Today is the day I get my PCR test and let’s all cross our fingers that the results are sent to me in time to work on Monday morning. It’s not like I can get the test any earlier. It has to be done three days before the job starts. The feeling of being overwhelmed is still with me and to top it all off, I lost part of a tooth this morning – I think it will have to be pulled – and my dentist is retiring as of today. So we’ve been referred to a new dentist to whom I will have to explain all over again by phobia-level fear of dentists. Thankfully, the tooth isn’t hurting and I have an appointment for next Wednesday morning.

Anyway, travel plans have been made by the touring company. I’ve worked with this company before and they are very efficient and extremely helpful, so that’s a plus. I’ll take Amtrak into the city on Sunday afternoon, then hop on the subway and head over to Queens. Monday and Tuesday will be filled with individual coaching sessions and I’ll head back home Tuesday night.

In the meantime, here’s little Sophie wandering around outdoors:

She reminds me of myself as a girl. My hair was brown and long and I wore bangs and I often wore a serious/worried expression. And I had freckles.

Stay safe.

Happy Friday.

My limelight hydrangeas looking very autumnal.

Thanks for understanding about my taking a break, though I knew you would. Honestly, this is a stressful time for me. There’s a lot on my plate. A lot of that involves change. I have to take the train to NYC on Sunday for the first time in a year and a half. I’ll be staying in a hotel. I’ll be working with lots of different people on Monday and Tuesday, then returning home on the train. Then I’ll be doing it all over again late in the week. I have to get a COVID test tomorrow and pray that results get back in time for me to work on Monday – something I have absolutely no control over.

I’m coaching via Zoom. I’m constantly making lists in my head about what I need to take to Brooklyn when I move there for six weeks. It’s very exciting and, at the same time, very nervous-making. Don and I have been together every day since February of 2020. I’ll be apart from him. It’s strange, all of this. While I’m enormously grateful for the work opportunities, I’m also reluctant to leave our nest.

Yet, I’m determined to do my best to live in the moment during the next few months. I have the opportunity to work on a film – something I’ve never done before. I am going to work alongside my dear Jim Parsons, and Ben, who I’m coaching via Zoom, and Sally Field(!) who is playing Ben’s mother. Very exciting stuff at this point in my life, and certainly something I never thought would happen.

But change is hard for me. As you know, I’ve been suffering from anxiety over the past two years and though there are stretches where it doesn’t make its presence known, there are also times that it does.

Anyway. I’m blessed and I know I’m blessed. But I’m also stressed. That’s the reality of it. A new phrase for me “Blessed and Stressed.”

Then there’s the world outside my door and the pain, death, inequities, willful ignorance, anger, climate change, and on and on.

I have to take a break at times.

We’ll take it as it comes, but there will be certainly be times in the next few months where I won’t have the time to blog. Days on the set are usually a minimum of 12 hours and that doesn’t include commuting back and forth from my apartment. There will be times when I just can’t  blog. Once I get some sort of rhythm going, I’ll know more.

Love you all.

Stay safe.

Happy Thursday.

Today’s version of a foggy morning.

As I write this, the sun has finally broken through. The mornings are cooler now, but the temperature will go up to 76 today.

I was very busy yesterday, picking up some new jeans I’d ordered (I desperately needed them), running some errands, cleaning, doing laundry, unclogging the bathtub drain (success!), watering houseplants. Today I will be coaching Ben for an hour and figuring out where to get my COVID test on Friday. This is not the rapid test. It’s the PCR test, which needs to be done 72 hours before I report to work on Monday. Rapid tests are not a problem. The PCR can be, in terms of getting the results on time. So I have to do some research today and make some calls.

It will work out.

The problem with jeans – the kind that stretch, which I need these days – is that they eventually stretch out of shape. And then I end up looking like a misshapen old woman. Usually I ignore that fact because I’m always at home and Don doesn’t care. But now that I’m going out in the world for work, I need to look a bit more stylish. Actually, a lot  more stylish.

No news yet on Greta, though I did just see a comment on Facebook from my nephew’s wife saying that she was “slowly improving.”

I watched a hummingbird dine on my zinnias yesterday. And we’ve had a doe and her young fawns dining in the back forty. A lone monarch flitted though the garden. And I heard a Carolina wren singing yesterday morning. At this time of year, I’m so happy when I hear bird song, other than crows cawing which seems to be the predominant melody at this time of year.

Okay. I’m off to get ready for my coaching session.

Stay safe.

Happy Monday.