April flowers

I have a friend that is a master gardener (actually I have a few who are master gardeners) and every year they have an open house for everyone to see their yard/garden at its best. Since I just saw it last Saturday, I told him that I would not be coming to his open house because I needed to stay home and work on my yard :-). As all of you who own a home know, there is always plenty to do to and around the house. Hopefully this weekend I can make a dent in my many "home improvement" projects, not to mention mowing the yard. In fact, I hope to spend most weekends this Spring and Summer working on things around the house. We'll see how that works out. I could put a list down of things I want to do so you could mark off my progress, but that would be just too much pressure. The good thing is I really like working on the house and yard. Of course I like working at UT too so there you go. Hard to set priorities when it is all so much fun. I took a picture or Tom's and Vicki's pool (fish and iris, not people), but it is on my camera, not my phone, so I will try to upload it this weekend.

I have been singing with an a Capella group for about 4 months now on Thursday evenings and I am really glad I joined it. I am not as aggressive as I might should be, but I'm getting there. It has been a while since I have sung complicated harmonies, but it is starting to come back to me. One of my fellow singers seems to always be able to get the harmonies quickly (in fact we rely on her), but I found out last night that is because when we get a new piece, she goes home and works it out on the piano for hours until she has it down pat. We laugh because she really can follow the harmonies well, but she often goes flat and then has to listen to me to see what the pitch should be (not that I am good at pitch, but I stay pretty close). We do a variety of music - African songs, Jewish songs, spirituals, a little pop music, even a couple from a Wicca group - just because we like the tunes, not because we want to start a practice :-). Next Thursday we are going to the Austin hike and bike trail to sing because the City of Austin has put pianos out on the trail for a month as part of a performance art thing. That should be amusing.