SubscribeStar Saturday: Back to the Mountains, Part II

27 January 202421 January 2024 The Portly Politico4 Comments

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Three years ago my family took a trip to the mountains around Burnsville, North Carolina, to celebrate my older brother’s fortieth birthday. I wrote about it extensively in my book Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Stories (currently just $12.68 in paperback). The area is truly lovely, and is very accessible from South Carolina. My girlfriend and I had the opportunity to do just that over the long MLK Weekend.

After a Saturday full of adventures in the small towns around Mount Mitchell, we decided some hiking was in order for Sunday. First, however, we rose just early enough to catch the sunrise. Sunrise in our little patch of the mountains on Sunday, 14 January 2024 was around 7:38 Eastern Standard Time, so we were up shortly after 7 AM. We threw open the curtains of the large windows, which faced westward.

Because we weren’t facing the rising sun, we watched as the sunlight crept down the side of the mountains to our west, their eastern faces slowly melding from a blueish grey into a glowing red. Sipping coffee and marveling at God’s daily light show was the perfect way to spend a day spent largely in His Creation.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Back to the Mountains, Part I

20 January 202421 January 2024 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Three years ago my family took a trip to the mountains around Burnsville, North Carolina, to celebrate my older brother’s fortieth birthday. I wrote about it extensively in my book Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Stories (currently just $12.68 in paperback). The area is truly lovely, and is very accessible from South Carolina. Ever since that celebratory trip, I have been eager to return.

The long MLK Weekend—which yours portly extended by burning a personal day—offered the perfect opportunity to get back there. My travel-loving flight attendant girlfriend and I were super excited to hit the road with Murphy for a few days of hiking, exploring, and good eating, and scored an excellent deal on three nights at a cabin/barndominium in the mountains.

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Some of the links in this post are links through the Amazon Affiliate Program. If you make any purchase through these links, a small portion of the proceeds go to me, at no additional cost to you.

SubscribeStar Saturday: Nativity Bricks Nativity Build and Review

13 January 20247 January 2024 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Back on Epiphany (6 January 2024) I built a Nativity from Nativity Bricks, a company that makes Christian-themed LEGO® knock-offs (I also composed an Epiphany-inspired original piano composition).

The build was very good, and the quality was as close to LEGO® as I’ve seen from knock-off bricks. Seriously, I was blown away with how excellent the pieces were, and how intuitive the instructions were to follow. Most of these cheap copycat building blocks are just that—cheap. But Nativity Bricks’ pieces actually felt like LEGO® bricks. Even Mattel’s attempt to compete with LEGO®, Mega Bloks®, don’t stack up (no pun intended—hey-oh!).

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Some of the links in this post are links through the Amazon Affiliate Program. If you make any purchase through these links, a small portion of the proceeds go to me, at no additional cost to you.

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Spirit of 1776, Three Years On

6 January 20245 January 2024 The Portly Politico1 Comment

A very Happy Birthday to our dedicated senior correspondent, Audre Myers. Have a great day, Audre!

It’s been three years since the New Epiphany Rising (the original Epiphany Rising was in 1400), when Americans protested the outcome of the 2020 election. We’re now staring down another presidential election in just ten months. Where are we now?

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SubscribeStar Saturday: 2024 Goals

30 December 202315 December 2023 The Portly Politico2 Comments

The new year is just a couple of days away, so it’s time for yours portly to lay out his best-laid plans for 2024, all the better that they might go astray.

2023 was a pretty good year, with a new book and three new musical releases (here, here, and here). I also started dating a flight attendant, which means I get a lot of Biscoff cookies for free. I also taught approximately 619 lessons over the course of the year—shew!

I have a few plans for 2024. I hope to expand my YouTube channel further, and to enmesh it more thoroughly with the blog. I also want to resume work on Offensive Poems: With Pictures, my planned third book.

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Lazy Sunday CXXXII: Christmas Concert Reviews

24 December 202315 December 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

The major professional highlight of the Christmas season for yours portly is the annual Christmas Concert at school, a time-honored tradition that is frequently honored in the breach (leave a comment and I’ll explain what I mean by that). It’s a huge undertaking for myself and my students, but when everything clicks, it makes for a truly magical experience.

Here are past posts about Christmas concerts from 2021-2023:

“SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Concert 2021 Review” (SubscribeStar) – The first concert since The Age of The Virus!
“Delayed SubscribeStar Saturday Delivered!: Christmas Concert 2022 Review” (SubscribeStar) – A fairly magical concert, as I recall.
“SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Concert 2023 Review” (SubscribeStar) – Perhaps one of the best Christmas concerts yet!

Happy Sunday—and Merry Christmas!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Traditions

23 December 202314 December 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Ah, yes, Christmas. Time to gather round the yule log with a glass of thick eggnog and sing some Christmas carols. It’s a time of cozy good cheer—and presents!

Every family has their own Christmas traditions, some of which date back generations to their grandparents or great-grandparents. Others are new traditions. That’s a bit of a paradox—a “new tradition”—but all traditions started as some newfangled innovation at some point.

