I might be glad to see the end of November, and thus the end of NaBloPoMo, except that, as usual, I signed up for Holidailies, so this daily posting thing will continue for another 31 days. I will leave it to you readers to determine whether or not that is a good thing.

After Monday night’s rehearsal, when we were all very cold and very tired and most important of all, very frustrated, several of us decided to get together for a little sectional rehearsal and see what we could accomplish. Yesterday afternoon I sat down at the piano and went through all my songs again, and this evening my coworker (who is also in the group) and I headed over to one of the other group members’ house, and five of us went through the songs.

We didn’t have a director, except for one woman who kept rudimentary time for us, although that didn’t work quite so well in the pieces where the time signature switches, sometimes almost every measure, and we only had an electronic keyboard to pick out the notes we were struggling with, or to at least get us started in the right place, and we didn’t always have all the parts represented for every song. But what we did have was a very productive rehearsal; so productive, in fact, that at the end, we went next door and did a rather impromptu seranade of the hostess’s next door neighbors, just because we finally had it all down.

There are still some rough spots that I know I need to keep on working on, and I do not doubt that we still have quite a bit of work to go over at next Monday’s rehearsal, but at this point I am feeling far more confident about the upcoming concert than I was on Monday. It’s reassuring to know that I’m not the only one who was feeling a little overwhelmed.

I found this here and thought it was interesting, so decided to play along. I will note, should those of you have a hard time reading this, that I actually made an attempt to write slowly. There’s a reason I use a computer to take notes nowadays – at least then I have a better chance of reading what I wrote later!

I have been singing along to the practice CD for the choral group in my car pretty much every time I drive somewhere for the past week or so, and a number of times I have sat down at the piano with my music to pick out the parts I’m having a harder time with, and when I do those things, I feel as if I am getting the parts down; they are sticking inside my head and I can do them right. But then I get to rehearsal and it feels as if all that work was just brushed off to the side and I am fumbling for notes in places where I *know* the darn notes by now, and I just feel so frustrated and worse, I am disappointed in annoyed at myself for not nailing the notes each and every time I make a mistake.

It is, unfortunately, no consolation that I am not the only one who is having just as much difficulty; that even the best singers in the group are still struggling in the hardest of songs. I know I have to work harder; we all have to work harder, and the concert date is fast approaching, and even though I know that it *will* come together, because that is always the way of these things and because I suspect I am not the only one who tends to shine under pressure, it still is a bitter pill to swallow. It is easy to ignore how much I have managed to learn in such a short time and how far I have learned to extend my voice beyond what has been my comfort zone for far too many years, in order to focus more sharply on how much I still have yet to learn.

Tonight, at rehearsal, several of us decided that we needed to schedule some extra practice time among ourselves, to focus on the parts we’re struggling the most on. And rehearsal ran nearly an hour late tonight, but we stayed because we needed to; because singing in a group is still far better than picking out your part at home on a piano, alone.

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It is a bit ironic, somehow, that my bout of winter cold/flu/whatever (and I am leaning more toward flu, since there was a fever involved) should finally clear up just about the time that the holiday week is over. We never did manage to get around to having our rousing game of Balderdash with my parents and sisters and husbands once the kids went to sleep, because by that time each evening I was usually started to fade, and no amount of cold medication could counter that, and I regret that, because getting all of us together to play Balderdash usually results in all of us, at one point during the game, laughing so hard that we are teary-eyed and breathless. Luckily it appears the entire family will be together again for a few days at Christmas, so I am hopeful that we will get a chance to make up for it then.

My little sister and her family flew back to Seattle this morning, and my older sister and her family drove back to Napa as well. So it was back to the normal routine – choir practice, some rather frantic scrambling (on my part) to get ahold of my dad so he would bring the appropriate recorders with him so our group could play (since I did not find out my other tenor player was too sick to be there until this morning), and then furiously knitting away on my sock-in-progress in the very back pew with my knitting mom and Richard and our friend (her daughter) until it was time to go home.

