Stuffing, Stuffed, and Stuff...

Not necessarily in the order the title suggests.

So, it would seem that things break a lot around here.  Refrigerator shelves, washing machines, computers, xboxes, cars, wall hangings, etc.  There seems like no end to the stuff that needs to be done.  Even the blog needs work.  The back ground of this site drives me nuts, but I haven't decided what I want to replace it with.

One of the FEW things of mine that we kept in the merger of the two households was my kitchen knives.  I have a nice set of VERY sharp kitchen knives.  I'm not allowed to use them.  When I do, I get to play doctor and use words like "laceration" "multiple lacerations" "sutures" "butterfly stitches" with duct, scotch, or any other type of tape laying nearby.  I haven't tried super glue yet though.  SGG did drop a knife this week and on the way down it stuck vertically into the side of the cabinet.

I went to Knoxville, TN for the funeral of my step-brother Steve.  While I hated the circumstances, I loved being with my family there.  I was really overwhelmed at how the community and their church responded and helped Wanda and Brianna out.

I got to do a presentation at a lunch and learn with my friends in Richmond on November 11.  I am already very attention deficit, and when I do public speaking, I have to be very careful to try and stay on track.  I easily fall into anecdotes and then lose where I am and where I am going.  Sometimes I compensate by going really fast just to get through it.  This time though, I could hardly talk as I had mostly lost my voice.  To make things just a bit funnier, my friend Jeff changed up some of my slides and didn't tell me.   He took some of my more cluttered ones and spread them out a bit.  I kept looking at the slides thinking "I just did this slide, sort of".  All was good though.  I loved talking to the customers and my friends afterward too.

For Thanksgiving we haven't done a lot.  The boys went to their respective bio-parents so it has just been SGG and I.  It has been GREAT!  We love our kids, but having some alone time is awesome too!

This video below is something that I started working on in the summer.  A piano piece that my book blew open to one day while the door was open and I just started playing it.  It is one of my all time favorite pieces too.  This version is simple, but I still manage to mess up a few spots (I get so easily distracted either by things going on around me, or just the thoughts running amok in my head).  I was trying to record it for our wedding, but was just to jittery to do it.  The song is Pachebel's Canon.  I hope you enjoy it.  I'll also be doing this and  Auld Lang Syne for my recitals in December.




I hope everyone had a great thanksgiving!!

We dressed up as hikers for Halloween....

and all we got when trick or treating was these pictures...

The hiking also gave me lots of time to contemplate on the loss of my step-brother, a truly wonderful person.  We did two four mile hikes, one in St. Mary's Wilderness off the Blue Ridge Parkway and the other was part of the Rip Rap trail just past Chimney Rock on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park.  Where are the kids?  The younger two were with their dad, and the older one was with his grandparents.  Two of them carved pumpkins and those pictures are below too...