This is my crazy week for choir, so I’ve decided to consider it something of a spring break. I can work, but I’m not holding myself to any quotas or expectations.

I had a choir rehearsal last night, getting home at 9:30. Then I have to sing for services on Thursday night, Friday mid-day, Saturday night, and Sunday morning.

There are a couple of pieces we’re singing that aren’t getting much rehearsal since the choir does them every year, but either I’ve never sung them before or I’m singing a new part this year, so I have to put in some practice on my own to learn them. One is the Hallelujah Chorus. I could sing the soprano part from memory without rehearsal, but I’m having to learn the alto part. Fortunately, this was a very popular piece for all those “cellphone choirs” from early in the pandemic, so there are a lot of rehearsal videos out there that focus on each part. There are a couple of spots with tricky rhythms, but otherwise, I think I can do this one. The first run past the tricky parts last night I got lost, but then I realized that the way the choir was arranged meant all the former sopranos now singing alto were together and all the “real” altos were together (because of another piece with a first and second alto split), so I couldn’t count on just following the people around me. The next time we went past that part I made myself stay focused and keep counting, and I got through it okay, and the others around me seemed to key off me.

The other piece is for the Saturday night Easter Vigil service. It’s going to be a smaller choir, since it wasn’t mandatory. I signed up because I’ve never seen this service before and thought it would be interesting to see. It’s a 16th century piece, in Latin, a capella, and really fast. We got a run-through last night and will rehearse it again on Saturday. It’s one they apparently do just about every year, so I’m diving in the deep end here while a lot of others have it memorized. I’m going to have to put in some extra work to keep up with it. It’s not a Latin text I’ve sung before in other settings, so I need to get used to the words while I’m also learning the notes. I’ve got a recording, but I haven’t found one that isolates the alto part, and the recording goes at performance tempo. I’ll have to sit at the piano to work on this one.

Meanwhile, Saturday is Fiber Fest at the Frontier Culture Museum, so that will be a busy day. It’s a fun festival with sheepdog demonstrations, shearing, other fiber arts stuff, and vendors to shop at. I may let myself buy some good yarn for knitting. I’ll be picking up some material for books, I’m sure. I’ll eventually get around to spring in Rydding Village, so there will be shearing.

Since Friday morning will be kind of crazy, I’m giving myself the day off and won’t be posting then. Even if I wrote a post, I’d probably forget to post it in the frenzy of getting myself together and heading to the church in time to rehearse before the noon service. I’m just declaring that whole day a holiday and will be spending the afternoon doing some cooking to have handy for the weekend. The idea will be to have breakfast and dinner food ready to just heat up during the weekend. I can heat breakfast before heading out on Easter morning, then heat lunch when I get home, and then I can collapse.

I moved the day after Easter last year, so I spent the day getting the house ready and then getting my apartment ready for the movers (though Easter was much later last year, so I’m not at the year anniversary). This will sort of be my second Easter in this house. I wasn’t technically living here then, but I had lunch here and spent most of the day here. It’ll be nice to be able to just relax this year.

Today is my one-year anniversary of finding my house, so I’ve now seen it through a full year.

It was actually a year ago last night that I first saw the listing, and I dismissed it. It just didn’t look viable — a 4-bedroom house in a bit more than 1,100 square feet (plus half basement). From the pictures in the listing, I couldn’t figure out how I’d arrange my furniture in the living room, and I didn’t need four bedrooms. But then my brain had other ideas, and I got no sleep that night as my brain arranged things. One of the bedrooms had sliding doors opening onto a deck. Why not use that as the living room? It’s a bit weird to have the kitchen and dining room downstairs and the living room up with the bedrooms, but why not? (It turns out that’s how the house was set up — there’s not even a door on the “bedroom” used as a living room) Then the downstairs could be the dining room and sort of a reception area. The house was old but the kitchen was new, and I really liked the deck.

The next morning, a year ago today, my Realtor contacted me while I was in the process of contacting her, and we set up the viewing later that morning. It was one of those “throw on clothes and run” situations, but the house was only a few blocks from where I was living. I’d never even looked at this part of town, mostly because there weren’t any listings. I didn’t know this street existed. The location was good, in walking distance of downtown and the parks but not on the main street. I loved the wooded back yard. And the moment I stepped into the house, I had the weird feeling that this was mine. It was an odd layout. The rooms were tiny, but I thought I could make it work. I had a vivid mental image of sitting on a couch in that living room, drinking tea and watching it rain or snow on the back yard (I got to do a lot of that this winter).

