and today's end

Bell choir went well.

We're actually getting...sorta good? And I'm realizing that when I screw up, no one can hear it (my screwups tend to be not-ringing when I need to ring) and as long as I'm not ringing before the piece starts or after it ends, I'm good....this is actually teaching me a better "catch up and move on" technique so I get less flustered at mistakes on the piano.

It also is deeply amusing to me what a ragtag bunch we are. Mike and I are the youngest (I don't know how old he is for sure; I am guessing mid to late 30s). There are two bank tellers, a couple retired teachers, the church secretary, the church organist who is also working real estate, a couple retired teachers, my former colleague (retired) Judy, and then me. And yet we can all work together.

As the director said: the dedication to be there and to work is about 80% of it. (Didn't someone famously say that 80% of life was showing up? I think more and more that that's true, after having had too many dealings with flakey people, and having been raised to be one of those "would crawl over broken glass to do something she said she'd do" kind of people).

So now I'm relaxing a bit, sitting in my room (which gets cooler faster in the evening than the living room - my bedroom is at the back of the house, which is the east side, and the living room - heh, the "front room*" is on the west side and gets the late-afternoon sun).

(*In the UP, where my mom grew up, many many people had a sort of formal parlor or living room and it was often called the "front room." My grandmother had one, even though her house was SMALL: there was the kitchen, which had the back door (which I thought of as the front door because it was the one everyone used) and a small dining area which was really more a walk-through area to the other rooms, a small family room with her bedroom off of it, and the front room. (There was also a small bathroom and two upstairs bedrooms. No one ever used the front room except for VERY formal things and it was where the Christmas tree went up.)

I'm listening to Pandora (what a great invention) and knitting on a scarf. I needed something simple so I dug out a multidirectional diagonal scarf I started a while back out of one of those "yarn cakes" that goes through a couple color changes:

No, I'm not sure what I will ultimately do with it. Give it away, maybe? Keep it? A lot of times, the stuff I make these days, I find I'm making it more for the making and less for the having.