Capstone Class and Prep for Senior Recital, Temple Trip, and Love Came Down at Christmas

I AM IN MY CAPSTONE CLASS. It started about four weeks ago, ever since my last post. Part of my Capstone is that I need to give a recital, and do all the preparations for it, so these last four weeks have been me preparing voraciously for this recital. I am able to invite anyone to this recital, so I invited all my friends and family. It is going to be an hour and a half recital, so I had to find songs that would fill that time. In the end, there are 18 songs which we chose to include from my prior repertoire. Another part is that I have to have it professionally video taped, so we decided to ask Trevor Gipper to do it for us, compensated of course, however, because of Sarah's help she gives to Emily Gipper, he is offering to do it for free, which is so amazingly nice of him. This will be an excellent opportunity to celebrate how hard I have worked on my degree at MCC and Ottawa. We are also choosing that time to celebrate my birthday and graduation (even though it will be a month early). So, all in all, beautiful thing, and something I'm excited about doing.

We have been doing our best to stay afloat on our finances (with a little help here and there). Thankfully, things seem to be going on the up and up for us. There have been struggles, though. One of them is shift drop has been incredibly hard in the past. We had Travis Jensen stay at our place for a week while he figured out his stuff, and the day of shift drop he had a job interview, so I was scrambling finding a place that had internet and ultimately only was able to get one shift. It was an unhappy time for me. But we've been able to work by doing Uber driving, so it hasn't totally been a waste.

We took the McCollam girls, Karmin and Erin, to the Phoenix temple for baptisms a couple weeks ago. It was a nice respite, and a fun time to be with them before they moved back to Show Low, Arizona. We had Dairy Queen afterwards in Phoenix.

The week before Conference Sunday, it was just a terrible week for getting things done, and on top of that, I had a toothache in the bottom right part of my mouth. I was not feeling up for anything, and I had had a headache that was causing me to be in a not so good head-space. Fortunately, after a lot of praying and cleaning the infected area, that part of my mouth is not in so much pain anymore.

The week of March 17th, we had the missionaries over and we invited the Chapin family over for dinner (for the first time) to our house. We had a traditional Irish meal: Irish sausage with Colcannon, and some Irish soda bread that I had made. It was a great thing that I had made that bread, because Jacen, their son, was super hungry, so before the meal even happened we gave him lots of bread to eat.

Prior to the 17th, I had spent 4-ish days composing a piece for choir called "Love Came Down at Christmas." It is based off a poem of the same name by Christina Rossetti. It only took me several days to finish, and I wanted to finish before the 17th so I could show my co-director of ASC, Forrest. I did show it to him on the TV and they really liked it. Forrest told me afterwards that he liked my other piece more because it was more rememberable. But I just think that Forrest hasn't had enough exposure to it just yet, because it is a piece akin to a John Rutter carol. The others in the room really liked it. Just recently, I took the time to submit it for publishing at Jackman Music and Hinshaw Music, Inc. It may take a while before it gets accepted, it it gets accepted.

We went to the temple grounds this last week to have a council before my studio. It was a nice time. We've also been taking the time to drive Uber Eats together, as well as go to the gym together. We started reading the middle book in the Debbie Macomber's Oceanside series A Walk Along the Beach. It's been good so far.

Sarah's birthday was just low-key this year. Eventually we made it to noodles and company at the end of the night; but we also drove Uber, and I had an injection in the morning. We did spend the night talking about solar transits and stuff, as Sarah's in her Astrology class with Naomi Fox. It's been a good class for her and I hope she got a lot out of it. I've been trying to learn from it as well, on my own.

Besides the weeks that I missed ASC (and the week that I had the toothache, even Forrest was not feeling it to have ASC that week at all), every time I am asked by Forrest to lead the Gilbert group, I feel I get better. This last week I was asked to do it with Benngy, and it went pretty good, except for the Soon I Will Be Done section. Grateful for this opportunity.