Like sands through the hourglass….

…this was today in my life.

Daily Challenges

Stretching	✓
1SE	✓
Intimate Time	✓
Cooking	Today’s Menu: breakfast shake to start; my late lunch was a piece of pizza at my mom’s, along with a slice of my Victoria sandwich cake; for dinner, I ate leftover pizza. I think this all counts, because we didn’t order new food.
Reading (Poetry)	“Praise the Tortilla, Praise Menudo, Praise Chorizo” by Ray Gonzalez is a beautiful ode to the cultural ties of food. I don’t know much about it, because I read it in my poetry exercise book (found the link on Tumblr), but it seems to be about either a lost childhood, or maybe being an immigrant. It makes me feel vaguely sad.
Reading (Fiction)	I probably read 40 pages of The Poisonwood Bibletoday. If I pace myself tomorrow, I can have some pages left for Thursday, and not have to decide on another book for this challenge.
Reading (Nonfiction)	I’m at the point today where I don’t care that I didn’t read anything nonfictional. I read other stuff. I’ll read something tomorrow.
Music	Hurray! I got my electric bass out and played for about twenty minutes, as I messed around with the settings in Logic Pro. I recorded a little bit, and realized that I desperately need to practice before we record for keeps. There’s my work cut out for tomorrow!
Postcard Poem	I read the poem above for a poetry exercise, and the exercise was supposed to be to write about a memorable family moment, but I went the food route. Because our house currently smells like cake, I wrote about the wonderful smell of cake: The first joy in cake is the hot sticky cloud of an opened oven curling around my nose, rewarding my efforts with a sweet promise. – Sarah Reebs 10/29/2019
Trash Pickup	Another day with no trash pickup. C’est la vie.

Today’s Challenges

I spent a couple of hours in the middle of the day trying to record music. It took me a while to assemble three mediocre tracks that I could put together if I didn’t care what it sounds like, and not much longer to realize that there is a wide gap between writing a song and recording and producing a song (in the way I imagined doing it). I had a vision of a multi-track, multi-instrument recording, and I’ve let go of that vision. I have to be realistic, or risk my sanity. I still intend to do something like that, to some extent, with Guy’s help and contributions, but not for my own song. I’ve got two days left, now, to finish my lyrics and melody. If I get the bulk of it done tomorrow, I will try to record a lo-fi video of it on Thursday.

After resigning myself to the fact that I cannot do in one or two days, without any training or experience, what other people spend weeks or months perfecting as their job, I turned to something more in my wheelhouse: cake. I spread jam over one of my Victoria sponges from yesterday, and then piped buttercream in dollops around it. The jam was very runny, and wanted to ooze off the side of the cake. I did my best to dam it in with buttercream, and then refrigerated it to firm up the structure for the top layer of cake. It turned out very nicely, and was remarkably easy. I will definitely make this again, and try to make it slightly less dry.

Finally, I ended the day with dance class. Let me just say, for the umpteenth time, that I am incredibly grateful for the community I found at Divine. I have never found so much unconditional love from people who barely know me, who insist that I am beautiful human and a gorgeous dancer. After literally years of hearing these things, I am finally coming to the conclusion that there is not a vast conspiracy, but rather, people are telling the truth. I almost can’t cope with how that makes me feel, which is okay, because I have the dance studio to work through those emotions, too!

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Featured image by Christos Giakkas from Pixabay

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