Friday bullets, May 19, 2017

This is much later in the day than I normally write, but I've been home about 1 1/2 hours today. I'm pooped.

• One of the day's activities was to go to a local, large appliance store with three friends. Three of the four of us are contemplating differing degrees of kitchen remodeling in the near future, so we went just to scope out the appliances together. And have lunch. And spend time with each other, which we very rarely get to do.
• About that scoping out... well, I bought a refrigerator. The one in our new house is not as big as we are used to, nor will there be room for the second refrigerator that we also have here. I was a bit concerned about how we were going to make this work. Well, we saw a floor model on sale that was big enough on the inside so that it just might work. So I bought it. It's being delivered at the end of the month and will just have to sit in the garage. I also have to call the moving company to warn them we are adding a refrigerator to the moving total. It was really a good deal....
• I have now sorted and repacked all the boxes which were packed months ago. The pile of things to go on the truck is about a quarter smaller, which is a good thing. And now that I'm done moving backwards, I can start packing in earnest.
• D. did a fantastic job in Fiddler on the Roof last weekend. I was very proud of him. He is really not a little boy anymore, and his acting really shows that. While I thought he was good last spring in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, he has significantly matured in his acting over the year and it really showed.
• Living with actors has taught me to expect this, but the post-show slump is not my favorite part of the whole process.
• Did I mention that J. bought a functioning car earlier this week? He did! Now he doesn't have to stop several times during the commute to put coolant in. The crazy thing, and somewhat telling about our lives at this point in time, I have yet to actually see it. He parks it in the garage in back, and the hours that he is home are not exactly the hours I'm going to head out to the garage to look at a car. Maybe I'll see it this weekend.
• I only have four more weeks with my current piano students. This makes me more than a little sad, as I am used to watching them grow up and mature. It seems a bit wrong to leave mid-stream.
• This evening we went down to the Field Museum Member's Night, where they pretty much throw open the museum to members, even the parts that aren't normally open. It is one of our favorite museum things to do. We spent most of our time this year down in the second lower level, two floors below the ground level which is as far as we can usually go. We saw all sorts of specimens. We got to touch a skunk pelt (very soft... who knew?), see an angler fish (much smaller than I imagined), look at a hippo skull (much larger than I imagined), and learn about the Golden Mole, which is neither golden nor a mole, has no eyes or ears, and pretty much lives below ground all its life. It's kind of like a burrowing tube of fur. It's pretty hard to go wrong with an evening like that. The best part? Even though it was late and we'd been standing for quite some time, everyone held it together and we all had a lovely evening. (If you know G. and L. personally, you have a good idea of how extraordinary this is.)
• J. may have to sleep for a month once this whole moving thing is done. He ends each week more exhausted than the one before. At least this weekend does not involve commencements.

And now, it's really late and piano students come early in the morning. I'm heading off to bed. Good night.