Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Busy Season

Besides being tax time, just about everyone we know is terribly busy these days and not always in a good way. That's the nature of the lives we live sometimes - life is a run-on sentence and we're in need of more commas and periods.

For me, those essential bits of punctuation are any moment when I can sit down with the mountain dulcimer and make some music. Production in the video studio has been pretty intense the past few months, so stealing time away for the music proves to be a challenge from time to time. When that time finally arrives, there really is a concerted effort to maximize that time and use it in a way to accelerate the moment. In other words, what is it that I need to work on the most?

It might be creating worksheets for workshops or writing lead sheets with tablature and chord diagrams, just as much as it may be a run-through of scales and finger-exercises, or the performance of a piece that floats across the front of my mind right then. The more flexible I am going in, the more productive I feel when emerging from these delightful cocoons of creativity.

And it's time to get crackin' on some projects - I always was a horrible organizer of to-do lists, rather leaving most things till the 11th hour and then scrambling like a frothing chemist in order to get everything completed and ready to go. The last bit hasn't happened nearly as much since Jae and started using the Yahoo calendar and e-mail to synchronize our communications. It's like those Dayrunners everyone used to have in the 80's - but you can't lose them or misplace them or have to buy all kinds of specially created filler stationary for a centrally located database online. Of course, you need an internet connection to access it - so perhaps the odds are even between the Dayrunner and the virtual one.