Wonderfully Tired

I feel wonderfully tired: the kind of deep but pleasant ache that can only come from a good workout. I also feel unpleasantly tired: the kind of deep but annoying fatigue that can only come from a day at work that was thoroughly frustrating. Life is ever full of contradictions.

My beautiful wife sits beside me; she has pumped out around 3500 words of her novel. I have written 30 seconds of a duet for clarinet and cello, and read half of a book on divorce and remarriage that I will be reviewing next week at Pillar. The piece for clarinet and cello is on a tight deadline; I have long since found that I work best and quickest under the pressure of a deadline where music is concerned. Two of the best pieces I have ever written have come together on extremely short time scales. Composition is thus perhaps the only area of my life where I understand the rush that procrastinators feel in accomplishing their goals in the nick of time.

(As a side note, "the nick of time" is a rather odd phrase. Think about it.)

In the last few days, I have started spending some time with GIMP, a free image manipulation program—it may not be Photoshop, but it's also $600 less expensive, and still incredibly powerful. Among other things, I have created a few buttons for the web, and I'm currently working on a render of a planet orbiting a star. The final product may not, in the end, be terribly impressive... but I am learning and enjoying the opportunity to stretch myself. I have always enjoyed visual art, but unlike Jaimie, I have no talent in sketching or painting. Software, on the other hand, makes sense to me; perhaps with some time I will actually be able to create some art with GIMP.

Our dear friends Chase and Julie Russell are in town tomorrow through Sunday... and, typically enough, we will be out of town Friday through Sunday, at a friend's wedding. The opportunity to see many of our friends excites us, but missing time with the Russells saddens us. We hope to spend some time with them tomorrow evening. While we have followed their adventures in Nicaragua via their blog, nothing compares to spending time face to face, sharing our thoughts and experiences in person.

Posts I hope to have up by the end of this week or early next week: something at Pillar on the Rock (I am still tossing around a few ideas), a poem for 52 Verses (that one is definitely going up; the only question is what the poem will be), and perhaps a post reflecting on the gospel here.

Go do something fun that glorifies God!