It has been an otherwise rather quiet day. We both headed in to Davis for a few hours – me, so I could pick up a felted hedgehog from the knitting store, where I’d left it for the owner of the Washing Machine of Doom because my own washer had been completely incapable of convincing it to cooperate in the whole felting experience, and Richard, so he could go hang out at Borders and do some writing. I hung out at the knitting store for an hour or so, working on my sock and chatting with the owner, until I reached the sock toe and could not go any further without a darning needle to seam it all together, so that seemed the best time to head off to Borders and find Richard so we could go home.

This past week has already started to feel as if it was a million miles away. Tomorrow it is back to work, back to the usual routine, and, sigh, back to popping decongestants because, as usual, my sinuses hate me and have taken this latest illness as yet another excuse to try to make me feel cruddy for that much longer.

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Every year or so, on the rare occasions when my whole family is all together in one location, we all gather at a photography studio and get family pictures. The last ones are a few years old, so my older sister made us an appointment, and this morning, all eleven of us met up at the Sears in Solano Mall to take some updated pictures. I was worried there might be traffic, so we headed out a bit early, and of course ended up with plenty of time to spare – time enough, in fact, to pick up a new belt for Richard and to even do a little browsing in the women’s department for me. We’d have had even more time, except that my dad called to tell me that the photographers were running early and had already started with my little sister and her family, and by the time we got up there they’d taken my parents in for their pictures, and we’d only had a few moments to sit before it was our turn. And by the time we were done, my older sister and her family had made it there, exactly on time for our original appointment, so at least the taking of the pictures went relatively quick. And the nicest thing about the whole process was that, since they now use digital cameras, we could see instantly how the photos turned out, which was good since it took us one heck of a lot of tries to get a decent picture of the entire extended family where everyone was smiling and facing the right direction and not looking like a complete dork.

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This morning Richard headed off to Campbell to spend the day with his family, and I headed back to my parents’ house to start the day with leftover pie and sticky buns for breakfast. My sisters and my mom and dad all wanted to go and do a little shopping, and since I didn’t really have any need to go to any actual stores, plus didn’t think I’d have the energy to do much in the way of mall walking, I went back home and took a short nap while they went out and hit the stores and did lunch.

I did manage to track down the blue Kool-aid at the one grocery store in town that was not actually open on Thanksgiving afternoon, so after they came back from their shopping excursion, I rounded up all the kids into the kitchen and had them help me dye yarn with Kool-aid. My niece, of course, chose pink, because she is very much into anything pink, and if it is sparkly, that makes it even better. My nephews wanted blue and orange. As we talked about what they wanted for their slippers, two of them decided they wanted stripes, and I had a momentary thought that maybe I should have broken the skeins into smaller balls to let them do more colors, but luckily, the niece wants blue and pink, the older nephew wants blue and orange, and the youngest nephew just wants solid orange. So it all worked out.

The dyes in Kool-aid are extremely bright if you concentrate them enough – we got a wonderful dark orange with four packets of the stuff, and the blue and the pink came out gorgeous too. We hung them out on the line in my parents’ backyard to dry, and my niece kept leaping up to see if they were dry all afternoon.

There was more playing of Twister by the small people, although us adults refrained this time. The kids were sent out in the afternoon to decorate my parents’ driveway with sidewalk chalk, and then we adults all trooped out later to check out the artwork (some of which was more recognizable than others, but that is expected when your artists range in age from five to eight). At one point we all headed outside for a ‘science experiment’, which mainly involved my younger brother-in-law dropping as many Mentos as he could slam into bottles of Diet Coke before they exploded all over him. He managed to get some impressive fountains, although nothing remotely as impressive as these guys achieved.

My older sister eventually packed up her husband and her boys to go home, and after my niece was put into bed I was just about ready to head home myself, when my little sister noted that my niece had been asking about the doll house in my parents’ bedroom, and wondering if maybe grandpa and grandma would let her play with it.