I wrestled with the decision for the rest of the day. It wasn’t at all what I’d envisioned as my house, so I was having to readjust my ideas and sit with the change, but the next day I told my Realtor I wanted to make an offer. It was accepted the next day. Now I almost can’t imagine living anywhere else. It’s like it was meant to be.

They’d had to do some re-grading of the lot and had put down grass seed under straw, and they’d mowed what was apparently a wild yard, so I didn’t get a good sense of what it was like at this time of year. This year I’m seeing that the yard is full of bulbs of some kind. The daffodils have started blooming, but I don’t know what else is out there yet. This was a particularly cold winter, with the cold weather lingering longer (we had snow last week and a few flurries Tuesday of this week), so spring may be delayed somewhat this year. It’ll be nice to be a lot less hectic in late March and April this year, since last year was a whirlwind. I had the house inspection the week after I first saw the house, then closed on the house in early April and started moving stuff over before the furniture got moved in late April and I cleared out the apartment during the rest of that month. I actually started packing right after I got off the phone with the Realtor when she told me I got the house. I figured I was going to be moving sooner or later, so I might as well box up books.

Now I’m settled. I’m still making adjustments as I get used to being in the house and figure out what I need, but it’s getting there. Next up will be trying to get ahead of the yard as spring sets in and the plants wake up. I let the yard get pretty wild last summer, but now I can identify the weeds I want to get rid of before they get big, and I’m going to add some plants.

I’m looking forward to a whole year without moving. It was around this time two years ago that I started making firm plans to move here. I found out about the apartment in late March and was here in May, so that was a blur. It’s nice to be settled.

I spent the last two days getting my tree taken down, and it was fascinating to watch. One of the guys climbed the tree (I think he had some kind of spikes on his boots to help, but otherwise he was free climbing) to place the anchor lines that they then clipped to and used to go up and down. He’d swing over to a branch, tie a line around it, cut it off, and the guys on the ground would use the line to lower it. It was like watching Cirque du Soleil with chainsaws.

The got most of the work done on Monday and just had to wrap it up on Tuesday, but that was when they were dealing with the trunk of the tree, and with a tree that old, you can imagine the trunk was pretty thick. When it got closer to the ground one of the guys asked if I wanted the trunk cut down or if I wanted him to make me a chair, so after a bit of chainsaw carving I have a tree stump throne for surveying my kingdom. I’m pretty sure I’m going to use that in a fantasy novel.

I’d also asked for another tree to be trimmed around power lines as part of the contract, but they went ahead and trimmed all my trees, cutting off any bad branches they noticed, and they left me a nice stack of the cherry wood to use for the fire pit, in a smoker, or for carving. The guy who carved my chair is planning to make a table out of some of the wood, so the tree will live on in some way.

It turned out that a couple of the guys were aspiring authors, so we talked shop and I gave them advice (I think the chair carving was “payment” for the writing advice). They were really cool and interesting to talk to, but it’s so nice to have my house and yard to myself again and to have some peace and quiet after two days of chainsaws going constantly. I was utterly exhausted by the time they left yesterday, and I wasn’t even the one doing any of the work. I think it was just the release of constant low-level tension. It was lovely this morning to have breakfast in my pajamas instead of being up, dressed, and ready for the tree crew to come first thing in the morning.

I’m eager to start doing some landscaping, but we still have a chance of freezing nights, so it’s a little early to put plants out. I have crocuses coming up in my backyard, though, and daffodils are about to bloom. I didn’t see this house until late March last year, and they’d mowed everything down to show the house, so the spring flowers are going to be a surprise this year.

Texans like to talk about how much their weather changes, but in some times of the year, I think Virginia can be even worse. Last weekend was warm and sunny. I spent most of the weekend working in the yard, trying to dig up some weeds that produce barbed seeds before they can sprout the branches that produce these seeds. I walked to church, and I spent time sitting out on my deck. Even so, there were still piles of ice/snow left from the late January storm. I had to step around these on street corners as I walked downtown.

Monday, I spent the day snuggled on the sofa with the electric blanket, watching it snow. It was above freezing most of the day, so the snow didn’t really stick, but the evergreen trees in my yard looked like flocked Christmas trees.

