Update

My posts have been few and far between lately, and this one will just be a brief update as I have myself spread pretty thin these days. That’s a good thing, though, as it’s an indicator of a lot of progress on multiple fronts – business, music, social.

The house in Parks is sold and I’m almost out of the high country. The last of my stuff will go into temporary storage this week. I’ve been busy trying to line up a place to live in the East Valley where I can teach in my home and still be close enough to the music store that the commute is not too onerous. I had hoped to have a place rented this week and to make a smooth transition directly out of Parks, but there will probably be a slight gap. I’m still narrowing down the housing options and should have that done in the next week to two weeks. It’s been great fun staying with my friends, but I’m anxious to get back into my own place again.

So far, I’ve built my student roster up to one third of my goal and, as I’ve seen happen before, the rate of new signups is starting to accelerate. I should have a full teaching load before May. I’m really enjoying teaching again and happy to have focused specifically on acoustic guitar. I’ve been getting some super students. I’ve found some other musicians to jam with; my repertoire is continuing to increase. New experiments on guitar nails, too, which I will elaborate on soon.

I’ve met a great guy and we’re having a lot of fun together – from visiting the Phoenix Art Museum to having a snowball fight in his front yard the last time I came back down to Phoenix from the high country. It’s unusual to find someone who has so many interests in common with me, and who is smart, articulate, and playful, too. I’m smiling a lot these days!

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So Much Stuff

The logic of an arsonist suddenly makes a whole lot more sense to me after several days of packing up to move, especially since I have been plagued by a cold for the whole duration. I’m tired and cranky. How could one person accumulate so many possessions – so much JUNK – in twelve years? Why didn’t I just keep that vow of poverty?

Hey, it’s cold out; the humidity is up. A bonfire seems like a mighty fine idea. There’s a snowstorm on the way and I could have a nice, warm, safe fire out in the middle of the acre. But that wouldn’t address the issue of choosing what to destroy and what to sustain.

So much stuff. So many decisions. That’s the crux of it.

The things I need for everyday maintenance are easy enough to decide on – kitchenware, clothes, linens, office supplies, basic household tools. The items I need for work are easy enough to identify. The things that are more difficult to sort into “Keep” or “Pitch” piles are the objects of sentimental value, the gifts, the beautiful but useless things that might have once delighted the eye but now seem to cry out, “Fragile!”

Most difficult of all are the things that hopes and dreams are made of. Books, art supplies, yarn – things that whisper of cozy evenings spent on a fun project or caught up in another time and place, weekends dedicated to creative ideas. Siren songs. Should I plug my ears with wax, or like Odysseus, tie myself to the mast? Or will I (once again) pack up EVERYTHING, and like some latter day Atlas carry it all with me?

So far, I have given a lot of things away. Plants, furniture, redundant items, electronics – I’ve gone through the easy stuff. I’ve got a pile of things for Goodwill and for the used book store. But there is oh so much left. Now comes the hard part…

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Star Light, Star Bright

One thing I miss about the Arizona high country is the dark night skies.  I’ve been back up in Parks for two days to do some more work on the place and I went out tonight to look at the sky.  The stars were breathtakingly bright in the cold, clear air at 7,000 feet. While gazing up at the Milky Way, I became acutely aware of the tension that I live with on a daily basis right now.  I have been so busy running to try and get everything done that I hadn’t taken the time to just look, much less to feel.

Pursuing a new life in the Phoenix area and trying to maintain my place in northern Arizona is an uneasy balancing act. Uncertainties abound and I never know from one day to the next what new surprise will come up next.  It is exciting, that’s for sure.  I feel as if I am riding a unicycle on a high wire while juggling.  Blindfolded.  I seem to recall saying something about not having enough excitement in my life, oh a couple of months or so ago…. Nowadays, I have about all the excitement I can handle.

