The funny little mauve unicorn featured on this blog yesterday is now named Ursula. Also, Jilly Moose's Warmy moose is now named Cosmo. I know everyone was waiting for those updates.
Yesterday I found out my high school friend died back in May, when I saw that there was a fake Facebook profile pretending to be her asking to be my friend, and it occurred to me that I hadn't seen one of her posts in a while. She usually posted silly things about coffee or alcohol, and indeed her last post was something like, "I drink a fruit smoothie every morning for my health, but the bartender keeps calling it a piña colada." The next day she died. I'm not that surprised, since she was in heart failure caused by diabetes, but I feel like a fool not to have noticed sooner. In fact, I wished her a Happy Birthday in September when she'd already been dead nearly three months. The thing is that she was a single mother who worked at Walmart, and I'll bet she didn't even have health insurance until she had to go on disability and could get Medicaid, and by then the damage had been done. If she'd had health insurance like I do, they would have pestered her (like they pester me) to get her blood sugar down while it's still in the borderline range, and she would probably still be alive. Also, she loved hiking and birdwatching like I do, but she probably never got to visit the tropics, even though she worked just as hard. I think of the woman working alone at a Subway we stopped in just before boarding our cruise, and I wondered if she was a single mother too, frantically serving a huge crowd of customers because one of her coworkers didn't show up. She certainly works as hard as I do, but I'll bet she has never gotten to go on a cruise herself. Everyone deserves leisure time. I tipped that woman $20, which is probably more than she makes in an hour, and I say this not to toot my own horn but to humbly acknowledge my privilege.
Today after Mass, Travalon and I learned how to collect the plastic people bring to our church to recycle it. We have to invest in a small scale, which we just learned today, but that won't break our budget. We have to take a photo of the plastic, weigh it, and then bring it to Pick N Save. And we have to do this every week that we are able. I didn't want to voluntell Travalon when they mentioned this chore at the Care for Creation meeting, but he was willing to do something to help the environment.
At my Brazilian drum lesson, we practiced the song we are going to perform at Carnaval with the little instrument that looks like a ukulele, a bass (played by one of us students), and a singer. It really helped to hear the context for our rhythms, and the song is a total ear worm. Very, very catchy. (If anyone wants to see this performance, let me know, and I can get you more details.) They had all of us drums in rows, and I thought I'd be safely in the back, playing a big drum, but for some reason I was in the front. No idea if this is the final configuration, but there will be dancers in front of us so nobody will see me anyway. The dancers all wear these four-foot headdresses, so that should block me from the audience's view, and they also all have bare navels, so that should distract the audience. I think I'm safe if I get out of step with the rest of the group, which seemed to happen a lot today.
Practice ended early, so Travalon picked me up, and we went to Garver Mill to have a warm drink. (We ended up trading, since what I had ordered was too sweet for me, but he liked it.) Then I went to the Slow Irish Session, and a fiddler from my band, the former bass player from our band, Famie, and a couple of people from Brazilian drumming were among the people there. I feel like my brain is still in the Bahamas, because I struggled with the tunes last night, but today was hardly better. We played a couple that I had to give up and look at the music, which I consider defeat. By the end I was getting more into the groove, and my violin was a trooper - she didn't go out of tune at all, despite the cold. Did I mention that the Former Professor Formerly Known as Lute Player is bringing me another instrument on Wednesday? It's a strummed string instrument I've never heard of, so I'm very curious. It's called a Woodrow. I still need to learn to play the Chinese moon guitar and the sitar and get strings for the bowed psaltry, which is missing half of them. That should be my New Year's resolution: take care of the instruments (and plants, and rosaries) that I already have before acquiring more.
Guess what? My earplugs glow under blacklight!
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