1. I met the appointment I had at noon today to listen to Spokane Public Radio's program "Concert of the Week". This show features recordings of local and regional live concerts.
Today, the featured concert was from Sunday, February 8th when the Spokane String Quartet played at the Fox Theater.
The quartet opened with Haydn's String Quartet No. 66 in G Major and then played Bartok's String Quartet No. 1 in A Minor. The spirit and emotional content of these two pieces stood in contrast to each other, with the Bartok quartet being a much more solemn and melancholy piece.
The concert closed with Robert Schumann's String Quartet No. 1 in A Minor.
Soon after this composition got underway, the quartet became a quintet: the fifth member was Gibbs, adding his protective barking to the more melodious sounds of the two violins, viola, and cello.
Gibbs was protecting me from Christy who was delivering a bag of Valentine's Day sweets to me and next door neighbor Jane and, I think, Jane and Christy conversed for a while and Gibbs had to protect the house from the potential danger of spoken human conversation.
Gibbs seemed under rehearsed.
He also seemed to want to pull Schumann into the 20th century when composers experimented more and more with dissonance and irregular rhythms and tempos.
But, the string quartet wasn't in the mood for Gibbs' avant garde contributions and I think that very dirty look from the cellist might have shut Gibbs up.
2. Fellow Whitworth alum and forever friend Deborah and I texted back and forth today about posterity. She has written two books via Storyworth about her life, values, family, interests, pet peeves, travel, hopes. She had a set bound for each of her grandson's, hoping that at some point in their lives they would be curious what their grandmother thought, valued, and experienced.
She asked me if I had considered doing something similar with my blog.
I haven't.
But her question got me thinking about what this blog has become to me.
kellogg bloggin' and I will celebrate our 20th anniversary in October.
I'd say that even though I've never come right out and said so, that this blog has been about what I was doing day to day while struggling with mental health problems until they miraculously vanished in mid-2009; it's been about my day to day life while living with Chronic Kidney Disease and then being listed for a transplant; in 2020 and on into 2021 it became a COVID blog, documenting how I kept my life meaningful and fulfilling while living very cautiously, mostly indoors, especially during the worst of the pandemic; more recently, I've hoped readers would see that I'm documenting how I've been living with a kidney transplant and all that come with it; and, finally, since 2018, when Debbie took a long term sub job in Eugene and then for months long stretches when Debbie has been helping family back east, this has been a blog about living alone for months at a time. I've been determined all this time, even when alone and quarantined (my choice), to make the most (or close to the most!) out each day and write about it.
I have come ardently to believe that this positive writing, whatever its quality and whether or not it's interesting to others, has contributed mightily to the success I've had living on an even keel and enjoying so many things in my life, especially over the last, oh, eight years.
By the way, one of the sources of great pleasure and happiness in my life from about 2011 until the transplant in May 2024 was drinking a wide array of craft beers in a most enjoyable variety of places.
I miss that.
But, thank goodness, hard as it might be to believe, there's more to life than beer! 🍻🍻🍻
3. After all, there's soup.
Last night, I had fun making a chicken and Thai wheat noodle soup.
I began with bacon. Once it had fried in the Dutch oven, I pushed it up the side of the pot and cooked chopped onion, celery, red pepper, chopped carrot, and a few chicken tenders. Later I added chopped zucchini and sliced mushrooms and when these ingredients had cooked up to my satisfaction, I added a quart of chicken broth, two packages of Thai wheat noodles, and frozen chopped spinach.
I salted the soup, let it cook very slowly for a half an hour or so and ladled it into a bowl and added a few shakes of liquid amino.
The vegetables and noodles worked great. The soup's warmth was a great comfort, as was the chicken.
Christy gave me a bag of peppermint-y cookies, along with granola and a sweet chex mix, and the cookie was a perfect dessert.
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