And weekend plans

My last piano lesson of the season was yesterday. (Long story, but: my teacher works here in town but lives on the other side of the lake. She comes to my house at 5:30 or so after she gets off work but then has to drive home. So when it's darker out at night - like in Standard Time - she prefers not to teach. I am OK with that. Though she did say she was gently pressuring her husband, who I guess is retired? about moving in to town, and if that happened, she'd probably teach year round).

I have stuff I can work on; I still did 20 minutes this morning of practice even though I have no lesson to prepare for. I might scale back to 40 minutes a day (from an hour) at least during busy times; I can usually manage 20 minutes in the morning and that would mean only 20 when I get home. (Though my ideal is: 20 first thing in the morning, 20 when I come home at lunch, and 20 in the afternoon. I might still do that on days when I can get home for lunch; practicing at noon is a nice mental break. And I admit I wish we had one of the bigger older traditional "all classes" classroom buildings where maybe I could find a piano in an isolated room during the day and just bring my music to campus with me sometimes)

Right now I'm just keeping up with what I was doing (an arrangement of the hymn-tune Cwm Rhondda and Invention #8) but I do have a whole book of "Lieder Ohne Worter" (Mendelssohn) that I can play around with and see if I can play any of those. (I've tried Chopin but find him a little difficult; a lot of times the reaches are too big for my hands. I like Bach because the reaches are generally smaller, and Mendelssohn seems to have kept that in mind, too). 

I also got my newest quilt from the quilt shop. The quilting on this was incredibly reasonable - about $60 for a slightly-less-than-double-bed-sized quilt. Granted, it was looser quilting than I usually get but I thought with the bigger blocks that would look best. (The person did a really good job matching the thread - I wanted it to match the grey background in the main fabric).

So one of my plans this weekend is to start binding the quilt. I have the perfect fabric from my stash - it's not from the same line as I used in the quilt but it has all the colors and it's pretty. And this quilt is wider than the one I currently have on the bed, which will be good to swap out, as it's getting colder at night.

I do need to come in here for a while tomorrow; I need to get the rest of the intro bio lectures updated and this weekend seems like the time to do it. I might also do a bit of reading ahead for Policy and Law. And I also have to get the court case files together at some point to start assigning them to the class; I think I have 20 people left so that means 10 cases needed. (I've had one or two drops in my classes. In some cases it's over low grades but a couple people dropped because life interfered with college).

I'm meeting with my research student this afternoon to cover the rest of what she needs to do; I'm hoping we can get a short paper out of what we found - I need to get another publication in the works. (Sigh. That's modern academia for you). But this should be interesting information; comparing data from 18 years ago before the sericea lespedeza invaded, and now, when it's all over the place. It shows how bad an invasion can get. (I suspect it came in around 2007 when we had flooding; it has small seeds that are easily transported by water)

I also need to run to Pruett's this afternoon while one of the meat-department people is on duty, in case I can't find what I want - I want a medium sized (like, maybe 4 pounds) chuck roast. We're having a potluck Sunday and I thought of making carne machaca again (which is essentially pot roast, but the vegetables are tomatoes and green chilies instead of potatoes and carrots.) I did it once before and every bit of it got eaten up, so I guess people liked it. (It WAS pretty good). I looked last I was there (earlier this week) and they had chuck STEAK and giant 10-pound shrink-wrapped roasts, but nothing in between, and if they don't today I will ask someone to find out if either (a) they have something in the back I could buy or (b) if there's another cut that would sub equally well. (I don't make a lot of pot roast so I don't know what other than chuck would work - it should be flavorful and stand up to being cooked slowly but not be tough. I am leery of brisket; some brisket tends to be tough because it's leaner.)

They also sell the Fairlife skimmed milk, which is tolerable to me (organic, and it's filtered so it does have less sugar, which I guess is good) so that means when I need milk I don't have to trek all the way across town and brave the wal-mart. (I pay a bit of a premium for that at Pruett's, but I think of that as a "convenience fee" and I am generally willing to pay those because I'm so pressed for time these days.) And Pruett's produce and meat are clearly better than what else I can get locally (I know the chain prides itself on the quality of its meat).

I do also need to think ahead; Tuesday my friend and I feed the college kids, and I am doing chili and a separate pot of vegetarian chili beans; she is doing everything else. The numbers have been down so I don't have to make a giant quantity of chili but I'm going to plan on maybe enough for 15 people...