Hidden treasures + changing a light bulb, musically and otherwise.

While home today, I did the usual things: ate, slept, took my medicines, knitted. I also chose to catch up on the KnoWhys from Book of Mormon Central. And because there was no time crunch, I read some of the footnotes and followed links to other articles. I posted one link to Facebook. I suspect that I will never read the Book of Mormon in quite the same way again. Here is another, an exposition by Jeffrey R. Holland entitled "Rending the Veil of Unbelief". It is sublime. You may want to have a box of tissues handy, if the Spirit moves you to tears as so frequently happens to me.

In other news, I needed to make a run to the pharmacy for my anti-anxiety Rx, so I left a little after 5:00, forgetting entirely that other folks would be coming home from work (that thing which I would ordinarily have been doing) or scrambling to find last-minute gifts. It was getting dark, and it was foggy, and cars were everywhere. Getting to the pharmacy wasn't much of a problem, other than waiting for my light to turn green already. Getting from the pharmacy to In N Out was a little wild. It was as if everyone in my suburb who owns a car had decided that they needed to be on the road with tired office workers and crazed shoppers and people with a sudden craving for dead cow.

I didn't take my phone, so I couldn't play Sudoko while stuck in the drive-thru. I turned on the classical station and was rewarded with a Magnificat by Monteverdi. I'd not heard it (or him; apparently he invented opera) before, and I've been a little weirded out by people going ho-ho-ho while singing the Hallelujah Chorus in some of the versions I've heard this month. There was a lot of ha-ha-ha-ing in this Magnificat, and my only-partially-housebroken musical brain told me to try a run of notes both ways: ah-ah-ah and ha-ha-ha and see which was easier.

Dudes, it's way easier to stay on pitch and at speed if there are consonants preceding the vowels. Old mezzo. New tricks. (Except with the work I've been doing on my lower register while driving home in the evenings, I think I might be a contralto. I can sing along with [most of] Josh Groban in the same octave, except for the lowest of his notes.)

Middlest and I worked together to change a light bulb in the kitchen. The one over the sink had burnt out, and Middlest avoids ladders whenever possible because of the POTS and the Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome but was nervous about my getting on the stepstool while taking Mucinex, which makes my kid woozy but just does what it's supposed to do, for me. So I got up on the two-step, and Middlest put a hand in the small of my back, and I got the globe out (dead hornet lying sunny side up inside it, arms folded in prayer) and the old light bulb out and the new one in, and the globe mostly on before my hands said done. Middlest traded places with me, put one knee on the edge of the sink while I did the hand-at-the-small-of-the-back thing, and finished tightening the screws.

So that's how many of us it takes to change a light bulb. And I have three rows left of this pattern on the Geology Shawl, so that's what I'm doing next.