Starting again this week with Sunday,<\/p>\n
This taize\u2019 service was fewer in number of musicians.\u00a0 We had a piano, two violins, a viola, and a flute.\u00a0 Next week we are going to be without our pianist, and I hope they can find someone to step in.\u00a0 Our viola player will be gone for 3 weeks.\u00a0 We did have a good time and went downstairs for pizza, salad, and cookies.\u00a0 We had a nice visit with the people who attended.<\/p>\n
Monday morning John left at 10:15 to pick apples from across the valley at a friends’ orchard.\u00a0 They donate to us and other trail rider club members each year.\u00a0 They let us pick for ourselves and we also pick for the Food Bank and the Senior Center.\u00a0 I have not participated in the picking, but I was at the senior center today, when 3 boxes were brought in by two members, who live down the road from us about 5 miles.\u00a0 They said John had picked all those apples (and more), so I got bags for the people in my exercise class and told them they were Cameo apples and where they came from.\u00a0 They were very happy and probably half of the class did not have access to apples and took a bag home.<\/span><\/p>\n John spent time sorting what he brought home and sharing with friends and neighbors.\u00a0 When state and national numbers are compiled China is the largest producer followed by the European Union and then the USA.\u00a0 Within the US about 55% of the marketed apples come from Washington State. Many tons of apples are picked by local folk and are not in the official statistics.\u00a0 There is an amazing amount of wasted apples that end on the ground.\u00a0 John brought a couple of 3 gallon buckets home for the deer and horses but because of a worm or bruise or a bird bite they don\u2019t keep very well so there is no sense in trying to salvage very many.\u00a0 Last year he picked a box from a road-side tree just a mile away from home.\u00a0 This year the fruit trees on the north side of the valley (our side) took two hits of freezing temps during the first week of April. Our walnut trees (two types) lost all their leaves but still came back and produced a few nuts. Ours and the neighbors apples, cherries, and pears had no fruit. Ouch!<\/span><\/p>\n I spent much of Monday on the computer, and answering the phone, making doctor\u2019s appointments and other things that go on in our lives.\u00a0 I had to straighten out some things with my medications and get an order in for refills.\u00a0 That is now a constant in life.<\/span><\/p>\n Tuesday\u2019s\u00a0 trip today to Yakima Memorial was LONG. This was the day Annie and Meghan decided to take a longer trip across the creek and through the swamp on the back and west side of our house.\u00a0 John was pretty ticked at them, but they came back while he was changing clothes.\u00a0 I kept going out and yelling and whistling out the back door–but with wind gusts to 35 they probably weren’t hearing me. Finally I could leave, but John had to park a couple of blocks away.\u00a0 I walked it, and got my exercise today.\u00a0 Then we went to Costco.\u00a0 There were no power chairs available, so I walked around… and got more exercise.\u00a0 That was good.\u00a0 Finally we finished and as we were leaving I saw a very good friend sitting there eating with a friend of hers I had never met, but had heard lots about.\u00a0 So, while John was checking out with $231 of groceries (included two bags of dog food at $25 each almost)– I talked to them and decided we would stay for lunch.. as I had not had anything since 7:00 last night.\u00a0 We each had a Polish Sausage (YUM), and I bought a Berry Sundae, which is a large cup (16 ounce perhaps) of soft serve vanilla poured all around wonderful strawberries.\u00a0 It was so yummy.\u00a0 I shared it with John, but I think I ate more than half of it.\u00a0 Thus ended Tuesday\u2019s happenings.<\/span><\/p>\n It was a small exercise class turnout Wednesday and I had a little less stamina from the procedure hangovers of chemicals in my body and probes into my esophagus from the day before.\u00a0 However, I made it through and got home to rest up for the last night meeting of the WA Geology lecture series.\u00a0 It was on the Geology of the Kittitas Valley and was very interesting.<\/span><\/p>\n Thursday was a play-date for our Fiddlers and Friends at a retirement community called Dry Creek.\u00a0 Our secretary from years ago is a resident there and was on the front row singing along and enjoying our performance.\u00a0 She was the Geography Department secretary for 28 years!\u00a0 We had quite a good interaction with the audience today, and they really enjoyed having us there.\u00a0 We enjoy being there when we are so much appreciated by the folks attending.\u00a0 The room was full.\u00a0 Afterwards they come forward and thank us.\u00a0 Today there was a lovely lady who decided that she would ask the facility to offer us rooms there so they could have music any time they wanted it. \u00a0I told her thanks for the offer, but my husband and 4 dogs and the horses, would not appreciate my leaving them.\u00a0 She said, well, you could have your dogs here, but I don\u2019t think there is room for the horses.<\/p>\n Friday was a day of eating.\u00a0 Breakfast was not large, thank goodness, because lunch found me in with the scholarship luncheon group eating a pulled pork sandwich and salad (with all sorts of toppings), chocolate cheese cake for dessert, and for snacks, some pretzels dipped in white chocolate.\u00a0 Then off to exercise class, which was hard on a full stomach.\u00a0 We got more of a work-out than usual today.\u00a0 Finally home to copy some music to take to the potluck, and try my hand at transposing violin music to another key for our clarinet player.\u00a0 I have a 30-day usable software for testing program that is meant to do this and print out a score of sheet music.\u00a0 The only problem is that each note has to be entered separately, and the note\u2019s type must be chosen (such as whole, half, quarter, etc.).