Forth OWLingas! [1]

I was too brain-fried to blog about this when I got home, but we did this year's Our Whole Lives parent orientation session last night. It looks like we may have as many as thirty youth this year for the Grades 7-9 course - not quite the mob we've had other years, but a crowd nonetheless.

This will be the fourth year running that I've facilitated OWL. The previous three times, we'd covered the curriculum in roughly four months, by running two sessions per Sunday night and having several Friday - Saturday overnight meetings that covered four sessions each. We're trying something different this time around; we'll do one session each Wednesday night from October through April (skipping school vacation weeks) with a couple of Saturday morning double sessions. The original "plan" for this time had been to do single Sunday night sessions; that went out the proverbial airlock once it turned out that our church only had one facilitator (me) who could do Sunday nights. (Two others begged off this year and the other two had already committed to other Sunday activities.) Just to make life even more interesting since our church's DRE [3] left over the summer, and our interim DRE just started a couple of weeks ago. So specific dates, times, locations, etc. are still in a state of flux.

Meanwhile, our choir sang Randall Thompson's Alleluia as the offertory yesterday. We sang it for the first time a couple of years ago as the big highlight of Music Sunday. As I mentioned at the time, it's a seriously tricky piece for an utter amateur such as myself, and we spent a couple of months rehearsing it. Frankly, I thought our music director was nuts for trying to do it on such short notice this time around - but after a mere two weeks of practice, we blew the socks off the congregation. We are getting pretty dang good, if I do say so myself.

[1] With apologies for mangled pseudo-Tolkien. [2]
[2] Well, maybe not that many apologies.
[3] Director of Religious Education, for the non-UUs in the audience.

Forth OWLingas! [1]

I was too brain-fried to blog about this when I got home, but we did this year's Our Whole Lives parent orientation session last night. It looks like we may have as many as thirty youth this year for the Grades 7-9 course - not quite the mob we've had other years, but a crowd nonetheless.

This will be the fourth year running that I've facilitated OWL. The previous three times, we'd covered the curriculum in roughly four months, by running two sessions per Sunday night and having several Friday - Saturday overnight meetings that covered four sessions each. We're trying something different this time around; we'll do one session each Wednesday night from October through April (skipping school vacation weeks) with a couple of Saturday morning double sessions. The original "plan" for this time had been to do single Sunday night sessions; that went out the proverbial airlock once it turned out that our church only had one facilitator (me) who could do Sunday nights. (Two others begged off this year and the other two had already committed to other Sunday activities.) Just to make life even more interesting since our church's DRE [3] left over the summer, and our interim DRE just started a couple of weeks ago. So specific dates, times, locations, etc. are still in a state of flux.

Meanwhile, our choir sang Randall Thompson's Alleluia as the offertory yesterday. We sang it for the first time a couple of years ago as the big highlight of Music Sunday. As I mentioned at the time, it's a seriously tricky piece for an utter amateur such as myself, and we spent a couple of months rehearsing it. Frankly, I thought our music director was nuts for trying to do it on such short notice this time around - but after a mere two weeks of practice, we blew the socks off the congregation. We are getting pretty dang good, if I do say so myself.

[1] With apologies for mangled pseudo-Tolkien. [2]
[2] Well, maybe not that many apologies.
[3] Director of Religious Education, for the non-UUs in the audience.