Back to the Tabernacle! 9 October 2016

I was blessed again to have the opportunity to enjoy the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in the Tabernacle.  I decided to sit front and almost center for the rehearsal, which was nice.  One of the young elders enjoyed making comments during the rehearsal, as he is acquainted with some of the orchestra performers.  I enjoyed the different perspective, but was quite happy to move to the right side by the tympani for the actual broadcast, not only for the sake of watching the tympanist, but also to have the closed captioning on the monitor to help with nuances in the text.

This had been a rather sleepy morning for me [probably because of my food intake at the dinner last night] so I made sure I set my timer for the various times I needed to be awake.  I did get to talk with my granddaughter in Virginia, and also with her mom.  I asked about my grandson who has gone off to work on a farm--he is close to living his dream life, living off the land.  He gets room and board for planting in the large garden and taking care of chickens.  He is signed up for 3 months.  I don't know if he has the option of extending.

My daughter has been very involved in helping a family of refugees from Cameroon.  For many years she has had the desire to help people in Africa--and as she said, "The Lord brought Africa to me." I am pleased that she gets this opportunity, and even more pleased that she has the desire to give this service.

Our branch choir sang "In This Very Room" today for our service.  We also are practicing a piece from The Messiah:  Glory to God.  We are learning that from memory--which is a bit of a challenge for someone whose memory is not working as well as previously.  I was glad to be able to find the music in the public domain, so I now have it downloaded on my iPad.

The room in which our Relief Society meets is very large, with high ceilings, so the acoustics are a large enough problem to require the use of portable microphones for anyone who wants to make a comment.  Today I was asked to get a microphone to those who needed to talk.  I did not have much to do because the "business" portion of the meeting took up almost all the time, leaving only 10 minutes for the lesson.  The sister who was the teacher did a great job of cutting the lesson to the essentials.  I am amazed at how well she handled that situation.  She had been one of the speakers in sacrament meeting, too, so she said after the meeting she was relieved to have gotten through all of it!