Weekend and upcoming week

First, some shameless self-promotion (ok this really isn't "self" promotion). My church, Zumbro Lutheran, is doing it's 27th annual service of Lessons & Carols this Sunday evening, at St. Mary's Hospital chapel. If you've never been to St Mary's chapel, it's a beautiful place to sit and listen to an evening of wonderful Christmas music. It is free and open to the public. My church has done this for 27 years as a gift to the patients and staff of the hospital as well as the community. Some highlights this hear include a harp player, a liturgical dance group, a french horn choir, as well as the standard vocal and handbell choirs (I play in one and direct one).

http://www.zumbrolutheran.org/carolsposter.pdf

This was a good, albeit busy week. Monday we got whole bunches of snow, which was kind of fun (now that my snow blower works well). On Wednesday, I took the day off of work - Wednesday was designated "A Day Without Gays", where GLBT people were supposed to take off work as a symbolic protest to the passage of Proposition 8. I went with friends Bill, Jay and Eric to the Twin Cities. We hit IKEA first, as I had been wanting to get another desk chair, and price out an additional desk to match the one I had for Erin, and Bill also wanted to look at and possibly get some household items. We walked over to Mall of America afterwards and had lunch at Cafe California, and then headed to "Uptown" to the Landmark Uptown Theater (the oldest theater in Minneapolis, the only theater with balcony seating, and still technically the largest screen) to see the movie "Milk". We got there early and had coffee at a Dunn Brothers nearby - Uptown Minneapolis is a really neat area, lots of older buildings, very "city". The movie was fantastic - it talks about the life of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person elected to a major office, all of the things gays had to go through in the 70s, and ultimately Harvey's murder.

By Friday I was so worn out that I fell asleep around 8:00pm. Saturday morning we had a make-up bell rehearsal because of the big Monday night snow, which took up most of the morning. Saturday evening friends Jay and Eric had a Christmas party at their house, which included a movie trivia game on the XBox 360. The more I see of the XBox the more I like - now you can stream NetFlix movies to it if you have a NetFlix subscription. Sunday morning was back to church to play for the service and then Peer Ministry afterwards. Sunday night we had a bunch of friends over for dinner and festivities, including playing with little LP, or rather watching him chase the cats around the house.