Progress, of sorts...
Apr. 9th, 2011 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aearwenAfter a couple of wet and drizzly days, the weather has turned far more spring-like. The sky is a crystal blue, with a few "average-sized white clouds" floating around; the breeze is present and not quite chilly, but not overwhelming; and the sun feels downright good on the skin. Things are warm enough that hubby has made great progress on painting the windowsills and doorjambs and doors in the living room - two coats of primer went on yesterday. Today, the first coat of paint went on, and he intends to do another coat this afternoon, once he gets back from taking JJ to Special Olympics practice in SLO.
I'm really looking forward to watching my "new" living room start to take shape. The bookcases that will be the supports for the new mantle are painted and in the "Man Cave", waiting for their turn to come in. We discussed whether hubby wanted to hang the big picture over the mantle before putting the mantle in permanently, or waiting until after - with a decision made to wait. Once the paiting's done and the bookcases/mantle are in and painted, it will finally be time to visit the carpet place and get things rolling to get rid of a forty-some-odd year old carpet (and all the dust contained therein.)
I also got the bad news that a dear friend of mine, whom I worried through treatments for breast cancer and then surgery for brain tumors (2 of 'em) will again be under the knife - this time for spinal surgery to "do a roto-rooter job" and free up the nerves to her legs. She's been slowly going numb in the legs and feet, and can barely get around now. The worse part I learned just this morning: she has bone cancer now too. Whether it is more of the metastacized breast cancer or something completely different isn't known yet. But I'm getting seriously worried. She is such a gentle, delightful, and incredibly talented person with a fantastic voice. I want her to be well, not going through all this.
My brother is finishing his move out of his house this weekend, and into a new place in either Tempe or Mesa. Evidently there are some major repairs that will need to happen to his old home that he now won't be on the hook for - and he's using that knowledge to convince himself that the Universe was determined to get him out of there before things got really bad. I believe that's called "taking lemons and making lemonade"; but considering how he has had trouble with depression, I find that attitude remarkably healthy and a sign that he's starting to cope. I'm hoping the worst of his emotional downturn is over now, that he's "hit bottom" and now on his way back up.
I'm personally struggling with a body that doesn't like me very much anymore. My right knee - the one I really messed up when I fell on a cement slab & landed with all my weight on the kneecap - continues very sore. I hope that as the weather gets better, I might be able to start to walk again, although I'm toying with the idea of biking to get some exercise because it puts less weight on the bad joint. I'm tired of being sedentary.
What's really getting me down, however, is the decrease of mobility in my left arm and shoulder over the past few weeks. The prospect of playing, not one, but two pieces of Scott Joplin ragtime this summer for performance (maybe multiple performances in a single day) with a left arm that just really doesn't want to bounce up and down the keyboard is downright daunting. I don't like to think that I'm losing my music at just the time that I'm ready to start really practicing myself up again, memorizing the Joplin, and being the accompanist for an entire musical review program to boot.
Some might be asking why I'm not a patient of a pain management clinic of some sort. I was - and I walked away from it after the cocktail of pills they were giving me, which included some decent opiates, wrecked my intestines. I decided that keeping my innards in working shape was more important. My innards don't work as well as they used to, but they're much better than they were while "drugged" up. Again, I'm hoping better weather and a more stable barometer will help ease this, but I'm less hopeful about it.
The idea of being on the brink of losing my ability to make music is not a happy one. I gave up my violin due to the knots in my shoulders. I don't play guitar or flute or recorder anymore either. Taiko (those great big Japanese drums) left my life years ago when I fell and messed up my knee (because the Japanese-American form of that art is very physical and requires a good deal of mobility.) Haven't touched a church organ in years, mostly because I don't belong to a religion that uses such things. Piano is all I have left - and I can feel the creep of time wanting to steal it from me, and I resent it. Piano was my first love, the one I could play the best. I'm gonna fight for this one, by gum!
On the writing front, I've got the first 600+ words down on a complete re-write of an O-fic novel that I'm hoping to actually sell. Daughter Súl has been patiently waiting for me to get off my duff and start working on it, and my Muse deigned to give me dreams this past week that showed me where, in the timeline, the new draft needed to start. I've done some world-building in Maple as well, because this will no longer be a very linear, tight-single-POV story, but rather a complex and multi-threaded work with plenty of good guys, bad guys, and guys who are that delightful shade of grey that defy categorization.
And I'm working hard on finishing I Dhaerlend Dadui now. It's the first LotR fic I've written multi-threaded and complex, with a load of OCs with and against which the canon characters are placed. It's time I thought through exactly what I want that story to accomplish, because it is so central to my entire IDD!verse. I enjoy that I have the entire Tolkien timeline to play in, but I want my Fourth Age and Beyond stuff to all mesh seamlessly - and to do that, need to finish IDD so that the stage is set and ready. Chapter 14 was posted at the workshops for concrit, and I've started to outline Chapter 15. Have a few sections already written and plucked out of previous chapters (due to length issues) that I can seed back in with just a few tweaks, so I suppose I could say that 15 is about 2/5s written already. Having progress there feels good.
