In other news

* Day 2 of my student coming in to get extra help at 7 am. I really REALLY really hope this helps him, not just for his sake but because I sit and look at my watch and twitch if I have prep to do before my 8 am class (or at any rate, I have to at least glance at my notes to remember if there's anything extra-special-hard I have to bone up on - this is genetics and stuff and it's not something I do every day, so harder to remember).

* We have had a few schools locally close for a day here and there. In two cases, it was "creepy clown threats." Can we be done with this now? If it's some kind of dumb viral-marketing thing, the company being marketed (or the movie studio, if it's a movie) needs to face some kind of sanctions.

They did catch one of the threat-makers; apparently he is pleading he didn't know it was illegal to make threats on a school.

Facepalming. Forever.

So of course we get a long news story about how making threats on a school is bad, mmmm-kay? and don't do it, mmmm-kay?

And of course I'm screaming at my tv set because good grief, if as a culture we have got too dumb (or too vile) to know that calling in a fake threat on a school is a BAD THING, then we are done for and probably should be done for.

(I fully expect us to receive some kind of threat dire and immediate enough that we get closed for a day or part thereof. There probably HAVE been threats in the past that have not been deemed sufficiently serious....)

* Started chording a new hymn for piano lessons - "Day by Day." This is an old Swedish hymn. We sang it a fair amount in Ohio when I was growing up, and some in Illinois. Less commonly here, but that may be because we don't have as many people of Scandinavian heritage, or it just may not be as traditional. I like it though; both the words and the music.

The version in the hymnal I use is in D-flat, which is a little bit of an unusual key for me so chording it will be a challenge. This week I am learning it as written, and one thing I IMMEDIATELY noticed this morning, is that the alto and the bass lines are almost a "drone," in the sense of being the same. note. over. and. over. And suddenly I wondered - could I be hearing a ghost of a nyckelharpa here? The composer Oscar Ahnfelt was Swedish, and I wonder if that was somewhere in his mind when he composed the piece.

There are a lot of lines in the hymn I love, but especially this one:

"The protection of His child and treasure/Is a charge that on Himself He laid;/"As thy days, thy strength shall be in measure,"/This the pledge to me He made."

Part of it is, the idea of being a "treasure" to anyone (even to God, who would be the best in the universe at feeling that way) is something I don't terribly often think of myself as, so that kind of gets me....right....here.

But also, secondly, the quotation about strength being equal to what you face in your days - that is what I most frequently pray for. Not for wealth or love or even wisdom, but for the strength to deal with what I have to deal with - both in the sense of not turning into a weepy mess when faced with difficulties but also in the sense of having the grace to treat other people with kindness even when I'm not feeling very happy myself.