Brain Dump

Things have been happening here. Things that have really put a cramp on my free-time activities (not that I've had much "free-time" in the past five years anyway). I'll have to play the catch-up game with this post as I don't know where else to start, except everywhere!

1) As my previous post indicates, my dearest daughter turned five last week. We celebrated from Thursday afternoon to Monday night. Daughter wanted to go fishing again, just like she did last year for her birthday. Great Uncle Ron is much better at the fishing thing than the rest of us are, so we let him do most of the work.

Here is Daughter with part of her big catch. Dear Son is in the background looking at his fishing pole like he has no idea what he had just done or that he could do what he did with this "toy." He had caught the first fish, just before his big sister reeled this one in.

Here he is with one on his hook, and the following pic is one of him with his big catch and Daddy. Notice how his Daddy is looking at his son's fishing pole like he can't believe what his son just did with it either.
















And here's Great Uncle Ron with the two wee fishers.















Here are the kids watching the lady we paid to clean the fish for us (what can I say? I wasn't about to do it, and Great Uncle Ron didn't bring his fish cleaning knives with him). The lady took the heart out of one of the fish while it was still beating and set it on the counter for the kids to watch while she cleaned the fish. That thing kept beating the whole time she worked, which was beyond gross as far as I was concerned.



Then there was Dear Daughter's party. She wanted The Little Mermaid as her theme this year. I'm still in shock over the concept of her being five years old now.




















2) I've been unhappy with many dynamics of my work and decided to leave my current practice and join a different one. What I didn't know is that I would be invited to join the new practice immediately upon receipt of my resume, and that my old practice would graciously suggest I take my clients with me, and that we would agree that the sooner the better to avoid further disruption to the clients, and that I would manage to move my credentialing status with the many private insurances I provide for to a new Tax ID almost immediately in order to remain in-network for my clients, and that I would begin seeing them at my new practice only three days after I received the invitation to join the new practice. I have also been busy moving all my furniture and belongings out of my old office. To say I've been busy would be drastically understated.

3) Dear Husband has his head set on installing a wood stove. Something about the exorbitant price of propane and all the dead wood on our property waiting to be recycled into our winter heat. He has requested my opinions on things like which stove and what type of rock to install behind the stove, etc. I couldn't have cared less about all these things, especially at this time in our lives and due to the fact that the stove is to be installed in the same room as my piano, and this means that the piano has to go to ensure that it is not destroyed by the dry heat which is likely to crack the sound board and essentially ruin the instrument.

This is the piano my grandparents bought for me when I was eight years old after I had demonstrated for two years that I was committed to practicing and learning. For 28 years I have drug this piano around the country with me. I have spent more time and money moving the thing than what it's worth. In the end, it was the sentimental value that mattered more than the monetary value of it. A few years ago I considered selling it and going digital, but I couldn't quite bring myself to it. Also, the digital I want will cost much more than what I can get out of my acoustic. Unfortunately, I cannot get anyone else to pay for my sentimental attachment to it.

Its successor will be a pricey digital with graded hammer action and some amazing features that have been perfected to imitate the sound and feel of a full-size Steinway grand. There is even a feature that creates the vibration as you play that imitates a concert grand. Oh, and it does a bunch of electronic and midi and mixing stuff that I don't even have any idea how to use. I didn't pick this instrument for these purposes. I chose it for the quality that will closely mimic the acoustic sound. I have to be able to feel satisfied when I play Chopin, Beethoven, Debussy, and Bach. I'll probably have to learn how to use the computerized interfaces and the mixing features because they're there, but not because it's my initial draw.

There's a rock and a hard place somewhere in this story. I have to part with the piano before the stove can be used, but I also have to be prepared to find and allocate the money to replace it relatively quickly as I do not want to be sans piano for any length of time.

4) My piano sold on Saturday and will be picked up on Wednesday evening. It's a good thing I worked my tail off in July and that July had five weeks, which means two extra work days in the month for me. I managed to earn a chunk of extra money to put towards the new piano. Suddenly my 12-hour days on Tuesdays packed with eight individual sessions and two groups of eight clients each, and those extra office clients I've picked up on Thursday nights are well worth it.

5) I have been busy writing and preparing 25 Kindergarten science lessons. I will be teaching Kindergarten science at the kids' home-school co-op which will begin just after Labor Day.

6) Dear Husband has been over-involved in one of his work projects, which means working lots of over-time and after hours in the effort to make major computer changes that affects an entire network of banking. Or something like that. All I know is that it is important, and it means he's been gone from home a lot. I'm not good at being a single mom, so whenever he is gone long nights and weekends, my stress level increases by about 100-fold.

7) I've been working two Sundays a month in our church nursery. This is NOT my proverbial cup of tea. But we are short staffed, and someone has to do it. I can't explain why I can be in a room full of severely emotionally and behaviorally disturbed teens and my pulse will remain unchanged, but being in a room full of two and three year olds just a couple hours each week sends my blood pressure off the charts.

There's probably more, but that's a good summary of dumpage. I will post a few more pics soon of Dear Daughter's birthday weekend and our trip to the water fountain park. Dear Husband rebuilt the desktop recently due to some weather that fried the motherboard or the network connections or something that I couldn't explain correctly even if I tried. Regardless, I have a method for downloading pics to the "mother ship" and then viewing them and editing them and posting them with my laptop via our wireless network. He hasn't corrected the default settings on my desktop log in so that I can do all these things efficiently. This means that I currently can't see the pics I need via the network, and therefore, I cannot post them yet. (Put that on your "honey-do" list, Dear).

I have a few more posts in my head that will hopefully make this blog soon. Right now I must return to the screaming chaos that is my children playing "toilet tag." *sigh* I'll explain later.

The end.