Halloween Decorations and an Autumn Day

Sam loves to decorate for the holidays, which is a trait that I think he inherited from J's mom. This morning we pulled out our small box of Halloween decorations, and Sam had most of them up and arranged within about five minutes. You'll notice that they are all concentrated 1) at Sam's about eye level and 2) at one of his favorite areas of the house, the entertainment center. I look forward to watching television with a smiling jack-o'-lantern bag blocking my view.

We have spent a nice day at home on in this brisk autumn weather, only to go outside to mow the lawn. It's so relieving for me to get caught up on all of the projects, grading, and household tasks that accumulate over the weeks. J cooked a lovely dinner and the boys cleaned the house while I graded papers. Right now J is giving Sam a haircut. I feel like we are on top of things and ready for the next week. I really need to remind myself to stay home on the weekends more often.

Sam in Love

Sam and I just had this conversation about the little girl who lives across the street. She and Sam are in the same class at school. Today she made a love note for Sam, which he opened once he came home. After he pulled the card out of the envelope, we had the following conversation:

Sam (in a tone of disbelief): Mom...I know it sounds crazy, but L and I are best friends and we're in love!

Me: Oh, really? You're in love?

Sam: Yep. Isn't that crazy?

Me: What do you love about L?

Sam: I don't know.

Wedding bells aren't going to peal anytime soon, but Sam did tell me that he and L want to get a dog together when they are grown-ups. That's a commitment, to say the least! L is a very cute and bright girl. I'm tickled that the card she made for Sam has the phrase "labor of love" (which her mom said she got off of a television show). Ha ha!

Current Choir Music

I am really enjoying singing in the university choir this quarter, especially since we are preparing for our Christmas concert! Our conductor is really great. She is very organized and has great methods for keeping the choir members on task and prepared to sing. We hardly have any "note plunking" during choir at all. Choir members are required to come to rehearsals already familiar with their singing parts, so we spend our time in rehearsal working on phrasing and dynamics. Our conductor also has a background in vocal pedagogy, so she spends about 20-30 minutes doing various vocal exercises with the choir at the beginning of each rehearsal. She's quite a character, too, so it's fun to work with her.

I already feel like my voice is getting into better shape. I'm glad to learn new vocal exercises and methods from this conductor; I felt like my private vocal lessons as an undergraduate were rather unvaried for several years, since all of my graduate-student teachers were trained in the same BYU vocal method. Some of the suggestions that were given to me never worked, even though they were taught to me over and over for several years. Hopefully these new exercises and tips will help me to work out some of the trouble spots with my voice.

Here are some audio clips of the pieces that we are rehearsing right now:


"Adam Lay YBounden" by Boris Ord (.PDF of sheet music available online)


"In the Bleak Midwinter" by Harold E. Darke (.PDF of sheet music available online)


"Salvation is Created" by Pavel Tschesnokoff (.PDF of sheet music available online)

"Magnificat" by Donald Kendrick (listen and see sheet music online)

"Tyrle, Tyrlow, Tyrle, Tyrlow (So Merrily the Shepherds Began to Blow)" by Healey Willan (You can listen to a preview of this song online)

I keep thinking of my friend ixoj when I am at rehearsal almost every day. I miss singing with her in choirs, and I know that she would love to sing the music that we are singing. Plus, we are also singing the "Hodie" chant from Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols, which specifically makes me miss singing with ixoj in the Christmas Chorus with Martha Sargeant.

Star Wars

Once,
I sat in a theater
Waiting for the lights to dim
With my little blonde-haired brother – the one
Who always called me “Pardner.”

“Jango Fett,” he corrected,
his little eyes rolling,
when I said “Boba” by mistake.

Mom instructed me to take off his glasses
During the scary parts.
I covered his eyes­, but years later
He confessed that he peeked through.

Now,
I sit on my couch
With a little blonde-haired boy
Watching the same film.
He always calls me “Mom.”

I skip through the scary parts for him,
Without being asked.

This story is familiar and different
Each time around.
The roles of the characters change
With each episode.

My little boy
And his now-grown uncle,
Duel with their new and once-new light sabers.

This is not just my cycle to continue,
But theirs.

Unplugging from Facebook

I disabled my Facebook account last night, and I immediately felt this overwhelming sense of relief. I feel like Christian in A Pilgrim's Progress who was able to get rid of his large burden. No more do I have to check for notifications! No more will I pull up Facebook if I feel even a hint of boredom! Instead, I'm going to try and embrace the bored moments to give my brain some time to relax.

I have struggled with maintaining my Facebook account for several months, largely because I felt like I was wasting too much time on there. Earlier this year, I went through and limited my number of friends to my closest friends from high school, closest friends from college, local friends, and my family members. In other words, I limited Facebook to the people with whom I regularly communicate. I wanted to do this so that I could limit the amount of content in my news feed, too. If I had less friends, then I would have less content to see. Although this helped me limit some time that I spent on Facebook, I still felt like it wasn't enough. I deleted the Facebook app from my phone about two months ago, but I still found myself often checking Facebook via my phone's internet browser.

So, I'm just going to be done. There are a lot of other things that I want to do with my time, and I'm increasingly disenchanted with the experiences that I have had on Facebook. Although I enjoy having brief updates from friends and seeing photos of my friends and family, I feel like those rewarding posts usually are about one in twenty or thirty of the posts and links that come into my feed. So, if I check Facebook multiple times a day and only have a few friends, then I rarely have something worthwhile to see or read. Instead, I feel like a good portion of my time has gone down the drain.

One of the things that helped me to push my decision to get off of Facebook was reading the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Carr discusses how our brains physically adapt to the fast paced, snippety bits of information that is provided by the web, social media, and search engines. The neurons literally change our brains, which affects our different types of memory and our brain functions. As a result of using the internet, over time our brains can lose the ability to concentrate for long periods of time and deeply think.

