Wondering...

Yippee!! I start a week of vacation--now.

I am wondering if I will get done as much as I'd like? It's a good question since I like to take things as they come and as the spirit moves me. But, if I keep one eye on my list perhaps I'll...

* Make soap... I'm totally out of all I made last fall.
* Make notebooks of the 2 small needlepoints I finished last year.
* Work on the rug.
* Get the 10-dent reed in the loom and begin warping it.
* Give the bird room a deep cleaning, meaning wiping the walls up higher than I can reach standing on the floor.
* Crochet edgings on the coasters I knit this winter.
* Sew the small sari-silk square into an eye-glass case.

There is little question that I will knit, probably every day, and spin almost as often.

The piano and cello are daily activities that I will have the luxury of taking up at whatever hour suits me (except evenings). On the subject, I've been playing a lot of Debussy lately on the piano. Isn't his music wonderful!? I'm thinking that one of these days I should try to video myself...

The cello--well I'm ecstatic aboout it. My teacher started teaching me vibrato about a month ago and ooh la la, not so easy. But I'm loving it. He has me working on a duet in addition to the Suzuki and scales. The Duet is by Kummer (it's this one: Opus 22). Well now! I don't sound like that yet. For one thing I'm not playing with vibrato even though I've started to do exercises for it. Isn't it pretty? I'm only on the first movement, but it sounds like I'll be on the 2nd movement soon.

I'm quite amazed at how practicing cello has "rehabilitated"--in my own words--large areas of my upper left torso. I have a scar running across my back from spine to underarm, where the surgeon(s) opened me up to operate in round about 1982 (and broke 2 ribs in the process!!).* For some reason I was never given physical therapy after that surgery--maybe they didn't do such things back then? I have no idea. Anyway I can feel much (much) greater mobility in that area after a year and a half of playing cello. And as I've mentioned before, it feels great!

* Long story short: collapsed lung, wouldn't heal itself, vacuum pump didn't work (after being hooked up to it for a week), so surgery was performed to re-attach my lung to the cavitity walls. Ugh. It was very painful when it happened and since it was on my left side I thought I was having a heart attack! Very thankful it wasn't. Other than that it was simply a matter of dealing with being injected, poked, pierced, prodded, sucked of blood every day, hooked up to a vacuum, shaved--how ignomonious (as Mrs. Slocombe would put it), and left to freeze, naked, under a very thin sheet outside the operating room for what seemed like an eternity. But all was well as soon as the magic potions started to creep up my arm and I remember flying from the operating table, literally out the window to embark on what must have been a lovely winged journey--just like a bird. A journey of which I remember nothing until the moments when I was swept up in my sheets, attached to a large scale and hoisted to be weighed. I imagine they wanted to be sure they hadn't left any of their tools inside!