We had a couple of cool, rainy days, then it got warm again. I spent most of yesterday sitting on the deck, brainstorming a book. It’s supposed to stay warm for most of the next week. Maybe the last of that ice will finally melt. I’m hoping to get more work done in the yard. It looks like I’m going to have a lot of bulbs flowering soon, so I want to get the bad plants out of the way.

I’m having to take down one of my trees, the biggest one. It’s blighted, so it’s dying/dead and will become a hazard soon. The tree guy estimates it’s about 100 years old, so it pre-dates my house. It’s actually closer to my neighbor’s house and part of it hangs over their roof, so I want to get it taken care of before it starts dropping branches. My house is probably safe from it, unless it topples over entirely heading downhill. The tree guy has suggested other trees I could plant and where I should plant them. That may have to wait because having a 100+ foot tall tree taken down from a spot where they can’t reach it with heavy machinery is rather expensive (though less expensive than replacing my neighbor’s metal roof and solar panels). They’re coming next week to do the work, and they do it by climbing the tree and cutting it down from the top. I may spend those days on the deck, watching the progress.

I’m hoping we’re done with snow and ice, but they tell me it can come as late as April. At least we should be done with single-digit temperatures for the season. Everyone tells me this was an unusually brutal winter. In Texas, I usually dreaded spring because it meant summer was coming, and that was miserable, but now I’m enjoying spring weather and watching things come back to life. Except for the weeds.

As I watch the Winter Olympics, I find myself in awe of the physical condition of the athletes. They have strength, endurance, and flexibility. They’re so fit, which is the exact opposite of me. I’d love to be in even half that shape, but I have this one little problem: I hate to exercise. By that I mean exercising just for the point of exercising or getting fit — lifting weights just to move heavy things, walking just for exercise or, worse, using a treadmill of stationary bicycle. It’s just so boring, and it takes a long time to feel the benefits from exercise. When I try to start a fitness program, I get bored with it and give up before I start seeing the kind of results that would encourage me to continue. Even with yoga, where I feel better immediately after doing it, I have to force myself to do it, and then I can’t wait for it to be over.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t like activity. When I was spending days shoveling snow, I found that I was actually enjoying myself. There was a great sense of accomplishment from seeing the results, and I felt myself getting stronger. I get bored with walking for the sake of walking, like walking laps or going on a regular route purely for fitness purposes, but I love walking when there’s a purpose to it. I enjoy walking as a form of transportation. One of my favorite things about where I live now is the fact that I can walk to so many things. I walk to church when the weather allows it, and I walk to events downtown. I can walk to concerts in the park or to the community garden market. I also love hiking and being in the woods and I enjoy walking when I’m exploring.

Or I enjoy activity when it’s something I’m doing for fun, like dancing. I was probably at my most fit when I was taking ballet classes, and ballroom dancing is fun. I can make myself do exercise when I have a specific goal, like when I was in physical therapy and trying to get back full function of a knee or shoulder, or when I’m trying to get better at something I enjoy. One reason I was so fit when taking ballet was because I’d do other exercises during the week to make myself do better in ballet.

What I’ve figured out from this is that I need a purpose to make myself do an activity. Even making exercise a task on my calendar or giving myself points toward rewards for doing it doesn’t motivate me. But having something specific and tangible that I’m trying to accomplish does work. So if I’m not walking because I need to get somewhere, I need to come up with some other purpose, like something I want to explore. In a town full of historic districts, that should be easy enough. I can play tourist and walk the way I did when I visited the town on vacation. When the ice and snow clear out, I’ll have a lot of garden work to do. Then the yoga will work as a way to undo the aches from the garden work and long walks. I may look into some dance classes.

I can’t believe it took me this long to realize that having a purpose might make a big difference. I guess it’s like the way I have a hard time keeping my house clean but can get it in shape if I might have company. I need external motivation for some things.

Now I just need enough ice and snow to clear so I can get out and do more.

I finished my draft on Friday, then I got my car shoveled out yesterday, so that’s been my recent accomplishment. I am now allowing myself to rest a bit and do thinking type work. Getting through all that ice was a real challenge.

This is what my car looked like before I was able to dig it out.

