I didn't blog yesterday because there wasn't much to say. I worked on campus, and Hardingfele was wearing a bright pink top that clashed wonderfully with her newly purple hair, only she thought the top was purple too and that they matched. Then we walked in Allen Centennial Gardens with her coworker who goes to my church. Travalon took me to work and picked me up, since he is working 9-5 this week during Spring Break, and on the way home we stopped for dinner at Nar Turkish Restaurant, where we had the usual lamb and chicken combo plate and orchid lattes that were really good.
Today I'd been thinking of going into work since Travalon could take me there and back, but I decided to work from home since it's my usual day to work from home. I took a long walk at lunch and saw lots of ducks from the dock, but they were too far away for me to identify. I'm sure they are the same things that Travalon keeps taking photos of. Here are some more he has taken over the last several days. First, a pair of mallards.
Some
northern shovelers with a female
common merganser in the foreground.
Tux Duck (a hybrid mallard) and his mallard mate.
A pair of northern shovelers.
There were lots of other photos, some of ring-necked ducks and common mergansers, but most of them were kind of fuzzy. Anyway, you get the idea of what sorts of ducks are hanging around our dock.
Today I skipped Adoration to check out the
Choro Jam.
Choro is a kind of
Brazilian jazz, and the music really reminded me of what they play at the
Django Djam. I thought they started at 6:30, but when I got there, they'd already been playing for half an hour. Oops! I brought Mandy, thinking from the video I'd seen of last month's group that it would be all guitar and
mandolin, but this week it was a woman playing percussion, one of my Brazilian drum teachers who had to leave not long after I came, the leader who was also playing mandolin, a guitarist, another Brazilian drum guy - the one who plays the little instrument that looks like a ukulele - and a grad student on the trumpet, and we talked the owner of the music club into joining us on cello. She had to transpose on the fly, which sounds impossible because I found it hard enough to play at their fast speed while sightreading all those
sixteenth notes and accidentals. Yikes! The trumpeter was really good, so I basically followed him, and the leader seemed pleased with both of us. I really enjoyed this music and am thinking about getting a sub for Adoration every fourth Tuesday so I can keep doing this. The chords look even worse than the melodies - what is an
F minor diminished? What? I feel bad that I got so lazy playing everything in G and D for years and never learned these harder chords, but back then I was doing so much choral music. I hardly played the violin at all, and I only played the mandolin in my band. Now I'm really focused on instrumental music, but I don't sing anymore except on Night Prayer, where I have my fans. There just isn't enough time to do everything.
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