Pics from Easter weekend at St. Thomas More

Happy Easter to all! Below are some pics from Good Friday and Easter Vigil at St. Thomas More. It was a great time of celebrating faith and fellowship, and the liturgy and music was excellent, as always.

Proclaiming John's Gospel on Good Friday. At St. Thomas More, we do this Gospel reading set to music, with the solo parts in chant-style and the choir sings the parts of the crowd. Here, Doug (in the foreground) is singing the part of Jesus, and I'm in the background singing the part of the Narrator. Deacon Phil is standing to my right. Photo taken from the photo album page on the St. Thomas More church website.

From l-r: Anne, Fr. John, me, Michelle, Danelle, Alessandra, and Jim. Anne, me, and Michelle are all bell choir members, Danelle is a lector, Alessandra sings in Celebration Singers, Jim is the director of Elementary and Adult Faith Formation, and Fr. John is our pastor.

Me and Roger, our music director, after the Easter Vigil Mass

Me, Anne, and Drew (another bell choir member) after Easter Vigil Mass.

The altar, all decorated for Easter.

Data collection done

For the past 4 months, the bulk of my time at school has been devoted to working on my master's thesis; specifically, collecting the data. When I proposed my thesis back in October, I had set the goal of recruiting 20 subjects (10 controls, 10 experimentals). However, last week we decided to end the data collection at 14 subjects because recruitment was getting to be quite difficult, particularly for the experimental group, for reasons beyond my control. So now, I am officially finished collecting data for my master's thesis, and now comes the fun part-analyzing the results. Today, I mostly finished running the statistics, and I got a few results that I did not expect, and I'm not quite sure yet how I'm going to explain them. I have a meeting with my thesis advisor tomorrow morning, so hopefully when the two of us put our heads together, we will come up with some ideas of how to go about discussing our results.

Holy Week

We are now in our final week of Lent (aka Holy Week). This is probably the busiest time of the year for church musicians, liturgists, and clergy, because there will be a lot happening Thursday-Sunday. At St. Thomas More, we kick it all off with Mass on Holy (Maundy) Thursday where we will be celebrating the Last Supper. On Good Friday, we have Morning Prayer, Stations of the Cross, and then the celebration of the Lord's Passion. Saturday starts off again with Morning Prayer, and at night, we have the Easter Vigil service. Then of course, Sunday is Easter, and we follow our regular Sunday Mass schedule. This year, I get to be a regular congregation member on Holy Thursday and Easter Sunday, but on Good Friday, I am singing for Morning Prayer, and I am both singing and playing oboe for the celebration of the Lord's Passion. Saturday, I am playing oboe for the Vigil service. I always look forward to this time of the church year because it is a four-day celebration of our faith, complete with really awesome liturgy and music

Training summary-Weeks 9 and 10

It's the home stretch of my half-marathon training. Since Ben and I were on spring break vacation during the end of week 9 and the beginning of week 10, I didn't meet my mileage quotas, but I'm running faster than my required pace, so I think I'm in pretty good shape to keep on with training. The weather this past week has been really nice, and I am so happy to be running in shorts and a t-shirt again.

10 weeks down, 3 to go.

Training summary-Week 8

This past week, I stayed at 44 total miles. I was supposed to run 46 miles, but we had storms all day last Tuesday, so I redistributed some of the miles from that run to my easy runs. My long run yesterday was 13 miles, and with the spring-like weather we've been having the last few days, it was a really pleasant run.

This current week is another easy week, with a drop in mileage but an increase in pace. I think the warm temperatures are supposed to stick around for a bit more, so it should be a nice week to be outside.

8 weeks down, 5 to go.