Exhausting Cuteness So my Saturday didn't go quite like I'd planned or expected, and
that's both good and bad.
I've been trying for about a week and a half to muster the spoons
to drive out to Bowie, do laundry (my dryer died a while back), visit
Mom and my youngest brother, and mooch some money from Mom for the
electric bill and groceries. I finally managed to do so, getting a
later start on the day, but considering that the day itself was
several days late, what the heck, eh? I took along the Vaio that
Does Not Talk To WiFi There (*sigh*) and my mandolin, figuring that
I'd have some time to myself as well, and could work on some of my
transcribing/arranging backlog.
When I got there, I found my sisters kids. And learned that my
other brother and his wife and son were expected soon for a big
sleep-over, and my sister was out fetching pizza. So I got to try
to catch a few photos, with partial success (the problem with shooting
small children is the same as the problem with shooting kittens. If
they're healthy and awake, they move too quickly and too often to
compose carefully.
Anyhow, sitting on a chair in the kitchen was a wee guitar.
Really wee. As in: well it was bigger than a ukelele at least,
but could've been mistaken for one in the fog. (I'm thinkin' maaybe
1/8 size ...?) I picked it up to see how it played, and started
tuning it. One of my nephews came in and said, "Uh oh. That's
Nicole's." I asked whether my niece was going to object to my
playing it, and he said she probably would. Sure enough, she came
in, saw me with the guitar, and held out her hands for it. So I
had the (*cough*) bright idea of showing her my mandolin.
After that, she was happy to let me (and my brother) play her
guitar as much as we wanted, but it wasn't clear that I was ever
going to get my mandolin back. She went all over the house with
it, not bumping it into too many walls, dancing like
someone from The Wiggles with it. She wanted it next to her when
she ate, but I took it into another room then ... and as soon as
she was done eating pizza, she ran into that room and grabbed the
mandolin again. I think someone retrieved it for me when she
went to sleep. When I got it back it was impressively out of
tune.
I have cute kin.
Anyhow, I got my laundry done, got money to pay BGE, talked
politics with my youngest brother much more calmly and agreeably
than before the election (though we still don't quite see eye
to eye), and talked religion with my other (middle) brother, who
usually keeps his beliefs close to his chest (apparently
fatherhood is prompting him to verbalize more on the subject).
And stayed a lot longer than I'd planned, and found the constant
noise (and high voices) draining despite how cheerful and adorable
and "yay family" it all was, so I'm hurtin' now (I also had to
buy gas and groceries on the way home). Fortunately my Sunday
appointment is here at home (I think) so I just have to be
awake and dressed and somewhat competent (and dig the drum kit
out from behind the stuff stacked in front of it) ... and with
any luck I'll manage to recharge enough spoons in the evening
to be able to do something fun planned for Monday morning.
I also came away with some homework. Mom asked me to
transfer some photos of Cyprus (and relatives there) from her
camera to her computer, and said some seemed to be missing.
Seeing movies sprinkled among the stills, my guess is that she
accidentally shot movies when trying to shoot photos again, just
like she did on her previous trip. So I got my brother to copy
the camera's contents to a CD, and I'm going to re-learn how to
split the movies into individual frames and try to guess which
scenes were what she meant to shoot (last time I also got some
cool shadows she didn't mean to shoot, because the camera was
running while dangling from her wrist as she walked) and extract
those. I did it before, but then didn't do it again for so long
that I've forgotten how I did it.
Later, if I have any spoons left after the rehearsal in the
afternoon, I'll try to get around to writing up some recent
thoughts about politics and philosophy. But I wanted to babble
about my niece and the mandolin first.
Now to try to figure out how Perrine managed to change the colours on this SSH window just by sitting on the mouse, and how to change it back. Hmph.