I know it’s kind of stupid to get so excited every time I have a day off – but I’ll take excitement anywhere I can find it. I have so many things I could do with this day! And the exciting thing is, there isn’t any overpowering, urgent thing that I have to do – I get to choose.  I could probably list a hundred things if I wanted to take the time to do it, everywhere I look something comes to mind. BUT what do I really want to do? 

I’m afraid I didn’t get off to a very good start last night, writing a comparatively boring blog post and watching the Olympics re-run.  I’m going to start this morning by putting Wisconsin weather on my computer. I need to watch it so I pack the right stuff for my two week vacation. Yay me for getting this vacation plan started!

I’m going to read today.
I’m going to do another “paper purge” in the house.
I’m going to do at least one improvement in the Oneacrewoods.
I’m going to make a vegetarian supper deluxe for Dennis’s diet
I’m going to start one artistic project (have several in mind)

The sun is hitting the tops of the trees so it’s time to get started, a fresh new slate to write on.

I love beautiful melodies, blending with others in harmony. I love playing the piano.  I love to sing the things I feel, which is why I’ve always had a special enjoyment of worship music. So my roles in music have ebbed and flowed in seasons throughout my whole life, often taking turns that surprised me.  I didn’t think it was an unusual thing to take piano lessons when I was in high school – lots of people played instruments or sang in choir. But these days, no matter what group I’m in there seems to be a scarcity of people who are comfortable playing.  When no one else steps up, I always figure that I’m better than no one playing at all, which sort of takes the stress out of playing for me.  

One of the biggest surprises was ending up being a piano teacher myself with actual students wanting lessons.  I always felt that what I was really good at in that role was motivating young children, not necessarily being a skilled player or teacher. Lots of things about teaching were fun. Lots of things weren’t. Scheduling was hard, and there were always students who missed lessons frequently.  When I started forgetting lesson times it got downright embarrassing and stressful. I also ended up with a couple students who played better than I did, also embarrassing.

I’ve had three different teachers in piano, two different ones in voice. I think I’ve been able to play for every church I’ve regularly attended and some where I was just a guest! I’ve had the fun of accompanying my own daughters when they took their lessons on flute and cello. I had a lot of fun playing with my friend Debbie, Esther’s flute teacher, when she did weddings and events. I’ve played for funerals and memorials.

It seems like music has gotten more complicated lately – the fault of the techno age if you ask me.  In all my learning experiences, no one taught me about pads, riffs, breakdowns, etc…  I had a pretty advanced music work station (keyboard) when I was teaching but years later it started making some awful sounds and died. We eventually discovered that some of it’s adhesives inside had melted during an episode of Florida heat.  But somewhere in there I started saying I played keyboard even though it is a lot different than playing piano.  I still don’t know enough about it. But that does bring me up to the present.

I started singing at the church I attend about a year ago.  Sometimes I just sing at the early service which is a blend of traditional and contemporary. Some weeks I am needed at the later service too, which is all contemporary. And lately I’ve started playing piano.  There are three others who do keys and piano so I’m the newcomer.  There hasn’t been a lot  of stress involved – I haven’t made any promises and there aren’t expectations to meet. Everything is voluntary. It’s still fun as I get to know the people better and get used to the way they do their music.

This coming Sunday there is an event called One Concert.  It’s a conglomeration of worship musicians and singers who meet for a concert open to the public every other month.  They are given a set list and pdf’s to download (techno, see what I mean) and meet for soundchecks and one hour of practice, then the concert. It’s held at a local Mennonite church but there are people from many Christian denominations taking part.  It’s a mix of contemporary and classic worship music.  I’ve been invited to join in, but I’m not even sure what they are going to let me play.  I’m pretty sure I’ll be the oldest person playing – I find that happening all the time now. Fortunately there are going to be a lot of musicians and the focus is worship, not performance.  I am looking forward to it and am thinking it will be an awesome night.

