I am not sure where things left off...
My partner is now home. She has a rota of aides from an agency, paid for by Medicaid. They are all experienced and take good care of her.
Somewhere during the time she was in the nursing home in Queens my laptop died. I now have a new one but it took 10 days to get someone to come to the house to set it up. I am still fumbling a bit with the new touch pad, and had a few glitches (I was told that they are common glitches in the new version of Windows 10), but now know (I think) how to handle them.
I need to make work a priority for the rest of March.
I still managed to practice every day. I am singing "Qui Sedes ad Dextram Patris" from the Bach B Minor Mass on Maundy Thursday and will have the alto solo line in a piece by Haydn (which I have not seen) for Good Friday.
I have let my opera repertoire lapse, except for singing through the Enzo and Laura duet from Gioconda because if I do a concert with my teacher (it will be based on the material from my birthday concert with some additions and deletions) that would be a nice upbeat bit of opera to include.
I vocalize up to a high C several times a week and my technical progress has held.
Right now the most important thing is making the end of my partner's life as happy as possible. Devoting oneself to a human life rather than a career or other personal goals does not make one a loser and it does not matter whether the person "deserves" this or not. That is my bit of wisdom for 2017. Why shouldn't I devote my time to caring for her? As long as I can do some singing and enough editing to supplement my Social Security. It is unlikely that I would devote myself to trying to have an "encore career" (in the sense of finding something to doooo for a living that I just loooove) whether I were taking care of her or not, so maybe it is time to stop beating myself with that. There are many things I love to do, so I can just treat working for a living as a necessary evil (as generations did before me) and move on.
I probably won't write as much as I used to. Regardless of how many hardships I have had lately, I am a lot less bored and hence have a lot less "existential distress".
