no burnt offering here

This has been a good week: I haven't broken anything.

I have tried to organise my schedule for leaving Botswana around my choir's performance of Handel's Messiah, which is scheduled for the evenings of 31 October and 1 November. (Never you mind, gentle readers, that I am the co-organiser of a conference scheduled for 30-31 October...)

My choir meets one evening a week. We had taken it upon ourselves to perform nearly the entire Messiah, and to say the least, it has been slow going. Two weeks or three weeks ago, we were called to a three-hour rehearsal on a Saturday afternoon. I attended that one. The next weekend, we were called again. I think I ditched that one; I was exhausted, and I didn't want to sit around for three hours listening to the men learn their notes. (Sorry, but it's true.) Last week I skipped the evening rehearsal because I was exhausted. I skipped this week because I was out of town. This past Wednesday evening, I received notification that there was a rehearsal that evening, but I missed that one because I was only just coming back into town.

Then I received notification that there was a rehearsal for this afternoon. No! I put my foot down: Today was the second day of a meeting central to my research, and I would not put choir before work.

I'm told, however, that things are so bad that the conductor is threatening to cancel the concert. That would be a shame, but I don't feel like the consequence of other people's bad planning should be that I sacrifice my work. I think the conductor and the leadership should have reduced this amount of music we were taking on a long while back. We could have chosen to learn less and learn it better. But I've got less than two weeks left in this country, and I know where my priorities are.