Ramblings of a rural(ish) geek

I had plans to do garden work over the weekend, and then the predicted "most areas will get half an inch of rain" turned into an all day rain with occasional stormy bits such that we got 2 inches of rain.

Monday and Tuesday were chilly (highs in the 40s!).

Monday's FCB rehearsal was stressful. The business manager (BM) had made a comment to PB (the NFHS band director) that made PB think that we weren't going to be rehearsing on Monday, so she had her band kids stage out of the bandroom for their Festival trip. Which is perfectly fair! But it really messed with my evening. *I* wasn't going to try and move their gear. The stage was set for a choir concert, and while I'll move risers and music shells, I will *NOT* move a concert grand piano without permission (at the very least) and preferably supervision. (BM and PB are in text communication at this point, trying to figure out a space to use.) We wound up in the choir room, which is considerable smaller than the bandroom. But everyone fit (as did most of the percussion). We had to take every moveable table out of the room, and scrounge chairs from various storage places in the music wing. And then we rehearsed -- down one BSax and two Tubas, with a concert in one more rehearsal. Then we had to put everything back where we found it. gaaah! (I don't get paid enough to do that regularly!)

Tuesday we processed incoming ballots. Well, DC did incoming ballots, I did outgoing ballots (applications come by mail, through the voter system, and voters can come in and get them), and BC did bills. I scampered out the door at 4:40 to make it to the PO before the mail left at 5. (DC was not yet done processing the 120 ballots that had come in since Friday. She apparently came in on Wednesday to finish them up.)

Then I went to LCCB rehearsal. (Thank Ghu I'm not playing bari in that band this time around. I didn't realise how tired I was until I got halfway to rehearsal.) But music is a thing I do, so I rehearsed well and made a few notes on my music. At this point in the session -- the concert is Sunday! -- rehearsals are mostly just run-throughs and picky bits. (there are still a couple of notes I missed, so I made notes to myself on the music.)

Wednesday I slept in. Then I sorted in the workroom and did some more in the laundry room. I re-thought the boot tray positioning, and the tray that I bought will work, just in a different place. (Upon further thought, I realised that my original plan for it was a bad idea anyway....) And I got the box of mealworms (for the birds) out of the hall and into the laundry room.

Today is errands and an evening at Hill Auditorium, and hopefully a cart or two of stuff out of the gardens. Between things that need to be cut back because they're dead and weeds that need to be pulled, there's a lot of work to be done out there. Maybe I'll do the groceries after the concert -- Meijer is still open then. But I do have a couple of local stops, so I do have to go out. Sigh.

J got the dryer installed late yesterday, so the main construction in the laundry room is done (and the Russell Hobbs kettle that started the whole project has its own plug in the kitchen). There's a nice new water heater in the basement, and the one that came with the house is at the dump. The laundry room is finally painted(!), and now we get to rethink how we're going to do storage in there -- one of the things that went away was 14 linear feet of shelf space. We added another 15 square feet of floor space, and we need to figure out how we're going to use it before stuff just appears. (and since it'll be "good enough", we'll never get around to doing something else with the space.)

There's a new floor in the laundry room, and a laundry sink! I've only wanted one since we built the house, but for Reasons we couldn't do that.

There are still boxes of things from those shelves around the house; and there's a pile of pantry things in the basement that need new homes -- the water heater took away about 20 linear feet of pantry storage, so that stuff has to go somewhere. But there are shelves in the storage room that are underutilised or full of "stuff that's not been sorted in years", so I should be able to find room for it all.

But early next week is the big push to get ballots in the mail, so I'll be working. Maybe I can get to the basement on Friday.... sigh.

(edit to fix typos)

why did I think that playing in two bands was a good idea? It's not usually this bad, but both bands started rehearsals for the next concert this week, so I've spent the last two evenings sight reading. And it's been weeks since I played -- Livingston's concert was the first week of December, Farmington's was the week before Christmas -- which is longer than the summer break. I was woefully off my game, although Tuesday's rehearsal was better than Monday's (I was getting back into the groove of playing, and the music on Tuesday night is easier). Still, this is the week that I look at the music and go "yeah, right", although I've never actually failed to learn at least most of it.

