Little Update

Excerpt from letter to the girls

Aside from today (rainy) the weather has been absolutely perfect lately. I keep doing my best to just soak it up and enjoy while it lasts.

Our bathroom floor is finally(!!!) repaired but I have yet to clean up the dried grout powder stuff completely, and the dining room ceiling still has a big gaping hole. meh. We're having a house concert here (for Brooke Brown Saracino) at the end of the month though so that gives a nice deadline for me to clean and my mom to get things fixed, although the plastering of the ceiling might be hard because not many people in town do it and the guy she found who does is pretty booked up. If it's not done in time though we can have the concert at my mom and Jeffrey's, so it's nice to have a back up plan.

I started an online music theory class through Berklee School of Music (Boston). I've only done one week so far which is learning the notes and beats, which I already knew, but looking ahead I can see there is a lot more to learn that I don't know, or don't know well at least, so I'm hoping it will fill in some gaps in my theory knowledge. Plus I'm taking it for credit so if I decide after this that I want to keep going I put it towards a songwriting certificate or something like that. One of the big things I got out of my songwriting camp was that there ARE certain concrete things you can do to write better songs, and knowing that somehow gave me the drive to go out and learn as much as I can about it.

I've also been doing an exchange with a local songwriter - Sharon Bousquet, where I do some internet/computer work for her in exchange for guitar or songwriting coaching and it's been pretty great so far, it's only once a week but the stuff I've learned has really opened things up for me and now I just need to get better at practicing - it's like lifting weights, all the knowledge in the world won't build the muscles!

Work at 3mix.com is good but I think it will get a lot better once there is a live site with users in it up and running. Right now I'm mostly just testing things for bugs, and writing a little bit. I'm supposed to write an article for the Source about the company but I'm having the darndest freakin' time doing it. Not sure what's wrong and it's very, very frustrating!

Radio show has been going pretty awesome, interviewing a lot of cool musicians and getting more confident talking on the phone: http://kruufm.com/blog/heather

If all goes well we will be getting a scooter tomorrow morning. It seems like a good way to use the both less of the car and gas. One of the ideas at one point was to sell my car, which will likely still happen in the near future, but it's so scary to think of not having a car, especially for the winter. It also makes me really pissed because I feel like I should be able to NOT need a car and figure out how to live without one. There are plenty of people who seem to manage without, my brother being an example in this very house!! He rides his bike or walks in almost all weather, he has a trailer that he can carry groceries and his entire Farmer's Market set up in, and in the winter there's a bus for special needs people that he can take to work. It's the winter that scares me the most. It's not like we won't have ANY car, Gilberto would keep his, and I also know plenty of one car families. And I could really use the money from selling my car to help pay for the scooter or my music class. ARGH! Anyway, I guess we'll see how it goes with the scooter for a little bit before making that decision...