Christmas is different this year. Not in a bad or good way, just different.
I remember years ago, my sister was wanting to move to England and I had been planning on going away for music school... i guess that would have been about 4 years ago.. My mom was very upset at the idea that it was going to be our last Christmas together.... well, since then we've been able to have another 3 together, and one this year, if you count it being a week and a day early...
Anyway, I guess you can never predict how things are going to change, you just have to wait and then embrace those changes as they come about.

Today I spent the afternoon with my (soon to be) Brother in law. He was on his way to Montreal, with a 6 hour layover in Winnipeg. We went out for lunch, found him some earphones for the flight and just hung out for a bit. He's such a good guy, a welcomed addition to our family.

Frustrating - I have some kind of mental block that is preventing me from being productive on this choral piece... I'm having issues even opening the book I have the ideas written in...
On another front, piano practicing has been making good progress... I have made a good chunk of development on the last movement of the Beethoven, and I have a complete pair of dances from the Bach - the Gavottes! with that and the openning... only about 8 more movements to go....
So ya, the choral piece... once I've written this post, I'm going to forcibly opent he book and try and do soem work.... but ya, I'm not sure if I'm having doubts about the piece or the idea behind it or if I'm just ;azy, or if it's writer's block.... Regardless of the cause of my stagnancy, I know I don't have the luxury of sitting back and watchign the rest of this month fly by - then I would be in another rush to get this piece done by the next due date... argh!
Im looking forward to my self-imposed non-conceptual music writing experience which will be the rest of this year. I definately need to focus more on the strictly musical elements of composition. Just pure music, simply aural exploration. With these 2 most recent pieces, I've spent considerable amounts of time thinking about structure and concept of the piece before I've even thought about the application or use of notes, rhythm, phrasing....
I think I'm going to do a piece for full orchestra as a piece of absolute music. Not to say that it is going to be dry, technical music; there will still be concepts to be explored, but the scope of those concepts will not venture into the extra-musical.

Bah, now it's time to write a piece for choir... of sorts...