I feel so good tonight it’s a shame I have to go to bed.  I don’t know if a nap can really make this much difference or if I’m getting a charge of energy for some other reason.  Maybe I’m just making up on this end of the day for the chaos on the other end.
I woke up this morning 15 minutes before I was supposed to be at work. I’m getting used to a new phone and didn’t set the alarm correctly. It takes on average half an hour to get to work.  I was only fifteen minutes late, which means I woke up and spent zero minutes getting on the road.  It felt like that. I was half way there before I realized I still had my mouth guard in. I did get dressed. I also got a headache, for which I took Excedrin (breakfast).

Work was uneventful. There were no remarks about the “no work travel anymore, here’s when my vacation to Wisconsin is happening” e-mail.  We rushed through the morning and she got off to Rotary on time.  I took a lab specimen down to Sarasota Hospital for her. I did an errand for Julie.  I took a pretty decent nap. I spent some time on the computer. I cooked supper and ate with Dennis.  We fixed a broken sprinkler head on the irrigation system together and I pulled some weeds while I was out there. I cleaned up and watched some Olympics. I did a small sewing project for work tomorrow.
I am ready for bed.

Yesterday when I was stuffing some yard trash down into the can, I got speared by a bouganvillea spike right into a large vein on my inner arm. It bled out on my shirt and under the skin quite a bit before it clotted so I thought it was probably clean. Tonight it’s starting to hurt and maybe is just a little infected looking. Not good. I am loading up on vitamin C and putting some heat on it while I sleep.

So I have no other deep thoughts or thrilling experiences to write about. It was just a good, quiet day for which I am thankful.

I’m waiting for it to be cool enough to go outside and mow the lawn and for the laundry to be done in the dryer.  I’m waiting to see how my employer will respond to my latest e-mail.  I’m waiting for a text-back from my daughter to hear how her trip home went. I’m eagerly waiting for my vacation home to Wisconsin to come.  I’m waiting for supernatural direction on several life issues. I’m waiting for numerous prayers to be answered. Waiting is not a bad thing, I don’t think. The longer I live, the more comfortable I am with it. 

I used to get very worked up inside having to wait for other people to get ready to go somewhere with me.  I’m very time conscious and given a choice I will always be leaving early to get someplace on time.  I even like to have extra time in case some unforseen thing happens to delay me. Having this mindset and being ready to get in the car, I would find out that the person who wanted to go with me was just beginning to consider taking a shower and getting dressed… the resulting wait was really difficult. And it usually made the following car time unpleasant as well.

 But now I think, this is the person and the circumstance that I’m given.  I can get angry, hurt them emotionally, make them angry or I can love them. I may not even make it to the next person or the next event so I’d better be really careful with the person I have right now. I believe my time is ordered by God, every minute of it, so when I’m asked to wait, it now occurs to me that there’s something God wants me to see in that waiting moment.  And that he will get me to where he wants me to be next, at the time I’m supposed to be there.  I’m not worried. God can do some really spooky things with time.  I still have to walk myself through this in crisis times but it’s getting more habitual.  My conscious choices are quicker and better.  I’m just saying that there are some very rich and rewarding things about living, learning and getting more experienced.

Now to mow the lawn.

Lately around home I hear a lot about diets, fat and weight loss.  A lot about heart disease, stents.  Yes, my husband has discovered he has some blocked arteries in his heart. The doctors he’s consulted want him to have a stent put in but after reading about some of the bad experiences people have had, he has decided not to do it. The people who died from not having stents placed aren’t around to post their bad experiences, a fact which has to be weighed in there somewhere, but still he thinks he can reverse his problem.  He doesn’t just think it, he’s really excited about doing it.  He’s thankful he has a compelling reason to do what he has wanted to do for years – lose weight.

So, his hero is Dr. Dean Ornish who has written the book on heart disease reversal.  The diet required is basically vegetarian, with only 10% of daily calories to be from fat sources.  It’s pretty restricted.  Exercise is also a big part of this regimen, as is having good personal relationships and avoiding stress. “So you should write up my progress in your blog”, he says. And I’m thinking it would be a lot more reasonable if he would write up his own progress in HIS blog.  I think I actually said that to him. But the whole idea got stalled on the matter of having a blog, because he doesn’t have one and probably won’t, ever.