Actually, things are going pretty well.  My student roster is growing and so is my repertoire. I’m almost done with a client’s website in Drupal. I’ve got a possible interview for a long-term temp assignment as a web developer later this week. If that all goes as I hope, I’ll be on that full-time as of next Monday, which should fill in the gaps while my teaching schedule expands. It’ll be hectic for awhile, but doable.  At least I will have a settled, predictable routine for two months!  I’m almost done with all the various projects on the “cabin.” It’s been difficult making all the trips back and forth, but it has let me see my folks more often than I would have otherwise.

It was wonderful to be able to be outside today in near 60 degree temps, scraping paint and caulking.  I could feel the warm sun on my shoulders and smell the dusty tang of the dried grasses in the yard.  I had to laugh as I took the extension ladder down off its hooks; I could hear Cap’t. G’s voice in my ear telling me in no uncertain terms how to lift, carry and place it. Angle, brace, test, climb, anchor your leg to leave your hands free- it was fire academy all over again.  I was grinning as I went up and down the ladder at each window and door.

If nothing else sticks with me from the old firefighter days, I did gain the confidence to tackle just about anything around my place. It all seems pretty elementary after learning how to run pumps, extrication equipment, chain saws, and to repair SCBAs!  (As you might have guessed, I never was much of a Barbie doll, though I have been rather mindful of my nails lately.  I don’t want to ruin my guitar tremelo!)

Some things are falling through the cracks at the moment, however, like blogging, Flamencophile.com, and accompanying flamenco dance classes. I have to remind myself every so often that it will all still be there when everything calms down. (Famous last words.) For now, the fact that I’m keeping up with practicing and my exercise program in the midst of everything else is quite an accomplishment. And, I did take a few minutes to gaze up at the night sky tonight and just appreciate the clarity and the beauty of the stars.

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Busy, Busy

In the last 24 hours, I’ve signed up my first student at Gilbert music, delivered promo flyers door to door in one neighborhood, handed out business cards everywhere I’ve gone, and labeled a batch of 55 CDs that I sold with all of the new contact information. I also made the drive back up to the high country and have been prepping “the cabin” for the winter this afternoon. I even got an hour in writing the Prologue on the next novel. If it doesn’t rain tomorrow, I’ll mow and finish up a good share of what’s left to do before shutting the place down for the season.

Calling the place in Parks “the cabin” signals the big shift that’s happened in my thinking in the last two weeks. This isn’t “home” any more. It’s the retreat, the getaway. It’s the place that still requires quite a bit of work to have ready for winter. It’s also an asset–the leverage I have into a new life. If I can keep this bit of the past without it being a drain and transform it as I move ahead into the future, fine. If I decide to sell it, it’s not the end of the world. I’ve even had moments of thinking I would feel a lot freer for that. There are good memories here, but there are many not-so-good memories, too.

One more trip back up for a long weekend over Thanksgiving should do the trick. I’ll be able to drain the water system and shut ‘er down. Then, the only things that will get me out of the Valley and “up the hill” over the winter will be a run to get the last load of stuff when I move into my new place and family visits. (And the chance to get in some snow-shoeing and skiing…THINK SNOW!)

I’m actually enjoying the Valley, much to my surprise. Yes, it’s congested, smoggy, and there’s a lot of traffic, but there’s also a lot going on in the arts, much more opportunity and stimulation, and I’m meeting lots of great people. It’s showing me just how isolated I was before I went south. The job hunt is always a grind, but there have been many positive developments this week and I’m finding time to have a little fun, too.

Now, I just need to get back on track with my flamenco guitar practice (again) and my baile. In all the hustle and bustle, those get set aside more often than I would like. But, things are settling down somewhat and I can see that within a few weeks, I should be well into my new life.

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A Year and a Day

Yesterday was this blog’s first birthday. I was at a job fair and running all over Phoenix for most of the day. So, I didn’t get this post together before the GMT coach turned into a pumpkin.

