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The way you embrace the complexity of your grandfather and your relationship with him is beautiful and I hope you really enjoy taking your time with the banjo, feeling free to be bad at it and knowing that you’re doing something wonderful anyway. 

Zero week - Monday   I was avoiding things in the morning but I made some progress on my backlog in the afternoon.   I was debating between going to aikido and staying home to do cooking and cleaning. Dumbledore encouraged me to go to aikido. This is why he is a keeper.   That was the right decision. There were only five of us there, including the instructor. I was the highest rank person there but the chief instructor had asked the other black belt to substitute for her. The other three people were younger women. That gave a 4:1 female:male ratio 😍. This is rare. Having a majority of women on the mat happens occasionally. After so many times of me being the only woman on the mat, it was fun to have the tables turned.   I got home and had to scramble to pack up the chicken stock and squash that I cooked earlier in the day. I tried sitting zen but my left hip is still very unhappy. I sat zen today at lunchtime and moved to a chair. Not being distracted by my hip improved my concentration dramatically.     ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ I have been thinking about what I am struggling with. I know that getting more sleep, more exercise and eating healthier would be good for me. I know how to do all those things. The real challenge is around making good choices and feeling good about what I am doing. When I lie in bed in the morning and contemplate my day, I find myself thinking "the first free time I have will be Thursday". That is not quite true, but it is close. There are days when my time is spoken for from gettin   I need to figure out how to enjoy the regular things so that I am not slogging through them. A big part of my eating too many sweets is wanting to have something enjoyable in my day. It has nothing to do with hunger. For example, I will have an hour this evening between work and the aikido BoD meeting. I was pondering what I could do to make my evening more fun. Make brownies! Hmmm, maybe not. Maybe set up some fun colored roving on my spinning wheel instead of the frustrating pearl-infused fiber. Or I could do evening prep before the meeting so I can just relax afterwards. So many options.   My next challenge is going to focus on figuring out how to work with my energy and attitude to make my life better.    

A new take on the Barny theme?   I loved him He loved me But he could be a raging ass With a bit of petty smite and a kiss from me to him Won't you hear my banjo too!

Hear hear. I'm in the same boat and have a similar focus of "just do what you do, that's the win" for excercise for next round. Solidarity.

Today I tackled some non-urgent to-do items on my list: 1. Call and schedule a hair appointment- I'm going in next Thursday!  2. Delete apps that don't spark joy-  I deleted 7 apps! 3. Turn off notifications for all apps that aren't time sensitive-I left on apps that are travel-related, health related, and text messages. Everything else is turned off.    I'm learning to play the banjo. I found a tutorial on you tube, and I like it a lot. I just woke up one day and thought "How can I be even whiter?" LOL. Seriously, though, my grandfather's banjo has been sitting in our house for a while. He left it to my brother who has his own banjo and no place to put a second banjo. So I was moving it out of the way so the visiting uncle didn't see it, because my grandfather did NOT want him to have it. He was very clear. And I took it out of the case, tuned it, and I just thought, "Well, now...I like this."  My relationship with my grandfather was okay. We got along, but he thought I should be married and cooking dinners for menfolk, and I finally told him some stories about first dates with different guys and he stopped bugging me about it. Then instead just told everyone I was his spinster granddaughter. "You know, the old maid" My grandfather also believed a person should be automatically amazing at a thing or else they were wasting their time being an idiot. HE was so impatient and critical.  So I'm taking my sweet, sweet time learning, and really enjoying it. I loved him, and he loved me, but what an asshole he could be. So you can understand there's something deeply satisfying about taking his banjo meant for my brother and learning to play it. It feels like I'm honoring him and annoying the shit out of him at the same time.     Thanks for hanging out with me today. I hope you have a good rest of your day.    

Yeah, there are so many other ways they could have handled this that would be better. I mean, if they said it was a cash flow problem and they needed you to pay for half of each session, but they were increasing your number of half paid sessions to make up for it, you would probably be understanding and willing to work with them.

I wasn't sure I wanted to click for cannibalism, but I'm happy I did!

+ Thanks!   I am planning to continue, but it might have to change a little bit. I'm discovering that having combat and non-combat activities happening each day doesn't really work for a linear narrative. I'm kind of thinking of having a couple of parallel narratives separated by some amount of time (an hour or two?), so that it doesn't sound like I'm attacking an enemy one moment and fletching arrows the next while the enemy is still alive.

Bwahahaha!   Not that kind of regular.

Honestly this is my whole feeling about the situation, and I'm on the fence about continuing, even though the therapist (who has nothing to do with this whatsoever) is amazing.  I'm not buying any advance services, for certain, and you are a good friend to point this out. This is Wisdom. It's still not a sure bet, and this whole thing has left me feeling very swindled, to be honest.