Who doesn't love a freebie?

One of my (many) little neurotic "things" is that while someone is working in my house, I feel like I must be working, too. (I would have made a terrible aristocrat in times past.) This week a very nice carpenter is here replacing the storm doors, and while he is doing that, I have been attacking the neglected filing in my music and hobby space.

OK, that's not quite fair. More accurately, I have been moving my stuff out of what is mostly DH's office space, and setting up my own space in one side of the open downstairs area. Truth be told, I have been mourning the loss of my previous closed studio to the gym a while ago, but am now ready to get over it and claim this area, even though I can't close the door on my practice time, as "mine." It's a combination music, stamping, blogging and study area. I have a table with two work spaces, moved the computer down, book cases and organizing cubes, the piano, and of course cellos, stands, and mirror.

So this week I emptied and moved some plastic file boxes downstairs and have been busily sorting, labeling and filing. I hope to get through the last four partial boxes of "stuff" today, which will then be the first time I haven't been living out of boxes since we moved here. Whoa. Major paradigm shift.

Now, based on the title of this post, I didn't start typing here in order to tell you all that, but rather to tell you what I found. I'm "pre-filing" the stuff from the boxes, sorting them into piles on the floor, and ran across a Shar flyer. It says that they have free sheet music downloads available, so I checked it out. Looks like they post something new every week, and this week it's the parts and score for a Mozart string quartet, k458, "The Hunt."

I love free sheet music. Did you know they were doing this? Great way to get folks to visit your shop every week.

And even better, now that I have blogged about it I can discard the flyer. Hehe.

Auf Deutsch

Cool. I get to hog the computer while DH is at a dinner meeting here in Vienna, and just discovered that all of my Blogger toolbar is in German. One can never assume anonymity. Fortunately, all reverted to English after I figured out that anmelden had something to do with signing in.

Bah

My short-lived blog renaissance has run into a roadblock in the form of a dead computer. It appears we had a power surge in the night, according to the tale told by the oven clock. It's really dead - no response at all from depressing the power button. Hopefully that means that the power supply bore the brunt of the damage, as it seems to me I'd get power up if I had "only" fried the motherboard. I happen to have a spare power supply sitting around, waiting to be transplanted into the computer that died a year and a half ago. That one can probably wait a little longer.

In the meantime, I am typing this last post on DH's tiny laptop. The font is so small that I can barely see it even with maximal squinting. It may be awhile until I try this again.

Visitor

Yesterday DH stopped by for lunch. Yes, stopped by on the way from Phoenix to DC. He had just left to return to the airport when the phone rang.

"I just saw a wild turkey across the street."

"Really? OK, I'll go check."

Not sure about the wild part, as I walked to about 8 feet away. I know it's not as unusual as a moose, but here in the metro area you take whatever Nature you can get.

Loaners

I see it's been almost a month since I last posted. Where has the time gone?

My friend D- knew I was still missing Frankie, so she kindly lent me these two four-month-old monsters to occupy the void in my heart for a week or two. That's laid-back Brad on my left and squirmy little Angelina on my right. She has the barest of white tippy toes on the left side, along with one white whisker and one white chin hair. Adorable.



And I have another loaner in the house today - a cello. In the continuing saga of the exploding cello from last winter, my new replacement cello developed a crack in the top of the top just as I was getting ready to take it in to have a new bridge made and some adjustments done in the hopes of making the playability more to my liking. I have been more and more disappointed, because this wasn't the cello I would have bought if it had been one of the candidates in my search.

Though the shop that I bought the cello from won't simply refund the money (which I completely understand), they have always been willing to trade the cello at the original purchase price for another cello. So that's what I'm (finally) doing. And I must say, even though I don't need another cello at this moment, having two perfectly good ones (and two cello-shaped objects, CSO's), it is always exciting to try new cellos.

But that's all I'm going to write about that now, because I want to go practice some more.

Halftime

Superbowl. Kitchen. Rockin' with The Boss. DH demonstrates the Dying Cockroach (I think it was originally called gatoring, but we renamed it in honor of a prominent feature of the hospital we trained at). I was worried that he would hurt himself, but he emerged unscathed. Kistler pinot noir and chocolate ice cream sandwiches. Man, we are getting old.

Expedition

Honey, I got the mail!

Bigs and littles

The event of the day was a home energy audit, one of the services provided by the gas company where a guy with ever so many more handyman skills than have you comes to visit your house with an infrared camera to show you where all the air leaks and other heating inefficiencies in your house are and glibly describes 40 different ways to fix each one.

Most interestingly, I discovered that when the temperature is 18 below 0 all you need to do is walk around the house with your hand out to identify all the same sources of heat loss.

No, really, this was a useful thing to have done, and I learned a lot. Probably the most important things were that the biggest source of heat loss in my house are all of the cannister lights (20? 30? 40?), and that I really need to clean the metal filters in my electrostatic furnace filtering system more often than, say, every year or two.

After we brought the house back up to a comfortable temperature (part of the process involved sucking all of the warm air out of the house with a blower fitted into the front door), I turned the furnace off again so that I could clean the filters. They looked like dryer lint catchers, no lie. Unfortunately, I forgot to take photo documentation, so you'll have to take my word for it. They have been delinted and are in the dishwasher now. Hopefully they will be dry before it hits 30 below tonight.

While the house is cooling off, the "Beaches" are popular with the resident catlets. I thought this tableau was striking enough to cause me to break my temporary vow of blogging silence.

Here we have a big stripey and tuxedo on one side of the bathroom sink:



And little stripey and tuxedo on the other:



Adorable.

Ennui

Blogging is temporarily suspended. BTW, I put the Christmas tree away yesterday, when finally someone managed to knock it to the floor. Bleak, interminable midwestern winter ensues.