A lot has happened in a year. Last year at this time I’d just gotten laid off from my web design job, was a day away from starting on my NaNoWriMo novel, and was a total blog neophyte. Since then, this little experiment in writing has had its busy and slow times, has gone through several visual metamorphoses, and topped 8,000 hits.

In the last month, my novel has been completed enough to be sent out to half a dozen “dedicated readers” for critique. I’ve moved to Phoenix for the winter and I’m doing music seriously again.

Today, I got the confirmation from Gilbert Music that I will be a guitar instructor for them. Woohoo! I also took a bike ride this morning, the first one in several years. It was a short ride – flat ground and under a half-hour – but it was an important test. Tonight, my legs are fine!

What a difference a year makes…

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The Great Divide

Whew! Been busy packing and practicing , writing and web designing. There’s just a lot happening right now. My brother’s wedding is tomorrow. And, I picked up a little side work as an instrument tech with my surveyor friend for Sunday.

We’ve got a boundary and topo to do on Hart Prairie, up on the north side of the San Francisco Peaks. That is going to be cool! Literally and metaphorically – for one thing, it’s at about 9,000 feet in elevation. Hart Prairie is a gorgeous area any time of year, but in the autumn it is truly spectacular. I noticed just today on my trip into town to accompany the flamenco dance class that the leaves are starting to turn in Flagstaff. I’ll take my camera with me on Sunday and see if I can find some good shots of autumn aspens. I’ll post any good ones here.

Every so often, I have a nostalgic moment or find myself dragging my feet about moving. I keep telling myself that it’s likely temporary and I remind myself of all the very real benefits of what I plan to do this winter. It should be an interesting and productive time. It will also be a big adjustment living in an apartment in a big metro area again after more than a decade in “the boondocks,” where my trip to the mail box entailed a drive through pine forests and open prairies over four miles of washboard and red cinder Forest Service road. It’s all trade-offs, decisions made on an intuitive sense that Phoenix is where I need to be and music is what I need to be doing.

I’ve learned to ask myself the crucial question, “If not now, when?” While packing two nights ago, I ran across a box of mementos that contained greeting cards from the last decade or so–a birthday wish from my dad from before dementia took away his memory, a note from my ex-husband from a time before the disintegration of our marriage, and congratulations on my graduation from Fire Academy signed by all my old fire buddies, including the young cadet who died just a few moths ago. It was a poignant reminder that disease, dysfunction, and death are the great dividers. To not live my life to the fullest right now would be to deny a number of very difficult and painful lessons from the past few years.

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A Time To Build Up, A Time To Break Down…

There are a lot of things on the upside of this latest development. For one thing, the last time I lived in Phoenix, I moved down there just ahead of the summer season and left at the end of a long, hot summer. Not very good timing. This time, I’m at least in better tune with the seasons! I know more people, I have good friends who have already blazed the trail, and I have the hope and expectation that this is at least somewhat seasonal, if not temporary.

With a little luck and a lot of hard work, I do think it is possible to keep my place in the mountains as a sanctuary and retreat from the worst of the heat and congestion. If not, at least I will have already taken some of the actions that would have been necessary anyway.

I’ve learned a lot since I left the Valley 16 years ago and, while some of my skills may be rusty, I’ve made huge strides on the software development front lately. My earning capacity has increased a great deal in the last few months in that area.

This is also pushing me towards a much more realistic assessment of my time and energy capabilities, and I’ve made some hard-edged decisions about focus. I am cutting out harp for anything but my own enjoyment and, depending on how things develop over the next year or so, I may even sell it. It is not my first instrument and it’s taking time away from developing my guitar. So is playing old repertoire. I’ve canceled the Sept. 19th Coffee Bean gig. I’m not going to be doing that music anymore and I don’t want to waste any more time on maintaining portions of that repertoire.

And there are all of the usual benefits of life in a big city – more cultural activities, more things to do, more stimulation in general. I’m looking forward to being part of a much expanded and more vibrant music scene. It will challenge me and help me grow. F1 and I are already making plans to take flamenco dance lessons from Yumi la Rosa again and to practice our Spanish together.

