Museums and Birds

Happy July 4th Weekend!

We just got back from a rooftop party down the block from us. The views of the Museum and Manhattan were great (7th story). It was being thrown by a friend of a friend: Katie’s friend Marc, a graduating Physician Assistant student, had a friend named Josh, also a PA student, who hosted the party. We had just gone to the Brooklyn Museum, too, for its free First Saturday. The current temporary installation is one on New York graffiti and I put up some neat pictures if you click here, or over on the right-hand side of the screen in the side bar under “Pictures.” One of the points about the exhibit was the controversy over whether or not graffiti is really art worthy of a museum installation. If you look at our pictures, we’ll let you decide. Definitely thought provoking.

Some other interesting things from this week: we are over half-way done bird-sitting for our friends Ben and Jara. They are in Alaska, where Jara teaches at a music camp (4-5 weeks every summer for about 4-5 years). Ben is finally getting his chance to visit Alaska, so they let us take care of the birds. So far so good, although the birds can get quite noisy. We put some pictures of us and the birds on our Flickr site. (Click here). I had two gigs on Tuesday and Wednesday. The former was a graduation for a Cornell University program. The latter was a neat Catholic Mass honoring Mary under her title of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. There is a huge Filipino population in midtown Manhattan, and people were actually visiting from the Philippines for this particular service. Apparently they really like this particular role of Mary. They paraded an icon of the Blessed Virgin all around midtown and were waving long-stemmed yellow roses in the air, sang all kinds of hymns I’d never heard before, including Latin chants, and were very appreciative of the brass quartet that played during the Mass. Katie has been studying like crazy, spending long hours at the library because the noise of the birds can be quite distracting. We did some socializing last night with our friends Ted and Dena, going out for drinks and dinner. It was great fun. I am working a lot at Mannes for the Prep program, helping out with the scheduling of music theory/history classes for next fall.

We should be doing some fun/interesting things for the holiday this week, although we are not sure what exactly. We’ll let you know in the next blog installment.