Great Compline, Litia, Matins and First Hour.

Time: 2:15
Congregation: started out 4 besides altar and choir, only one was left at the end. It was a Tuesday night, of course, when nobody expects to go to church.
Crew: Altar: Fr T on his own Choir: 3 women; we sang most of the plain stuff in unison.
Coordination: good!
Tunefulness: good enough, especially as we mostly ignored Fr T when his cold made his voice go all over the place.
Knees: standing too long made them unfit for kneeling, so I had to sit between the two instances of the prayer of St Ephrem the Syrian to let them relax.
Voice: normal with a little burr at the end.
Strangeness: the service has intrinsic strangeness. It starts very Lentish, though with God is with us in the elaborate setting; then it becomes an all-out feast for Matins, and goes back to Lent very abruptly with the First Hour cutting in before the proper end of Matins.

Or: biology is easy, physics is crunchy

(Blosxom doesn’t do tagging, at least not without a plugin that would destroy other things. Faking it:)

Tags: AdaLovelaceDay09, #ALD09

The school is in a sad state of rebuilding, not only renovation but also much structural work. There is hardly a classroom, hallway or common-room that doesn’t sport boarded-up bits or is covered in plastic. All except the new science wing with combined theory-and-lab classrooms.

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The introductory talk (with lots of examples from 15th- to 20th- century art) was about the conflict between figure and background and different ways to deal with it. You can emphasise the contrast, or make the background part of the figure, or vice versa, or any kind of mix-and-match. It’s amazing how people pick up things from the introduction even if they don’t intend to put it into practice consciously.

It was a very nice relaxed class: sometimes it’s a fight for me (usually enjoyable, but still a fight) and sometimes it just flows, like today.

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They’re in no particular order, and I may think of more, but these are the ones that come to mind immediately.

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From my slow Lenten spring-cleaning:

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Maidens all:

When it’s your turn to clean the upstairs bathroom, the laundry also falls to you, as you know well enough. Here are some things you may not know, or if you know them, may well forget.

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I think I’ve got the hang of desktop activities now. For a while I liked the idea in theory, and even had a couple, but never really used them because I didn’t use a lot of widgets— I’m of the empty-screen school. But I do a lot of things that do require stuff on the screen, and that’s what I’ve discovered activities are in fact for.

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