Preview

We just got home from 10 days in Akumal, Mexico - the "Mayan Riviera" - to celebrate our 25th anniversary. I hope to post more pictures in days to come once I'm settled back in again. The trip was AMAZING!

Current Events #2

Today was our TWENTY FIFTH wedding anniversary!

We started our celebrating with dinner at Olive Garden with our boys. More celebrating to come - more pictures then :-)

God has certainly blessed us with our 3 AMAZING boys!

The white flowers are to me from David, and the colorful ones are to us from his family. Though perhaps not romantic per se, it was really special to us to have our boys come to our anniversary dinner with us. We're on the verge of empty-nesting and loving every moment we can get with them!

Current Events #1

I have always loved the organ, and it finally occurred to me that I could take lessons, so I am! I was a little nervous about it at first because I was a very reluctant piano student as a child - didn't want to practice - used all kinds of shortcuts like having my teacher play the piece for me and then not counting but just matching the notes to what I knew it was supposed to sound like and so on. In other words, I didn't give myself a very good foundation for music in my younger years. And my last piano lesson was in 1979.

It's been a humbling experience to engage in lessons again, but it's also been amazing in so many ways. I think I'm learning a bit about what my students go through as they learn math - especially in the basic skills classes I teach at the college level. Music, like math, is a language you have to be able to read and also something you have to be able to perform and not just "know." There's also some amount of "test anxiety" involved. I can play a piece just fine, but then when my teacher asks me to play it for him, it's like my fingers all turn into thumbs, and I can't see the notes, and I fumble around and make mistakes!

My work keeps me very busy, but I do have time during the summer to take on a new venture, and that's a privilege. I've been practicing anywhere from an hour to two and a half hours a day, and just today - about 4 weeks into this venture - I've been starting to feel some mastery of the little things I've been working on so far. I also feel like my brain is being rewired as I try to read notes on different staffs that are both the same clef but playing them on different manuals (keyboards), sometimes with my left hand above my right - also playing the left hand and the pedals (both bass) really stretches my brain! I'm thinking this may be a good "Alzheimer's Prevention Program!"

No Longer, Nor Yet

Brother, that breathe the August air

Ten thousand years from now,

And smell --- if still your orchards bear

Tart apples on the bough ---

The early windfall under the tree,

And see the red fruit shine,

I cannot think your thoughts will be

Much different from mine.

Should at that moment the full moon

Step forth upon the hill,

And memories hard to bear at noon,

By moonlight harder still,

Form in the shadows of the trees, ---

Things that you could not spare

And live, or so you thought, yet these

All gone, and you still there,

A man no longer what he was,

Nor yet the thing he'd planned,

The chilly apple from the grass

Warmed by your living hand ---

I think you will have need of tears;

I think they will not flow;

Suppposing in ten thousand years

Men ache, as they do now.

Edna St. Vincent Millay