A Good Day

This was a mighty fine day in the life of this working musician.

I started off with a workout, as usual. I cranked out 34 push-ups. Only a few months ago I could only manage two. After a short practice session, I checked my email and found a gig waiting for me, courtesy of an event planner. This is the third gig that this event planner has booked for me, which is a very good sign. She followed that up with an email asking for the different musical configurations I have to offer (solo, duo, trio, vocals, no vocals, instrumentation), saying that she'd like to make me one of her "go to" musicians. That's music to my ears. I've been trying to get my foot in the door with an event player (any event planner) for quite a while, and this is a welcome development.

As I stepped outside to run an errand and grab lunch, it truly felt like autumn, my favorite season. It was sunny but crisp. The wind was blowing, and the leaves were falling like rain. It was beautiful.

In the afternoon, I drove to Northwest UUC, where I am the music director. I planned the evening's choir rehearsal and answered/wrote a few emails before a staff meeting, which started off with celebrating Terry, our minister's, birthday. The meeting was a good one. We spent most of the time discussing issues surrounding our church's upcoming experiment with expanding from one to two services. That's a hot topic, to put it mildly, and will be the topic of another blog article soon to come.

Rainbow Loom Bracelet

After our meeting, I taught a couple guitar lessons. One lesson was with an adult student who is making very good progress. The other lesson was with an 8 year old girl who is a joy to teach. She's so enthusiastic and funny. This week, she had a present for me. She had made a rainbow loom bracelet for me, which I proudly wore for the rest of the day. That small gift really made my day.

We had a good choir rehearsal in the evening. We're all set for Sunday's service, and we made good progress on some November music. I reserved 15 minutes at the end of rehearsal to talk with the choir about the upcoming two-service experiment and how it will affect the music program. Again, this is the topic of a future blog article, but for now, it's enough to say that it was a good discussion. I received a lot of good feedback that will help me decide how to handle scheduling music for two services, and in our general discussion, they brought up a couple issues that I hadn't considered. I'm glad we had the discussion, and I'll be consulting with them again as we get further into planning the church's overall schedule.

As usual, this was a busy day, and because I wear many hats, the day offered a lot of variety. Yup, a good day. I could stand to have more days like this.