Our moving date (if everything goes according to plan) is two weeks from today.
The Honda was nearing the end of its useful life, so rather than drag it to Indiana and then get rid of it, we preemptively sold it. We’re delivering it this morning. Once we’re in Indy we’ll keep an eye on the Carmax site for a replacement.
Amy has had her first cheerios. She doesn’t have a pincer grasp yet, so she can’t really pick them up and get them to her mouth, but she plays with them and accepts one offered to her lips.
Yesterday she and I spent the early afternoon at Sarah’s. Her kids, two girls and a younger boy, enjoyed playing with Amy and she did pretty well being played with, too. We sat outside by their sidewalk, under a huge maple; the weather was fantastic.
She is outgrowing her car seat. She’s tall for her age, and her feet stick out a bit and the top of her head sticks out a bit. And it’s getting very heavy, too. I was mentioning this to Sarah, and she offered us her boy’s car seat, since he’s too big for it now; unfortunately it has a low weight limit for rear-facing and the “use by” date on the back is this December. We plan to shop this weekend.
Last night Mark’s advisor and his wife took us out to dinner. Amy was a little fussier than usual, but otherwise it was a nice outing, and very kind of them.
Sunday the Hanshaw Trio is having a farewell party with music and a potluck. I need to tune sometime between now and then!
Wow! Two weeks to move day!
Events always seem to multiply near the move date. May you all be able to relax (I know, I know - relax during a move?!) and enjoy every minute of them and the move!
We’re finally getting some settling-in issues within sight of completion. Spending two weeks in No. Ireland didn’t help in that regard, though it probably did - the break from the constant work of packing, planning, getting things turned off and on, etc., etc., then unpacking and finding a place for eveything (right!) was welcome and needed though, at the time we went, we didn’t realize just how much it was needed.
One of the things that’s exciting about a move is all the new possibilities one can explore. It can be scary doing that, but there’s also a kind of hope attached to it - maybe something better or more fulfilling, or even as fulfilling will present itself in this new place with these new to us people.
In our week home since NI, we’ve been able to make and take time to spend with some other people. I’m not very good at just going to parties with people I don’t know. On Thursday night, though, since our fridge was broken, we accepted an invitation to eat at a local English Pub called, appetizingly enough, “The Hair of the Dog”, with a couple of guys from the local Irish session whom we had just met before our trip. We had a good time talking with them, and our waitress came up to me and commented on my John c campbell Folk School T-shirt which I was wearing, asking if I’d been there. I told her I had for Dance Musicians’ Week, and she got excited, saying she was a local contradance caller, and there was a great need for local contradance musicians! (You just never know, do you?) So, that was a good contact. I think it turns out rather than just calling a dance now and then, she’s vitally involved in the local countradance organization.
Then last night, we went to a cookout at a neighbor’s house a few blocks away. As I said, I don’t like these kinds of thing, but I knew we needed to meet our neighbors, so we went. And did we meet our neighbors! There were probably a 15-20 people in all who came by, all of them artists or involved in art in some form. One fellow was putting together the photoshop version of a mural the artist would use to paint it. Others were various kinds of visual artists, and our host was a young woman who finds and writes grant applications, a valuable person to know! And she is also the woman who is interested in starting a food coop and maybe a farmer’s market with local farmers (the markets we’ve been to don’t necessarily focus on local, though they do have some few local farmer) to bring in good food at a reasonable price to our neighborhood, so we talked to her about my playing (and maybe others as well) at this market to provide atmosphere - not a performance like at the big Chattanooga Market, which isn’t mainly a farmer’s market at all. She was excited about that, and also to find out that the person in NC Brandy had found out would mentor them in setting up the market/coop was asociated with a coop she had experience with and liked a lot, so all that was very cool.
And, I’ve just been invited to post on a private blog here made up of Christie, Butch and others who are interested in documentary, to see where all this will lead for us all. There apparently are several projects afoot, and some ideas floating around that might be of interest to me.
So, I’ve said all that to say, congratulations on the moving, and enjoy it and the hope and new things it will bring not only to Mark in his new teaching job and career, but to you and to Amy as well. Moving, though tiring and sometimes frustrating (I have definitely had my times of frustration this week!), is an exciting event. Blessings!
Comment by Rick — June 16, 2007 @ 4:51 am