia had an oil change scheduled for Tuesday morning and, while they were working on it, they discovered that our front struts were shot so we didn't pick up the car until Thursday! Good thing we still have Leo, the Honda Element (and an auto repair saving account!)

Sally had a grooming appointment on Wednesday and she now has to wear sweaters because our weather has finally turned chilly.

This week, our library room was not only a place for books but also for sewing machines - broken ones - belonging to various Afghan women. I was supposed to take them to the repair shop last Thursday morning but, because we had just one car and because Steve had a doctor appointment, I rescheduled the repairs for yesterday, Monday. It was so nice to have more room in that already over-crowded space!

Our neighborhood is crazy about decorating for Halloween and below is one very clever house. We will be gone on Halloween so I am not sure I will blog until we return from Utah on November 10th. Let's hope life is less crazy then.....

 

A magical concert

Steve and I attended Noah's orchestra concert last night. Yes, he is wearing a crown - because the concert featured selections from various movies about magical things - Chronicles of Narnia, Kiki's Delivery Service, Lord of the Rings, Queen of the Night, Swan Lake - so the students were encouraged to wear appropriate costumes. The conductor certainly did! He put on wigs and robes appropriate to the number. It was a very fun concert and it was fun to see Noah doing so well on the bass!

 

Noah was lucky to have two sets of grandparents in the audience. Joe and Vicky came into town Friday evening and are leaving tomorrow. They have been staying in our guest room since Emily and Joe's house is pretty full. We haven't seen them much, though, because they have been in Ballwin both days and we were in Columbia all Saturday up until the concert and today, we were in meetings. 

The ward choir sang a beautiful Rob Gardner number called Fill My Soul in September and it was a shame to perform it just once so we offered to "go on the road" 😃and sing in the Tower Grove Branch this morning. Their meetings started at 10:00 and ours don't begin until 12:30 so it worked out timewise. We had a Self Reliance and Resource Center meeting at 3:00 so we just went from one meeting to another. We got home at 4:20 and I put on my comfortable sweats and haven't ventured out since then. 

My huge project this past week was getting the civic orchestra program ready to go to the printers. I spent almost all of my time on Tuesday working on it, sending pages to Jayne, another cellist and an amazing editor, for proof reading. We continued doing this back and forth Wednesday morning until finally everything looked good to both of us and I was able to send everything to the Ink Spot that afternoon. Whew!

My continuing project is the Afghanistan women sewing. This week, it was looking at three sewing machines to determine if the problems were more than just a thread tension issue. They are and I have three machines sitting in the library waiting to be taken to the repair shop next week. 

Steve and I had our flu and covid shots on Wednesday. For some reason, Walmart Pharmacies in the state of Missouri - or maybe just the city of St. Louis - were not offering the covid shot. BUT, Walmarts across the river in Illinois were so we made our appointments for the Fairview Heights store. It was a 30 minute drive away and we took Fred with us to get his shots, too. Both Steve and I had little to no reaction to the shots (we got one in each arm) aside from my arms feeling tender for two days. Fred, on the other hand, was laid up for three days! Poor guy. Since Wednesdays are our usual grocery shopping days, we just did it over in Illinois. Aldi is right across the street from Walmart. And, there was also a Culvers in the same parking lot so we three had lunch there before heading home. 

Our trip to Columbia was packed with visits - Melanie, Elizabeth (we drove her to a "No Kings" protest), Steven and Tamara (lunch at Culvers again - yummm), Wendy Remus to get sewing supplies for Days for Girls which I am going to sew for again, the Amish stores (Steven joined us), and finally Elise before we headed back for the concert. Missouri finally got rain yesterday so we drove all the way home in a fairly heavy downpour. Construction and an accident caused us to come to a complete stop twice which added an hour to our drive and we got to Noah's concert ten minutes before it started! While driving in the rain is not fun, I am SO THANKFUL for the rain.

The full and the free

Our neighbor brought over this box of a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts Tuesday night. TOTALLY gluten full (sniff). Steve, Fred and the Southerlands got to enjoy them.

And I made this double batch of lemon poppy seed muffins on Friday. COMPLETELY gluten-free. Most of them went to the church for the light supper in between leadership meetings Saturday afternoon and the evening session that night but I got to keep a few for myself.  

In two sittings throughout the week, Steve and I watched The Force Awakens. Aside from daily Jeopardy, that was about all the viewing we did. (Well, Steve does watch Perry Mason every morning from 8-9 on ME TV.)

I guess I blew out our six-year old scanner with all the photo scanning I have been doing for my dad's history book so I had to get a new one on Saturday. And, I broke the wheel on the rolling office chair in the library so I got a new one of those on the same Walmart trip. Last night, when Steve and I got home from our stake conference meetings, he put together the new chair and I set up the new printer/scanner. 

Throughout the week, I was able to crop all the photos I scanned and now, I just need to put everything all together into the Blurb book. My deadline is Black Friday when Blurb has 50% off printing prices so I think I will make it. A more urgent deadline is the program printing for the orchestra concert on October 25th. I gave the director and assistant director this weekend as their deadline to get program order and notes to me and, as of 9:30 Central Savings Time, my email inbox is still waiting. I emailed the treasurer some clarification questions three days ago for the contributors page and have heard nothing back from him. So, maybe I will have everything by this Tuesday when I have a large block of time to finalize everything???

Weather has warmed up again and we have had no rain all week, again. Autumn color is hardly a thing this year.  BUT, I did manage to put October decorations up around the house so it sort of feels like autumn...