And this was the end of my driveway Monday, after I’d been shoveling at it for days. I was using a garden hoe to hack the ice into blocks. And then my neighbor brought over a tool he’d been using. It’s designed for breaking up tile flooring, and it works amazingly on ice. There’s a narrow blade on the bottom and it’s heavy. You just let it drop onto the surface, and it shatters it. I went from clearing maybe a foot or two a day to getting the rest of the driveway and my car freed on Monday afternoon. Tuesday morning I finished a good path to my driveway and cleared space around the car so I could get to the door and open it, plus cleared a path to the mailbox and freed the trash bin. It was easier work with this tool, but still tiring because you have to keep lifting this heavy thing, and you still have to move all the blocks of ice. That’s why I’m resting today.

This is just part of the piles of ice blocks I moved from my driveway. I’ll have to track to see how long it takes to melt. We actually got above freezing yesterday, and that actually made it a bit harder to move more ice because when it got slushy, the tool no longer worked and I couldn’t just move chunks at a time. I had to actually shovel.

After a day of rest, I may do a little more work on paths. The path I dug from the porch to the driveway doesn’t follow the actual walkway (I’ve been thinking of moving the walkway, which is stepping stones, and this path might be a good option because it’s what made sense at the time, especially because the snow/ice drifted deeper on the real path). I may try to dig out the walkway. And I may move some of the slush from my deck so it doesn’t melt and flow toward my basement. Plus, this is a great workout and I’d like to maintain and maybe even build on some of the fitness I’ve developed from doing all this, so I need to keep working instead of just sitting now.

Once I freed my car, I was able to restock on groceries and run by the library. The city streets are somewhat cleared, but side streets are mostly one-lane. They had crews out loading chunks of ice into dump trucks because clearing the streets had created walls of ice around the town. I don’t know when all of this will melt.

When I was living in Texas, I noticed that whenever we got hit by an ice storm (and it was usually ice rather than snow), people in more northern climates mocked us because it paralyzed the city for days. They didn’t seem to understand that we didn’t have the infrastructure for dealing with that kind of weather (and it wasn’t cost-effective to develop the infrastructure when it was something that happened once every few years) and that you really can’t do a lot about ice other than wait for it to melt.

Now that I live in a more northern place and in the mountains, I get snow more regularly, and they still shut down. They’re good about getting the streets plowed, but the school buses are too risky on the steep hills until the roads are truly clear. This weekend, though, we got a storm that was more like what Texas gets. It started as snow and turned into sleet. Now we have a crust of about 3 inches of sleet on top of about 4 inches of powdery snow, and the whole city has been shut down for three days. They can’t plow the ice (and broke some snowplows trying). They’re now going out with heavy construction equipment, the kind they use to break up asphalt to resurface roads, to break the ice up so the plows can then go through and move it out of the way. That’s slow going, so my little one-block side street that’s on the bottom of the priority list is still solid ice. One neighbor tried going up and down it with a snow blower, but that did no good.

To make matters worse, it’s getting single-digit cold at night, sunny and in the 20s (F) during the day, so the top layer is melting slightly while in the sun then freezing hard at night, so it’s like a skating rink. If you look at it, it looks like the kind of snow that looks like mounds of fluffy whipped cream, but I can walk across the top of it without leaving footprints. Well, I could on Monday before it slightly melted in the sunlight and refroze to be very slippery. Now I can’t walk on it. I was able to shovel a path to the street Monday by breaking through the top layer and flipping it to the side, but now that top layer is even harder and my shovel does nothing, so I can’t clear the driveway. I may get out the garden hoe to see what I can do today. I can’t do much at any one time because it’s very cold and my gloves aren’t up to the task. I have to come inside when my hands start hurting. I tried to buy some better insulated gloves last week before the storm, but they were clearing out their winter gear and setting out spring gardening stuff, so they didn’t have any heavy gloves that would fit me. I’m going to try knitting some mittens to wear over the gloves I have.

Once you get that top crust of ice off, the rest is light, powdery snow that’s easy to move. I’ve been able to clear much of the ice/sleet off my car, but the area around the car is still pretty solid, and there’s a wall of snow at the end of my driveway from when they tried to get ahead of the storm by plowing during it, which only made matters worse because it shoved the snow aside so the sleet was directly on the street. I don’t think I’ll be driving anywhere anytime soon. Fortunately, I stocked up at the grocery store last week. If I do need something, my neighbor has chains on his car and has been able to get out, and he’s offered to pick up anything I need.