Probably didn't help that Tuesday was the first day that ballot applications really started to come in, and I spent 7 hours at work doing election things. Tomorrow we need to run the accuracy test for the tabulators, as the ballots and the v-drives with the code both came in yesterday.

I really need to do the holiday cards. Maybe friday! (tonight I have an obligation in AA and one in Farmington. whee! at least it's not supposed to snow tonight.) Brain is still tired from all that sightreading.

I did get the shelf units swapped out in the basement, but the new shelf is a little bit narrower than the old one, so I have to rejigger the boxen on the shelf. And I have things I should do at the sewing machine, but right now it's somewhere behind a wall of boxen in the midst of re-jiggering.

- I ushered for UMS on Sunday. It's only the second event I've been able to usher this season, as I have had other obligations for other events (or I'm not at all interested in them -- theatre immersions, modern dance). I guess it's better than last season, when I didn't usher any events until January! Sunday's show was Michael Feinstein and Jean-Yves Tibeaudet doing a show called "Who Could Ask For Anything More?" It would have been a much better show had they not amped the pianos so much -- concert grand pianos are not supposed to sound like good electric pianos. Ushering a Sunday afternoon concert is as much time out of my day as actually *playing* a concert, although it's not quite as much work. More standing, though.

- one of the storage shelves in the workroom is failing. I could fix it (I think), but it'd only be a temporary fix. It will be easier (FSVO) to just replace the unit. Unfortunately, it's the one in the back corner, so I basically have to move everything in the space so I can get the old unit out and a new one in. foo. I really didn't want to spend the next two weeks rearranging the basement. :(

- I found last year's Christmas cards. Next to the stack of Christmas letters. oops. Don't know if I'll get them sent out before we go to see Nana, but I will get them out this season. Really I will!

- today is "go through the pantry to see what ingredients I need" so I can take Nana's holiday baking down to her next week. Step one for that is probably "decide what I'm making". I know apricot bread and cranberry pecan bread and probably cinnamon diamonds. Maybe Scotch Bars, and plain ol' chocolate chip cookies (with walnuts, because that's how she likes them). She called yesterday with an invitation to join the "pennybyrn singers" as they go caroling through the complex. :)

FCB concert at Hill Auditorium was Sunday. It went pretty well, I think. I threw a decent amount of money at things, and we rented percussion from SMTD rather than renting a truck and hauling gear from two different places in Farmington. (Somebody else threw money at it as well, because I know how much I threw at it, and I know how much it all cost....) I left the house at 10:15 and got home at 5:30. Moved chairs and stands and percussion and a 7ft grand piano. (I'm still not really sure when Maestro insisted on the piano, but mine is not to question why.) And killed my black dress pumps. Now I get to find another pair. sigh. I hate buying dress shoes.

Attendance was kinda sparse, but there were more people in the audience than onstage, so.... If we do this again, the publicity team has *got* to do a better job. There was no advertising in the A2 area, and the event wasn't even listed on the auditorium website(!). I do blame MW & FB for that at least a little bit, because they picked a date, put down a deposit, and then walked away from the board. Prez & BM came in in the middle of things, and were kinda making it up as they went along. I don't know what Publicity was thinking, but the answer seems to be "not much". To be fair, there were at least three other community band concerts in the area at the same time (A2, Dexter, LC), so most of the people that *I'd* invite to a concert were already committed somewhere else.

Still working on rearranging furniture in the house. J needs to run an actual ethernet cable up to the space that will be my new "office", and then I can move the computer and a shelf from the LR up there. And bring the chair that we had to stash upstairs last summer down into the LR now that there's space for it. I got another accent chair at IKEA today, but I don't know if it will stay in the LR or go into the nook upstairs. I think I may have gotten ahead of myself - it currently seems as though the furniture solution will be the futon in the office, a chair and lamp in the nook, and the mattress/box spring standing in a corner until needed.

I was going to weed today (Monday was a day of rest, other than necessities and 90minutes of sight-reading; Tuesday was laundry and cleaning and driveway sealing and 2 hours of sight-reading), but it rained all day. So I ran errands instead. Hopefully, it'll be dry enough tomorrow that I can weed the strawberries and maybe around the pond.

