While were at the Messiah Sing this evening, a light dusting of snow came through. The radar map shows a cold front headed our way and the forecast says the high for the week will be 26 degrees — on Friday.  This will be a good week for staying inside, thinketh me.

This was a pretty busy Sunday. I teach the Priesthood lesson on the 2nd Sunday of the month, which was today, so I spent much of the morning preparing the lesson. Church services were from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. after which I had choir practice (and we definitely need the practice, don’t we Sister Christensen?). Nina came back down to the chapel at 4:40 p.m. so we could do tithing settlement. As Jim says, “All’s well in the kingdom.” After dinner at home we went over to the east side of town for the 23rd annual Messiah Sing. We got there early enough to sit near the front of the chapel and were soon joined by some neighbor friends. The orchestra did very well, the soloists were delightful (particularly one soprano and the bass), and the chorus was, of course, outstanding. At least the bass section was outstanding! By the end, though, I didn’t have much of a singing voice left and I’ve got a couple of those pieces rattling around in my head. There are lots worse things to go to bed with in my head, that’s for sure.

Music, cold, and possible snow. It’s definitely the season!

December is definitely the month for concerts. We went to two of them this week. Wednesday evening was the Idaho State Symphony and tonight was the Camerata Singers. Both of there were excellent concerts. Of course, the fabulous Jensen Grand Concert Hall definitely helps!

The Symphony featured a guest trumpeter, Ryan Anthony who is an incredible talent. He was with the Canadian Brass for a number of years and is now concertizing on his own.

Tonight’s concert featured the ninety-voice Camerata Singers. The first half of the program was fairly modern choir music including a set of Psalms composed by Leonard Bernstein and sung in Hebrew. John Jemmett, who worked for me at my last job (and is still working there as far as I know), had a solo part in the concert. He has a nice voice and it was fun to hear him “fill the hall” with his voice. The second half of the program included a number of Christmas carols and the audience singing along with four of them. Very delightful.

Christmas can come now. I’m getting into the spirit!

When I got up this morning we had about an inch of snow on the ground that had fallen overnight. About 11:30 I went out to get the paper and took this picture. It was still kinda snowing … that is occasional flakes were coming down. But the snow was melting faster than it was coming down. By late afternoon nothing was left. However, it was some much-needed moisture.

The national weather forecast says we should get four inches of snow or more overnight tonight. It’s 10 p.m. and so far, no other flakes have fallen. It’s going to need to really start snowing to meet that forecast. However, we’ve a number of errands to run tomorrow so having nice roads will be a bonus. It’s just that we really need the snow!

We put up the Christmas tree after dragging a number of boxes up from the storage room. We’ll only put up one tree since (1) there will be no one coming by to see and (2) the second tree would require moving Nina’s desk and where would we put that? After getting the tree set up and the lights on, it was very clear that we had many more lights at the bottom of the tree than at the top. So, Nina started putting on another strand of lights. She got them on the tree, plugged them in, and and about half of that new strand promptly stopped working. Off came the strand and we’ll have a tree with more light at the bottom than at the top. But, I can say that it is beginning to look like it’ll look a lot loke Christmas around here!