Monday, December 31, 2007

2007, The Year in Review

2007 started off like this. I totally trashed my hands working on the house, but I guess it didn't matter since I didn't have any gigs. It takes a while to get back in circulation after being on the road for so long. We got a lot of work done on the house on the house, but it is nowhere close to being finished. We were over there day in and day out and finally we had some professional help as well, although there were some mixed results in that regard. There's a full description of the year's events over on our house blog.

We got all of our back taxes done and it was a huge relief to get this major area of tension finally resolved. I am putting this mildly. At least we didn't owe any money, so we didn't get in trouble. I kept wondering when they were going to come after us and throw us in jail. I am just going to have to be a pain in Doug's ass about this in the future, that's all there is to it.

I took a jazz arranging course at UMD.

Our beloved Ted is no longer with us.

In the fall I took a trip to Montana with my parents and brother to visit my aunt and uncle and cousins. It was a little bit of a road trip because we went via Salt Lake City and Yellowstone.

I started gigging a lot more from September through the end of the year. We are still renting and insurance is no longer covering it, so we really need to finish our house as soon as possible. But it feels like the pace of work has gotten slower. We are wearing ourselves out. I'm trying to be cheerful and supportive, even though this was not how I would have done it. I guess I'm stuck. It sure will be great when the house is finally finished, sometime next year.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Visualization

We were down in Pensacola recently and we visited our friend CJ who lives just over the line in Alabama. He is an infectiously joyous person who has spent a great deal of time exploring his spirituality.

One technique that has worked very well for him is visualization. I believe that everyone does a certain amount of visualization and in order to feel optimistic about something, visualization is practically a requirement.

So I started thinking that maybe if I began to visualize a little harder about my house being finished, it might happen even sooner than I realistically expect it to. I realize that the end of that sentence kind of negates the whole visualizing effect. Nevertheless, the time I spend waiting for the house to be done will definitely pass more pleasantly if I am visualizing its completion. And our lives are going to be so much better when we are back in our house. That is a fact and is very easy to visualize.

Then I remembered all of the times when we’d come back from tours or vacations and Doug would comment on the fact that the house hadn’t burned down. I think he was joking, but for some reason we were always relieved to see that it was still there the way we’d left it. I guess in our case this could be an extreme example of visualization gone awry. You just don’t want to mess with those bad vibes, I’ve learned. They might come back to bite you!