Life, the universe, and everything

Last week was a little bitty whirlwind slice of life, death, and nearly everything in between.

I don't like writing too much about the future on my blog, protective of my family's security, but the past is over and done, and often fair game.

Sunday was Mother's Day, and a decent day for all of us.

On Monday, one of our friends from church passed away suddenly. We knew he had been in the hospital, but on Sunday he had seemed to be recovering. And then he was gone.

I knew in January that I would be job-searching, and was open to moving. I would very much like to get back to Houston--some day. I feel like that's where I was able to really be my best self, and to be respected for who I am. But I'm starting to wonder how much of it is just wishing to go back. I don't think I would stay settled in Houston now. Maybe another few years, and then move on again.

Here, there has been too much... some of it is just pressure to be quiet, conform, be smaller... I'm not sure whether it's the whole town, or just that I hadn't quite found the right fit yet. But there are things I would miss if we left, and this dance studio is one of them.

Summer of Art

I have been working on Part 2 of my social justice series, but today I'm going to take a break from it and talk about my summer of art.

Before I do that, I want to backtrack and talk a little bit about my grandmother.  See, her mother died when she was only a week old, so my grandmother didn't really know her mom.  Into her 80's, she could be heard saying "My mother never taught me...".

Now... I love my grandmother, and I am sorry that she lost her mom.  But I figure, that's something that dominated the first 20, perhaps 30 years of her life.  I'd accept that excuse from a youngster.

Eventually?  Somewhere in the 20s or 30s, I would hope, I figure that I am responsible for my own life.  Whatever happened in my childhood that held me back then... well, now I'm a grownup, and responsible for my own learning.  If I want to learn something, I'm going to set out to do it.  Even old-school, I could always go to the library and find books with ideas, read the newspaper for classes and seminars, check the phone book for schools.  New-school, it can start with Google.

In the past, I have written about the hangups and holdups that I had with my music and art.  As an undergrad, while I did participate in the bands, I focused my non-class activities on engineering homework and other things, rather than music practice.

Not Abandoned, just Quiet

I've been very busy, as usual.  Summer business classes are over, the fall engineering class has begun.  I think I forgot how comparatively easy business classes are vs. the mathematics of engineering.

I finally read "Lean In" over Labor Day weekend, and will probably write something about that eventually.  The short-short version is that it was better than I expected.

Chorus is in rehearsal.  Over the summer I started taking real dance for the first time ever, (Well, I square danced in college as part of a club.  I'm not counting that.)  and I'm keeping it up this year.  It's not martial arts, but it is fun, challenging, kinesthetic, and these things make me happy.

I plan to pull together thoughts I've learned about online classes.  Things that work, things that don't work for me, ways instructors can help out distance learning students.  It's going to take some time, since I have other higher priorities right now.

The whole point being, I'm not doing a lot of long-form blogging right now.  Feel free to follow me on Twitter (@stargazer412) and Tumblr (a similar handle, linked to my Twitter account) for the ultra-short and short forms.  When I read the news, I usually queue a lot of articles about a variety of topics: books, movies, geeky things (both SF / Fantasy and STEM), career and business articles.