Thu Sep 1 - Happy New Month everyone. Although I'm going to have to postpone my "Flip the Calendar Day" to tomorrow. *grin*

This evening was my once-monthly-trek to the business meeting up north in my home shire. For once, the drive really went well and quickly. It's still a little too warm for me in the afternoon drive, and I hate that feeling of "I'm getting sunburned, aren't I?" while driving. But the temperature just kept dropping the further away from Orange County and LA County that I got. And by the time I got to town, it was downright cold outside. By then I had gone from blasting the air conditioning, to using just the fan, to just the window open a crack, to the car closed up tight and the air switched to just vent/defrost, to actually turning on the heat when I pulled up at 6:30 pm. Wow. Amazing, all in an under-three-hour drive.

The meeting went really well, and I was glad to sit with Jeff and make little jokes under our breath all through the meeting. He's doing better now that his roommate is not as sick as last month. The chemo has really done the trick, and his roomie's oncologist has never lost a Lymphoma patient in 25 years. So JS was so much more his old self, and that was a relief. And since I had some fun/good news from my life too, he was happy to hear that I've been really happy lately too. I think he's finally figured out that I'm not a threat to him, and the noticable relaxing around me has also been a relief. Besides, he's one of those kinds of guys that's all "red flags" for me, so I couldn't possibly be anything more than friends with him. I think he finally gets that, which means the friendship is finally repairing itself.

I didn't stay in town for coffee or dinner this time, since I had a coffee date already down in the Valley/LA-area. Saul was running around doing errands with friends, so I organized my bookbag for a while until he finally got there. We each had a coffee and a dessert and just got to enjoying hanging out and chatting for a change. It was so nice to have nothing else going on, just to be sitting still and getting to know each other more. He is just the nicest guy, and he's part of that "twenty-something contingent" that has decided that I'm "one of them." He only lives 30 minutes up the road from me, or only 15 minutes up the road from the studio, so we've gotten to hang out a few time in the past month. And he's friends with my roomie and all her friends, so we see each other at SCA events and things.

And he's a theatre person, and I haven't had another theatre friend since my freshman year in college when Lisa and I first met. Yeah, Kristin is sort of a theatre person too, but we never really connected on that level originally. But Saul even ran into one of the actors from his last show while we were at coffee last night, while made me laugh. Ah, the LA Theatre scene! *grin*

He and I each headed to our respective homes around midnight, and I fell asleep (AFTER parking my car!) for 30 minutes before I went into my apartment. I didn't realize I was that tired, but apparently I was.
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Oh! And this morning I went through all the music on my shelf, and I had way more medieval resources than I remembered. So I've picked out what I'm doing for the Bardic competition this weekend at the SCA camping event. It's a regional competition, and the first of it's kind for our "Kingdom." The champion of the competion will be named "The Bard" of the kingdom/region for a year. It's not so much that I think I could win or that I'm trying to win, but I'm entering because someday when I'm an old biddy I can sit around telling stories about competing in the first competition of this kind in our kingdom.

There's a well-known guy up in the Berkeley area who wrote a Memorial Hymn back in 1999 when a ton of the founding members of the SCA or close friends of his all passed away in the same year. At a large camping event in November that year, I toured from camp fire to camp fire with him, singing and sharing that song with folks at the event. I asked him (over email) today if I could enter that song and perform it as "A piece the performer considers his/her best" in the competition. He said he was honored, and faxed me a copy of the music and words again so I could memorize it before Saturday.

And before the shire meeting, I spent some time flipping through an Elizabethan song book that used to belong to my Mom, and found several good candidates for the entries under "A period Piece/or an original piece in a period style" and "A piece on the topic of 'Virtue'." The fourth entry has to be "A piece to be composed on-site with 3 words drawn from a hat" which is the entry that does not worry me at all. I can either compose something or I can't. But writing little songs and ditties on the fly doesn't intimidate me at all. I've spent the last six years consciously getting over my nervousness factor of really writing lyrics, and I've been writing melodies since I could talk and sing.

So that's on Saturday. Wish me luck!

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Recently Listening to: Barenaked Ladies "Maroon"