I do have a certain perspective on this program he’s setting himself to. After all, I’m the one who most often shops for what we eat, and fixes what we eat, and calls him to the table. I also seem to be the exercise police in the evening. So I’m a part of what goes on and I guess I might as well add this story to the other ones I tell.

I am proud to say that the husband has lost (by his own report) a total of 15 pounds off his all-time high. He has many more to go but this is a good start, and as I said, he is very excited this time around. So from time to time my post will be about the deprivation, discipline and agony we are going through and about the fat melting off, I hope.

Do you remember that rhyme? For some reason it always comes to my mind, but I don’t say it because the parts about the market and buying a fat pig don’t seem too relevant.

There is no place like home and I am glad to be here once again. I have such a mixture of feelings about this travel that I do for work. I really don’t want to do it anymore but I hate to admit that my age prohibits it or my ability to do it has diminished. Obviously I can do it, but it seems to be that I pay a price, and the price is going up somewhat. Maybe I just need time to forget the parts I didn’t like, if that’s possible. The long night drives scare me – we are always arriving at our destinations late and tired out and of course that’s when my night shift starts. I really miss a lot of sleep, which makes the return trips even more scary. Sometimes I get in the van after stopping for a gas break, and am amazed at how clear and three dimensioned the road looks compared to before the break when it all looks flat and I’m fighting to keep the white lines in focus. Evidently I’m a pretty good driver even in zombie mode but all it would take to create disaster would be one moment of the eyes going shut. I don’t even want to think about it. Sometimes I do imagine what I would do if we crashed and rolled and I had the responsibility of helping a quadriplegic who is strapped in a 400 lb. wheelchair and bolted to the floor of the vehicle… I don’t know if it even pays to have a plan in mind for that. I thank God that he hasn’t put me in that place.

I have a box of delicious peaches to reward me for traveling through the state of Georgia in July… that and a paycheck.

I have always loved to see inside other people/s houses, especially when the outside looks mysterious or especially well designed or creative in any way. So yesterday was the tour of all tours, seeing the interior of the Vanderbilt home, Biltmore, the largest privately owned family residence in the United States. When George Vanderbilt decided to build his retreat in the North Carolina mountains he was thinking 50,000 sq. ft, that is until his architect convinced him he needed 175,000, more like the castles he’d seen in Europe. I haven’t done the math but one of the guides said that was around 4 acres (but maybe that was just the area the house covered, not counting the two upper stories).  It was quite a house. I’m sorry you can’t see here some of the things I marveled at because photos and sketches were not allowed inside. You’ll have to go there yourself sometime – it is worth seeing and you can easily spend an entire day doing it. It was built over a six year period in the 1890’s and has many features that were way ahead of the curve. Personally, I can’t imagine living in anything that big in scale and I wouldn’t have known how to start decorating it. They evidently did not have any problems there. It is full of rare art and furniture.  None of the family lives there presently but several of them do have homes on the 8,000 acre estate. They have opened the home to the public in order to afford the historical preservation that is being done. Real people actually remember growing up in this place and playing hide and seek in the many rooms when they were kids. Awesome.

The employer and I had a nice lunch in the stable which has been converted into a cafe, a BIG cafe. In the late afternoon our party of four walked through all the gardens and greenhouses for which the estate is famous.  They were so filled with gorgeous plants that it made me want to start growing something immediately. The designer of Biltmore gardens also designed Central Park in NYC, although he was only warming up when he did Central Park. The Biltmore gardens are several times bigger.

Would you ever decide to read a book standing up for hours on end? The answer is probably not because it wouldn’t be comfortable. Well sightseeing and touring is a lot like that and we were all very tired, especially in the feet and legs and the headache parts of our brains. (Shopping has a very similar effect.) I couldn’t take it two days in a row, which is why I’m not with the others today while they “do” Asheville.  I did take a short walk to look at the nice community around our hotel and finished off with a salad, a pear/gorgonzola pizza (Oh good!) and a piece of strawberry tiramisu. I am quite content.

