Week in Review

It has been a few days since I last posted anything (other than some pictures).  Going back to Monday, I got together with my duet partner, Gail, who is recuperating from having a cancerous tumor removed by surgery from her left lung.  She was in good spirits and eager to resume playing duets.  We played for an hour and could have gone on longer, but we stopped there.  For the first time, we held our practice at her house.  It was quite enjoyable to get back to playing duets.

We took Luke and Ayle to the Charles Page Library for a program on magic.  The library had hired a magician, and he was quite good.  He performed many illusions.  He did card tricks, coin tricks, and metal ring tricks.  He was smooth.  He certainly fooled my eyes.  After the program was over, we bought Luke and Alya a kit of magic each.  The kit had three tricks in it.  They seemed to like best the one with a sliding tray which seemed to turn one coin into another.

On Thursday we traveled to Springfield to visit my parents.  The AC in the car kept us cool all the way there and back.  Outside the car the temperatures were over 100.  We have had some scorching hot days here in Oklahoma.  While in Springfield, we went to Hoover's Music Store near downtown.  I bought four pieces of piano duet music: "Hoedown at Cripple Creek," "Festival Suite," "Festival Toccata," and "Waltz" from "Three Fantastic Dances" by Shostakovich.

The previous week I received in the mail 4 American Folk Songs (piano duet), which include the songs "Long Time Ago," "Every Night When the Sun Goes Down," "All the Pretty Little Horses," and "Cindy;" Piano Together (piano duet), a collection of five pieces which are: "Alouette," "Scarborough Fair," "Billy Boy," "A Little Rocky," and "The Fountain;" All American Boogie Woogie, a collection of twenty pieces for piano solo all written in boogie woogie style.  I also received Erik Satie, Piano-Album -- a collection of 286 pages of solo piano music written by Erik Satie.

I have been listening (while walking) to a series of lectures titled Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion.  The lectures were recorded by Bill Messenger of the Peabody Institute of Music.  I recently had to buy a new MP3 player after my other MP3 player went through the wash while in a pocket of my cut-off jeans.  The previous player had a 2G capacity.  My new one has 4G capacity, but costs the same as the 2G.  The music I recorded on the old MP3 player is still on it, but the player will not hold a charge for very long.  We transferred the eight lectures on The Teaching Company discs by Messenger to the new MP3 player.

We always eat well while in Springfield.  Dad took us Golden Corral and the next day to Logan's.  We ate high on the hog.  We returned to Oklahoma Friday evening.

Today was Food and Fellowship for July.  There were 11 of us present at Rib Crib for the meal.  I had the catfish dinner.