Here I am. At last. The vacation went okay-ish. The weather was amazing (mid-60s to mid-70s, raining only once). The mountains up in the Park were gorgeous, the most snow-covered we've seen in 10 years. Plus, I saw a line of at least 10 brand new Corvettes drive past at the top of Trail Ridge Road (while I'd been striving to capture a furry marmot on film). Them'sa beauties.
I say things went 'okay-ish' because my mother and I both suffered great pains throughout the trip. I've discovered that driving our Astro for extended periods (like across the plains of western Kansas) results in acute agony in my left knee. The friggin' wheel thing that simply has to be there is ill-placed, imo. I did manage to read Hammond's book, On the Edge: My Story. The section his wife wrote covering the early stages of his brain damage made me cry. *feeling weepy* I came up with 1 new scene for Sanzo Wannabe. Yes. 1. Sad, but I was spending my time reading books besides Hamster's, namely Quiet, Please, a friggin' high-larious account of one Librarian's experiences with the public, The Silence of the Lambs, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (or to avoid using the term 'android' in the title, Blade Runner).
Overall, I really did enjoy my time there. We finished the trip out by staying with a family we met in Estes Park two years ago, and I'll tell you that at one point, sitting out on their balcony at 9:30pm, seeing the sun's rays almost completely disappear, a lovely little bat paid us a sweeping visit and scared the holy bejeezus out of Shika. She squealed like a little girl (which caused mom to squeal...and then finally...me XP).
In other news...
Remember that dive meet piano performance thingy I said I might be doing? and that was scaring me bleepless? Yeah, well, that's Monday and Tuesday of next week (and yes, that means I'll be doing two three-hour sessions, not one). Meepies. =( Needless to say, I'm freaking out. We just moved the piano upstairs into the music room, a process that the two guys we hired to do the moving (no, we didn't attempt to tackle that project in our mangled state) didn't seem to enjoy. One of them remarked numerous times as they trudged up the stairs "man, these are steep". A piano tuner will be by Saturday morning, but even a freshly tightened and tweaked set of strings won't assuage my fears. I told the woman in charge of bringing me in to play that the piano there (a nice Yamaha baby grand, one that has a rather familiar touch to my own Yamaha) would most definitely need a proper tuning before it could be played, but for all I know, that request/command fell on deaf ears and I'll show up to find a not-so-melodious sounding instrument. I need to calm down. Breathe.
It doesn't help that as I type this, I'm not only remembering the number of distinct trouble spots I have in the music I'll be playing, but I also have the realization that I'm starting in on a new account tomorrow, and new, unfamiliar work will always give a person stress. (It's storming quite spectacularly right now. It looked quite impressive as we left AMC after Hancock (a film I rather enjoyed btw (alongside Wall-E that I saw 2 days ago (made me cry)))) I need to simply calm down, go to bed, and approach tomorrow with a level head. Yeah, keep saying that, Twisted. Toodlies.
