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...

In yur flowrbox, sittin on ur flowrs

In yur flowrbox, sittin on ur flowrs
Originally uploaded by hum97

These kittens officially belong to the people across the street, but they think they own the whole block! They love to hang out wherever they see people and sometimes just wherever strikes their fancy. The other day I came home to find them sitting like little salt and pepper shakers in my flowerbox. The orange one has a charming habit of yacking up hairballs on our sidewalk. Good thing they are so cute, because between the flower crushing and the hairball hacking, I'm about ready to get out the hose... Maybe I should? As a preventative measure for when they get bigger? We already have some creature pooping in our garage, and it might have been their mother. Sigh. I love cats. Just not when they do gross things in places where I walk. That's what litter boxes are for right?

(in case you are wondering why the heck I spelled my title so horribly: http://icanhascheezburger.com/)

Whirlwind

The Girls are coming in one week!

The house is a whirlwind. My mom's friend Blossom is helping with some of the deep scrubbing and cleaning and dusting that I never manage to do, which is fabulous. I'm trying to get some upstairs rooms organized so she could go in there and work on them.

I'm also trying to do some deep organizing and purging of stuff - things I've been wanting to do since we moved in and never had quite the motivation to do. So it's good, but it's hectic and dusty, and a little overwhelming. Just gotta do one thing at a time.

yay game night!

We just had a fun little game night at our place! Which means two things really - our house is pretty clean, and we got to have friends over and play games!

It was pretty impromptu, so it was a small gathering, but that was good because that meant less pressure for me both food and house-perfection wise :) I think N like the food we made though, and there's some left for my lunch tomorrow.

We played Cranium (our team lost by ONE CARD) and Uno Attack for a few rounds after I found some new batteries. A and G really battled it out in Uno, pretty funny. :-)


More significant events of today:

I kinda sorta figured out some chords for a Sharon Bousquet song, but then when I listened to the recording it was in a totally different key... so yeah. but I think it was still pretty close to the right chord progression.

Hung out a little with some people from my class at Cafe Paradiso, I hadn't seen Leela in probably 5 years or more! Took a group picture and I joked again that now we wouldn't have to bother with a reunion next year since we had one already. ;-)

G got the winterizing plastic stuff up on the rest of the windows in the TV room, and we got the other two blinds up in the bedroom! I hope I wake up in time tomorrow, it's gonna be dark in there!

My mom is almost finished getting stuff out of the kitchen, just the spice cupboard and her files and stuff from the white shelf that is above where her desk used to be. It's soooooo nice to have more space in the kitchen!

PS Lame-a-tron iPod - or more like computer - it only will recognize my iPod if I start the computer with the iPod plugged in. grrrr.