Oh, don't the days seem lank and long,
When all goes right and nothing goes wrong,
And isn't your life extremely flat,
When you've nothing whatever to grumble at?
-- Sir William Gilbert, English Playwright and Poet (1836-1911)
3-1. Last Tuesday's game was a defensive struggle - final score 38-36 (Them). The Tall One was almost the heroine of the game, making two clutch free throws with less than a minute left to put us up by one. Unfortunately, the other team managed to get a score on the other end AND a foul, and with less than 10 seconds left one of our guards put up a three and missed. Tall One got the rebound, put up the shot to tie and was blatantly fouled - but the refs chose for some unknown reason not to blow the whistle and the game ended with us on the down side. Oh, well. Stuff happens. The up side is that the game was a good challenge for our girls, and we played better overall than we did the first three games. Oh, and in case you're wondering, she had 9.
Thanksgiving Eve in the ER. You know the conversation is not going to go well when it starts with, "Now don't freak out or anything, but I may have go to to the Emergency Room and get my leg stitched up." This from the WGH at about 8:30 on Wednesday night. Both sets of parents at the house, and he's closing the store with a 1-1/2 inch gash in his left calf from the brand new razor blade he had just put on the floor scraper. There is a praise in all this, however - you always say "it could've been worse", you know - it was the new blade and not the old, nasty one he had just taken off, it was a very clean cut and only required three staples, and it's approximating and healing quite well. And no restrictions on activity - which will become important in the paragraph after next.
Thanksgiving. 20-pound deep-fried turkey with all the extras. 16 people. We had very, very little in the way of leftovers - no turkey sandwiches on Friday. A lovely time was had by all. 'Nuff said.
An evening of culture. Friday night the WGH participated in his first performance with the Nashville Pipes & Drums (Scottish bagpipe band), at the new Schermerhorn Symphony Center downtown. They were part of a Thanksgiving concert celebration featuring the Nashville Chamber Orchestra and the NCO Gospel Choir, with special guests Wynonna Judd and Donna Summer. Wynonna was pretty good - although she tried something new, a rather contralto rendition of Ave Maria. When a country singer does opera it's something akin to yodeling. It wasn't bad, just ... different.
Donna Summer was phenomenal. I mean, wow. The Boy remarked that she looked like a walking disco ball - the lights were reflecting off her dress - but oh, Mylanta, can the woman SING. Still. Brought the house down with Amazing Grace. Just a splendid performance overall. Just before she came out, the NCO did Bartok's Adagio for Strings, and it was such a beautiful piece that The Boy actually leaned over to me, asked me the title of it, and said, "That's a great song." Yeah, we're working on the whole terminology thing. He said "piece" later - he's getting it. I was just impressed that he enjoyed it and thought enough of it to make a comment. Sigh. Every parent's dream, for her kids to have this kind of opportunity.
The Writing Weekend. All the company was gone by Saturday noon. My parents shifted locales to my brother's Friday, and the father-in-law went home. The mother-in-law stayed with us, then hung around long enough Saturday morning to hear The Tall One do the local radio show - Sports Round Table kind of thing, where she got to talk about her team and the games and did a terrific job filling in until the coach made it in - and then by midday it was quiet at my house. I took advantage of the opportunity by spreading my working copy of the manuscript out on the kitchen table with all my notes and settling into some serious work. One plot point I'd been struggling with gelled into focus quite nicely, and I wrote an entire new scene (by hand, oy) in about four hours. Got it typed into the file Saturday night and found that I'd bumped the word count quite a bit.
This week it should be relatively quiet around the household, at least during the day, so I'm pushing myself toward that December 1st deadline of having a good chunk of this thing ready to call a first draft. Good grief, that's Friday.
Better get to work.
Music to motivate. Apropos - on my radio, since I didn't switch to the CD player yet, is Joe Walsh's Life's Been Good to Me So Far.
Yes it has, Joe. Yes it has.
Read a book. It's good for you.
=) JB
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