We had a storm kind of like this in Dallas in 2014, and we’ve been paralyzed here just as long as we were in Dallas. The bright side is that I haven’t had to worry about the electrical grid crashing the way it did a few years ago in Texas during a winter storm.

I’ve been able to keep up with writing in spite of the distractions. I should theoretically have more writing time because I can’t go anywhere, but my brain has other plans. I’m close to the end of the draft, though.

I’m trying to be more mindful about how I spend my free time. I especially don’t want my weekends to feel too much like my weekdays, which tends to happen when you work at home. Even if I’m not writing over the weekend, I have a bad habit of spending a lot of time online or otherwise sitting at my computer. So, to encourage myself to spend weekends in a way that feels like a weekend, I came up with three main categories of kinds of Saturday, and I try to plan in advance what I’m going to do, so I don’t get into a round of “What do you want to do? I don’t know, what do you want to do?” with myself.

One category is work. That can include writing if I need to catch up after having other stuff come up during the week. It may also include things like workshops, conferences, conventions, book festivals, etc. It also includes projects around the house or in the yard, like organizing or gardening.

Another category is adventure, which is what I’m calling activities that involve leaving the house. That can include classes, touring and exploring, hiking, museums, and that sort of thing.

And then there’s cozy/creating. This is good for rainy or snowy days and involves things that are good to do on a cozy day at home. I added the “creating” so I’d have to do something other than just read. It may involve baking, cooking (especially trying new recipes), sewing, embroidery, knitting, coloring, music and stuff like jigsaw puzzles.

I pondered a social category, but that usually involves leaving the house, so it could be “adventure,” or else it’s something like a block party that involves work or creating to prep for. A few weeks ago, there was a choir party, so I spent the day baking before the party. Generally, social activities are an add-on to a weekend, and if they’re a focus of a weekend, like the church retreat, then they’re also an adventure.

I imagine I’ll have a lot more cozy/creating Saturdays during the winter, more work in spring and summer when I have yard work and gardening to do, and more adventure in the fall, when there are all the festivals, looking at leaves, hiking trips, and that kind of thing.

I generally try to save Sunday afternoons for rest. I have church and choir in the mornings, and I usually walk there, so that gives me some exercise. In the afternoons I read and maybe cook. Sometimes I have things scheduled that would fit into my other weekend categories. The church does field trips and the pastor leads prayer walks (meditative hikes) once a month.

The Saturday before last was a cozy/creating day because it was rainy. I baked bread and read. But there was also some work because there was an online seminar.

Last weekend was a mix of all of them. I had a pottery class in the morning, which counted as adventure, creating, and work (since it’s research for a book and I asked the teacher questions that have come up in my writing). Then in the afternoon the hiking group did a city walkabout hike. Between walking downtown and back for the class and the hike, my phone says I walked more than 9 miles that day. It’s a good thing I had a restful Sunday afternoon planned because my legs were tired and my upper body got a workout from the pottery.

This coming weekend I have another pottery class on Saturday, then a committee meeting after church Sunday and then one of my neighbors is having a party Sunday evening, but we’re also expecting a big winter storm, so I don’t know how much of it will end up happening. It’ll be really cold Saturday morning but the snow isn’t supposed to start until later, so the pottery class may happen (I’ll drive instead of walking if it’s that cold), but we could get about 10 inches of snow overnight Saturday, so there’s a chance the Sunday stuff won’t happen. I don’t know if the neighbor will cancel the party or just assume we can fight our way through the snow across the street. After the pottery class, I plan on going full cozy. There will be baking, soup, and cocoa. If it’s going to snow, it would be nice if some of it would happen while I can watch it. I’ve found that it tends to snow overnight here. You wake up and there’s snow on the ground but you don’t get to watch it fall very often, and I only really like snow when it’s falling. I love to watch it fall but could do without it once it hits the ground.

The local weather people started off all “don’t buy the hype” about the storm but are now saying to make preparations, so that means grocery shopping today to beat the rush.

