Blue-Footed Musings

One tiny upside of being sick is that it was a good excuse to skip my music lesson on Friday. Lately the lessons have been more stressful than fun, and I’m thinking about quitting. Weekly lessons feel like too much of a grind right now, but I’m afraid that if I quit lessons I’ll also ultimately quit composing. I think what I really want is a teacher who is closer geographically and willing to give biweekly, monthly, or perhaps even on-demand lessons. I couldn’t find one the last time I looked. That doesn’t mean no such teacher exists. I’m paid up through the first week of November. So I will give myself the rest of October to carefully consider my feelings while also looking at other options. Today I sent e-mail inquiries to a couple of local music shops. I’m not super optimistic that they’ll have what I need, but I figure they’re good places to start. Maybe they know somebody who knows somebody, etc.

• A couple of days ago I started to feel sick (sneezy, sore throat, goopy eyes, etc.). I had hoped it was just allergies. It is not. 🙁
• I had planned to visit my parents this weekend, but that didn’t pan out. Just as well, because I would have had to cancel anyway, thanks to my cold.
• My wedding anniversary is this weekend. My hubby and I are limited in our ability to celebrate this year. We’re quite the pair–me sick and he partially incapacitated due to an injury. Good thing we vowed to stick by each other “in sickness and in health.” 😉

I woke up late today. It was a poor start to the weekend. Not only am I feeling groggy, but having slept away a significant chunk of this day, there’s less weekend left to enjoy. It’s already well after noon, and I’m only just starting to think about what I might like to do.

Anyway, here’s a list of things I should do.

1. Set up my new office air purifier.
2. Roast chestnuts. I already printed out my “recipe” and bought some chestnuts, as well as a proper chestnut knife. There is nothing to stop me except perhaps the chestnuts themselves, which are a couple of weeks old now, and it’s possible they’ve gotten moldy. (Please don’t be moldy, chestnuts!)
3. Bake a pie. I picked up some Wolf River apples yesterday. Though I immediately joked with my husband about them being “sacrificial apples,” because far too often we buy things and then neglect to use them in time, I have high hopes.
4. Write some blog posts. If you are reading this post, that means I’ve already written at least one. Success!
5. Listen to my overdue library CDs.
6. Read some of my overdue library books.
7. Go through the stack of papers on my desk. Really, I need to do this. The stack is getting ridiculously disorganized and precarious, and it contains things that actually need to be taken care of.
8. Laundry. I always need to do laundry. Sometimes there is more laundry, sometimes less. Now is a “more laundry” time, and I’ll only be making my own life harder if I don’t tackle the problem now.
9. Assorted cleaning tasks. I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that the house is a mess. If I can make at least one area less messy, hooray.
10. Pay the credit cards. I ought already to have done this. Naughty me.
11. Finally have my celebratory birthday dinner. I wanted to go to my favorite Mexican restaurant for my birthday, but there was some reason we couldn’t go, so my hubby promised me that we’d go later. Enough time has since passed that we’re in danger of forgetting not only the reason why we didn’t go before, but also to go at all.
12. Take a nice, long walk. I didn’t need to include this item on this list, because walking is a daily goal. I just wanted the list to end on an even number. 😛

• The kids finished their first week of school. I got up every morning at 6:00 a.m. to make sure they were out of bed and getting ready without getting in each other’s way. I’m proud of how well they managed it. I feel comfortable leaving them on their own in the mornings from now on. And thank goodness, because I am already exhausted. Me and morning just don’t mix!
• My husband saw a bobcat in our yard!
• I finally finished the composition piece I’d been working on forever. Now my teacher suggests I write a passacaglia. Hmm. I’ll think about it.
• My husband has arranged for Livia to have fencing lessons, at her request. She hasn’t fenced in years, not since Covid. Previously she studied foil but will now be learning epee. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly she can catch up.
• I think I may have fallen behind at work, but I can’t seem to care. I’ve lost all my joy in the job.
• I gave in and bought the NYT subscription. Well played, NYT. Well played.
• The Powerball jackpot has been over a billion dollars for the last few drawings. It’s fun to dream about becoming a billionaire overnight, and I think it’s worth a few bucks to entertain that dream. Too bad every one of our tickets so far has contained not a single winning number.

Today I hit a paywall for two previously free NYT puzzles: Letter Boxed and the Mini. It put a damper on my day to have my usual round of puzzles cut short. I wasn’t terribly surprised by it, though. I’d been expecting something like that to happen. Naturally the newspaper wants people to buy subscriptions, because they need to make money. So now the question is, do I want to do that?

Pros:

1. Supporting the puzzle makers, editors, and solving community. This is a strong pro!
2. Supporting a major news outlet. God knows we need a free press, and if we don’t pay for it now, someday we’re going to “pay for it.”
3. The current price is good ($18 for a year of Games or $1 per week for unlimited NYT access for 6 months). Maybe too good. It used to cost $50 for a year of Games, and I thought it was excessive to charge that much on top of the newspaper subscription. IMHO, the newspaper subscription should include everything, or at least get you a discount on the extras. But $18 for Games alone is selling themselves too cheap, and it worries me.

Cons:

1. Spending more time on puzzles each day, as will inevitably happen if I get more access to them (like I don’t already devote enough of my time to puzzles!).
2. Spending money on something I don’t need at a time when I should be trying to spend less.
3. Supporting the NYT, which I’d previously quit for a reason. I trust them (mostly) to give us accurate news, but I don’t trust their motives or allegiances, which is why I added “(mostly).”
4. It irks me to be strong-armed. They’re trying to force me to do something, and my inner rebel is like, “Screw you, I don’t need your stinking puzzles anyway!”

Hmm. Gotta think about this for a while. But I am leaning toward buying a subscription.