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Jump. Fall. Fly. Again.

The metaphor of skydiving that I used in my original “Jump. Fall. Fly.” post of a few months ago has taken on new meaning. I’ve been hanging onto the edge of the jump door resisting this one for a while now, but the time has come to let go and take the dive. This bird is flying south for the winter, maybe longer.

When I left the “Valley of the Sun” sixteen years ago, I swore that I’d never go back there to live again, but as the old saying goes,”Time changes everything.” There’s a lot that has changed in my life and a lot that has not turned out anything like I’d hoped or planned. I never thought I’d ever look at metro Phoenix and see a place to make a fresh start…

Understandably, when your life falls apart, one’s first reaction is to try and stabilize what’s left. I did that. Then you start to look everything over and figure out what you can do with what you’ve got. I’ve identified what I want to accomplish in what remains of my sojourn here and I’ve started to make some progress towards those goals. However, a lot of what I want to do simply isn’t going to happen in the Flagstaff area.

In the last couple of months, as I’ve held onto the old dream of staying in the high country, a kind of stagnation has started to creep in, despite all of my new learning projects and ventures. I’ve also come to realize that I will set myself up for failure if I get stubborn with my original plan and persist with what I want vs. what the times demand.

It happens sometimes in the fire service that an incident commander will stick with the original plan even when it becomes apparent that things have changed. The results are seldom good when you let yourself get into a situation where the incident is getting ahead of you, not you ahead of it. That’s the reason you do continuing assessments throughout an incident, not just an initial one. Tactics at least, if not strategy as well, must be revised as conditions change.

So, it’s time. Time to shake up everything that’s left and see what happens. It’s scary and this isn’t my preference, but I’ve packed my parachute and my emergency backup. The stomach butterflies have started to dance their little slip jig. Now, the only way to know if I’ll fall or fly, is to jump.

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A Little Bit of Inspiration

I’m pretty tired today after getting back to the novel edit, exercising more, practicing guitar, and being up to my eyeballs in working with my new content management system, so I’m going to take the easy way out and do a link post. Here are a couple of inspirational posts and pages I’ve benefited from lately:

The Good News About Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith, by Barry Brownstein on Giving Up Control

Eight Principles of Fun, by Michael Bungay Stanier at Box of Crayons

Wisdom From the Ninja Village, by Alvin Soon at Life Coaches Blog

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Five Big Questions

I just ran across a link that I thought I’d share. It’s a fun little animation that makes some big points about life and is a different way of exploring some of the same issues that I like to write about here. Enjoy. Five Big Questions

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Arizona Highlands Sunrise

One Way to Become an Early Riser: Elmo has been making a habit of cavorting around the bedroom in the wee hours of the morning and waking me up. Meowing and little cat paws tromping across my belly have a way of ending a peaceful night’s dreams and launching my day earlier than expected. The upside of all this has been that I’ve seen some truly gorgeous Arizona sunrises the last few days.

Week in Review: Other than that, the music is progressing, as is the promo work. The old gig van is up for sale. I’ve rearranged the furniture in two rooms of my house and started purging my shed and the “sewing room,” which would be more accurately named as “the catch all, store every unfinished craft project, yarn ball, and odd end from the last thirty years of knitting, spinning, weaving, sewing and beading” room. There’s a lot of stuff being set aside for an upcoming yard sale.

I’ve also got some blogging surprises started in the background here, and those are set to launch in another week. And, I’ve lost another pound, in large part because I have been much more consistent in my exercising. Daily flamenco dance sessions, even if they’re only 20-30 minutes long, are great breaks and they have been the majority of my exercise. (I’m learning a flamenco tango, as opposed to the Argentine tango.)

Highlight of the Week: The highlight of the week was getting back in touch with a dear friend that I haven’t seen 30 years. It’s been wonderful starting to catch up on some of what’s happened in our lives in the interim. That about wraps up the week from the AZ high country.

