holding on.

when i was little i would sometimes get stomach aches. usually from eating too many unripe plums. anyway. if it was really bad i would crawl into my parents bed - my mum's side - and somehow that made it feel better. my dad, being a doctor, seemed to also have a magic touch. he would put his hand flat on my belly and tap on it, and listen. to this day, i'm not sure what he was listening for, or even if this is an actual medical procedure. but it seemed to work. i'd always feel better. he uses this same tapping technique to pick out the best watermelons. i tried it myself in the store the other day - i tapped away at the watermelons but heard no difference between them. and got plenty of weird stares. the one i picked ended up being average. so i obviously need to work on my technique.

all this to say, i have a stomach ache right now. it won't go away.

it might have started about the time when i realized that i did NOT book the venue for the huge on sale event i have planned for an upcoming show. this is bad news. very. bad. news. because now the venue is being used by the ballet and i have no where to hold my event. i think at that point my stomach tied itself in knots that will not be undone, not even by a whole troup of boy scouts.

i thought this week would be slower. calmer. easier to keep up with. but no. i've already been booked for lunch every day of the week and there are meetings around all the lunch meetings, and then afternoon and early morning meetings around those, and oh perhaps in the five minutes of my day i'm not in a meeting i can get my actual work done.

i shouldn't be complaining. i love being busy. i love being challenged by my work. but i do crave moments where i feel like everything is under control. i never have that feeling lately.

okay. enough with the whining. onto the good stuff...

i made more money in two hours than i make in a day by being the "face" of the united methodist church. long story. but basically i was a 'presenter' on this DVD they are creating for some big national conference. they asked me to read the teleprompter in a "magazine news journalist style". i did my best. but there is only so much vivaciousness and energy you can have when you have to talk about finding seat allotments in the main hall and silencing pagers and other electronic devices.

i am looking forward to marabeth starting work on monday. people raise eyebrows when i tell them that we are going to be working together and living together. what they don't realize is that we have done this before. a year and a half in israel. and it was easy. we balance each other out. she is calm, has her feet firmly on the ground, sensible and i'm well, i'm not consistently any one of those three...so it works out. underneath her poised exterior she is also one of the funniest people i know. we constantly laugh. it doesn't matter what mundane activity we are involved in, we find a way to make it funny. just observe us in the supermarket aisles. you'll see.

i'm also glad to be going to monteagle, tennessee at some point this weekend.
should be a great escape.
a much needed break and a chance to catch my breath.

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today i finished off a jar of peanut butter that he had bought.
a huge jar to have lasted so many months.
oh america - when you say 'bulk', you really don't mess around.
i am surprised it lasted this long especially as m2 and i lived off pb&j for several weeks.
it was weird throwing out the empty jar though.
one more remnant.
gone.

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