Sing a New Song

This weekend I sang with the Christmas choir at my church. I think that it's been a good 9-10 years since I've sung with such a group (i.e. on stage, in 4-part harmony, etc.). After the first practice, I was beginning to doubt my decision to join the choir. I was having a difficult time picking up my part and we were only going to have a couple more practices the weekend of the service. I stuck it out, however, and I'm glad that I did. I was amazed at how much easier the next practices went, specifically how the notes came a lot easier for me (partially due the fact that one of the other altos wrote out our part on a staff).

Now one of the best parts (in my opinion) of being in a choir is how if one person (like me) misses a note, there are more people that got it right to cover up your mistake. An added benefit for this particular "performance" was that we didn't sing alone as a choir, the worship team and congregation sang along with us, too. Therefore, I was rather surprised when a number of people came up to me after the service to thank me for singing. Turns out that while they couldn't pick out my voice from the group, my FACE was able to express the true joy I felt in worshiping my Savior and telling of His birth.

City of Brotherly Love

Okay, so I thought soccer was over for the year. While I knew that some of the other refs from State College were planning to work a few more weekend tournaments, I needed my weekends for fixing up my house, etc. I was also worried about the possibility of needing to do some last minute lab experiments before sending out my NRSA grant application (which was due on Dec. 5th). When I realized that my grant was actually going to be finished a little early and my mice weren't going to be old enough in time for any experiments, I decided to go away for another weekend of soccer reffing. (An additional motivating factor was the $350 bill I had for replacing the O2 sensor on my car last month.)

This time we only had to drive ~3 1/2 hours to get to our hotel outside of Philly. While the days were fairly sunny, the temps were hovering between 30 and 40 degrees, and the wind really didn't help matters. I made sure to layer, and got away with wearing pants part of the day, so it wasn't really that bad. On Saturday we were at a girls showcase (for prospective high school players and college scouts), while Sunday was a typical boys u15 tourney.

On Friday morning I had done a quick Mapquest query to see exactly where our hotel was located. I also remembered at this time that a friend from Rose lived "near Philly," so I checked the map for his place, too. To my surprise there were only 5 miles separating the two! I wrote Eric a quick email to see if he and his wife were going to be in town for the weekend (which, thankfully, they were) and made plans to get together with them for dinner on Saturday. Eric and Kimberly picked me up from the hotel after my games (and a quick, but warm, shower) and we went to Macaroni Grill for big bowls of pasta (and bruschetta). Afterwards we went back to their townhouse, where I got to meet the two greyhounds they've adopted. It was a great time to catch up with Eric and get to know Kimberly more. She and I also had a fun time reminiscing about Rochester, MN (where she grew up).