The last week

This semester is over.  Hallelujah!  

None of my classes were that difficult, but they sure felt like a lot of work.  

Playing the Martin Amlin flute sonata for two performances in the middle of the semester and learning the Lowell Liebermann 1st piano concerto also probably contribute to the feeling that I accomplished two semesters in one.  But even though the semester is officially over for me, I'm still slogging through my independent study German course.  I'm glad I'm doing it; glad in a glad-I-ate-my-brussels-sprouts sort of way: it's good for me, and I know it's good for me, and when the actual work is over then I feel good, but because it's just hanging over my head I've come to sort of dread it. Even though it's (thank God) getting easier.  Now I just need brain plugs to keep the vocabulary from leaking out of my thirty-something-year-old brain.  

My friend R. and I had a lovely brunch on Sunday.  We went to Leaf Kitchen.  As I described it to her: "This place is great, if a bit strange.  It's sort of like going to your grandma's house, the grandma that has slightly kooky cool things, and it's the 1960s, and we're eating in her big open kitchen." She laughed but when we got there she saw that it was sort of an apt description.  Not that I was alive in the 60s, but you probably get my drift.  Food was great.  We ordered tea, and the milk came in the cute little guy you see in the upper left.  I was going to insert him 

[here]

but I'm still learning how all of this works and frankly, it's kind of slow when I upload pictures. 

There was an ice storm here about a week ago.  You probably heard about it and/or lived through it.  That's past, and in the days immediately following it I forgot to bring my camera with me.  But today I went for a walk, and took some pictures.  

Some of the ice has melted, but a lot of it still lingers on the trees.  (See above.)

And, perhaps most importantly, I started playing Scrabulous on Facebook this week.  Yes, now I have yet another way to procrastinate and feed my time-sucking addiction.