Almost makes up for not being able to put in 2 hrs a day on the piano anymore. :-(
I'm really looking forward to watching my "new" living room start to take shape. The bookcases that will be the supports for the new mantle are painted and in the "Man Cave", waiting for their turn to come in. We discussed whether hubby wanted to hang the big picture over the mantle before putting the mantle in permanently, or waiting until after - with a decision made to wait. Once the paiting's done and the bookcases/mantle are in and painted, it will finally be time to visit the carpet place and get things rolling to get rid of a forty-some-odd year old carpet (and all the dust contained therein.)
I also got the bad news that a dear friend of mine, whom I worried through treatments for breast cancer and then surgery for brain tumors (2 of 'em) will again be under the knife - this time for spinal surgery to "do a roto-rooter job" and free up the nerves to her legs. She's been slowly going numb in the legs and feet, and can barely get around now. The worse part I learned just this morning: she has bone cancer now too. Whether it is more of the metastacized breast cancer or something completely different isn't known yet. But I'm getting seriously worried. She is such a gentle, delightful, and incredibly talented person with a fantastic voice. I want her to be well, not going through all this.
My brother is finishing his move out of his house this weekend, and into a new place in either Tempe or Mesa. Evidently there are some major repairs that will need to happen to his old home that he now won't be on the hook for - and he's using that knowledge to convince himself that the Universe was determined to get him out of there before things got really bad. I believe that's called "taking lemons and making lemonade"; but considering how he has had trouble with depression, I find that attitude remarkably healthy and a sign that he's starting to cope. I'm hoping the worst of his emotional downturn is over now, that he's "hit bottom" and now on his way back up.
I'm personally struggling with a body that doesn't like me very much anymore. My right knee - the one I really messed up when I fell on a cement slab & landed with all my weight on the kneecap - continues very sore. I hope that as the weather gets better, I might be able to start to walk again, although I'm toying with the idea of biking to get some exercise because it puts less weight on the bad joint. I'm tired of being sedentary.
What's really getting me down, however, is the decrease of mobility in my left arm and shoulder over the past few weeks. The prospect of playing, not one, but two pieces of Scott Joplin ragtime this summer for performance (maybe multiple performances in a single day) with a left arm that just really doesn't want to bounce up and down the keyboard is downright daunting. I don't like to think that I'm losing my music at just the time that I'm ready to start really practicing myself up again, memorizing the Joplin, and being the accompanist for an entire musical review program to boot.
Some might be asking why I'm not a patient of a pain management clinic of some sort. I was - and I walked away from it after the cocktail of pills they were giving me, which included some decent opiates, wrecked my intestines. I decided that keeping my innards in working shape was more important. My innards don't work as well as they used to, but they're much better than they were while "drugged" up. Again, I'm hoping better weather and a more stable barometer will help ease this, but I'm less hopeful about it.
The idea of being on the brink of losing my ability to make music is not a happy one. I gave up my violin due to the knots in my shoulders. I don't play guitar or flute or recorder anymore either. Taiko (those great big Japanese drums) left my life years ago when I fell and messed up my knee (because the Japanese-American form of that art is very physical and requires a good deal of mobility.) Haven't touched a church organ in years, mostly because I don't belong to a religion that uses such things. Piano is all I have left - and I can feel the creep of time wanting to steal it from me, and I resent it. Piano was my first love, the one I could play the best. I'm gonna fight for this one, by gum!
On the writing front, I've got the first 600+ words down on a complete re-write of an O-fic novel that I'm hoping to actually sell. Daughter Súl has been patiently waiting for me to get off my duff and start working on it, and my Muse deigned to give me dreams this past week that showed me where, in the timeline, the new draft needed to start. I've done some world-building in Maple as well, because this will no longer be a very linear, tight-single-POV story, but rather a complex and multi-threaded work with plenty of good guys, bad guys, and guys who are that delightful shade of grey that defy categorization.
And I'm working hard on finishing I Dhaerlend Dadui now. It's the first LotR fic I've written multi-threaded and complex, with a load of OCs with and against which the canon characters are placed. It's time I thought through exactly what I want that story to accomplish, because it is so central to my entire IDD!verse. I enjoy that I have the entire Tolkien timeline to play in, but I want my Fourth Age and Beyond stuff to all mesh seamlessly - and to do that, need to finish IDD so that the stage is set and ready. Chapter 14 was posted at the workshops for concrit, and I've started to outline Chapter 15. Have a few sections already written and plucked out of previous chapters (due to length issues) that I can seed back in with just a few tweaks, so I suppose I could say that 15 is about 2/5s written already. Having progress there feels good.
Almost makes up for not being able to put in 2 hrs a day on the piano anymore. :-(