I should note that this is not some ordinary doll house. This thing is about five feet wiide, and about five feet tall and composed of nine rooms and an attic, all connected with doors with actual handles, built my my dad for my sisters and I when we were probably about the age my niece is now, which is at least thirty years ago. My mom and dad did not approve of Barbies, so my sisters and I had the Sunshine Family, which consisted of a mom and a dad and a little baby, and each doll or item of clothing purchased came with a little leaflet full of do-it-yourself projects for making your own furniture or other dollhouse accessories. My sisters and I spent hours playing with that thing, crocheting rugs, building chairs out of egg carton segments, beds out of tissue boxes, lamps out of empty spools of thread.

The doll house moved with us everywhere the Air Force sent us, until finally we ended up in California, and then we were all too old to play with doll houses, and eventually, when my parents moved to this house, they stashed it in their bedroom for lack of a better place to keep it, and filled it with miscellaneous boxes, and it’s been sitting there ever since. One of the things my mom had envisioned when they built the enclosed three-season porch on to their house a year or two ago was that the doll house would eventually be moved out there, so the small people could play with it. I guess my dad’s been resisting it, since there’s really no where to put it where it won’t be blocking some of the windows, but once my niece finally noticed it and my younger sister and I started talking about it, my dad got this look on his face that indicated that he knew he had finally lost this particular battle.

The first question was whether or not they still had the dolls and the accessories for it, so we started pulling out boxes, and I swear it was like someone threw my little sister and I into a time machine, because sure enough, they’d actually kept them. We opened up one of the boxes and pulled out the dolls and started diving down into the rest of it, pulling things out, do you remember this? Oh, remember when we made this, oh wow, I can’t believe we forgot about that. So then there was a very brief discussion about waiting until everyone else was there the next morning to try to move it, but then my dad figured if we were going to move it we might as well just do it right away, so before we knew it, we were clearing out all the boxes and vacuuming out years of accumulated dust, and then carrying it onto the porch. And then there was nothing to it but my little sister and I had to immediately sit down with the boxes of dolls and accessories and pull out every single one of them and try to get the doll house set up. Our excuse was that this way it would be ready when my niece got up in the morning, but really, it was just because neither of us wanted to put off getting a chance to go through those boxes again.

There are some of the pieces that are broken, and some where we weren’t entirely sure what they used to be. It took three of us to try to put together the farm kit, and even after we were done, we were not entirely sure we’d set it up correctly (because for some funny reason, the directions were never put back with it when it was last packed up, probably twenty five years ago). My little sister tried a quick eBay search to see if she could at least track down a picture, but she had no luck, so we muddled through the best we could, and figured that chances were likely the little kids wouldn’t really care if it was perfect anyway. And then we all stood back and looked at all of it – the little farm in one corner of the porch with the water trough that actually pumps water and the chickens that used to lay real ‘eggs’ (although we have long since lost their eggs) and the tiny little house that houses Holly Hobby – or rather, the original Holly Hobby with the gingham and the braids – and standing against one wall, that amazing doll house that had somehow survived all the moves and the changes of thirty plus years, looking now as if the three little girls for whom it was made had simply just left the room only moments before, instead of thirty years ago, and were going to come around the corner any minute, still with long braids or pigtails, two of them in glasses, the youngest barely able to reach up into the attic, each of them full of stories and adventures for those well loved dolls and those lopsided pieces of furniture they made so proudly, so very, very long ago.

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I feel as if I have spent a better part of today anxiously watching the clock to determine just when it is I can take more cold medication. I can feel when it wears off; the sinuses clog and the chills come back, but when I take more, it all goes (mostly) away for a few more hours.