Music schedule

You might not know it from reading my blog recently, but I do still play the cello. After taking two whole months off over the summer, but still feeling slightly burnt out, I cut back my schedule significantly this year.

What I am not doing:
Orchestra
Flute trio
Piano trio
Piano lessons
Vocal ensemble

What I am doing:
Cello lessons, weekly +/-
Voice class, also weekly
Cello quartet, weekly, with a coach
String quartet, sporadically, every few months
Church orchestra, weekly rehearsal and 1 or 2 services, 3 of 4 weeks

Plus a Christmas performance, which is this week. So we have a dress rehearsal tomorrow night, scheduled for four (4!) hours, and concert on Thursday night. I also simplified my life by scheduling everything at Music School on one day, which happens to be Thursday. So this week I'll go straight from my lesson to dress rehearsal, and miss voice class and cello quartet.

I am annoyed that, even with having cut back, my scheduled elements are stepping on each others' toes.

Frosted

I return to the Frozen Tundra of the North, and what am I greeted by?



Snow! The very next morning. This is what my deck looked like after all the kitties (who aren't allowed out on the deck while I am out of town) trooped outside to inspect it.

And it's what the deck still looks like this morning. First time this year that the snow lasted another overnight. I heard on the news this morning that we have already had 4 inches this year, the most in the past three this early in the snow season. And last year it snowed on December 1st and we didn't see green again until late April.

I'm not ready for Winter. But at least the sun is shining today.

Mystery

Yesterday I boiled a few eggs, and placed the ones I didn't eat in an egg carton with a big "HB" written in Sharpie at one end. I stashed the carton in the refrigerator near the other (unboiled) eggs.

This morning I found the two boiled eggs sitting loose on a shelf, one cracked around the middle, and the carton in the recycling bag.

Are we imagining the same scenario?

(I giggle each time I think about it, but maybe I should apologize later.)

Ice in approaches

This morning when I dragged myself out of bed too early, to feed the cats before I left to play in church, it was dark except for the luminous strips of walkway amongst the fallen leaves, shining with a light coating of snow. As the dark lifted - the sun must have risen but under the clouds only the shade of gray changed - I saw that the pond is partially covered with a thin sheet of ice.

It's just a matter of time, and probably not much.

Veterans Day

DH wished me a Happy Veterans Day this morning, as he was leaving for work and I was trying to sleep through the roar of purring Vanalikalikes ready for breakfast. I asked him if that wasn't an oxymoron.

A long way to go

I ran across a link to a fun longevity calculator in my medical junk e-mail this morning. Great news: statistically my life expectancy is 98 years. They recommended a few small changes I could make to get past that century mark, which included slightly increasing my activity level, convincing my bowels to (ahem) move more frequently, taking a regular aspirin dose, giving up my last cup of daily coffee (give up 48 years of morning coffee for three more months of life? I don't think so), and becoming more optimistic about my life.

Ha.

Commitment

I love waking up in the morning with the feeling that I can do anything I want to. That's been my morning feeling nearly every day since I retired three years ago. But I am beginning to realize that the reason I am getting less and less done is that I am so reluctant to give up that feeling that I won't commit to doing anything. I waft through the day, thinking but not doing.

Next paragraph would normally describe what I am going to do about it, but I am drawing a blank.

First snow

Yes, truly. We got the deck furniture inside and stored this morning in the nick of time, then I ran off for the last session of my weekend Barry Green seminar.

Winter. Bleh.

Complications

We have greatly enjoyed our finally-discovered local farmers market for the last couple of months. In addition to the usual vegetables, berries, and now apples, I scored some wonderful maple syrup, and know where I can find locally produced honey. And every week there are flowers, huge bunches for $5.

Four weeks ago I bought a couple of monochromatic bunches that included eucalyptus, cat tails, and these wonderful spiny green globes. After enjoying them in water for a couple of weeks, I dumped the water and let them dry in place. I figured I'd have a lovely dried arrangement for the winter but then...



One of those green globes popped open to reveal a pod full of fluffy white seed parachutes. Agh! Unless I want the house to look like Cottonwood Canyon, that is simply not going to work.

This morning I discarded my "flowers," and not a moment too soon. What are those green things, anyway?

Every good run deserves a pancake

Two miles

Labor Day was still summer, muggy and low 90's. Yesterday the storms came through, but it stayed hot and humid until mid-afternoon, when the temperature dropped precipitously. Today was our first perfect Fall day, low 60's, crisp and clear, not a cloud in the sky.

A day like today always makes me want to run, even if I haven't in awhile. And it's not that I haven't tried, but I haven't really been able to run since my ACL reconstruction surgery last year. At my first annual eval we seriously considered a second procedure to remove the hardware and clean up some adhesions because I was still having so much discomfort at the site, with bending, and, especially, after running.

The exercise regimen I described in my last news post has paid off, though. I have visible muscle surrounding my knee cap, and I've made great progress with my walk/run program. I had stopped "jogging" because of my tendency to do that without really engaging my quadriceps. But today I really, really wanted to run the whole block, a distance of two miles, and I can't "run" that far yet.

In my previous life I remember running with our head nurse, who desperately needed to pass an upcoming PT test, as a source of support and low-key drill sergeant-type motivation. She was slow but determined, and we ran a four mile loop at a speed that felt like standing still at the time. I still remember the surprise I felt at how easy it seemed. I decided today was a good day to try to recapture that ease.

So I did. I ran, but v e r y s l o w l y. No, I jogged. But I remembered to contract the necessary muscles to stabilize my knee on each step, and I completed the two miles, still jogging. It was a glorious day.

Woo hoo!