Amethyst's Shiny Pebbles

We went to Belmont last week.  It was, despite my multitudinous sources of anxiety about the trip, really just fine.  ( The memorial service and associated other stuff )

It's good to be home, in our own house - though I am forever grateful to S for giving us crash space in their spare bedroom while we were there.  It's nice to have been able to spend the day here, with our kitties, who are all very pleased that we are once more available for lap creation.  I've played some Portal, Huz beat the first dungeon in Wind Waker, we cleaned (yay for temporary decrease in household concentration of cat fur!), we've made and eaten our own dinner.  Looking forward to a quiet evening and a pleasant day tomorrow.  Extremely grateful that we came back on a Friday night and have two whole days instead of just one to rest and recover before getting back to normal life.

I just got email from the choirmaster at my mom's church.  There will be 22 choristers for my mom's service!  It's a quite sizeable response - the full choir is around 40 people I think.  (Admittedly, each participant is going to be getting paid for their singing, but they're doing quite a lot of music so that's fine.)

22.  Wow!

Fear not, I am still here. I am merely frighteningly busy, between working on The Guest List for The Memorial Service and other such matters in the morning and some evenings, and trying to pack in a whole lotta work during the day between now and when I take my next trip to Boston in May.  Oh yah, and there's this recital thing too.  (And my choir director is stuck in South Africa, waiting for British Airways to be able to fly through Heathrow again.  My life is EASY compared to that.)

I think I might have gone through most of my social circles at this point (finally).  I don't mind so much talking about Mom's death, it just gets kind of exhausting after a while.

I didn't think finishing the book that I started while I was in Boston right after she died would make me cry.  It's a sort of marker, a reminder that it all happened.  (And Tigana is still a very good read on its own merits.  Even though the last sentence screams "Sequel!!!!" and Kay has never written one.)

Sometime I suppose it will quit feeling weird to call my father on weekends, as opposed to briefly saying hi as part of a longer conversation with Mom.

Sometime Easter season won't feel just plain weird.  We'll see when it gets to Pentecost whether it's Easter-specific or church in general.

Sometime it will hit me - really hit me - that she's gone.  I 'spect that'll happen right after the aforementioned Memorial Service, which I'm in charge of.  Once that project is done, I'll have much less "stuff" to do that''s related to her death but so full of fiddly details that I am buffered from emotional thought.

Right.  That must mean it's bedtime.

...is that Viking adult males speak in a kind of Highland brogue.  Huh??!?

I saw How to Train Your Dragon with a good friend last night.  It was just the thing as distraction and entertainment from what I've been dealing with for the last week or so.  Furthermore, Mom would have approved of the whole thing start to finish:

- We went to a late (9:20 PM) showing
- We bought movie junk food (which I NEVER do, EVER)
- The movie was really quite charming - she would have liked the film itself
- Oh yah, and she really liked the person I went to see it with, so bonus there too.

It's a pleasant diversion.  In general, you should probably see the matinee rather than the full-price, but you should also see it in 3D, which is nicely done.  Or you can wait and it will generally stand up to DVD home viewing, it just won't look quite as impressive.