|
2024-01-22 (Week 2303): 14k and Busy Times
Thank you, Neocities, for the 14k views. I’m grateful for the continued interest in putting my thoughts to the page. Getting my head together has become a healthy habit, so I will persist for the foreseeable future.
Last week was a rough one, as I spent the first three days of it over at my mother’s house, helping her to go through some of my father’s personal effects, as well as assisting in fighting back against the accumulation of things that happened while she was his primary caretaker for the past two years or so. We made a healthy dent and shed a few tears while sifting through his belongings.
The three 12-hour days there took their toll on me, and the next two days were back to work. I ran to get things done the whole time and couldn’t finish everything I wanted to. Thankfully, my co-workers had time to help me with my work, which I was grateful for.
The weekend (outside of errands and chores) was a lead-up to today, as my partner and I made each other our favorite dishes. On Saturday, I cooked Beyond beef stroganoff for us, using a modified version of this recipe. I’ve only made it three times so far (the maiden voyage was right before Christmas last year), but it’s been mighty tasty every time. Yesterday, she made us gouda and mashed potato bourekas, which were also delicious, and we have some in the freezer for a later date.
Today brings my partner and I to the 7th anniversary of our first date. We’re headed to Seattle to hit some of our old favorite haunts and the place we had our first date. We’re meeting up with one of my oldest friends, who became a mutual friend, and some friends of ours that we’ve made during those seven years.
Neither of us is interested in marriage, but we both respect the idea behind Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn’s relationship over the past 40 years without being married. They choose to stay together without legally binding documents requiring them to do so. Plus, anything that correlates me with the actor in one of my all-time favorite movies (my father introduced me to it) is all good in my book.
Returning to things relating to the passing of my father, the church that my half-brother belongs to is doing a memorial for him on Saturday. It was supposed to happen two days ago, but 7-9 inches of snow covered Nashville, TN, and they’ve endured sub-freezing temperatures for the past week.
It’s given me more time to help my mother go through some old photos to send my half-brother for the memorial and figure out some music to play it to. My mother remembered that “Gimme Shelter” was one of my father’s favorite songs. I’m not sure it’s lyrically appropriate for a memorial in church, but I’ll leave that up to my half-brother.
To shift gears to creativity, going through old photos led to finding some of me when I was five or six, and I want to use one of them as an album cover. The current idea is to write an album to my past self. It covers some of the same ground as the book I’m working on, so I’ve found how they correlate. I don’t imagine I’ll finish the book or the album until sometime next year, and that’s fine; there’s no rush.
As for what the music will sound like, it’s still ephemeral. I’m tinkering with some drum loop samples, but those might be to help build a foundation, then taken away. Like a retaining wall to help form concrete, they may be the wooden walls taken down or the rebar that the concrete wall forms around. I don’t know; I’m not there yet.
I plan on the book to be fiction, and it feels like it will be novella length, but we’ll see. It’s also in the primordial stages, and I have some of the essential plot points figured out, but the story is more of a platform for the ideas I want to express. Again, I don’t know, I’m not there yet.
With the passing of my father, it’s helped me to revisit my bucket list. The only thing on it for the longest time was seeing The Milky Way over Monument Valley, but there are a few more things on there now. Finishing the album and book mentioned above are on there, as is returning to Tennessee to revisit family. I haven’t been since September 2005, so another visit is overdue.
In any event, this is getting on the wordy side (even for my tastes), so I’ll call it for now and do my best to progress with my goals.
Until next week!
|
