Ladies meeting, music

Mama had a Ladies Meeting at church last night. The culinary theme of the meeting was to make a new recipe to try on the ladies attending versus trying it out on their respective families. Mama’s new recipe was not a huge success. She tried a soup. She knows I like soups. The soup had ground meat, black beans, onions, tomatoes, etc. The issue was the noodles the soup recipe called for. Once the noodles were added they soaked up all the broth in the pot. Swelling larger and larger through the evening before Mama got a chance to serve her new recipe. By the time she was ready to pack up to go to the church, she was debating even taking the “soup”. It was pretty mushy. The fact that there was so little of it left when she brought the pot home was a testament to the willingness of the ladies to try it out. Fail or not. I actually liked the mixture, but soggy noodles do not usually bother me. Mama would not allow me to pack up the leftovers. She will feed those to the chickens this evening.

I spent most of the evening getting the music together for the next three weeks of services. Mama and I will be leaving after the morning service this Sunday. We will miss Sunday the 9^th. Even though we will be back for the service on the 16^th I wanted to have the music schedule published in advance. That took some time to get together. Checking and double-checking selections and page numbers. Making sure I noted the selections and the corresponding date in my songbook. I still try to not repeat any song in a three-month period. We sing on average 450 songs per year in our typical services. There are over 600 songs in the hymnal we use, of which we know about 400 well. It just seems a shame to skip over so many of the good songs in favor of the most familiar ones. So, I limit the most familiar ones to once per quarter. Filling in the music schedule with the others. It works out well. But it is a challenge sometimes. Twice a year, I go through my annotated hymnal to see what songs we have inadvertently skipped over. Those we have not sung at all or have sung only once in six months. I add those in over the next few weeks, so we do not forget them. Getting three weeks together took me more than an hour.  

Yesterday was chilly; about 45°. What made it feel much colder was a north wind that was steady at about 30 mph. It did not seem to bother the animals, but it required a bit heavier coat for me and Mama to tend to them. We had some rain through the night Monday into Tuesday morning, but that was quickly dried up by the wind. My immediate concern this morning was whether or not any of the faucets had frozen overnight. I did not take the time to cover the house hose bibs or disconnect hoses from hydrants based solely on the overnight forecast. The temperature was forecast to be just below 40° but the wind was still blowing hard. Mama will let me know if there was an issue when she gets out to do her morning rounds.

Tonight is church. Tomorrow we start packing for Honduras.