Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I apologize for my lack of posts over the last few days, I’ve been fighting off a cold and not had the energy to write. Look for my regular posting to start again in the next day or two as I get rested up and feeling better. I am thankful for a lot of things, but let me just say, thanks for reading this blog!
Last night I went to the SC Philharmonic Orchestra concert, something I do every once in a while. They had a special performer, Wu Man. She is the acknowledged foremost expert in the world on the Pipa, a traditional Chinese instrument, and it definitely showed. In the program for last night, it mentioned the fact that while there are tenured chairs in the orchestra, the orchestra members are not payed on a salary basis, but rather on a per concert basis. Long story short, if you’re in the orchestra, it’s not for the money – you have to have another job if you want to pay the bills. So while I was sitting there, enjoying the music created by dozens of musicians, I was also doing some thinking. There I was, sitting in a concert, having payed substantially less than a “regular” concert, listening to musicians whose primary motivation is playing for the love of playing. Doing something for the love of it. Hmmm.
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This may be my last blog for the next few days – two days from now, I’ll be standing on a mat in a hotel meeting room, enjoying the company and instruction of fellow martial artists for four consecutive days. Once again it’s time for the martial arts clinic that is presented by my school each year. As with year’s passed, I’m really getting excited a bout going, though I won’t be testing for my black belt as originally planned after last year’s clinic. The line up of instructors is nothing short of spectacular, as usual, I have already seen the list of classes, and I have one word to describe them – awesome!
My dehydrator quit early last week. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4 years old. This seems to be the year of everything falling apart. My heat pump has developed a problem as well, and someone is coming to look at it Monday. It’s an outdoor unit, since it won’t fit in the crawlspace under the house. At almost 10 years old, the unit is rapidly approaching the end of its working days. I have to admit that over the last few years,the whole idea of maintenance of things has been on my mind more often, and with all the things occurring the last few months, I find myself thinking about planning for the replacement of things that are going to break, Having reached the point some time ago that I have sufficient means to handle recurring day to day living expenses, I find that it’s time to start planning for the recurring but infrequent and larger expenses that life imposes on us. In other words, it’s time to start thinking about what happens when something needs replaced.