The laptop shut down yesterday for no good reason.  Just turned black and the lights went out.  Luckily I was able to get it up long enough to get everything backed up, but my fate was sealed.  I was condemned to spend the day with Tech Support.  The guys in tech support are from – well, I’m not sure, but I prefer to use the chat feature for two reasons: 1) I don’t have to spend extra brain seconds interpreting what I think they’re saying and 2) They take over the machine from wherever it is that they work and fix it for me.  I can’t hear the sound of their voices so I don’t know whether or not  they’re making fun of me for having such a stupid problem, but I don’t care.  That’s what they’re there to do, give help to the helpless.

I’ve been around the block long enough to know that when you buy a laptop and work it as hard as I work mine, you buy a good warranty with premium tech support.  They have to be nice to you when you’ve done that.  So Vinyh and I spent some quality time together yesterday that resulted in me spending more quality time with Noor last night, but the problem’s fixed and that’s all I care about.

So now I’m back to working on a through composed Gloria to use for Ordinary Time.  The new Roman Missal translation is difficult to try to score because the language is so awkward and disjointed.  There has to be enough repetition to make it learnable, but not too much so that it becomes boring.  It needs to sound joyful, after all it does open with “Glory to God in the Highest,” but I was unable to make 6/8 rhythms works without doing a refrain-verses form.  So I managed to compose one that’s in 4/4 and in a reasonable key.  Everything I do has to be in a reasonable key or I hear about it from my congregation – nothing higher than a D1 and don’t go there too often.

So I crafted one together and I’ll try it out on my choir tonight.   They’re pretty honest about my compositions and I can tell when they don’t care for something.  They’re honest, sweet people who give the church their time and talent in the music ministry but they all have day jobs, so if it flies with them I know it will fly with the congregation.  We’ll see how it goes.