An awesome way to spend a Saturday

Last Saturday I was in San Francisco singing the choruses of the St. Matthew Passion.

If you don't know it, you must start this video while you finish the rest of this post:



It's awesome stuff!  Really gets the blood pumping.

Every year the American Bach Soloists put on a free choral workshop.  They always pick music that has something to do with their current season (they're doing the St. Matthew Passion at the end of February), you sign up in advance, they email you the music, and then you get to spend six hours singing Bach in a gorgeous church with 250 other people.  Their Director/Founder is awesome, PLUS he's from Pennsylvania (like me), so I bonded with him talking about pretzels.  What more can you ask for?

The organ of the church where we sang

Also, I have to give a shoutout to my 4square app because it helped me find a really good sandwich place in Little Saigon.  And the tips even warned me that the proprietors didn't speak much English.  Another win for social media!

And you know what I love?  I love that the San Jose airport has a meditation room.  Every airport needs a meditation room, as I first discovered last spring when I was in a rental car shuttle in Oakland and saw a baby who was exactly the same age that Baby T would have been, and when I got off that shuttle at the airport, all I wanted to do was go somewhere quiet to cry, away from the Auntie Anne's and the magazine stores.  I went to the end of the airport, to the furthest gate, buried my head under my jacket, and cried until it was time to board the plane.  I thought then that every airport needs a quiet place for people, and San Jose has one.  Even though it's a little further from my office than Oakland, I'm going to fly there from now on.  Plus, you can get to the car rental area without having to take a bus now.  Rock on, San Jose.

Hey, I'm starting my weight loss journey again.  I kind of hit a plateau and quit there for a little bit, but not anymore.  We're taking a little more time off before we try to get pregnant, and I'm going to use that time to lose another 20 pounds.  I was reading Fitness magazine yesterday, and there was this bit about how, if you spread out small treats, you don't feel the need to binge.  That makes sense to me, I think.  Then I read the example:  "have a few squares of dark chocolate every other day, to stay satisfied," they say.  Seriously?  How big are these squares??  You think a few damn squares of dark chocolate every other day are going to keep me from going on a binge?  My God.  Who are these people who are satisfied with a few squares of dark chocolate every other day, and what do I have to do to become one?  Do people like that even exist?  Or is it an urban myth, perpetuated by Fitness Magazine, to make me feel bad about myself because I gotsta have me my Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches?  Seriously, do a few squares of dark chocolate every other day even count as a sweet?  Isn't that, like, your daily requirement of dark chocolate antioxidants? 

Anyway, I'm down 1.4 pounds so far this week.  Go me.  Yay cabbage.  The other day my afternoon snack was beets.  I'm not kidding.  Beets.  But then I step on the scale and it's down 1.4 pounds, and I think, Ok, I can sacrifice some cake for beets, I suppose.