December Insanity

This is where we live:









And this is where my gig is tonight:


So, just like last night, I won't be getting back until 1 AM at the earliest. My gig is actually in Utica, which isn't quite all the way to Saturn. Why did I agree to a gig in Utica? Because I still apparently have trouble reading through all of the fine-print details of an email before responding "Yes, I'd like to do that." I should work on this before we attempt to purchase a house.

In other news, our furnace has stopped working. J heard it dying on Sunday, but we didn't act right away because James sometimes likes to toddle back into the laundry room and bang on the sides of the washer and dryer as hard as he can. A furnace man came twice yesterday and again today. Since I was traveling in outer space, J had to move all of our worldly goods out of the laundry room by herself with a fussy 1 year old "helping." We don't have a basement or extra closet space in the duplex, so the corner of the laundry room is home to our boxes of storage items. (Basically the Christmas stuff and all of the books that don't fit on the bookshelves.)

I didn't ask, but I think this meant that she had to give up any chance of taking a shower before going to a meeting for her new job. James (who would have loved to assist the furnace man) was heading off to be baby-sat again. He was baby-sat yesterday evening while J was at orchestra in N. Chili and I was doing my gig in a separate time zone. He was baby-sat the day before while I directed my church choir and she directed hers. He was baby-sat last Friday, Wednesday, Tuesday, and Monday. We are very fortunate to have such a good-natured and forgiving child. We are even more fortunate to have such good-natured and generous baby-sitters. Most of you (and you know who you are) have refused to take payment. This is good for us, but not in the way you think. (Yes, it is financially better for us to have the money rather than to give it to you, but I'm not talking about that.) It is really difficult for us to ask for baby-sitting so often and to let you take care of us for no pay. We aren't used to this. We're self-sufficient people. It makes us feel terrible to send out another wave of phone calls or emails asking people to give up their time to help us out with James. But we need you, and if you've watched him over the past few weeks you've helped us make an impossible schedule work. Things will slow down after Christmas concerts and big church services are over. But if you end up spending an hour or two with our little boy before then, THANK YOU, and give him a hug from his Dad.

(I'll be re-entering the Earth's atmosphere by midnight at the latest.)