Weekend in Review

[tedwords]

 

My Friday night martini post 

One of the things I am really digging about this new phase is how the focus of my life has become centered around creative expression. Every day this week, I worked on something involving the arts, whether that was spending nights at rehearsals, or blocking everything out in preparation, or holding meetings about the future. And meanwhile, Corb is busy with his own personal acts of creation, with the two of us of course doing our rounds on Thursday nights at all the stores. He's got some special plans for the future, after the Elton show is over. More on that another day.

I even snuck in time to work on some Queer Birds. In addition to my journaling project (up to 1987 now!), I’ve been digging out old CDs (remember CDs?) to recover some of the old short stories I used to write when the kids were younger and I was living an entirely different life married to Josie. Some of those old stories definitely need to be included, even if some are a little sad.

There was one, though, that I was looking through, that speaks precisely to this act of creative expression and the positive impact it can have. In it, Ashes is maybe three or four and I’ve been enjoying a week off from work and totally have the pre-Monday blahs in a big way. Ashes asks me to play a game with her and we go down in the cellar and I’m just so bummed out. I go to grab the game from a huge pile of other games, and boom! All the games crash down on top of me.

Ashes looks at the pile and decides she doesn’t want to play the game after all because, oh look! There's a bead set, which had been sitting on top of the big pile of games the whole time. Had she only chosen that to begin with, the big fall would never have happened.

So there I am, sitting in a pile of games with a big black storm cloud over my head, and she’s insisting she wants to play with the beads instead, and I give in.

But as I am sitting there threading beads, something strange happens. The storm amazingly lifts. The Sunday blahs disappear and suddenly I’m feeling creative and happy and enjoying spending some time threading beads with my baby.

I think the story speaks to the creative joy one can derive from the mere act of creation. So tonight, I raise a Tiramisu martini and toast to threading beads, to singing songs, to building chandeliers, to lighting lights, to writing stories and to living life with a creative mindset. Creativity can bring joy, it can lift moods, it can inspire and inform the future. And I am 100 percent there for this Renaissance in my soul.

The rest of the weekend

With Sunday nights now taken up with rehearsals, we have kind of switched up our days with Corb's mom--instead of Sundays, we take her out on Saturdays, and this Saturday, we met up with my parents for our monthly get-together at one of their favorite restaurants. 

It was an enjoyable meal, as always, but this time around, my cognitive concerns didn't center around my mother, but my father. I worry that the fact that he is with mom 24/7 and relatively isolated may be taking its toll. 

For example, at one point we started discussing how long I have been away from former job and he said he thought it was two years. Two years? It's only been five months! He also seemed clueless about the current state of the stock market, which is something he always used to have his eye on. 

They also mentioned that my sister Laurie would be coming home in two weeks to celebrate her 60th birthday, and afterwards, I realized I wouldn't be able to see her as my show goes up that very same weekend. That makes me sad, too, because it also means mom and dad won't be able to see the show, and I have put an awful lot of effort into. In addition to writing and directing, I am singing four songs and co-hosting, so there is a lot of me in it. It's okay, though, it's important for them to be with Laurie that weekend. 

I also was able to sneak a photo of Mom with Corb's mom. They are such good friends it always makes me happy to see them together.

After lunch, Corb and I took his mother to some antique stores and after that, stopped for some ice cream at the end of the day (in related news, I gained weight this weekend).

At the end of the trip, Corb's mom posed an indelicate question that I knew she was going to get around to asking, namely: our travel plans for 2027. I already have the first half of the year booked out, with a trip planned in January to the Caribbean, and then a trip back to Barcelona to start, followed by visits to Paris and London. That one will be a LONG trip (@pondhopper, perhaps we can even see you!). The problem is, I have been asked by several folks in front of Corb's mom where we are planning to go and I am deliberately cagey, knowing she will want to go, too. And of course, my father asked today, and that caught her ear.

We did tell her in delicate terms what our plans our but quickly shifted to what our intent is: what we plan to do is take our time in each location and look for lighting fixtures for Corb to bring back to the States. In other words, this is more a business trip than a sightseeing trip, and we are going to play a lot of it by ear. We are also looking at it as a model for the future: will it work? If so, can we go even bigger in the future? How cool would it be to spend half the year in Europe every year?

We did stress that this was a long-term goal and probably wouldn't happen for quite some time. But it led to a conversation more focused in that direction. She did say she just loves the idea of renting a B&B and picking day trips in Europe, but a) that is not anything like what we are planning b) she is incapable of doing the type of quick looking and deciding we are talking about and c) if the trip to Amish country proved anything, it was that she is not good with playing things by ear. It makes her too anxious. Besides, I don't know how she could spend so much time away from her cat.

So, she knows. But we did a lot of avoiding a deeper discussion. 

 

Sunday night was my blocking rehearsal, so I spent most of the most of the afternoon preparing for that. Things went off quite smoothly.






And today? I did more show work in the morning, followed by some yard work outside. I also learned just now that my sister had the dates wrong and everything will now work out so Mom and Dad CAN go to my show and I can celebrate my sisters' birthday on Sunday. So, everything works out in the end. Hurray!