And...Done!

I finished the violin I've been working on!

There is really nothing quite like stringing up a an instrument for the first time that you've spent so many hours creating and finally getting to hear its voice.

I mean, it started like this:

Spruce, maple, and neck block

And now, all by my own hands, it is this:

Hey Dad

I miss you.

Did I call you last Father's Day?  If I didn't I meant to.  I know I didn't get a hold of you every single one, but I certainly thought of you.  I'm thinking of you today.

I actually think of you every day.

Remember how I used to call you on Mondays?  Mom was usually out drawing in Ann Arbor and I knew you'd be a little lonely, so I'd call?  I miss that.  I still reach for the phone at work when I have a quiet moment on Mondays and want to tell you something, but then I remember.

Middle Ground

Every time there is another mass shooting in America I feel compelled to write.  Most of the time I give up before the post does more than cycle around in my head for a day or two.  I am frustrated.  I am stuck.  And I am on a loop because we never come to an end to these stories.

There is always a new one, always the same useless responses on all sides, and always inaction.  Gun people circle the wagons and deflect to tangential issues, gun control people ramp up rhetoric that further alienates the gun people, random people change their Facebook statuses and post sympathetic preprocessed words to make themselves feel like they've done something, when in fact they are more likely removing themselves further from being productive due to the false sense of involvement.  The discussion goes nowhere.  Nothing changes.  And we wait for the next news story and start all over again.  I've stopped feeling like my words contribute anything to this morbid dance.

This weekend I had to tell my kids about the shootings in Orlando.  I kept it simple: At least 50 dead that we know of and there is no reason "why" that will make any sense.  This is what happens in our country.  This is what we allow to happen in our country, and I'm not sure what the reason "why" is for that either.

However, today I am writing because maybe in this case I do have something to offer.  I'm in a position to write about this dispassionately, because I am not absorbing this tragedy.  I can't do that right now.  Sandy Hook about ruined me.  That story made me physically ill and continues to tear at me if I let it in.  I think as caring human beings we have to exercise our empathy with important stories that aren't our own when we can.  We should feel devastated by accounts of the Holocaust, and slavery, and child abuse, and 9/11, and any number of other horrors that people seem compelled to commit upon one another for reasons I can't fathom.

But we can't live there all the time.  We have to live our own stories and create good to balance the horror or what is the point?  I could choose at any time to wallow in the sadness of past or present.  It's easy to go there.  If feels virtuous at times to go there.  But it is not usually productive to go there, so today I will not.  My knowing details from Orlando will not change it.  My tears will not make it better.

But maybe some clear thinking will.  Media--social and otherwise--is nothing but emotion on all sides from what I can glean today while trying not to absorb much news.  I am setting myself apart from this deliberately for my own sanity.  Here are my thoughts.

Pigs in Space

My first baby just graduated from eighth grade.

How does that happen?  I remember a decade and a half ago the pregnancy test coming up positive, and telling Ian, and then telling my grandma (who cried).  I remember talking to Aden in my belly and enjoying having her with me everywhere I went even though I hadn't seen her yet.  I remember the baby who smiled at me for real at three weeks old, and who had full blown empathy at four months.

I remember a little girl starting at her public Montessori school who refused to walk down to her kindergarten classroom in the basement unaccompanied, which was a problem in the winter for her pregnant mom with the toddler in tow and a husband deployed in Iraq.  That problem was eventually solved by her finding a friend to walk with her.  That same friend was one of the last she walked out of the school with after graduation.

I can't believe time can come crashing all together like this.  Hundreds of trips in and out of that school, no particular one looking like a milestone, and yet she started as a tiny four-year-old I could scoop into my arms, and came out an impressive young woman who performed a violin solo on the stage for the graduating class and left clutching a certificate.  I am overwhelmed.

Rethinking the Kitchen

We've decided to take the plunge and remodel our kitchen.

We've been trying to figure out what to do with it for the past year or so, because it's sort of all or nothing, which is daunting.  The counter tops have reached a crisis level where they are buckling, one of them is burned, and the edges are falling off to the point where if we don't keep screwing in one section with bigger and bigger screws the dishwasher falls out.  Plus they are just not attractive or all that practical since they are textured.

The problem with just replacing the counters is that the layout of the kitchen is bad, and buying new counters to fit that layout sort of seals it in for a long time to come.  We looked into getting all of it rearranged.

After getting some estimates last year it looked like there was no way we could afford it.  Which was a shame, because now is when we use the kitchen.  Now is when we have three kids all living at home, now is when we host meal-heavy holidays like Thanksgiving, now is when we are cranking out cakes for birthdays and cookies for recitals, now is when we actively use the whole kitchen all the time.  We could wait until the kids are grown and gone but by then I may not care much.  A new kitchen for just me and Ian would be a luxury by then, not a necessity, and there are other things I would rather spend money on.

When a new kitchen seemed out of reach I decided I was content to simply get new counters and a new sink and then work with Ian one cabinet and drawer at a time to replace all the crumbling hardware and make them work at least a little better.

But finances work in mysterious ways sometimes!  Business was worse for us last year.  Which ironically means we now can (just barely) afford to do the kitchen because something about not having to do estimated taxes every month something something.  (This seems completely messed up to me that if we had done better last year we would have less money for such a project.  I will just keep working on my violins and try not to think about that too hard.)  When Ian got the final word on our taxes this year he gave me the unexpected green light on the kitchen.

New kitchen!  I can barely believe it's going to happen.

So what is so wrong with our kitchen?