Did some yardwork, although not as much as I should have, but it was cold and/or rainy. (well, and there was snow last week that lasted for a couple of days. It's melted now -- we had a really warm day yesterday, with rain squalls in the evening.) There are still trees losing leaves, so we probably won't be done with raking for another week or so. Unless the wind blows our leaves down the street, in which case we won't need to rake, just pick up corn leaves that blew in from the field. If we don't get snow/rain today, I should be able to go do some raking tomorrow -- too wet today. J did go out on Sunday and drove the lawn tractor around with the leaf sweeper on it, so there's many fewer leaves in the yard than there were.

Much of what I've been doing is transferring the contents of SR's dressers into boxes, with the ultimate goal of sending the bedroom set off to ShareHouse/ReStore and moving my computer *out* of the living room. The dressers are now empty, but I need to move the LEGO off the top of the tall one before we can move it. I have the shelf to put in on, now I just have to do it. :) She has a *lot* of assembled LEGO, mostly HP.

Music is being music - the FCB is being ambitious (when isn't it?), and there's a lot of music in the folder, some of which we will play at the concert on December 12. LCCB's concert is December 5. I'm flailing a bit on Sleigh Ride, as I've never played this part. And since "everyone knows it", rehearsal speed is performance speed. And they fall into the "sleigh race" camp for speed. The FCB takes it a bit slower, because there's some really nice music in there that gets lost when played too fast. In more muttering, the lead sax in LCCB can't swing. The bari player and I both can. We're doing "In The Christmas Mood" (a kind of dorky but somewhat amusing selection of popular holiday music in a swing style), and apparently they spent about half an hour of last week's rehearsal working on the sax part. Once I stopped trying to match her style and went with the bari, it was easier, but now the director is annoyed because the saxes aren't all playing together. :shrug: what can you do?

COVID vaccine scheduled. Wednesday. (Thru Michigan Medicine. They do random pulls of eligible patients. I already have an appointment for stuff to sign halfway to A2 on Wednesday, so...)

J is annoyed by this. He wants his vaccine *naow*, tyvm. IHA sends out their invites on Monday, so he won't hear from them until then at the earliest. He's also registered at Meijer and is checking the WCHD site. Today he's doing a 8 mile walk with co-workers. And a half loaded backpack - apparently, he's going to do some overnight hikes this summer, and he's training. Not like he's told me or anything, but this is what I overhear. I just hope he gets a clue and doesn't follow through with his Isle Royale pipedream - that's a fucking jump into the deep end with weights on your ankles. Isle Royale would be good for next year, after a few smaller/shorter hikes.

Bathroom floor is down, but I suspect that progress will halt for a while. K is down, and that's more important than working on the house, dontchano. We did buy the new baseboard yesterday. At some point, we need to get paint - I want the tub+surround in first before I think about paint. The tub is white, the floor is marbled white and grey. The toilet is almond and the vanity is almond "cultured marble" with white and biscuit swirls. Most of our towels are dark green or dark blue or medium gray (so no pink or peach because I don't want to replace towels too). Probably going to wind up with blue or green -- it's currently a (badly done) light sea green (J hates painting, and races through it so that it's all uneven and sloppy) -- although a lemon-y yellow might be nice. The master bedroom is a pale purply blue.

There are three daffodils blooming in the garden, and a bunch more will open tomorrow. whee!

Reticulated irises in the side garden, and one early giant crocus. I did get out into that garden and cut back the milkweed stems. Windy today, so I'll have to go out and rake branches under the willow and the cottonwoods.

Sunday we went to Menard's and bought a bathtub and surround and doors and all the shower bits. When J went back to pick them up, he bought floor tiles. Monday he went back for more stuff (exhaust fan, lights). Today I picked up a couple of other things. There's at least one more trip for switches and timers. Yesterday, we extracted the old tub. We wound up cutting it (it's fiberglass) into two pieces so we could get it out - it was installed before the wall between the bathroom and the room next to it was, so there really wasn't a way to get it out in one piece.

