True confessions

I am much better at decorating for Christmas than un-decorating from it. We are still days (days!) away from being able to eat dinner in the dining room, giving that it's covered with ornaments. The tree itself is now out, but the vacuum cleaner sits there in its place and the place still looks like a total disaster. Santas all over the place just aren't that cute anymore.

This time last year, and every other year in recent memory, I was making much more of an effort to exercise and eat right. I need to get back on the exercise bike, back off the cookies. It bothers me that I haven't been more attentive to this -- if I'm slacking off in January, what is August going to look like? Hmmm. I realize that the exercise bike itself could be the problem and perhaps if I can walk 5 days a week instead of 3, I'll feel better about this. Hey -- I'll take my camera with me!

Natalie's CD of music she'd been listening to recently that she shared with me reminded me how much I love the tune Simple Gifts. (She sent the Yo You Ma, Alison Krauss version that is breathtakingly beautiful.) I'm using Ken's guitar sheet music to try to learn it on the piano, but given that I kind of have to fake the process since I don't really remember the right way to play the piano, I'm feeling like I need to have a version of the sheet music that includes the words so I don't keep losing my place. Worse still, the only reason I can hope to learn it (as I did, much to Ken and Dean's relief, finally learn how to play Jingle Bells last month) is that the electronic piano we have includes a display that shows you what key you're hitting, so I can hunt and peck until the picture of the note on the display matches the note on the sheet music. What was kind of weird, though, was that Ken HAD the sheet music and had been playing it but I didn't know -- he only plays his guitar in the basement and won't let me or Dean listen to him. Time to suggest a duet?

And yet I am quilting, and I feel very active in other ways. Why is it always such a challenge -- why does it seem so impossible to do more than just a couple of things adequately at any one time? Oh, I'm not depressed or upset or anything, just curious. Busy, active, engaged, thinking about a lot of things in ways that make me happy to be alive and to be curious, but still feeling a bit off-kilter.

Finally, with thanks to Helen:

Your Superpower Should Be Mind Reading

You are brilliant, insightful, and intuitive. You understand people better than they would like to be understood. Highly sensitive, you are good at putting together seemingly irrelevant details. You figure out what's going on before anyone knows that anything is going on! Why you would be a good superhero: You don't care what people think, and you'd do whatever needed to be done Your biggest problem as a superhero: Feeling even more isolated than you do now

What Should Your Superpower Be?