Well it’s been a fun, busy week already – and there is lots more yet to come.
I took choir rehearsal this Monday and conducted the choir for the whole evening as our musical director was on holiday. It was a great experience and enjoyable once I got going but I was quite worried about it beforehand. I’ve sung with choirs for years and have always been involved in music, but I’ve never had to conduct and carefully construct a piece with all voices before. I was mostly worried about identifying faults and picking out where they were coming from and how but that seemed to go quite well and I think we really made some great progress on the pieces we went over. I was working mostly on the dynamics and the small details of the pieces (like observing the rests correctly) with some of our music – and I really hope everyone sings it next week how they were doing at the end of this Monday as I think it sounds a lot better. I’ve also had a lot of positive feedback from the evening so I’m hoping the choir enjoyed my conducting also. I managed to take some recordings of myself to review later and see how things went from an observers point of view – however the battery would only last for 30 minutes of continual recording before powering off. So I only managed to get 2 x 30 min recordings (the first 30 mins of each half), but I hope that is enough to review.
Mits recently seems to have made friends with a hedgehog (we assume) as he came home with some quite large fleas – bigger than regular cat fleas. This wasn’t too bad in itself as it made them easy to spot, identify and even pick some out manually. However we picked up some household sprays, some cat shampoo, and some tablets for him and had a thorough flea removal evening. Mits actually did very well with the bath considering. He obviously didn’t like it, but he trusts us enough that he didn’t put up a massive fight about it, and even seemed to make a little bit of a game about being dried with the towel. The bath alone managed to wash off a few of the fleas and got rid of all the dirt and cases from his fur. The chemicals in the shampoo must have worked quite well too as all the fleas seemed to flee (no pun) to his face, which must have been itchy for him, but allowed us to pick them out very easily. We then gave him some 1 treatment flea tablets designed to kill all fleas on him within 24 hours, and gave him a spray down with some flea killer spray, before going over all the house with a household flea killer. The next morning Mits seemed a heck of a lot cleaner than usual, there were no signs of fleas any more, and he seems a lot more active and less lethargic than he was the day before. He got another dose of the flea tablets the day after to be certain they had all gone, however he seems to be fully in the clear now.
Now I have my birthday celebrations for the rest of this week to look forward to. I’m heading out for drinks with friends tomorrow night for the evening (although probably not making it a late one since its a working day the morning after), then on Friday I’m going for a curry with my team from work. Just a small, quick, quiet get together which will likely be finished by 7:00, then I’m heading up north that evening in convoy with Sarah’s parents who are joining us for the weekend. Followed by a meal out with family on the Saturday evening, and maybe even a small brothers get together on the Sunday if it can be arranged.
I’m hoping to put all my birthday money towards a Full HD 32″ TV for the office to act as a computer monitor, second TV for LAN party nights, and a good alternative television in the house for us or for guests when they come over to stay. However this is dependant upon how much extra I will have to put towards the TV as I still have a summer holiday coming up, a repair job I know needs doing to the car before its MOT in October, and retaxing of the car to be done at the end of the month. – It’s all go 