\u00a0 Because I\u2019m transposing to the key for the B flat Clarinet to play, I have to click in a note one whole note above the one on my music.\u00a0 So, if there is an A on my sheet, I have to click in a B note on the computer.\u00a0 I just used the program for the first time today and haven\u2019t been through the tutorials that come with the software yet.\u00a0 I was using the Graphical User Interface, and winging it.\u00a0 There are more things I need to use, but now that I have done two lines of a song, the instructions will probably make more sense and be helpful.\u00a0 I hope I will learn to write music relatively fast.\u00a0 Certainly I will improve over what I was doing this afternoon. (John says: Am I the only one that reads the manual first<\/em>?)<\/span><\/p>\n We ended the day with going to the potluck with the music group at the house of one of the members, and then having a jam session.\u00a0 We practiced some Christmas music because we will need to do that in the next several outings.\u00a0 While I was in town earlier, John had cooked our offering tonight, that turned out to be the only meat present.\u00a0 It was a pork loin roast that he cooked with cherries, and spices, such as cloves.\u00a0 He also cooked a large cast iron roaster with some apples with two types of cherries (cherry pie filling and some of the cherries frozen from our orchard a couple of years ago).<\/span><\/p>\n What food was at the potluck?\u00a0 Let\u2019s see if I can remember.\u00a0 Beans, two types of potato salad, green salad with shrimp (guess there was another meat), purple corn chips with dip, and two types of cookies (chocolate chip and chocolate chocolate chip.\u00a0 Yummy.\u00a0\u00a0 And drinks:\u00a0 water, coffee, and hot apple cider.<\/span><\/p>\n Saturday will be a busy evening, and because John will likely put this blog out on Saturday night, I will end it now, with a description of what will happen that evening.\u00a0 There is a potluck and music program at the Teanaway Grange (about 30 minutes away), and I\u2019m driving up with the friends who hosted the potluck tonight.<\/span><\/p>\n http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_National_Grange_of_the_Order_of_Patrons_of_Husbandry<\/p>\n The musicians playing are from Ellensburg, and often play with our group, but they have their own group, called Prairie Spring, and they do Celtic, folk, and other music as professional musicians.\u00a0 Tomorrow night\u2019s performance costs $5.00 \/ person.\u00a0 I\u2019m taking a Costco Fruit Cake for my entry to the potluck.\u00a0 I hope there is some left for us to enjoy.<\/p>\n Okay — that\u2019s about it for the short week.\u00a0 I will close and send to John to put out on the blog.\u00a0 We hope you had a nice week, and we wish you a fine next week.\u00a0 We started getting some snow tonight and it likely will build over the weekend.\u00a0 Good thing John has finished getting his yard, pasture, and barn work done.\u00a0 Yesterday, he moved about a ton of hay to the interior of the barn, from the side, which he has opened up for the horses to get shelter if they wish.<\/span><\/p>\n Nancy<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Starting again this week with Sunday, This taize\u2019 service was fewer in number of musicians.\u00a0 We had a piano, two violins, a viola, and a flute.\u00a0 Next week we are going to be without our pianist, and I hope they can find someone to step in.\u00a0 Our viola player will be gone for 3 weeks.\u00a0 … Continue reading “SATURDAY — playing with notes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-issues"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p72iNf-aP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=671"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":673,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions\/673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIt was surely nice when we saw them coming around through the front pasture… and we got on the road by 9:05.\u00a0 Got down there and was on time for my 10:00 a.m. check in.\u00a0 Then there were several emergencies in the hospital including a \u201ccode blue\u201d \u00a0(\u00a0http:\/\/www.medicinenet.com\/script\/main\/art.asp?articlekey=57667 ) as they were prepping me. \u00a0I’m so glad John stayed with me so he wasn’t out in the waiting room worrying why I had not reappeared on time.\u00a0 First we waited 45 minutes for the IV Therapy person to come and put an IV in my arm.\u00a0 She was in ER taking care of needs there.\u00a0 Then we had to wait for our doctor who was to do the TEE (Transesophageal Echocardiogram) test.\u00a0 It was scheduled for 11:00, but he too was busy in ER, with another CODE Blue.\u00a0 We must have heard 5 code calls the first 1.5 hours there.\u00a0 The doctor didn’t make it in till after 11:30, and then had to call the Yakima Heart Center for details of my last (August) TEE test results.\u00a0 \u00a0Eventually John was asked to leave the room and they started the procedure.\u00a0 There was a sonographer helping, and the doctor was poking the probe down my esophagus.\u00a0 Finally it was over about 12:10, and they buzzed John to come back to the room.\u00a0 We waited another half hour while the doctor dictated his notes and then he came back in and reported to John and me what he had found.\u00a0 That was really nice.\u00a0 The results are that no infection was found and all the insides of my heart and valves are in good shape (for the shape they’re in), including the artificial one.\u00a0 Great news.\u00a0 I hope this is the last time I have to go in the hospital. He also suggested that the anemia, the cause of which seemed so elusive, could have come from the shut-down of red blood cell production with the infection.\u00a0 Normal wear and tear and loss of red cells goes on but new ones are few and far between \u2013 thus a slowly developing anemia.\u00a0 That sounds like a good assessment and, if it is the case, will mean I don\u2019t have to swallow a camera any time soon. I soo\u2026 looked forward to that too.\u00a0 Yeah, right!<\/span><\/p>\n