We headed over to my parents’ house in the morning for the traditional breakfast of homemade sticky buns (made without salt, which means that the bread dough is always a bit sweeter than you expect when you bite into it) and then we all spent most of the day lounging around, reading books or knitting (well, I was the only one doing that), or lurking in corners typing madly on laptops (Richard was still working on Nanowrimo) or sometimes chatting. The kids pretty much kept each other entertained, playing with toys inside the house, or out on the back enclosed porch, or even taking advantage of the gorgeous sunny weather outside and dragging some of the adults out with them to go run around in the school playground across the street.

There was the usual assortment of fresh veggies and crackers and dips for a browsy kind of lunch, and then Richard and I headed off to the grocery store to see if we could find just the right colors of Kool-aid for the yarn-dying project I planned to do with the kids (and discovered that the blue Kool-aid is very hard to find – we couldn’t find it at either store we went to, and by then most places were already closed or just about to shut down for the rest of the day so we finally gave up). At one point I tried to go take a nap, but the combination of strange bed, stuffed nose, and the ambient noise of small people who really ever only talk at one (loud) volume) on the other side of the wall meant that I only managed to just lie there and snuffle miserably for an hour or so before I finally gave up and rejoined the rest of the group to continue on my knitting.

At one point in the afternoon, as it was getting closer to dinner time, and in order to keep the kids from getting more squirrely, someone pulled out the old Twister game from the game cupboard. The kids had never played before and they had a complete blast. They are all still a bit too small for the game, in that there were times when they just couldn’t stretch themselves far enough to reach completely across the mat after getting all tangled up with their feet and their hands. But they absolutely loved it – I think they could have cheerfully played it for hours, and the good thing about them all being so small is that all three could play at once. Eventually, of course, we all insisted that the adults take a turn, so first my sisters and I did it, although eventually I gave up because bending over for that long was making my sinuses go completely haywire, and then all three husbands did it, and that is when we discovered that my older sister’s husband knows how to play dirty. Here we and the kids were all being nice and sticking to our half or third of the mat, but there he was, stretching across the mat in front of the other guys so they’d have to work extra hard to get around him and I am not sure who was laughing the hardest throughout the entire game – those of us watching, or the guys themselves.

Dinner was, of course, delicious, and we all ate far too much, but that is only because there was too much to eat in the first place. My parents got a special turkey from the Co-op because most turkeys are injected with a salt water solution to keep them moist – fine for the normal person, but not remotely fine for someone on a low sodium diet like my dad. It turned out fine though – I’m not honestly sure any of us could taste any difference at all, which makes me wonder why they do the injections at all – and there was so much other food on the table that it wouldn’t have mattered if the turkey had tasted terrible anyway. My little sister made polenta with a marinara sauce for her and her family since they are vegetarian, but she made enough for the rest of us to try it too, and that is the first time, I think, that I have ever had polenta. It’s pretty darn good, actually, and I am going to have to have her send me a recipe or three to try, since cornmeal is Core, and we (Richard and I) are trying to follow that diet again (although he is the only one going to Weight Watchers meetings because I am not sure I can actually stomach the peppy lectures about inane things I already know and the required cheering for the people who only ever had ten pounds to lose and dropped it in five weeks by just switching to diet soda, and somehow still think that they have fought as hard a battle as those of us who have a heck of a lot more than ten pounds to take off and who have been losing that battle for most of our adults lives).

There was talk of the adults all playing a game together after the kids had gone to bed, by the cold medication only goes so far, and I didn’t sleep very well last night, so I bowed out shortly after the kids were all put to bed, and Richard and I came home to collapse on the sofa downstairs – me surrounded by four cats who instantly converged on me with tales of being left alone *all day long* – and we watched Grey’s Anatomy, and now I am trying to talk some sense into my very uncooperative sinuses to please let me get just a little sleep tonight, and please, once this cold goes away, do not take it as a sign that they need to clog up and force me to spend the next week wired on decongestants, which can only now be purchased after signing a special form and showing a valid picture ID.