I’ve not lived very long—just nearly thirty-nine years now—but I have been around long enough to see the gradual (and sometimes sudden) morphing of Christmas traditions to accommodate new realities. When I was a child, Christmas Day followed a predictable pattern:

Presents with my brothers and parents in the morning
A late, hearty breakfast at my maternal grandparents’ house, followed by more presents
Dinner at my paternal grandparents’ house, and again with more presents

It made for a very fun Christmas—and not just because of the presents! My paternal grandparents had five children, each of whom had two or three kids (with the exception of one uncle, who remained a bachelor until later in life). Some of those kids—my cousins—went on to have lots more (one of my cousins has given birth to at least ten children; we’ve lost count at this point). But before all those great-grandchildren were born, we still had a lot of cousins running around at my paternal grandparents’ relatively small house. It was fun.

Inevitably, we’ve grown up and started families of our own (or, like yours portly, I’ve remained a bachelor, my only “child” being an overweight purebred dog; I’ve really embraced modernity in that regard). I’m extremely blessed to have my maternal grandparents still, but both of my paternal grandparents have passed (Papa in 2005, Mama in 2012). Those changes have meant changes in Christmas traditions. My plethora of cousins and their God-given fecundity have necessarily meant that the focus has shifted to their families. My aunts and uncles are now grandparents, and they have their own Christmases.

So, what of Portly’s immediate family? What of our yuletide celebrations?

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Concert 2023 Review

16 December 202312 December 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Eight days ago (Friday, 8 December 2023), my students had their annual Christmas Concert. The Christmas Concert is one of the two marquee concert events of the school year, the other being the more amorphous Spring Concert, which can fall pretty much anywhere between March and April (and even early May). Of the two, the Christmas Concert is my favorite, and while it’s also one of the most stressful days of the year, it’s also one of my favorites.

Our Christmas Concert follows a predictable format, consisting of performances from our choir, our World Language classes, and finally from my Middle School and High School Music Ensembles. Historically, dance classes have performed pieces prior to the musical portion of the concert, but this year marked the first that dances were not included, as the dance class performed before the Christmas Musical, which was on Friday, 1 December 2023.

Honestly, excluding dances was a major improvement. I have nothing (well, not much) against dance as an art form, but it was never a comfortable fit in an already-overstuffed Christmas concert format. It also adds some minor additional headaches for yours portly, who in the past has had to move pianos in the middle of the concert to accommodate the dancers. At the risk of editorializing (but isn’t that the whole point of a blog?), I find most of these “dance” routines to be rather distasteful and a tad lurid, although I am to report that this year’s dance performance was really exceptional, tasteful, and beautiful.

But I digress. What of the music itself? Let’s dig in, like a Wisconsin dad shoveling snow.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Boring Politics

9 December 20233 December 2023 The Portly Politico2 Comments

Has anyone else noticed how boring politics has become? I don’t mean to imply that nothing is happening—I mean, we had a Speaker of the House fired for the first time in American history a couple of months ago—but it all seems so… dull.

If everything was hunky-dory, it would be fine for politics to be boring. Indeed, it would be great—we want to live in a world where the issues that face us are so miniscule, we can elect boring people to administer boring, predictable law and order.

But the opposite is the case. Everything sucks. Our government is wildly oppressive. Our institutions can’t pave the roads adequately, much less govern the country. People aren’t allowed to say anything reasonable in public without losing their jobs. Inflation is through the roof. Wages are stagnant. China owns everything. Our leaders want to drag us into wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East that involve ancient clans battling over ancient grievances. Peaceful protestors—actual ones, not progressives robbing their local Wendy’s—are in federal prison without trial because they were invited to walk through the Capitol Building.

In spite of all of that, politics is boring. I think I know why.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Showtime!

2 December 20232 December 2023 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

It’s the busy Christmas season for yours portly, and last night I made it over the first of two major humps before Christmas break: the Middle School Christmas Play. The next hump is the Christmas Concert for my own students, which is this Friday, 8 December 2023, in the morning.

There is a tremendous amount of work that goes into the play, as our school particularly loves to stage light-hearted musical comedies. You wouldn’t think that a musical would involve substantially more tech setup than a typical play, but it makes the work exponentially more challenging.

The Drama teacher this year did a fabulous job, and created one of the most tech-heavy productions I’ve been involved with so far. It was a multimedia extravaganza: songs, choreography, videos, backing tracks, lights, around twenty-five microphones (stationary/hanging mics, floor mics, individual headset mics, wireless handhelds, etc.), and more.

Here is a panoramic view of my sound booth about ninety minutes before the play:

The astute observer will note two sound boards/mixing consoles, plus a lighting controller, as well as my $80 refurbished laptop, which does fine if I’m just cuing backing tracks, but otherwise runs like a potato powering a lightbulb. There’s also the spotlight, two lighting trees with around ten lights each, and a projector screen. During the production my student assistant and I had to move a projector into place, along with a auxiliary cord running to a DI box, which fed via XLR (microphone) cable to a “snake” onstage, which ran all the way back to us at our booth. We also had to move a baby grand piano (don’t worry—it was on wheels)!

Setting all of this stuff up is stressful, because it’s usually done in fifty-minute snippets of planning periods. But the finished product is worth it.

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