milestones

Homemade Salad Dressings and Croutons–plus Costco Thoughts

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This image is copyrighted, but hey! I’m pushing people to go there!

Jim and I made our way to Costco yesterday morning, the first big shopping trip since everything started shutting down. It was my first venture out for maybe two weeks. I had made the prediction that either the parking lot would be empty or that there would be a line out the door waiting for this magnificent place to open at 10:00, and, as usual, neither of my predictions was accurate. Instead, the whole experience was perfectly normal, with the exception of limits on certain items, the fact that a smiling woman was handing out packs of toilet paper, and that other items were missing entirely, notably chicken parts and regular pasta. (I was tickled to see quite a bit of gluten-free pasta on the shelves. Since this snarky comment is in parentheses, please feel free to ignore it.) The lines were no longer than usual; everyone was friendly and efficient, and we were in and out in under an hour. They had even opened early. I came home encouraged that the great engine of American capitalism is probably not going to grind to a halt any time soon, even as many are suffering from its slowing. We’re going to get through this, folks!

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Monday Miscellany

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Well, we take off on Wednesday for a three-week trip to France. Now that the Chorale concert season is over and I’ve done the shopping for tomorrow night’s member dinner, I’m sitting down for one last post before we leave. Don’t know if I’ll get anything posted during the trip. May I encourage you, by the way, if you enjoy my posts, to forward your e-mail to someone who might also enjoy them? You can pick an individual post that you think will be particularly interesting to your forwardee. I’d like to see the blog grow.

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A Bittersweet Farewell–and a Look to the Future

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Overlooking Lawerence and the Kansas River. (Boston Public Library) (cropped).jpg
Old North College, the first building on the University of Kansas campus, at the northeast promontory of Mount Oread, looking north over Lawrence and the Kansas River, ca. 1867. Image accessed via Wikipedia.

I decided to re-post the following here at the Intentional Living blog from my Behind the Music blog. This is my last post for the season. Next fall I’ll do something to amalgamate the two blogs for my subscribers. In the meantime, here’s what I wrote about the lovely piece that we’ll be performing to end our concert. Be sure to come if you’re in the area! It’s going to be great. (And if you come on Friday night you’ll get to attend the reception afterwards, which will include my version of Sally’s Baking Addiction Guinness brownies. If that’s not enough of a reason for you to come, I don’t know what is!) So here’s the post, in its entirety:

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Magic Flute Musings

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A couple of years ago I wrote a post titled “Loving the Mozart Requiem Isn’t the Same as Singing It.” My beloved Cherry Creek Chorale was performing the entire work, with orchestra, in the original Latin, and I was so excited about it. But when we actually started working on the piece I was pretty lost. I ended up investing in a professional recording with the tenor part being sung over the top of an actual performance, a move that helped tremendously. That performance was such a joy, on many levels. But boy, did I work! In the end, though, to stand up there and be so sure of my part was an experience I’ll never forget. I said in that post, “If I really love it, I’ll be willing to do the work. But the love isn’t a substitute for the work but the inspiration for it.”

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Savor this Fleeting Day–and All the Ones to Come

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Christmas lights at twilightI had every intention of getting this post written at least by yesterday, but the rush of company, outings, etc., got in the way. It’s Christmas morning. I’m up early because I couldn’t sleep, so here are the thoughts I wanted to get down, and I plan to get the newsletter out later today in between the biscotti-baking, the green-bean casserole making, and the last-minute gift-wrapping flurry.

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Ignore the Fear—and Press on to the Finish Line.

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Feet going down stairsStop me if you’ve heard this before:

My psychology is very weird.

Or maybe not. Maybe you’ve had this experience too: You’re chugging along, making real progress on a project, and then you think, ‘But what will I do with myself when this is finished?’ I used to say this about our various landscaping endeavors at our house in Virginia. What would we do on Saturdays when we got all of that stuff done?

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Where Will Your Month Go?

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leaves fallingSometimes I think that this blog wouldn’t have many entries if I didn’t do so much cribbing from other sources. Gretchen Rubin is a big crib, but another one is Laura Vanderkam, whom I’ve mentioned before. She’s quite a gal; I last wrote about her in this post about downtime. In addition to her quasi-daily blog posts she also sends out a weekly newsletter that sums up her week or gives ideas for the week or month to come, appropriately called “A Week’s Worth.” (The link is to the signup form.)

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The Joy of Tackling a Big Project

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Building materials and half completed buildingMy current Big Writing Project (BWP) is the finishing up of my commentaries on Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana for publication. I’ve been using the writing software Scrivener, as everybody who’s anybody says it’s magnificent. Well, I’d been finding it magnificently hard to use, to be honest. The final step in my project was the addition of images, and Scrivener just wasn’t cooperating. Until, suddenly, it was. I’m not sure what I did, but I think I had somehow created a table where I didn’t want one, and Scrivener was stubbornly following the

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The Happiness of a Big Event

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bowl of foodI have a separate blog called Intentional Hospitality, but my purpose in writing this post isn’t so much to give you recipes and timetables as to talk about a major source of happiness–and nervous breakdowns—in my life: throwing parties.

I have always liked to cook, going way back to my grade-school days. In fact, one of my fondest memories from about fourth grade is the time that my mom put me in charge of cooking dinner and I made everything from the

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Fuzzy Finish Lines

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countertop and stove finish line
See how close the stovetop is to the counter!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about finish lines, especially in how we view big projects and how we think they’ll advance. We look forward, we long, for the day when everything is done. It seems as if it will never happen. And then, gradually, the pieces start falling into place. It’s not one big ta-da moment like a horse crossing the finish line but a succession. There are bumps and reversals and then bursts of progress. This past Sunday, for instance, was a burst. The in-laws were off on a square-dancing trip until Sunday afternoon, and Jan’s daughter and her husband wanted to come over that evening.

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