I have noticed that my attention span has changed in the past several years due to my internet usage, and I don't like it. If I ever am involved in something difficult or boring when on my computer, I often jump over to Facebook or another website for a quick distraction. But these distractions add up in terms of time, and I feel like I'm less productive overall. Although I realize that the internet will continue to have an important role in my life (after all, I am writing on a blog right now!), I do think that I need to take more control over the time that I spend online. I want to be more of a deep, meditative thinker, not a wired and distracted person.

Hopefully this change will help me to enjoy life a bit more. I'd rather live my life, then spend time observing the lives of others without genuinely and meaningfully interacting with them. I'd rather write more letters, write more emails, and make more phone calls to those people. Although I may get on Facebook again in the future, I think this is a welcome break.

Recent Art by Sam

Left to right: a carrot chew toy, a giraffe, a dachsund (love the body and ears!), a train, and a rocket ship

 

Left to right: Gram, Bop, me, a icy snowflake, Sam with a heart, J, the pond at RB

Sam doesn't like to draw or write very much, but we are trying to gently encourage him to develop these two skill a little bit more. Last week, Sam's kindergarten teacher gave the parents of her students a few recommendations to help children work on refining their motor skills. We bought some bath crayons the other night, and Sam had a lot of fun drawing in the bathtub. I think these special crayons will be helpful in getting him excited to draw. And, unsurprisingly, Sam does like to draw on the children's menus when they are provided at certain restaurants (first image). If baths and restaurants make drawing more fun, then I suppose we will need to have more of them!

Deluge of House and Garden Projects

I have been swimming in a deluge of house projects over the past few weeks. This sudden push to complete house projects largely was due to two things: 1) the kinda-sorta finding of chairs to complete our dining set (see below) and 2) more free time since Sam started kindergarten. I wanted to get all of these projects done before school started, too.

We haven't bought any furniture for our house for over a year, even though we would have liked a few things. J said that he didn't want to get anything else for the house until we solved the dining room chair issue. So, we have been saving money for other furniture projects while I hunted for chairs online, insisting that we could find readymade chairs at a reasonable price somewhere (so we wouldn't have to pay through-the-nose to get the last chairs custom made). And, after searching for a year, I miraculously found a fourth chair at a consignment store in New York state that was willing to ship the chair to me. That completed our set (with two local chairs, one received through a store in North Carolina, and the fourth from New York state). We wanted to get two more chairs for the ends of the table, and I found some similar chairs (made by Blosser) on Craiglist in North Carolina. I had the chairs shipped, only to realize that I had bought pub-style chairs instead of regular chairs. Argh! So, the saga still continues a bit, but things are finished enough for J to feel okay about working on other furniture and house projects. We may have the legs of these high chairs cut, to help accommodate someone sitting at our table. But if you look at the set of chairs at the table, the set looks pretty good:

The Blosser chairs will need to be refinished with a darker color, too. You can see the difference between the chairs when they are side by side:

The other really big project was spreading gravel on our driveway. (I wrote a little bit about the early stages of this project HERE.) We got a little too much gravel, but luckily our next door neighbor was able to use most of the extra gravel. We also were able to spread some of the gravel on our walkway, which was pretty much nonexistent before. I'm so thrilled too walk out of the house and see gravel instead of dirt and weeds.

BEFORE

You can see where I had started to pull out grass and weeds in the foreground of the image, along the fence

AFTER 

IN PROGRESS

You can see how much grass we had to pull out, based on the unfinished portion in the background

I've also had the chance to paint, find furniture, find lamps, and work in the garden lately. Here's a smattering of images:

I painted the interior of our front entryway closet. This was the last area of unpainted drywall in our entire house. No more major painting projects!

We found a small bathroom cabinet for downstairs. J had to saw off the towel rod underneath, so that it would fit. I painted it a cream color to match the beadboard.

A curtain for the upstairs hallway! It's nice to have a little color there and more privacy.

His-and-hers lamps for the sides of our bed. When we moved in, some faux-antique white lamps were installed in the walls. My lamp didn't work, so we had it removed and there was a gaping hole on my side of the bed for about a yaer. I searched diligently for new lamps for a long time. J finally told me that I didn't need to be passionate about every single lamp and piece of furniture that we buy, so I settled on these practical ones.

We also rearranged some furniture and brought this chair upstairs to create a little reading area in our room. I got a little Ikea table and small Ikea lamp. I'm not passionate about them either, but they fill the space just fine.

I do really like this hall tree that we put in our entryway. The storage bench holds all of our boots and unseemly dirty shoes.  It's also nice to have a place to hang coats when guests come over.

 This lamp helps to really make our entryway seem more complete, I think. I really love this lamp. It has some nice purple and raspberry colors that go well with both the interior walls and the exterior color of our front door. I'm glad that I'm passionate about the first and last thing that I see when I go in and out of the house.

We created a little reading area in the downstairs living room with this accent chair and ottoman.

I've also been working in the garden. The flowers on the side of the house are coming along nicely. I also pulled out all of the old California Poppies, and put a few Black Eyed Susans in the gaps that were created. These Black Eyed Susans are perennials, so I hope to enjoy them each year.

I feel like the house has really come together over the past few months (although there are more projects I could name - don't look too closely at that shed in the background of the last two pictures!). Now I feel like I can move on into the fall season and upcoming school year, since I have been able to make visible improvements in the house during my summer break. I really love this house and enjoy making it a beautiful space that fits J's distinct taste and my distinct taste. It's really fulfilling and rewarding for me to work toward something that I hope to enjoy for many years to come.