a busy few days

[kareina]

As with all major life changes, my suddenly becoming single has meant a variety of tasks that need doing, and it has exponentially increased the amount of correspondence I've received as everyone checks in to see how I'm doing, or offer helpful suggestions when I've asked for them (here and on Facebook). I'm delighted to hear from everyone, but haven't really made an effort to reply to them all yet. I suspect that as things slow back down I'll manage it. In the mean time I'm back to doing Uni work (yay!) and back to eating properly (thank goodness I keep that food log--for several days I was busy enough that it would get to 6pm and I'd look at the log and notice that I'd had *way* less food than my average intake, so I'd make myself stop and eat something more, to bring the total for that day up to only a little below average), getting plenty of sleep, and just generally enjoying a positive outlook. As I told a friend who asked how I was doing "I'm feeling pretty happy. I'm healthy, fit, slender, cute, intelligent, with fantastic prospects and many friends who love me." Life is good. Sure, there are some things that may not have gone as had once been planned, but there are many different ways to enjoy life, and I'm content to keep enjoying it.

I do plan to sit down and write down details of what happened for those of you who have been asking, but that will take a while. I'm trying (with varying success) to limit my internet use to 15 minute increments so as to leave more time for uni work, which needs doing and is important, but with all the new messages to read, that doesn't leave much time for writing, so perhaps sometime in the next week or so I'll make the time anyway. Watch for it in my "too much information filter". If you aren't on it and want to be, let me know.

In other news, it has long been my practice to add a new good habit to my life when doing major life-changes. Sometimes the change is a move, sometimes it is a change in primary relationship status (though, usually, those two tend to go together), but whatever it is, I find that it is much easier to start a new habit when there are other changes going on as well. This time I've decided to start really giving some time and attention to learning to play my hammer dulcimer, by actually playing with it every day, instead of every week. This has been helped by clovis_t having chosen to spend the weekend with friends, so I set the duclimer up on his desk (since he wasn't using it). As a result I've played with it many times this weekend--just pause every now and again to sit down and practice a bit, since it was out (it normally lives under the bed, that being the only place with room for it, and it isn't convenient to get it out from there with all of the furniture in the room).

I've still only got the three tunes I've worked out the notes for, but I know have them memorized well enough that I *usually* hit the correct string. This evening I decided to further challenge myself my trying to play one of them along with the computer (Noteworthy Composer is a useful program--give it sheet music, and it will play the tune). My first attempt left me feeling like I'd been running a race--even my adrenal gland triggered! I soon figured out that I can do the first half of bransle l'official with the computer just fine, but was having difficulties with the second half (which has always been the harder bit for me), so I copied just that part of the music into a new document and set it to repeat lots and lots of times, very, very slowly, and kept trying to play along till I could mostly manage. I'll give it another try later. Alas, the computer isn't easily in reach of the dulcimer, and it requires a bit of fiddling to set things up so that I can play while it sings to me. Hmmm. I wonder if I can re-arrange things to make it more convenient? Probably not--this room is full pretty much to capacity already.