intelligent insects

Today we slept in a bit, and arrived at church for the eleven o'clock service. While the 9.30 a.m. service features the traditional (Cokesbury) hymns, the eleven o'clock service features a quartet called a "praise team" and songs with solid Brill Building/Tin Pan Alley/mellow rock melodic influence. These songs prove easy to sing, because every melody or harmony is entirely predictable. They are direct descendants of the "Word Publishing Company" sound, which bowdlerized gospel music at roughly the same time that larger record companies were bowdlerizing Nashville. It's hard to entirely dislike the pop songs, which tap into familiar places for anyone raised with modern pop music, but it's easy not to like them, as well. I even get amused because I know the hymns I do like were themselves kind of sacred 18th and 19th Century pop songs, but I like them better than the love/dove/same/Name. I did love the harmonica player, and then wished, a bit, we could all try the lovely drone of a Gregorian chant. The sermon was about how the truth sets one free.

We ate lunch at the Allen Cafe. This is Allen's little neighborhood breakfast place, a pleasant place converted from an old burger restaurant. The owners are Albanian-American, which may explain why Mother Teresa's picture hung right next to the painting of the InterUrban Railway train standing next to the long-departed Allen station. The Allen station was a very unimposing square building, so I appreciated that the painting was accurate. I enjoyed my bowl of oatmeal accompanied by two scrambled eggs.

I read a bit of "the rest is noise" about this fellow Richard Strauss, who proved to be a bit more of a scamp than I realized, and then drove to take a walk. I hooked up my mp3 player to the AUX plug on my new car stereo tuner. It worked very well, and despite the salesman yesterday's sage warning about how my original car stereo speakers are just "paper", the sound quality improvement was noticeable.

I went for a walk at the Wilson Community nature trail in McKinney. There were red berries and purple berries.
. A huge bug stared at me serenely from a tree--his mosquito-like eyes were as large as small buttons, and I imagined a science fiction novel in which it turns out that an intelligent insect civilization has always lived among us, undetected. I watched sunfish and butterflies in my binoculars. Then I played the CD of Mahler's 8th Symphony as i drove to the Verizon store to get a car charger. I stopped by the used bookstore, where I got a CD of Paganinni guitar pieces, and an album of contemporary classical choral music by a choir in Halifax. Then I left a nearby Plano Radio Shack on Parker, because the store attendants, unlike our Allen store guys and girls, move more slowly than the average store folks.

I came home, and fell asleep in the early evening. I awoke, at a simple lasagna, and prepared to rest once more.