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Analog vs. Digital: A Renaissance Woman in a Post-Modern World

The other night, M gave me an assignment. A simple one, really, but I had no idea what a shift would come out of it. I was getting very frustrated with my job hunt and my promotional activities and was back feeling like I was spinning my wheels. I couldn’t focus; I had lost all sense of perspective and priorities. Railing about being a Renaissance woman in a post-modern world was certainly getting me nowhere…

M: “You’re trying to do this with logic and words, which is not how your mind works best. Why don’t you “map” it, see it on the web?”

Duh. Why does he always make such perfect sense, and why do I continually miss the obvious?

So I did as he suggested. I closed my eyes and let the images form. Within a few minutes I had my map and I knew where all the things I do fit into that picture. Not that I can articulate it to someone else yet, but I knew. That’s enough for now.

That night, I went to sleep calm and relaxed. The next morning I got up and knew exactly what I needed to finish up my business cards, and within about an hour they were done. Things just “fell into place” all day long. Yesterday, I went into my office/writing room/art studio and pulled out my old art portfolio. This was a purposeful action, though not terribly conscious. Blind intuition. I really didn’t know what I was looking for or about to do, but I knew that it was a direct result of my web-map.

It had been ages since I even had looked through any of that old art work. I went through the portfolio and pulled out whatever struck my fancy and then arrayed the pieces around my living room. And I saw…

I saw the dates of the work. I saw the progression from analog to digital, from nature illustration to fibers to computer art. I saw how I had sold or given away almost all of the early hand-drawn and hand-painted work. I felt how much I missed the feel and sound of pen on paper, the smell of my Prismacolor (TM) pencils. Bet you didn’t know that they have a very distinctive smell…I nearly cried when I pulled out my old tackle box of supplies and opened the lid to the smell of wood and graphite and long ago.

Most of the afternoon was spent shooting photos, and then sorting out and selecting the best ones for my promo materials. Most of the evening, and well into the wee hours of the morning, I did pencil sketches and studies from the pictures in preparation for the self-portrait that I hope will be good enough to use in place of a photograph. I’m rusty, but you know what? It’s one more step towards integrating my art, music, and writing, and all from a simple little exercise in using my mind in its most natural way. I’m still way behind on my practicing, and I’m still a long ways from having my demos where I want them, but I’m on my way. Progress. That’s my motto right now. Just keep moving forward a little each day.

Guess I’m really just an analog girl, who knows and respects the power of the digital age in which we live. And while I am adept in the digital realm, I don’t want to lose the directness, the purity, and the sensual qualities that only come from a pencil in my hand or strings beneath my fingers. As I write this, I lift my fingers from the keyboard and look at my hands, really look. Digits, digital. [Grin.] A Renaissance woman in the post-modern world…indeed.

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Surveying the Terrain

Early this morning, it hit me what a great metaphor surveying is for this process I’m in the midst of. Run the gun, set the backsight, use repetition shots for error correction, locate the foresight, focus, shoot it, record it – I’m surveying the terrain of my life over the last forty some years and seeing things I simply didn’t notice before.

Not that the map is the terrain, but it allows me to see features in new ways and plan what to build next with detailed information and attention to the errors in previous structures. I know where the trees and the drainages are, the rock outcrops, the hookups, the obstructions, the highs, the lows. I can plan my new edifice to take advantage of the view and the natural setting, and still compensate for the deficiencies in the site.

At the decided risk of overextending the metaphor, I can build with confidence that my crew did the necessary field work this time…I want to build something that’s going to last beyond the few decades (hopefully) that I have left.

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Heartache

I got a phone call from my mom this afternoon and when she warned me that I’d better sit down, that the news was bad, I did. She’d been down to get her mail and learned that last night a fellow firefighter and friend of mine from the old days on the department had been in an auto accident out-of-state. Three of V’s four daughters were killed in the crash and she, the other daughter, and a niece had been treated for minor injuries and released. Minor physical injuries, anyway.

