Elena 
- The big news around here is that my son, Sam, and his wife, Kassi, sold their business. They opened NOMZ in 2019. They survived the pandemic lockdown and had lots of publicity on t.v. and local print news. Businesswise, they were doing very well. But they have been struggling in this economy with finding good, dependable workers. They even had to close down for two weeks over Christmas because their staffing situation was so grim.
They found a buyer and finished their last week. I still have two of my kids working there. Time will tell how long they stay under new management.
In the immediate future, they are going to Bali, Indonesia for about 9 weeks. Then they will come back to the states and start their new adventure. I want to point out that Sam was homeschooled all the way through and neither Sam nor Kass has a college degree. Yet they built a business from nothing and sold it for a tidy profit. This even makes me question the necessity of a college degree and all that debt in the 21st century.
2. I had everyone but Calvin and Sarah over to celebrate the Lenten birthdays. It’s kind of a send-off for Sam and Kassi as well.
3. Miss C. and Gabe went to their first father/daughter dance. The theme was Boots and Belles. Gabe is obviously channeling his inner Clint Eastwood!
4. I am still apparently banned from playing with our parish music ministry, but they are looking for bass players and strings. So that made me wonder, what are other Catholic churches doing for instrumentation with their music groups? Is it only guitars and piano? Guitars, piano, and string? Any little orchestras? an occasional flute, oboe, or clarinet? I’m just wondering because so many of the pieces at JW Pepper have other instrument parts, but maybe that music isn’t contemporary enough? How new is contemporary? Last five years? Last decade? Here’s a clip from The Fest in my diocese. I’m pretty sure I hear woodwinds in the music.
5. I have to start working on Rosie’s NCAA core worksheets so that she can participate in college sports in a few years, but I’m not sure at this point whether I really want her to be part of that organization. They support the inclusion of biological males in women’s sports. Obviously, that is going to knock the top girls down from finishing in the top five. But when a heat can only take a limited number of people, it also knocks female athletes out of competition from the bottom too. I just can’t understand why more women aren’t upset about this.
6. For example, I was watching Lizzo’s Big Grrrls. She had 10 spots for backup dancers in her show. She had 13 finalists and one of them was a trans-woman. She promoted one girl and sent two others home, but allowed the trans-woman to stay in the competition. So to me, that means a biological female dancer lost out to a biological male. I guess that means that men do everything better than us – they even make better Big Grrrls.
7. If you didn’t know, Lizzo is a woman of size dancer and flutist. She’s good too.
This is proof to me that I was born 40 years too early. In my heyday, the waif-like Balanchine dancer was the all the style and I never ever fit into that body type – even after my year in high school battling anorexia. Being a bigger performer, readily accepted for dance and playing the flute – that would’ve been heaven.
… and now I’m losing gigs for being too old and out of style. It’s always something.