Rick's Journal

Ok, I'm adding in cuts because this ended up being a lot longer than I anticipated.

( Much needed (and appreciated) friends time )
( 7V staff lunch )
( Mixed bag of family stuff mixed with an unhealthy dose of cleaning )
And finally, to all my friends who are Packer fans, congratulations on your team's fine victory last night in the Super Bowl.

I swear I go into every weekend these days with the best intentions and rarely get everything done I plan to.

Saturday I got all 5 air conditioners taken down and put away, put up a load of firewood on the back porch, did a load of laundry, finished my Madrigal PEL and put up the LJ safe version and a few other little odds and ends, but that was only about half what I had planned for Saturday.  I just have no idea where the day went.

Sunday, I spent almost the entire day making chocolate.  I had not planned on this at all.  Last weekend, when Monique and I were in NH, she asked if I wanted to make some Halloween chocolates for the people at work, and in a moment of weakness I said yes.  Not only did I say yes, but I said yes to doing one of the most time intensive molds we have.  It was fun for some of the time, but after a few hours I remember why I was happy to get out of the chocolate business when we moved to CT.

So I got no 7V stuff I promised and will have to push for time each night this week.  I did however have a very productive flute choir rehearsl last night and the Patriots won over the Ravens (the game was playing in the background while we did chocolates).

This weekend was try2catch32 's birthday and for her birthday she wanted to spend time with friends from New England.  So burkefireguy11 , with the help of myself and rowan_syngwyn  and gianajho   made plans for her to do things with her friends all weekend.

( Birthday weekend details under cut )

On unrelated notes, I went up to sans_peur 's place last night to take care of her kitties.  On the way up there in the pouring rain on back roads, I hear this loud "bang" and the car lurches sideways.  It felt like something had run into the side of the car.  When I stopped to check it out, the passenger side rear view mirror was gone, just totally gone, but there wasn't a scratch anywhere else on the car.  Weird.  I can only guess that something large must have clipped the vehicle, maybe a deer or something.  I don't know, I never saw a thing.

Oh, and belated Happy Birthday to outlawblade .  He shares a birthday with t2c  I was celebrating his birthday all weekend too.  He just didn't know it.  :-)

Friday night Monique got a call from her sister.  Their mother was down visiting them, had taken a fall, passed out and was taken to the hospital.  It appeared she had broken her wrist and they admitted her, not because of the broken wrist, but because of the passing out.  She's had blood clotting in the past and is on blood thinners and they ran tests on her heart, carotid artery, etc. 

Saturday morning it became apparent she was going to be staying, so we trekked across the state to the hospital to spend a few hours with her.  This ended up taking the vast majority of our day and we didn't get home until late, thereby killing any plans I might have had of stopping to see Dave and Xephyr at the fair.  :-(

Sunday was pretty awesome however.  We had the 7 Virtues party at Eagle Pass to help raise money for the building effort and to give the players some IG down time to talk, plan and spend some non-save-the-world time with the faculty.  There was much fun role-play, lots of it with characters I often times don't see much of in the normal setting.  It was really cool for me to watch people working on the Wisdom Book and listen to the theories and such being kicked around from it.

Dinner after with a huge crowd at Uno's was fantastic.  I got to sit with a few people I spend little to no time with and it's always nice to hear new things about new people and clear away some of the conceptions that form from only knowing their characters.

I got home at midnight and this morning I'm exhausted, but it was so much fun and so worth it.

PS - Mom (-in-law) is doing fine and was released from the hospital yesterday afternoon. 

We went up to NH Friday night with intent to go to dinner and spend some time with Monique's mom.  Unfortunately, things came up for Monique and we ended up getting to NH really late.  This meant we didn't get much time with her mom, especially since we had to leave her mom's house by 9:00 Saturday morning for me to get to the NHAB walk-a-thon on time.

I was the last team member to arrive but still on time for the start of the walk.  It was hot and sunny in spite of the call for thunder storms.  The walk wasn't as bad as I feared.  My ankle held up pretty well and I enjoyed the company of my team.  Our team came in first for dollars donated.  Yay!

Thank you to silverhare , jbradshaw666 , agraitear , tressum , arianhwyvar , silway , marcus_sez_vote , stableyr , outlawblade , noradannan , last_real_angel  and quentarielf for your monetary support and to all my other fine friends for their encouragement.  You helped me personally raise $380 for the cause.

We went to Randy's bardic last night.  It was a small and very diverse group.  There was a greater diversity in the music than usual.  I thought it was a fun night with the poetry and music mixed in.  I wasn't mentally prepared for a performance.  I forgot my flute and just wasn't feeling up to singing, though we had a Tom Lehrer theme going for a couple of songs and I was sorely tempted at that point.

Monique and I visited with both my parents today and then headed back down to CT for the final flute choir rehearsal of the season which didn't happen due to too many last minute cancellations, so I spared the few members that would have driven a fair distance for no real good purpose.

I went out to dinner with sans_peur  last night and we stayed at the restaurant talking for several hours.  It was a really lovely evening.  I truly enjoy just talking with her and we don't do it often enough.

I must have been completely wiped out though because I slept in until 8:45 this morning.  It was nice and all, but I had a really full schedule today.  I needed to run a bunch of errands, including making the bank and post office before they close (long story behing needing to be at the bank). 

