News, October 2009 • October 25, 2009, 1:38 AM

Whew! Finally I have some time to bring you all up to date. In terms of career advancement, things are pretty well status quo, but it's been something of a roller coaster ride.

First, let me give you a bit of background. My dad just turned 80 several days ago, and he's got some health problems—he contracted polio in the late 1940s and broke his kneecap about nine years ago—twice. When he recovered from each of those injuries, he was able to walk with two canes at first, but now he has a brace on his right leg and is unable to stand or walk on his own (he can stand without the brace, but it's safer to have him wear it). Over the last several years he has also developed symptoms of Parkinson's, osteoporosis and, particularly in the last year and a half or so, signs of dementia. He is currently at the point where someone has to be with him 24/7. Since my mom and I have both been doing the 9:00 mass at St. Augustine's—she as a choir member and I as organist—she had my brother come in on Sunday mornings to watch over him, but my brother wasn't always available, and so my mom found it increasingly difficult to justify staying in the choir. She has since chosen to leave the choir to watch over Dad herself.

Mom also has some signs of atrial fibrillation, a type of slightly irregular heartbeat, and given all these factors she's reluctant to drive me around between St. Augustine's and St. Elizabeth's, not just for the Sunday morning masses but also for choir practices on Tuesday and Thursday nights because she's uncomfortable with the idea of leaving Dad home alone for too long.

Meanwhile, at St. Augustine's we had something of a pastoral shuffle, with the result that Father Richard Siok got moved to St. Patrick's Basilica, while Father Paul Shepherd came in from Holy Redeemer. While Father Richard was preparing to make the move, he told me that the group that was doing the 10:30 mass would not be returning in September, and so he offered me that mass. Boy, did that ever cause my heart to outweigh the universe times that and twice its double, because that would have meant I'd have had to leave the 11:00 mass at St. Elizabeth's, where I'd been working for the previous seven years with a choir that I love working with. This was obviously not a decision I could make right off the bat. Mom, however, seemed to think I ought to take the 10:30 mass, particularly given the circumstances surrounding Dad's health situation, because since St. Augustine's is only a fifteen-minute walk away from home, I could simply go there for the 9:00 mass and stay for the 10:30 mass, effectively simplifying my work schedule, particularly in the winter when it's possible for us to have enormous snowfalls.

On top of that, leaving St. Elizabeth's would have meant I'd have had to arrange to have St. Augustine's pay me enough to make up for what I'd have been losing by no longer doing the 11:00 mass, since St. Elizabeth's pays me for the rehearsals. I wanted to wait for Father Paul to come in, however, because I knew that although he may have had an initial look at the parish's financial numbers at that point, he wouldn't have been in as much of a position to say, "Yes, we have the budget to give Jamie the raise he wants," as he would have needed to be until he actually looked at the financial numbers in greater depth and saw the numbers behind the numbers, not just the annual summaries. I had a meeting with him in mid-August to discuss the situation, but he later told me he wasn't prepared to give me the raise. In effect, I was back to square one, but I didn't mind—Father Don later told me he would have had a hard time finding someone to fill my shoes at St. Elizabeth's.

In mid-September I almost ended up in a position of having to leave St. Augustine's instead. Apparently following a meeting of the parish's Finance Committee, Father Paul called a meeting of all the music ministers and two members of the Finance Committee, in which he announced that he wanted all the music ministers to start doing their work on a volunteer basis because he wanted to save the parish some money. The people now doing the 10:30 mass and our choir director for the 9:00 mass were okay with the idea, but I wouldn't have any of it. After all, what I make at St. Augustine's amounts to about 40% of my annual income, and if I were to leave, the choir would have to leave too—they've been struggling to stay together ever since Bob Boulanger left. And if they were to leave, some of the parishioners would leave that mass or even that parish altogether—they attend that mass not so much because the time slot works with their schedules as because they like the music. And there would go some of the parish's revenue. So Father Paul agreed to spare my salary, and as a result my job is safe. Again, there's no raise involved, but it's better than not being paid anything at all.

Meanwhile, Hotter than Ice has gotten back in the studio, with a new guitarist, a new bassist, and a new vocalist. It's been slow going, however, because our bassist appears to be a classic example of the old adage, "You don't use it, you lose it." He used to play bass in his native Ghana, but when he moved here to Canada he wasn't allowed to bring his bass here with him, and as a result he got so rusty that he's having a hard time getting his bass parts into his gut. I hope he doesn't take too much longer to get back into the groove.

I don't know if he'll stay with us or not, but I feel the need to help the band prepare in case he decides to leave. With that in mind, I just bought myself a five-string Squier Affinity bass guitar in the last couple of weeks. I'm not really a total beginner—I'd already been playing rudimentary "bass" lines on our old B&S Grange acoustic for years—but I'm no Mark King or Jaco Pastorius either. So I've been starting to learn some bass techniques from dmanlamius.com, and even something as simple as how to play a major scale has started to open up my eyes to what is possible on the bass.

On the personal front, my friend Ralf Waldvogel and I are co-administrators of Kira Fans Online, the official fan site for Kira. When he and I began planning the idea in February, there had been another fan site set up on MySpace. But it hadn't been updated in quite a while, and in that time Kira had switched music publishers, gained sponsorship from Initiative Musik, and had begun planning her Deine Insel tour—stuff that should have been listed on that fan site but hadn't been yet. In addition, when Kira did a gig on February 21 that coincided with the Echo awards (the German equivalent of the Grammys and Junos), there was a low turnout because of this coincidence, and this gave Ralf the idea that the fan site should help promote her upcoming gigs. The Kira Fans Online concept began as a German-English web site, a MySpace site and a forum site, and then, as a result of Kira's recent tours in China, was expanded to include a Chinese version of the web site (卡拉歌迷在线) and a Streetvoice site (a Chinese equivalent of MySpace).

Nor have I been busy in just music these last several months. In January the aforementioned Bob Boulanger, who runs a business that publishes directories of firms related to the recycling industry, had me manually convert data for a 15,000-record database of companies, a process that took two months. Additionally, I've just completed a month-long accounting project for my brother, involving physically sorting and annotating receipts and invoices going as far back as late 2003 and reconciling bank statements from as far back as late 2006.

So all in all, it's been a busy time. Now that I've completed my brother's stuff for the moment, things are quietening down, but within two months we'll be coming into the Christmas season, and things will once again get hectic for me, but in a more musical vein. Stay tuned!