Between now and the 8th Oct, I have moved twice house, done a years tax accounts, fixed my car, started a new job and been bridesmaid to my best mate. It's been epic. Very little time for imagination. Still, at least I know I can graft like a bastard. Like all really horrid times it's been useful in a clarifying kind of way.
**NB. Wedding was not horrid but lovely & excellent**Somehow I'm almost out the other side - I got properly bored tonight and had a bit of time to reflect. Tired and bored and grumpy go hand in hand for me but thankfully often bear useful fruit. In this case I learnt how to use twitter a bit more (requirement for new job), skimmed fRoots and realised I should listen to Martyn Bennett. I also realised that my whinge on this blog about working on my own back in the summer has now been fulfilled.
The new job brings me work colleagues: hurray! We're not exactly in the same office (remotely working: first skype conference call on Monday) but we are working together. I'm enjoying having colleagues to go heeeeelllpppp!! to or just giggle about our work. It's so much more fun to work with other people.
It's also a completely different kind of work to get my head around. I wasn't ready to get on with album-y stuff and was a bit bored with what I did have to work on. It's funny how the right amount of busy-ness can bring you extra focus. Perhaps it's the right amount of excitedness.
In other chunks of change, the new house is quiet, clean, warm, tidy, with nice friendly house mates and basic working facilities like cookers and washing machines (lacking in my previous establishment). There's a garden and I can park easily. My lungs don't hate me and housemates are out in the day so there's plenty of noise making time. I think long term housemates will probably be fun. I can teach. There are a lot of upsides.
The downside is I miss my noisy, dirty, smelly, barely see anyone room above a pub that was right in the centre of town and full of people and music. I might never have got a good nights sleep but I was never bored. I miss cooking dinner with people playing jazz underneath me, or watching the world go by out of my front window. I miss the sound of college bells in the evening and the "terrace" - sitting half in half out of my window ledge and leaning into the courtyard. I miss all my neighbours and the sense of being connected up with a city. I miss the park out the back with the river.
Where I lived was pretty damn close to an artsy commune. We ran a ceilidh in the courtyard out the back in summer and had to stop every now and then to let cars go past. I knew my housemates before I moved in so the fact I am a loud disorganised enthusiastic curious messy happy changeable person was obvious and had space to exist and didn't impinge on anyone or need to be quashed.
Right now I live in silence and neatness and that careful careful exploration of space shared with other adults. I hope I discover I live in a space where it's ok to be pretty silly: invent a song about your dinner being a fish and make someone else laugh rather than wince. I briefly lived in a housesit this month and found that I could indeed make up fish songs and make the owner laugh. That was a good day.
As my musical life is not going to happen beneath my feet I want to invest more time going out to play with other musicians. This used to just happen but now I'm going to have to do the far scarier thing of going out and finding new spaces and introducing myself. To be fair though I wanted to do this before but had no incentive and no energy. Hopefully a quiet sleeping space means more fun time long term. I need to re-jig my working week though - I have too many nights taken up away from home. I'm not sure how that is going to happen. Time to look at priorities anew...
... and on with the next adventure.