Adventures with food, sewing, and scanning

 Three food adventures this past week:  On Sunday, the 28th, Beckie came over and cooked tuna steaks for us for dinner. She seared it, leaving the middle part raw, and she sliced it up on a bed of rice and then she added pickled cucumber and carrots, ripe avocado and green onions topped with an aioli sauce. It was delicious! I would never have attempted such a thing on my own. Yay for Beckie...On Tuesday, I tried a new chicken nugget-type dish that was way more work than it was worth. That recipe was tossed into the trash. On Thursday, on the other hand, I tried a honey sesame chicken recipe that was a keeper. However, I re-wrote the instructions to fit my learning style - bullets vs. narrative.  I get so lost in narrative recipes that it takes twice as long to follow.  

Sewing adventures: wow, where do I begin??? Angie, a woman who used to live in our ward but moved further south (she is still in the stake) reached out to me last week asking if I was interested in sewing a wedding dress for her (this is a second marriage - she is about 15 years younger than I am). Oh, mercy, where on earth did she hear that I might be able to do that for her??? I don't want anything to do with a project like that - the pressure alone to get it right, much less the time involved. I told her I knew some Afghanistan women who were tailors in their own country who could do it for her (with translators, of course). But, she still wanted my input as to what kind of dress and how it could be modified to be temple-appropriate. Over the course of a few days, she kept sending me links to dresses. I finally sat down and looked at all of them and talked to her about her specific needs and I created a list of needs. (see photo below)

I also identified a possible person to do the work. Shakila, who was a trained tailor in Afghanistan. I asked her to bring a sample of her work to class on Thursday, which she did. She does satisfactory work but I wasn't blown away with her precision and attention to details. Nevertheless, I sent her home with the paper shown above. Then, I got home to a text from Angie reporting that she reached out to the company who made the dress and they told her they could accommodate all her needs! All that time and fuss for nothing. Sigh.

I spent Monday morning taking photos of Afghanistan women sewing projects which will be put onto the Kindness Begins With Me website to sell. I set up my "studio" in one of the entryways to the church that had the best natural light. You can see I taped up a paper backdrop. 

Then, I started clicking away with my phone camera (Emily advised me on all of this. She said the phone camera was just fine). I was only able to get through about a third of the items so I will continue tomorrow. 

Here are some of the items I photographed:

In other sewing adventures, on Monday, I dropped off a broken Singer sewing machine belonging to an Afghanistan woman at a place up on Delmar in the Central West End. I had looked at it on my own and it was not a "simple fix" . The repair woman, Nita who is about my age, opened it up and two gears were stripped and she ordered parts for the repair. She sells refurbished machines so I bought a used Jenome machine for Kindness. Since I have acquired the role of sewing "guru" with the Afghanistans, Miryam reached out to me early in the week to see if I could diagnose a broken Kenmore sewing machine that belongs to her landlord. I brought it home and, aside from a bent needle, it worked just fine. All this diagnosing takes time because I have to find an online user manual to figure out how to thread the machine and where all the adjusting knobs are. 

Wednesday morning was Happy Hookers and I donated nifty knitter hats I had made throughout the summer plus some zippered fabric bags. I gave Karen Bazdresch a ride and she had two bags of fabric for me - one for zippered bags and one full of clothing-type fabric. I brought home additional clothing fabric from the donation table at Hookers.  Thursday night, I spread out all the clothing-type fabric on a table for women to take after English class and it was gone within five minutes!

During General Conference yesterday, I sorted and organized by color and size a bunch of fabric scraps I had purchased at the City Sewing Room. Tomorrow, I am in charge of the women making the little yoyo Christmas tree below so I was getting all my fabric for that.

 

I have enough sewing projects for Happy Hookers, for Kindness, and for myself to keep me busy for months!

And, now we come to scanning adventures....I am at a point in my father's history book (to gift to family for Christmas) where I needed to find photos to scan and insert.  I have two large tubs of photo albums from my mom to pull from. Happily, she was very organized and all the photos were labeled and inserted by year so all I needed to do was identify what I wanted to scan and then get to it. My goal was to finish scanning by the end of this week and I got about half way through when the scanning app I was using on the laptop stopped working! The printer worked fine but I kept getting the message that the scanner was not available. I rebooted and trouble shot without success. Knot in the stomach stuff. We bought our Hewlett Packard printer/scanner back in the summer of 2019, just after we got home from our mission, so maybe it was time to get a new one? I was planning to do that yesterday but I noticed another scanning app on the desktop that I had downloaded before the one I was currently using and, lo and behold, I was able to scan with it!!! I was not only able to complete all my scanning projects but I was also able to scan all the photos of Steve's mom that he will be inserting into his book. Success!  As I think more about it, I might just need to uninstall the non-functioning scanning app and reinstall it?

I have had to resume watering outside. I cooked up a bunch more pumpkin. I am doing all the driving these days as Steve still doesn't have complete vision in his left eye. The gas bubble that was inserted at his surgery is gradually dissipating but, until it does, the bottom half of his vision is blurry and the upper half is clear. He does not feel comfortable driving with that situation.

We watched the tribute to Russell M. Nelson Wednesday evening. We watched the movie Escape from Germany on Friday night. It was based upon the true story of pulling all the Mormon missionaries out of Germany before the start of World War II. It was interesting to watch but rather poorly done, sadly.

This weekend has been General Conference and it has been wonderful!