Odds and Ends

Our son Benjamin has done an excellent job of feeding my fascination with "techy" stuff.  I am now enjoying his old Apple laptop and an iphone.  I love them both even though I am far from using them to full capacity.  Lately I've been experimenting with using my iphone to play my dance music collection, stored in itunes.  Each Monday I plug in the dance music while I do my housework.  Wow, what fun.  I dance and sing my way through the chores.  I get them done twice as fast and get some good exercise doing it as I can't resist stopping to dance along my working way.   I believe it has lifted my spirits as I have been feeling exceptionally happy for the last couple of weeks.

I've also designed an organizational system for myself, to help me get things done a bit more efficiently.  I admire organization, but usually from afar.  I have dozens of projects in my mind and begin many of them.  But I finish very few.  Why?  Well, partly because I always leave those fun things for last and last never comes.  But now I have a plan for actually doing them!  Using this new system I have finished one of my projects.  I've made a Christmas book for the grandkids.  It tells the story of the birth of Christ using pictures of the grandchildren as biblical characters.  It's kinda cute.  I plan on giving them to the family for Christmas this year.  I can't quite put into words the joy that comes to me when I actually finish something.

Here is the cover for the Christmas book.  Our oldest
grandchildren, Rayne and Chase are pictured here.

Layne and I are in the thick of Nutcracker rehearsals.  We are the old folks again.  This year the woman in charge of our scene, "Miss Maria" is a beautiful young ballerina with big expectations.  Basic dance steps are not enough; we must move at just the right angle and our hands need to be in just the right position with each movement.  Maria has big ideas for Layne's solo part too.  He's not impressed.  But he's doing it.  He makes every effort to do just as she asks at rehearsals, but when we get home he isn't nearly so enthusiastic.  "This is the last year I'm doing this," he has said to me several times over the past couple of weeks.  We'll see if he softens over this next year.  This may indeed be our last experience with Nutcracker.