Just some stuff

I'm impressed with how quickly time goes by when you are relaxing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not sitting around doing nothing with my summer, it's still chock full of good stuff, but I am surprised just how quickly June 2nd turned into June 12th...

This week, I've participated in the bell choir, sung with the interfaith choir, played bassoon trios, installed a drip line sprinkler system in the garden, cleaned the basement (and subsequently messed up a bunch of other stuff...), searched for a new home (and looked at listings of literally hundreds of southern Utah homes - some of which won't work because they are in other counties or ...Beaver...), rode over 20 miles (multiple trips) on my bike, and started to get back into shape!

My summer has been good. The drip line might be my biggest accomplishment so far. That felt good. Plus, I killed a black widow spider in the process! (Don't judge... Those things are hateful!) If the thing is dumb enough to hide in the hinge of the sprinkler valve box, it deserves to be squashed.

I'll have to get some photos up from the garden. I'm pretty proud of it! There are tomatoes, rhubarb, squash, zucchini, lima and green beans, bell peppers, and corn. It's not a huge area, but it's a good size, and the plants are pretty healthy.

Today, when I turned on the water to the sprinkler system, I realized that I hadn't put plugs in all the holes in the main water line (I'm using recycled hose lines). AND, the pressure was a little too high for my little garden area. Thus, one section of sprinkler sprayed about 20 feet into the air, catching the wind, and blowing over the fence into the neighbor's yard. I patched that hole, then started the system again. One of the drip valves blew out (aiming at me, of course), blasting a pretty solid stream of water in my direction. Luckily, the wind kicked up right about then, thus I avoided getting totally soaked! Replaced said drip head... twice... and started the system up with much less pressure. SUCCESS! :-)

I talked about riding my bike. That's been fun. I told my brother the other day that my route took me through the adjacent neighborhood to mine, up the running trail, down the hill around the block to the grocery store, back up the hill (oof!), then down the trail and back home. Turned out to be a really good route... just with a lot of uphill! That one section didn't look so enormous until I had to go up it with my heavy bike at the lowest gear. I passed the same old man watering his lawn going down and going back up. I think he made a face the second time I saw him...

Bell choir was pretty awesome. I've never done that before! My first experience was pretty good, too. I had three notes: F, Gb, and  G. Turns out that some of the pieces they are playing have a lot of those notes! I got tied up at one point holding all three bells in my hands and trying to play them sequentially... Just for the record that doesn't work... Gotta do one bell at a time! Anyway, it's good practice for when I do some bell things at the school next year. OK, so they're not fancy bells, but they'll do -- Suzuki Tonechimes. We used to play them in elementary school pretty regularly, and now I have a set in my classroom! w00t!