J has seemingly forgotten that the reason we got the 'garden tub' (48x60) is because *he* wanted a soaking tub. I just wanted a tub for a kid to take a bath in, but the wide garden tub sucked for that. We could have gotten a standard tub/shower combo when we ordered the house, but.... Today he's going shopping for an office chair. He'll be working from home for the foreseeable future (the current WFH order expires in July, but the crew pretty much expects that it will be extended), and the chair he's been using for the last year is one that DB and I stopped using four or five years ago. (For reasons not necessarily related to a single person usability - he and I were sharing it, and we had to move it up and down every day, and the lifter started to get cranky - but it wasn't intended to be a 10hour a day chair.) J's been threatening to see if he could sneak into the office and get the chair from his desk, but that's really not plausible (he needs two different people to sign off on his office access *and* make an appointment with security). I finally said "you can just go to Office Depot and buy a chair." "huh. so I can."

Errands today, abbreviated because the list was short. A few things I didn't get, but one of them isn't stocked at the stores I went to, and the others have been out of stock for a couple of weeks already, and I don't expect to see them for another week or so.

PT says I went backwards last week - shoulder is both less mobile and less strong than it was last week. She says I really should ice twice a day for the next week, and be really careful about the exercises that I do so that I don't stress it further and trigger more inflammation. boo. No visit next week as the team schedule got over-run with new patients, but back to it the week after.

I know why - Tuesday we were wandering around the yard trying to figure out where a new root-pruned shrubbery was going to go, and I pointed out that the serviceberry had been swallowed by a grapevine (or three. or four). J just mm-hmm'd at me until he actually looked at it. Yeah, I really wasn't exaggerating. So we spent the next 45 minutes or so pulling grapevines off of and out of a 10-14 foot tall shrub (depending on where on the ridge you were standing). Lots of reach up, pull down motion, with things pulling back. And then I went and got the rake to rake all the viney bits up so I could haul them over to the burn pile.

Also on the burn pile is the branches of the old burning bush. Have no idea what happened to it. It was fine in the spring, but somewhere around July it just died. The wood is really light, as though it doesn't have any water in it, and the stump just sounds "wrong" when we kick it.

I cleared the dead bleeding heart stems out of the front flowerbed, and got the blackberry lilies cut back in one of the flowerbeds. I'll see how much gardenwork I can get done this weekend, before my shoulder starts complaining too much. There's lots to do, and it's supposed to be warm and not rainy all weekend.

We are now running on solar power! The electricians were out on Tuesday and Wednesday to hook everything up, and to swap out the old garbagy main service panel for a much better (safer!) one.

(also, I have marked my ballot, and sealed it up in the return envelope. I still have to deliver it to the township clerk. I'll do that next week. DB's went in today.)

- the hummingbirds are back. Or at least one is. DB said that he got "the Look" from one late Sunday morning (the Look means 'where's the food?!); so I made up a batch of nectar and put it out. I looked out about 4pm, and there was a male hummingbird perched on the feeder, eating away. He's been there three or four times a day since.

- we have a pair of Baltimore Orioles (lovely orange birds!) visiting the backyard on a regular basis. I saw them on Friday, and dug out and filled the oriole feeder. I've seen an oriole on the feeder every day since.

- a bleeding grey squirrel has taken up residence in the garage. The birdseed is now in metal cans with latching tops, as he gnawed his way through the plastic lids on the previous storage system.

- the cats are now caught up on their shots. Belle was not to be found when J left for the vet, so he took Ji and was going to reschedule Belle's visit. A few minutes after he left, Belle wandered downstairs. I swooped her up and tucked her into her travel box, then took her to the vet and joined J and Ji.

- New furnace/AC is in. The cats were less than thrilled with the house full of workers (and noise! and Smells!) we had yesterday. Belle got shut in an upstairs room, while Ji hid in the back. At one point, Ji was going to go downstairs to "get away from the noise", but then one of the workers went past him with a sheet of metal - he decided that the back room was a better place. The furnace install came with a big wifi thermostat which does not call home by default. It also has a big graphic indicator where it tells you whether they system is heating or cooling. This is surprisingly important, as the fans are really quiet, and it can be hard to tell if it's actually running.

- Today is finally warm enough and dry enough to weed. I can only do one garden a day, so I need to prioritise the weeding order. I think the big strawberry patch will be today's job, and maybe some work around the pond.