Ah, sweet Wednesday.

My baritone (wait, I have two baritones now, would you believe) who is giving his recital this year did not show up for his lesson on Monday. I was a mite put out, but spent the time practising, so it was not wasted. When my next student (the other baritone) came in, he pointed out that his colleague had left a note for me on the door, a note which I had totally missed because the absent student had put it at eye level--not my eye level, but his. When I saw him in choir yesterday I admonished him that he must put any notes for me at his chest level, and also that I had given him a Monday lesson time at his request, and this conferred on him great responsibility to conduct his weekends in accordance with the expectations due a Monday singing lesson. I think I made my point. We rescheduled for today, which worked out fine, and we got a lot of good work done on the Handel.

In Latin we finished translating the passage from Livy describing the origin of Romulus and Remus and I learned a very interesting thing which I had hitherto been unaware of, namely that the Latin word for she-wolf, lupa, also means �prostitute�. According to Livy, the infant twins (their mother was a vestal virgin [also a princess in direct line of succession] who had been raped [a definite no-no for a vestal virgin] and her uncle [who had usurped the throne and didn�t want any competition] ordered the babes to be drowned in the river) were not necessarily rescued by the legendary she-wolf and suckled on wolf milk, but were found by the king�s chief cowherd and given to his wife to raise, a woman by the name of Larentia who was said to have made her sexual favours available to the local shepherds, which meant she was being pimped out by her husband Faustulus, and she was most likely the �she-wolf� of the legend. The things one learns by going to school!

After class I adjourned to the Upper Crust, which is what the loft is now named, to eat my lunch and work on the first part of the passage which I had missed when I stayed home ill, having borrowed the translation of one of my classmates (OIiver, the keyboard player in my daughter�s band). He soon joined me and we went over the parts I didn�t understand, and right now I am caught up. But Patsy gave us a whole bunch of homework for the Thanksgiving break (classes are officially cancelled Friday, Monday and Tuesday), so it�s not as though I don�t have anything to do.

I also met with the organist at the cathedral this afternoon and we went through the two pieces I�ll be singing on this concert. Apart from my upper break still being rather shaky, it went very well. Unfortunately there was incense burning in the sanctuary, and the smoke was rather irritating. Why do they persist in this archaic custom?

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