Notes from the Studio

This is where I am spending my days...

We're in the middle of a recording project right now (last week it was Christmas concert prep!), so--in spite of my expressed intention to post occasionally over these weeks, I haven't had much time for much of anything online. I keep the phone out of the studio, not entirely trusting that "do not disturb" setting. (All we need is a rogue "bzzz" as we aim for that one delicate note...)

Me, aiming a note at Sr Julia.

In preparing for our concerts, Sister Margaret Timothy also created an Amazon "wish list" of concert supplies. We go through a lot of batteries and gaffer tape in a concert season and "Concert Angels" have already begun helping us stock up! (For some bizarre reason, you have to be logged in to Amazon to see the list, though.)

I saw that the US bishops are calling for a special collection on Sunday to help with the Louisiana recovery.  While I was on retreat, the flood waters found their way into my youngest sister's house. The flooding in her neighborhood was not catastrophic (only three feet of water overall, and about 6 inches in my sister's house), but (as with Hurricane Katrina) that still requires pulling up floors, tossing upholstery and other furnishings that bathed in that muddy stew and cutting out drywall up to three feet past the flood line. For the first few nights, my sister and her husband waded through a hip-deep lake of flood water to a hotel about a mile from their house (where luckier locals delivered gumbo and barbecue for the flood victims) and are now in a rental. (To give you a hint of what things are like, just yesterday we siblings learned that one of my sister's cats is suffering from stress-related cystitis.) People in the flood zones have not only lost their homes (or the use of them): compounding the loss is the fact that local businesses were damaged or destroyed too, putting many flood victims out of work. Sis is a social worker. She has plenty of work these days, processing food stamp requests for thousands more households than the state could have anticipated.

And in our studio, we keep singing Christmas songs. We added a prayer for peace to our Christmas lineup this year, strongly suspecting that by the first week of December people will be feeling that need for "peace that surpasses understanding." (Yesterday's news about the murder of two religious sisters in Mississippi only confirms the need for an unceasing prayer for peace.) Please join us in that prayer.