Neglectful- Not Lazy

For all my fan(s?) I am hereby apologizing for the past three or more weeks of neglect to the wanderings. Partly I WAS wandering.

• I spent part of a week as vespers leader at one of our church camps for elementary age kids. It was my first trip back as a camp staff in well over 10 years- and the first time ever (after 45 years in camping ministry) with this age group. I was a blast. Some for the kids, some for the opportunity to do some exploring of faith sharing, but most significantly to reconnect with an old and special friend and a couple former campers from over 20+ years ago. Basically for vespers I told stories of heroes and "she-roes" of the faith, connecting with the program leader's (my old friend) theme. Great week.

• I was home for a few days and got ready for the Vintage Band Festival in Northfield, MN, with the Polished Brass Quintet. These performances started the second week when I wandered off to the Shell Lake Trumpet Workshop. Prior to the week (and the previous camp) I was highly engaged in getting The Tuning Slide blog posts from the past year into a book format. I published it through some crowd-funding help and the participants were very appreciative. The week itself was even more awesome than last year when I got kicked into high-gear with my trumpet playing. I have lots of ideas and thoughts for the next year of the Tuning Slide which now has it's own domain name and web-site: www.tuningslide.net. That took time, too.

• In the week I have been home I first had one of those special opportunities of life- getting together with a childhood best friend. We reconnected several years ago on Facebook and finally had the chance to get together as he came through Rochester on his way west. We had some amazing times sharing where we were and where we are today. The fact that he is a "traveling Santa Claus" just made it all the better. Exciting!!!

• A week ago I realized I was on a 12-day deadline to finish editing my Christmas stories book to get it published on Kindle and Nook by the end of the month. In so doing I decided to do a hard-copy publish as well through Amazon's Create Space. Here's the link to pre-order the Kindle eBook. (The Lost Jesus. Nook and hard-copy on Amazon will be available soon.) More time.

My "To-do" list has hardly gotten any shorter. I still have a day or two of work on completing the publishing of the Christmas book. I have a video from the church camp to put together and get out to the participants. I want to get our videos from the Vintage Band Festival finished and posted. I have the weekly deadline of The Tuning Slide. No wonder I have not completely retired from my "career job"- I need to go to work to slow down.

Put this all together and I have been neglectful of these Wanderings. Not a good way to treat your writing outlet of over 13 years. (I even missed posting a first day of August video. I will make that up this week.) I am not planning on stopping this blog. The thoughts and reactions I post here are not the kind of posts I feel are appropriate to also post on The Tuning Slide. I do think that things are going to slow down a little bit. We will be doing some traveling in the next six-weeks and should be back to some photography, which has also been neglected.

So thanks for hanging-in with me. I haven't forgotten to write or wander. Stay tuned. We still have over two months until the election- and that is worth writing about.