Got up, eventually, or at least became conscious while listening to :NPR’s “Sunday Edition.” For some reason my dreams were all mixed up with some college basketball team’s woeful performance in a tournament. In the dream I was telling one of the players that they were an embarassment to dream about and they needed to hustle, hustle, hustle the ball more.

I don’t even like basketball, what was that all about?

Okay. Needed coffee soon after that. David brought some up (he often does that on weekend mornings, the little muffin) and found something to wear and toddled off to church.

Good crowd today, the Sunday school scrimmage was bigger than usual. The concert tickets were designed and printed by somebody else (not me) this time (which is fine, yes I dragged my feet on it, but in the end their tickets were cuter than mine could have been). So now I have some concert tickets to sell to the Mardi Gras party/concert with “Celebration Brass Quintet” on February 22nd.

Anybody want to buy tickets? I thought not. But it should be a good time.

The previous two concerts were groups I either found on my own or that found us but I dealt with, but this one was not one I had much to do with other than putting the information up on the website. Both previous concerts went really well, but weren’t well attended. We’re hoping this one will be both a good time AND well attended, because this group says they have a following. Well, a full house would be nice, but I had my hopes up for the Renaissance folks at Christmas, only to be dashed, so we’ll see.

And we (the choir) sang our little thing, based on a poem by George Herbert and sung to a tune by Ralph Vaughn Williams. Hey! This is cool. My old parish in Seattle has a web page up about this very piece. It’s very nice to sing, especially if you want to drama it up a little. I think Martin Olsen would have approved of the way we did it today, although we don’t have anywhere near the numbers or quality of singers he has.

Anyway, church good, got tickets, anybody want some… that brings us up to the next thing we did.

Last night sometime, David’s mom called and reminded us we were coming down there for lunch on Sunday – today – and we both went “Huh? Lunch? Did we get the memo on this?” Honestly, I don’t remember talking about it at all, and David thinks he told me about it, but he didn’t really remember talking to his mom… durrrrrrr. So we had this sudden committment and had just a little time for puttering around home after church (David, being an orthodox agnostic, maintains a masterly inactivity when it comes to any religious observance).

So off south we drove, and arrived about 1pm, just in time to mop up the leftovers of breakfast casserole, lox-bagels-creamcheese-onions, and coffee. It was a pleasant time – the other family members present were from a distant branch of the family. Years ago all the branches lived together in the same small planned community, Park Forest, and they were passing around a new book about the place and reminiscing. They actually got David in on the nostalgia bit up to a point, and the conversation mostly went with a swing and a few laughs. Neither of David’s brothers were there, the bums, so we were left waving the flag for our branch of the family (they had real excuses, we had none other than not remembering a damn thing about the invitation).

The thing is, most of these people looked vaguely familiar (in the family sense, even), but it was one of those situations where you wish everybody had name tags. It took me til after the second batch of bagels went round what everybody’s first name was. I felt bad about this until David told me it took him until almost the end.

Yep, we’re barely functional, but somehow we manage.