On the bonnie, bonnie banks

Post-choir tour illness is fun. I have almost no voice and I'm at work. Awesome.

Tour started off on the wrong foot. We had to sing at a church service here in town, and in between our sets, there was a guest speaker instead of the regular pastor. Now, this church is semiangry Baptist to begin with (no intention of bashing Baptists there, though), but this guy was angry. He started with a business spiel about all the tapes/books/etc he was selling and the sermon he was giving at some other church that night (he wanted us to be free in worshiping the lord, but we all "needed to attend" the sermon). Then he led a prayer asking the lord to "quiet all the crying children so their parents can listen." Then he referred to abortion as "slaughtering babies" and named it as the cause of the Virginia Tech massacre. Then he said it's our fault we feel angry at our parents/bosses/etc. Then he said that women have no ambition and made some comment about bringing the apples home.

And this went on for 53 minutes.

I'm quite pissed. And not just because I'm agnostic; there are some devout Christians in the group who were pissed. He had the potential for a good message: if we bind together and pray/worship, we can start good vibes in this town, which will spread elsewhere, which will put an end to the world's bad stuff. Hell, being agnostic doesn't even have anything to do with it, because the way he went about presenting this "message" was so angry it wasn't even Christian.

Anyway.

Morale just sunk throughout the rest of tour. I finally got on the intercom en route and gave a couple pep talks. Needless to say, I ended up conducting the entire half-hour medley, and confidence went through the roof. I guess I just had an epiphany or something while bored on stage that morning. I realized that if I want morale to improve, I can't sit around and bitch with everyone else. I have to take action. If everyone feels like giving up, or like the director's giving up on us... I'm not giving up. I got a pretty big cheer on the bus for that line. And then we started a half-hour jokeoff that made us feel a whooooole lot better.

Otherwise, the usual fun aspects of tour were indeed fun. I made some new friends, I stayed up late one night (even though I felt like puking the next morning because of it), and I got to spend time with some of my favorite people. I miss that aspect of tour, but aside from that, I'm glad it's over.

I also brought along a bunch of knitting stuff, thinking I'd be knitting on every bus trip. I brought my expensive hat yarn, the cotton I'd purchased a while back for socks, and the bag I've been working on** periodically. I didn't get much done. I was able to cast on enough stitches for the hat, and discover that it wouldn't be long enough to work on the circular needle I'd purchased for it. Grr. Oh well, at least I know how to knit with double-pointed needles.

**scroll down to bottom of post to see the correct picture

Aaaand... I think I'm caught up. "Caught up," meaning, caught up to the current time, not caught up to the number of posts I'm supposed to have right now. Blah. I'll have to work on this a lot this weekend.