Winter is probably my biggest adjustment in my move from Texas to the mountains of Virginia. Summers are humid, but much cooler than in Texas, and spring and fall last longer and are glorious. But winter is colder — sort of. There’s something weird in the way the temperatures feel. We do get truly cold days, where it’s below freezing all day, and we get more snow here, but then on the days when it’s above freezing it doesn’t feel as cold as I expect from the thermometer. As a result, I’m usually overdressed when I go out, or else I resist going out because it’s cold, only to find that it isn’t that bad. Last winter, I shoveled snow while wearing a sweatshirt and leggings, and I wasn’t that cold (I did have on gloves and a hat). I’d gone out bundled up but had to shed layers while working in the sun.

I actually enjoy cooler weather, and I’d rather it be cold than hot, but I generally enjoy cold weather by being inside, wearing a sweater, with fuzzy socks on, wrapped up in a blanket, and with a cup of hot tea. I’ve been slacking off on exercise because I’ll look at the temperature and think it looks too cold to go out, but I completely lost that excuse last weekend. It was a sunny, cold day, but still above freezing, so I walked to church. It’s a little more than half a mile, and it’s not much faster to drive because I can walk right to the churchyard gate, but if I drive I have to go past the church, then go through a couple of stoplights and make left turns to get to the city parking garage behind the church, then walk from the parking garage. It is uphill both ways from my house to downtown, since the road goes up and down hills, but it’s definitely easier heading to church than heading home because I live far uphill from downtown. The main hill is big, but it’s a fairly gradual slope. When I’m driving to downtown, once I get to the crest of that hill, I just coast the rest of the way. Walking home up that hill is a bit of a trudge.

There was a brunch after church on Sunday, and when I left, it was sunny and quite pleasant. No wind, and the sun made it feel warmer. Kids were playing on the church playground. I was enjoying the walk home, thinking about how nice it is walking through a historic district and looking at all the Victorian houses along the way.

Then I got to the crest of the hill, and it looked like I was walking into a dark tunnel. Next thing I knew, I was in the middle of a blizzard. There were dark clouds, the wind was whipping around, and snow was blowing. I’m not sure how far the visibility went because I kept my head down so the snow wouldn’t blow straight into my face. I kept my eyes on the sidewalk, putting one foot in front of the other. The front of my coat was crusted with snow. I was glad I hadn’t driven because the streets in this general part of town are pretty hairy in good conditions. There are all the hills, and the streets were laid out before cars existed, so they’re pretty narrow. On that street between my home and downtown, there’s one particular part that’s treacherous, where there’s a sharp curve on a hill at a point where the road narrows. I suspect they cut into the lawns of the houses to widen the street so there are two lanes (one in each direction) plus room for parking on one side. But at this one spot, there are churches built right against the sidewalk, and they’re historic (one is on the National Register of Historic Places), so there’s no tearing them down, and the road can’t be widened there. There’s no parking in that stretch, but people do the “I’m just running in for a second” thing and park anyway. It’s supposed to be a 15 mph speed limit there, but most people ignore that. I can’t imagine trying to navigate that area with no visibility.

I only had to walk through the blizzard for a few blocks before I turned off to head to my street, and there I was sheltered from the worst of it. Then on my street I was heading away from it, so there was snow falling, but it wasn’t blowing into my face. At my house, if I looked out my front windows it was snowing, but if I looked out the back windows it was sunny. By the time I changed clothes, the sun was out all over and there was no sign that it had ever snowed. I couldn’t even see any dark clouds. It was above freezing, so the snow didn’t stick.

The TV meteorologist calls that a “flizzard.” It’s blizzard conditions but with the scope and duration of a flurry. This one was so small that it didn’t even show up on the radar unless you zoomed in. It covered that one little spot, a few blocks long and barely wider than the street, and it moved past quickly.

But Monday when I was looking at the temperature, around 42, and thinking it was so cold, I remembered that I’d walked to church when it was 33 and walked home through a blizzard, so I had no excuse. That was a pleasant walk, though I may need to find better walking shoes for cold weather. I have Skechers, and they’re ventilated. That’s great in the summer, but you don’t want a cold wind blowing through your shoes in the winter. I was wearing fleece-lined boots on Sunday, and that was perfect, but those aren’t really walk-for-exercise shoes.

This coming Sunday, it’s supposed to be in the 20s for a high and may be in the teens in the morning, so I’m going to plan to drive. By any standard, that’s a bit cold for a comfortable walk. Getting from the parking garage to the church will be bad enough.