March 25, 2018

This morning I woke up at eight o'clock and laid in bed for a little while listening to music. After taking a shower I went upstairs.

My grandma made biscuits, and we eventually had those and scrambled eggs for lunch because the biscuits weren't ready before the livestream. The livestream was of the church service that my cousin sings at (and my aunt was attending) in New York. We were able to watch it on the TV and I left a note for my aunt on how to do that so she can get the right cable and hook her laptop up to the TV. Right now they huddle around her laptop, and my grandma said it was so much better being able to watch it on the big TV.

They had one camera devoted to the organ and it was really impressive. They have two different organists and I want to say they made it look easy because they're so good, but jumping between five keyboards, while also playing with your feet, still looks incredibly intimidating. It was also interesting how much and how bluntly they commented on current events, like gun safety and racism. At different points the main pastor (there were several different denominations represented) showed the protest sign she had made for the March For Life event on Saturday, and referenced the projected cost of Trump's military parade (while talking about an event in the Bible). I liked that they were acknowledging the present state of affairs, the reality in which we live, and not just making broad connections between the Bible and how people should act. I don't frequent church but I can't imagine most churches are that progressive.

When the livestream was over we ate our late brunch After that I ended up taking a nap in the living room with Mister Rogers on the TV while my grandma read the newspaper. There is something about this house that just makes me want to nap all the time.

Later in the afternoon I got all my microphone and computer stuff set up and I interviewed my grandma. I used the questions from a book she had filled out years ago, which I think worked pretty well, and we had a few digressions. I wasn't paying attention to the time at all and I think we ended up talking for nearly two and a half hours. I haven't checked the recordings but I used two microphones so I hope I got something good out of it. And, I just checked the one of the recordings and it is pretty much unusable because there was a noise gate that cut off a lot of what was said, so that is frustrating. The other recording seems to be pretty quiet (and probably won't pick up a lot of what I said because it was the microphone in front of my grandma), but I'm hoping I can edit it to make it better.

It was 6:30PM by the time we finished so we moved right into dinner. I had leftover pizza (which was still good as leftovers), a toasted peanut butter sandwich, and apples. And then we had a little bit of vanilla ice cream and chocolate ice cream for dessert. It has been a long time since I've had just regular vanilla ice cream and it was really good.

After dinner we watched Bob Ross until 11:00PM, so we really did hit all the high points of my childhood memories this weekend. It was pretty great.