Some New Passions and Some Old Passions Make Life Busier Than Ever Before!!!

Well, the past few months have been an absolute blur - I don't think I've ever been this busy (for such a prolonged period of time) in my life. I think the meds are helping me to focus, keep track of more things and to do everything I've always wanted to, and I seem to be making up for lost time.

First of all, I mentioned in a previous post that I was asked to teach night school for the Insurance Institute (the organization that oversees the Chartered Insurance Professional program which is the designation I got last year) and started that in January. I kind of always thought I'd like to teach - but I don't just like it - I LOVE IT!!! It's fun to help adults in my industry learn insurance concepts and theories. When someone is struggling with a difficult concept (like co-insurance) and we work together through many examples and different ways of explaining it and the light finally goes on and they get it - that's the greatest feeling and very rewarding. I try to make my classes fun, interesting and really make my students think, and while it's a lot of work (I figure I spend an average 10 - 15+ hours per week (the majority of my weekends) on my lesson plans, flip charts, quizzes, exercises and home assignments), it's also amazingly fun and rewarding. In fact my students seem to love me - several of them started a mission to get me to teach another class from the end of April to the end of June that they want to take and the Institute agreed to add it with me teaching if we get 5 students registered by April 20th (we have 3 now...). Before this came about I was looking forward to some time off (what is TV anyways and are there non-insurance books to read?!), but if this goes ahead I'll do it and just wait til July to rest over the summer.

In addition to that, other passions or interests in my life have resurfaced and become too much fun to give up. I used to decorate cakes for many years (I started when I was 12) and quit for about 8 years because I had tendonitis in my wrist and my wrist was fried. Well my wrist has definitely healed in that past 8 plus years, plus I find magnetic bracelets and FAR infrared wrist bands really help me do lots of other crafts and writing, so I was asked to decorate a very basic cake back in late October and discovered how much I missed it. So in November I started building up my cake decorating tools and supplies (I sold a lot of them when I quit before) and decorated an elaborate cake for a wedding reception in early December. Wow - I love decorating cakes!!!! Now it's like I'm making up for the 8 years lost - I've decorated 7 cakes this year already and I have 4 more in the next week alone!!! I work in a company with 50 employees, so almost every week there is a birthday, promotion, farewell or other event, and now those employees are paying me to do cakes for relatives and friends. My new side business - Crystal's Custom Cake Creations - is officially launched and I am having the time of my life dreaming up unique cake ideas and bringing them to life. I am trying to set up some kind of basic (hopefully free) website to display my cakes, and when I get that figured out, I'll post the link here.

As if all of that isn't enough, musically things are taking off too. I am in an Easter choir at church, the band that I was in for the New Year's Gala (see previous posts) is doing a reprise of that music for a special church service on April 15, and my original band - Tin Pan Alley - has started up again with new life. Tin Pan Alley has been on hiatus for a few years as my husband and I - the core duo of TPA - couldn't seem to find any other members (we need drums and bass). Well we met a really cool percussionist in the past year who we started practicing with and he wants to join, and we just need to find a bass player and then we want to really get practicing to get gigs this summer and get playing regularly again. So in addition to teaching and decorating cakes, I have practices for something music related at least 2 or 3 times a week. until Easter or the week after. (And believe it or not I do manage to sleep at least 7 hours a night, work full time and sing and/or do sound in church!)

So that's my busier than ever life, but as long as I don't burn out I'm having the time of my life and getting more success stories for my ADHD book whenever I do get it written.

I'll post more when I come up for air again..........