Photos

We had a request for pictures of everyone so I made an effort to get shots of the kids and even Bill and me. I'm not loving those, but hey, the kids' ones are super cute. I just don't like selfies that much. But I'll post the kids' ones. :)

Meandering thoughts

I like to blog every week but lately I've found I don't have anything that jumps out at me that I want to share. This has been an uneventful week. I'm still working on my piano. It's coming along nicely, but I'll save the pictures for when it's closer to done.

I got a $14,000 EOB for my surgery back in January today. That was a little eye opening, but not too much so because I knew it wasn't correct. I called in and sure enough, they thought I'd needed a referral and I didn't, so they're resubmitting it. I will be forever grateful for my job that got me so much better acquainted with healthcare so that I can speak insurance speak and decipher the bills better. It's still so convoluted, but that's a very useful side benefit of my work that I never expected. And I won't go into a discussion here of how it's absurd that four months post procedure I still haven't received but a few bills. It's ridiculous that it takes this much time and is so hard for providers to get it right. That's a rant for another day.

And I've really just been thinking about how I don't have any pictures to share in this post because lately I've felt like I want to try living life more than documenting it. I want pictures, but mostly right now I just want to actually enjoy what's happening in the moment. Like yesterday. We pulled out the sprinkler and the kids had tons of fun. And the day before that we had a water balloon fight. I almost didn't do it because I was tired, but I'm so glad I filled up those balloons. It was fun. This last slog of grad school really is such a slog. It feels very heavy on hard work on both mine and Bill's part. His in doing his work to finish his dissertation, me because I'm working more hours to help the finances a bit as this drags out a bit longer than expected. Those are good things, but it feels more like drudgery most of the time than a triumphant completion of earning a PhD. We have very little down time right now between parenting, work, and school. It's tiring. So for now I think I'll not take pictures if I don't feel like it, because the water fight and playing in the sprinklers were way more of a novelty than they ought to be. I'm much more likely to be sitting on the sidelines being a stick in the mud and that's not really that much fun. Here's to trying a little harder to enjoy the fun instead of watching others enjoy it.

Piano Progress

I am making slow progress on the piano redo. I took some pictures to document what it looks like right now. All the paint is off minus a few hard to reach places I'll get to soon. There's a good bit of residue on the legs as well as below the keyboard, but I stripped one leg and was pleased to see that what I thought would happen did in that most of the damage on the leg is to the finish, not in the actual wood. When I stripped off all the finish it looked infinitely better. I did a little bit of work on one tall side as well to see how it would go and it's going to take a ton of work, and in shifts because all that scrubbing with steel wool makes my arms sore, but the finish will come off and the bare wood is going to look amazing when I add new stain.That's a long way off, but it's fun to have a project and I work on it a little bit here and there. This one is going to take longer than most of my furniture projects, but the result is worth it to me.