Clare Choir videos

They've posted a couple videos from our last choir concert:

Adoramus te, Christe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8lhHJu2bkk


and Ave verum corpus.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSG3Rbobceo

Enjoy!

God is being strangely predictable...

A pattern has developed. Whenever I acquire an extra sum of money, i.e. birthday check, extra gig, etc., some major expense immediately follows, i.e. $1500 car maintenance & repairs or $900 dental work for two cats...

So, when I started noticing some extra padding in my bank account due to increased studio business, I told my friend MM on Sunday, "something's coming down the pike." And right on schedule, at least $550 in vet bills (total TBD) and another $550 in my own medical bills (nothing's wrong...I'll explain another time).

It's interesting to see how God provides. I consider myself fortunate that God provides the money right before I need it, not after. Actually, I consider myself fortunate that God provides, period, but you know what I mean, right? On one hand, it seems strange that God is being predictable about these things right now, but then God has always been predictable to some degree, hasn't he? The same 2000 years ago as is he is today and will be forever and ever. In a world of terrible uncertainty, it's nice to know you can count on God to be consistent. :-)

Vet drama

So, I took Trisket to the vet today, as I mentioned last night. It was surprisingly traumatic.

All of his symptoms are unilateral... the one runny eye, one drastically swollen lymph node, etc. and it turns out he has some bad gingivitis on that side, although they say his teeth look pretty clean. So, the theory is that an abcess or other type of tooth infection has caused a sinus infection. To get a 2nd opinion, the doctor took Trisket back to their dental specialist for a look. They were gone about 10 minutes.

As I waited, I heard a cat down the hall screaming bloody murder...for the whole ten minutes! I almost started crying because it sounded like they were torturing the poor animal, and it just wouldn't stop. I'd never in my life heard an animal in so much distress. When I later found out it was my cat that was making the fuss, I went all to pieces. I got tears all over my kitty and he gave me kisses in return. And all they had done was look at his mouth. They said he started crying as soon as they left the room and didn't quit until they got back to me.

So, they're going to do some dental and sinus x-rays in the morning and then clean his teeth and do whatever else needs to be done in there. They did pre-anesthetic blood work today. They started to take him away from me again, but I asked them to do the blood draw there in the exam room. "Can you handle watching us stick needles in your cat?" "Of course! I just can't stand listening to him scream from the next room." She thought he would scream anyway, but I was pretty sure he was only crying because he was very frightened. They humored me, thank God, and my good little boy was a model patient for his blood draw - barely a peep.

The moral of the story seems to be not to let them take this particular cat out of my sight when he visits them. Unfortunately, tomorrow we have to leave him there for several hours. :-( I'm not looking forward to it. In the meanwhile, they've started him on antibiotics to treat the infection. Tomorrow's visit focuses on addressing the root cause of the infection rather than the infection itself. I am proud to say that my kitty and I were world-class in our execution of the first dose of medicine this afternoon... we didn't lose a drop! Good kitty!

Catching up

Okay, it finally happened... I joined FaceBook. Within three days, I had 100 friends. Unreal. You never realize just how many people you know until you start listing them all! (I'm now up to 163 or something.) It's a very addicting program.

Been a busy time. I am feeling out of touch. I am behind in my email, and the sad thing is that it's the personal emails from good friends that I am behind on. Studio email always gets taken care of, but then I'm too sick of typing and communicating in general to reply to anything else.

Studio recital is this weekend, then a full day of normal teaching on Monday, followed by group lessons in the evening. Then the rest of the week off! I sooo need the break! It will be good to get refreshed so I can be fresh and effective again starting in December.

Oh, good news... I was cast in the chorus of Opera Colorado's upcoming production of The Pearl Fishers. This will be an interesting one to be in because it is not performed very often. It will also be my first fully-staged production with OC. The Flying Dutchman was a concert version, but they still owned me for two solid weeks. This time they will own me almost every evening and weekend for six weeks! It will be intense! In order to do it, I have had to request a 6-week leave of absence from Clare Choir, which (thankfully) I was granted.

Trisket has a cold. He's had it about 6 days now. We tried to wait it out, but today he sneezed up a blood clot. On one hand, Eric says he's got the same stuff coming out of his own nose this week (he has a cold, too), but on the other hand, I've never seen a cat do that, and he's clearly not feeling well, so we'll go get him checked out tomorrow and maybe get him some medicine to make him well. (Oh yes! Cat and medicine! Won't that be fun?) Poor kitty.

And my mom is having neck surgery in a couple of weeks. Not going to offer a lot of details on that for a variety of reasons, but she is having her neck fused to relieve the pressure her four herniated discs are putting on her spinal cord. I welcome prayers for her safety and quick recovery.

Okay, that's probably enough catching up for now. If I don't write much in December, it's because I have at least a dozen holiday singing gigs. And if I don't write much in January or February, it's because I'm living at the DCPA, eating, sleeping and breathing The Pearl Fishers.

Happy Thanksgiving!