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Apparently the last two days were a complete and utter fluke. I woke up this morning with my throat hurting again, and my nose all stuffed up, and a little bit of the chills, which always suggests that there might be a fever coming along for the ride. So I guess I get to be sick for another major holiday. Ugh.

I took some cold medication just to tune all the symptoms back to a minor annoyance for a few hours and tried my best to get more things on my list-for-the-week done, but the cleaning of the office took a wee bit longer than I’d anticipated (which really does suggest maybe next time I ought not to leave it this long, hmm?). So instead of reorganizing and creating an inventory database of my yarn stash, I instead made two loaves of banana bread because the remaining bananas on the counter were looking pretty nasty, and I swung by my parents’ house to get a little plastic baggy full of their sodium-free baking powder and baking soda substitutes (and then felt vaguely illicit, dirivng around with an unmarked bag of strange white powder in the cup holder of my car). I zipped off to Vacaville to pick up the books we’d put on hold for my brother-in-law’s birthday and then came right back home to get the pumpkin bread (made as sodium-free as possible for my dad) mixed up and in the oven in time for it to cook before we had to head off to Napa. I really wanted a nap, but I do not trust myself to wake up to oven timers when there is the potential of overcooking or burning as a result of oversleeping, so instead I knit furiously on my next sock-in-progress (mystery yarn in stripes of every color brown and cream that remind me so much of a cake or a Snickers candy bar that I have decided to call them my chocolate layer socks). Richard left work early, this being the last day before a holiday, so he came home in time for us to get the bread out of the oven and wrap the books and then hop right back in the car and head off to Napa for my brother-in-law’s birthday dinner celebration, with only a very slight detour along the way to pick up a new box of cold medication for me, because by then I was getting pretty desperate.

Dinner was a little delayed, but that just gave everyone more of a chance to chat, and more time for the little kids to tear around upstairs (although they were not running, they assured us, each time one of us adults would go up to check on how it is that ‘walking’ feet can thunder quite so fast). My cold medication kicked in enough that I managed to spend most of the evening feeling slightly more human than I did all day, but by the time it was time to go, it had started to wear off. And driving down Highway 12 in the dark and the rain is just enough fun (not) that I decided throwing cold medication into the mix was probably not a wise decision.

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The defnite problem to putting off a big project is that it will invariably take far longer than you planned. I am beginning to think that the chances of me managing to do everything on my list for the week are dropping rapidly from slim to none. Heh. Ah well.

The good news is that I finished all the shredding today. Not only that, but I think I am just about done with organizing the desk. I set up a new rotating filing system for bill paperwork, and also a tracking spreadsheet so we can see at a glance what has and has not been paid for the month. We will not discuss the fact that there are little bits of shredded paper all over the floor on my side of the computer room or the bags of stuff that still need sorting in the bedroom, or the fact that there is a stack of old checks from long-defunct checking accounts that need to still be shredded; the important thing to note here is that for the first time in possibly years, my desks are clear.

I took a short break from all the sorting and shredding and dust and hastily finished up the pineapple hat that I was making for a store sample. Naturally, this meant I had to then go drop it off at the store immediately, if only to get myself out of the house and away from the still slightly messy computer room. While I was there, it would have been rude to just fling a hat at them and run, so naturally I also had to sit and knit and chat with them for a while, especially about how we all wished that somehow, by the time we returned home, elves would have come in and magically finished all our cleaning/organizing/home caring tasks.

I worked on my next sock-in-progress (the last of the zebra socks) and rewarded myself for a job well done by buying some cute little needle holders for my sock needles and also a measuring tape that looks like a Queen Bee. And naturally I also had to poke around and see all the new yarns which had arrived since I was last there, which led to me bringing home two skeins of bright red cotton and wool blend laceweight, and a pattern for some pretty lace scarves to do another store sample. Have I mentioned lately how very cool it is to have friends who sell yarn (and let me make stuff for them)?

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