My heart just ached as I hung up the phone. Two things kept running through my mind – the thought, “How will V ever cope?” and an image of the oldest girl’s face. The eldest of the sisters had been a fire cadet, one of the kids that I helped train. I cried and then paced around the house, until I forced myself to sit down and pray. Even then I had to knit to be able to sit still.

This afternoon has been a lengthy meditation on impermanence and the fragility of life. I think back to the times I spent training the department’s cadets, three bright, excited, and happy teenagers eager to learn and test themselves. I remember feeling so proud and protective of them, and wondering what they would do, who they would become, with their whole lives ahead of them. And now, at just eighteen, one of them is gone.

V will have the support of the department and the community. It may be a tiny little town, but when someone has real trouble, people go out of their way to help. I pray for the three girls as they embark on the next phase of their journey. I hope and pray that my friend’s faith and her family’s will be enough to sustain them all through this.

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Lose Thirty Pounds…

I got out my old survey crew clothes – heavy, double-kneed jeans and some long-sleeved henleys – and they are way too big. Hey, alright! Curious, I stepped onto the scale and I’m within two pounds of my old firefighting weight. Granted, I’m not packing near as much muscle as I used to, so my BF% is still higher than I want, but this is definite progress and I’m quite motivated to keep at it. It still amazes me how much weight I put on while I was on light duty and after, but continuing to eat like a firefighter when you’re not doing that kind of heavy work anymore, and taking solace in Ben & Jerry’s “Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough” when you’re going through emotional turmoil, will do that to a body.

So, for inspiration, motivation, and some concrete tips, here’s what I attribute my loss of more than thirty pounds to: portion control and healthier food choices. It’s that simple. I knew I was eating too much and the wrong things; I had to change that. I made a deliberate choice to do it gradually, however, and I believe that has also been an important component in my success.

Last fall, when I finally got fed up with being overweight (interesting choice of words…), I knew that I was not in a good place to start a complicated or labor-intensive diet. I simply resolved to cut back on portions. Easier said than done, so I used a lot of Healthy Choice frozen dinners to retrain myself on what a reasonable size portion actually is. It also took a lot of the decision-making about meals out of the picture and made eating simple, if somewhat predictable.

I’m not a big fan of factory-produced meals, so once I felt that I had re-learned healthy portion sizes, I transitioned back to cooking my own food, but divided it into containers and froze it for later use. This strategy was a reaction to the fact that my refrigerator had turned into a microbial zoo because I was still cooking like I was preparing meals for a couple, but it also served to resolve some of those choice issues about what to eat. I live far enough from town that if I don’t have it in the house, I’m not going to drive twenty five miles into Flagstaff to go to the grocery store or, heavens forbid, buy fast food. I’ve got it easier than some of you in that respect.

Ten pounds came off between September and the first of the year just using portion control, and I have to say that it was pretty easy. By not pushing towards some external goal, just gradually changing habits, I took a lot of stress out of the process. That helped build my confidence and my motivation. Since the first of the year, I’ve lost another twenty pounds. That has not been difficult, either. I just ask myself, when I go into the kitchen, “Is this a healthy choice? Does this serve my long term goals?” It doesn’t hurt that I’ve put the scale right in front of the refrigerator door, either. :-) I have a visual cue to ask my questions.

That’s it. Pretty simple. Slow. Steady. Nothing that I had to pay money to a doctor or pharmaceutical company for, nothing where I had to subscribe to a particular idealogical framework or theory of weight loss/gain.

True, I haven’t been exercising much – been slacking on my dancing, too – and that’s the next thing that’s going to change.  When I went down to Phoenix last month and put on a sleeveless top it was a shocker. (So much for the well-defined biceps and triceps I used to have!) The dumbbells are going next to the computer, for more steady, incremental change. I can get some reps in while on the phone or taking a quick break. It may be time for the Arnis sticks to come out again, too.

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