All In A Day

When I was in college, now forty years ago, my favorite breakfast was animal crackers and grapefruit juice.  I would get up most mornings around 5:15 so that I could be in the practice room by 6am, getting in almost two hours of practice before my eight o’clock class.  This college routine taught me much about the discipline needed as a musician, but maybe not so much about breakfast being the most important meal of the day. As a college…

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I am an introvert, an introvert that thrives on the solitary creative process.  So, being at home for all of these months has been a gift to me.  I’ve had the time and energy to do the things I love to do as well as dabble in some new to me forms of creative expression.  The one place, however, where I prefer being with others rather than going solo, literally, and that I do miss, is making music.  Playing or…

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Several of you asked to see a photo of the blanket I wrote about in my previous post.  Here it is.   I have finished 35 of its 55 blocks.  Today had to pull out half of block 36 because I realized that I was not going to have enough yarn to finish it.  That is the risk when working with partial skeins.  Without doing more measuring than I am interested in, I have no way of knowing exactly how…

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For whatever reason, the first thing that I feel called to do at the end of every semester is to go on a cleaning binge.  This is likely due to the fact that housekeeping is never a priority for me during the school year.  The kitchen and bathroom are cleaned regularly and are sanitary, but several generations of dust bunnies have taken up residence under my bed.  I suspect that their gestation period is about four weeks so there are…

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A week ago today, I was in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a port day in the middle of a weeklong Caribbean cruise.  It was sunny and in the mid seventies, unlike today in Dallas where it is rainy and barely forty.  I will write a more general post about the cruise in another post, today I want to focus on St. Thomas. Unlike St. Kitts, where we had been the previous day, the “main drag” in St….

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I’m feeling a little like Goldilocks today.  I know that life is all about finding balance, but sometimes that balance, that sweet spot between what is too big, too small, too much, too little, is more delicate than I know how to deal with. I am writing this as I sit in the Miami airport waiting for my friend, Becca, to arrive from Illinois.  Several months ago, she called me and said that she needed to get away and go…

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I am not a new year’s resolution maker…not because I don’t believe in them, but because I usually fail at keeping resolutions.  I am, however, a master goal-setter.  Somehow in my feeble little brain, setting goals seems more positive, and more attainable, than making and keeping resolutions.  I realize that that is probably not rational thinking, but it works for me so I’m going with it. I achieved many of my 2019 goals, but I’m not sure that happened in…

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Have you ever wondered how loyalty, perseverance, and “beating a dead horse” differ?  How do we know when we should try a little harder at something, or do things a little differently, or change our course of action entirely?  I have had many teachable moments when it comes to this life lesson and yet still I struggle.  This month, I have turned to the IT world for further training on how to deal with these things. Whenever something doesn’t work…

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