music, therapy, and me

Six days left before I go back to work for the last six months of my school contract year. I am getting ready to send my boxes back to my house and pack up all of my things so I can travel across the country to the world of cold. This is always the hardest part about visiting - leaving again. I love this part of the country, and it is always a wrench to have to leave it. I also love where I live because it is different from here.  Yesterday, my family members took me to one of my favorite places in the world - the La Brea Tar Pits. This is a park complex in the middle of Los Angeles where fossils were found in the 1870s while people were excavating the area for oil and gas. There are tons of animal remains contained within the tar, and excavations continue. The animals in the tar pits come from the last 60,000 years and includes the end of the Pleistocene era and all of our current time which is known as the Holocene (Thanks to A Field Guide to La Brea Tar Pits  and the articl...

Oh, well, this is awkward. The surprise is for me, not for you, though you could go to this link to download a previously released free resource in my TPT store... Surprise?? Anyway, my sister and mother are taking me somewhere. I had to fish out a school id that identified me as "teacher," and am now waiting to see what we are going to be doing. My sister has a medical issue going on, so she just called to say that we would start our adventure after she goes to urgent care to get medication for her issue. I am hoping that it will be a good time. I've been warned that we are going to be walking lots and will need to have layers, so I know we are going outdoors. I have some suspicions, but I am not really worried about it. I know that my Sister and Mom will have thought of something pretty good for me. We will see what it is and go through it all! I'll reveal more tomorrow about the surprise. Anyway, I am now sitting in my guest room, in my pjs, at what is 9:38 am at ...

I am halfway through my break now, and I am starting to think about work again. I am not really planning sessions or anything like that, but I am starting to figure out my timeline for the next six months. Even though I still have six months at my current job, I am finding myself more and more looking at the future. I am both exhilarated and terrified by this change in my life. The last time I had such an enormous life change was in 1996 when I moved across the country for graduate school. It is more than time, though. I never intended to stay where I am as long as I have. The problem is that I am unsure how I will earn money starting on July 1st. If all goes as planned, I will start the new year in my own home. I will have another four days of time away from work to arrange things in my house and my life. We have an educational enrichment day away from work, so I am going to spend some time taking stock of what I have in my music therapy resources. The music therapy room is getting mo...

It is the time of year when I tend to do some reflection on the past 12 months. It is easy to do this now because I am away from the demands of my regular life, so I spend time in the early morning hours waiting for others to wake up and get going. It really bites when my internal clock is set two hours ahead of everyone else's clock, but it provides me with time to think. I am finishing up a planning journal that I started back in September 2024. It lasted 15 months, so I think I got my money's worth out of this one! This book of mine will be completely full once I return to my home. The new journal will start on January 4th, and I have been designing elements of it for the past two months. I love having these books, and I am thinking of new ways to use them in the next year. This year has been a difficult one for me as a human but not as a music therapist. I went through my first round of cancer - everything is fine now, at least, that's what they tell me! This health stu...

It is Boxing Day here where I am, and it is raining again. It was raining when I came to visit, we had some sunshine yesterday, and now it is raining again. That is a good thing for the place where I am located, but it is getting to flooding stage because the desert ground is getting saturated and will be sliding down the mountains pretty soon. Where I am staying is not in any danger from mudslides, but you never know what might happen... Anyway... Yesterday was a good day of leisurely celebration with Mom and Sister. We ate good food, opened our presents, and did all of our traditions. I received lots of capybara items - my favorite animal of them all. I also opened up the cutest little R2-D2 Bluetooth speaker and a huge R2-D2 popcorn tin. I now have more of my favorite Ivy Corelle dishes, and my sister's secret Holiday Casserole recipe (all sorts of M&Ms in a huge dish - SCORE!!). The gifts I gave were duly appreciated. Mom got all sorts of glue from me while my Sister got lo...

Merry Christmas, to those of us who celebrate, and Happy Wednesday to those of us who do not! It is time to start one of my end-of-the year traditions - recaps and reveals for the next year. Today, let's recap this year a bit. I'm not going to sugarcoat it - 2025 was a rough year for me. The major headline is that my doctors found and then cut out my first bout with colon cancer. I am hoping that preventative colonoscopies will keep me from having to lose any more of my bowel (I've already had over 2 feet of large intestine surgically removed), but we will see. My grandmother died of complications with colon cancer and a work acquaintance of mine also recently passed away from the same thing, so this has been on my mind this year. I did not go on any trips this year. This is unusual since we (my Mom, my Sister, and I) are starting to take summer trips as a unit. Instead, due to the aforementioned cancer, my Sister, Mom, and Aunt came to my house to help me through my first ...