It is really strange how I came to have so much to do with this memorial for a woman I didn’t really know all that well. I did know her a little and admired her a lot. I will miss her and all that she added to my job in taking care of her daughter.  She was immediately cognizant of me and how I was responding to the job – I think she worried about her daughter finding good caretakers.  For instance, she was the one who chastised her daughter about not having chairs for “able-bodied” people to sit in at the Ocala house, she was the one who insisted I take her nice car for my day trips to see my parents or my daughter, she was the one who purchased Mary Kay from me in generous amounts whether she needed it or not, she was the one who took my side when things were getting unreasonably difficult. I learned a lot more about her today from the speakers at her memorial. She was Martha Stewart before there was a Martha Stewart.  One story I loved was about a luncheon that she put on for a group of people. Her house was beautiful, all the food was homemade, all the appointments were perfect, and when someone admired her plates and asked where she had gotten them, it turned out she had made them too, in her basement on her pottery wheel.  For years she was on tv and radio with a cooking/homemaking themed show that she did herself for the Egg Commission. I had a few conversations with her about her faith as well and she was very open about her love of God and her journey in following him. I would have enjoyed being her friend and feel a sense of loss having only known her a short time.

The service was in the Pinehurst Tea Room in Stockbridge Georgia – lovely place. It was done in a style that did credit to all that she stood for. I got to help type up the bulletins and get them printed, get the slide show ready for the computers and start them up, and brought a keyboard to play for several hymns which everyone sang.  My employer loves harp music so she had hired a harpist to play and sing for us and she did a wonderful job – I enjoyed playing the hymns with her too. It’s over now and we are resting back at the hotel.  So, I just have to say I appreciated the time I had with M. R. S. , and I hope to see her again some day in a better place.

Going north, not very far north -, in fact most people in Atlanta would not want to be described as being north of anything, but they are at least nine hours in that direction for us. Traveling for work almost never starts early either because there is so much packing to be done that can be done ahead of time. So our 1 pm departure was pretty good for us.
The remarkable part of this trip was the weather. It’s summer here and there is typically rain in the afternoons. Strangely, the clouds often seem to line up over the interstate (I-75) and you drive in and out of showers through much of Florida. It started for us around Gainesville with some pretty intense downpours. It got worse before long. It was knuckle-biting, white out, 35 mile an hour, 2 inches standing on the road, cars leaving a wake rain for at least an hour. My stomach was in knots. I can only imagine how scary it is for my employer being helplessly strapped in her wheelchair and bolted to the floor of the van, trusting someone else to get her through it. I have to hand it to her – there was no backseat driving AT ALL. This was unusual and remarkable, which is why I am remarking about it. We were relieved to stop in Valdosta at our usual eating place, even though we had to wait for quite a while before we could exit the van.

The only thing worse than driving in torrential rain on the interstate is driving in torrential rain on the interstate in the dark. And of course the roads got a bit more crowded as we went past Macon and on to Atlanta. The windshield of our van had gotten waxed by mistake before the trip and oncoming lights and the rain did a funny reflecting effect that wiped out any piece of visibility I might have had. Thank God for white lines on the side of the road because they are the only things that kept me in my lane. The trucks going past reminded me of jet skis the way the water shot out from under  the wheels. Enough of this horror story. We got there around 11, some friends met us at the hotel and helped unload. I was in bed by 1:30, and yes I had a real queen bed all to myself.

Before I forget, I need to pass on this advice that could be very important, maybe life-saving.  When driving your zero turn lawnmower please keep both hands on the steering handles where they belong. Don’t be fooled by the drink holder, which would suggest that you can have a beverage while mowing the lawn. You can’t.  One hand, one handle, one direction.  Other hand, other handle, other direction. It is not a round steering wheel that can be turned wherever by one hand while the other hand does whatever it wants. Try that and you will leave a very strange mow pattern behind you until you crash into something. These handles determine not only direction but also speed so the very strange mow pattern happens very quickly until you put the drink down and get control again. Trust me.

Or if you insist on using the drink holder while mowing be sure you are in the middle of a large empty space, and drink quickly. (Or just stop the machine, put in park, take a drink.) That’s it. That’s all.