The whole bank thing though did mean a bunch of financial work today.  Because I'm transitioning from one bank to another I'm juggling the transition of several automatic withdrawl and the timing has been "interesting", especially since the new bank sent my access information to the wrong address.  So I'm having to work really hard to make sure that there's enough money in each of the old and new accounts on any given day until the transition is complete.  Then I'm blowing off those assholes at Bank of America.  Oops, sorry, my bitterness showed there for a second.

Some of the things that automatically draw do so from the debit card number and not the bank account info.  This is problematic because the card was mailed.  They'll send me a new one but I won't have it for a week.  What a pain in the neck.  I've wasted my whole afternoon on this and I'm going to have to monitor my old and new account every day for a few days to make sure I haven't screwed up and unbalanced the amount of money one needs over the other.

On top of that, my head has been really fuzzy today.  I hope I'm not coming down with something.  I needed to get away from that stuff for a few minutes and thus the update.

I really wanted to work on 7V stuff today.  This is totally blowing my schedule.  On the bright side, it means I made the right choice in skipping Madrigal this weekend.  I'd have been a ball of stress.

Short version because I'm so far behind, but we're having server issues that are keeping me from my regular work, so in a nutshell.

Saturday afternoon Monique and I drove to Martha's Vineyard, took the ferry over, went out to dinner with silverhare, browstein, browstein's brother and his lady friend Cortney, which was just delightful.  We picked up burkefireguy and his lovely lady when they came off the ferry and then went to a party for friends of the bride and groom.  Monique was not quite so thrilled with the last part as it turned to lots of LARP talk, but I had a lot of fun.

Sunday we went out and had breakfast with burkefireguy and then went and toured the island.  It's really quite a lovely place, beautiful scenery.  I dropped everyone off to get ready and went out to rehearse with the bride for the surprise song she had me write for the groom.  The wedding itself was beautiful.  The setting was awesome.  The ceremony was very emotional and there were many moist eyes, though being the stoic I am, I was immune to such things.  Yeah, it was my allergies acting up, that's it.  ;-)

The reception was a good time spent conversing with good friends.  The food was good.  We left just after the dancing because Monique needed to go out for food that was on her new diet (which is going great) and because it was getting late and we had to catch the 7:00 ferry the next day.  We did get her the lobster she wanted and enjoyed a nice, quiet conversation with Josh and Mary who joined us for this.

The ride back Monday morning was a nightmare.  There was construction on 195 in RI.  It took us over two hours to traverse a two mile stretch of road.  I worked late last night to make up for it because I didn't get into work until almost 12:30.  Oh well, the weekend was a blast and well worth it.  Beside seeing two of my dearest friends get married and spending lots of quality time with other dear friends, I had a whole relaxing weekend with Monique (who is leaving me today for 10 days for a work trip). 

Hmmmm, that was a bigger nutshell than I thought it was going to be.

Low key, laid back, restful.

( Weekend details under the cut )

All in all, very nice.

Monique and I went to NH this weekend.  We visited her parents and stayed up way too late Friday night talking.  As is typical, if I go to bed late, I wake up early to make up for it.  I hate my body clock.  We spent the entire morning chatting with them some more before heading to Nashua to see my mom.  The visit there was ok.  My mom only managed to piss Monique off once and she kept her temper and her tongue.

We checked into the hotel after that visit and took a 20 minute nap.  Unfortunately, it lasted an hour.  I looked at the time, kind of freaked about being late to the Bardic and fell back down for a few minutes.  I looked at the time again, freaked again and poked Monique, who sort of groaned and then I fell back asleep for a few minutes.  I woke up again a few minutes later, looked at the time, freaked out again and woke Monique again, who decided she needed the sleep more than she needed Randy's Bardic.  I could sort of agree with this sentiment, but knew that I'd be upset with myself later if I didn't go, so I forced myself to get up.

Fortunately I found a Dunkin Donuts on the way and met the bardic well caffeinated.  While everyone else was drinking beer and mead and other such alchololic beverages, I was toasting with coffee.

I snuck off with my favorite duet partner, jjmarika, and we worked up a couple of flute duets and even snuck in a bit of practice on Mystery of Shadowfane for good measure.  We probably won't perform it until the fall, but it's good to keep chipping away at it.    We performed the two pieces we prepared and The Three Captains as well upon request.  No matter how many times we play it, that piece never gets old and it's so full of fond memories too.

There was the usual crowd with many of the usual songs and a few interesting new ones (people *AND* songs) as well.  Ayesha was in funny music mode and her lolcats song had the room in stitches.

I ended up there until almost 1:30.  I was just enjoying it far too much to leave at a reasonable hour.

Sunday we went to visit my dad and Monique had the idea to take him out for a ride instead of just sitting in the nursing home visiting.  This worked out really great.  We took him around Nashua and Hudson and visited a lot of the places he had lived.  It was a wonderful trip down memory lane.  I can't believe the house where I grew up.  It's so tiny compared to my memories of it.  It must have shrunk.  ;-)  My dad was really lively and he looked so happy to be out and about.  We stopped and got him a small coffee as a treat.  He really liked that.

Monique and I listened to more of "The Time Traveler's Wife" on the way home.  I bought this audiobook a few months ago and had listened to it when I went to DC.  Monique has been listening to it and I didn't mind hearing some of it again.  It's a really good book and I highly recommend it.

Last night she took another nap and I started work on a song for NERO, a commissioned work to save some unicorns.  I'm actually pretty pleased with the progress I made on it.  With any luck it will be ready for opener.