Thanks John W and Gelsenbury!
Gelsenbury wrote: "It obviously worked in releasing some tension and calming the mind, which is great to hear. Hang in there, and best wishes!"
Thank you, and I'm happy to report that we managed to get the snow removed from important roofs prior to the heavy rain starting, so those are no longer at risk of collapse due to rain-saturated snow. Huge relief.
And yes, taking a mini break to plunk around on mandolin helped me to de-stress so that I could think more clearly about what we needed to do to deal with the dilemma we had.
Gelsenbury wrote: "found the time to play mandolin"
Lol well it took exactly 7 minutes 47 seconds total playing time to come up with this tune. I have my Zoom H2n recorder's WAV file which documents the tune-discovery process. The first couple minutes I was just fumbling around playing random runs and riffs trying to come up with something I liked the sound of. I wasn't sure I was going to get anywhere with it but around the 4 minute mark it started to sound more like a tune instead of just a bunch of random notes. I kept at it for several more minutes and I figured that was probably about as good as I was going to be able to do, so I stopped playing and turned off the recorder.
Went and got a glass of milk from the kitchen and went back to my computer. Transferred the recording to Audacity, skipped past the useless first and middle part to see if there was anything decent towards the end of the recording. Found that the last 2 min 9 sec wasn't too bad, so I merged that with the backing track (after doing a simple treble-cut EQ and "Small Room Dark" reverb), cropped the start, put a fade-out on the end, and exported that as a WAV file for my video app.
I put the video together towards the end of my 'day' because I knew it would help me further unwind so I could stop worrying and get some quality sleep. Worrying is useful if it leads to productive ideas/action, but at that point we'd already done everything we could at that time. There would be more to do the following day, but high-quality sleep and clear thinking would be beneficial.
Took about two hours to assemble the video, time well spent though because I did sleep really good afterwards! The video editor I use is Adobe After Effects, which is mostly beyond my understanding but I've figured out how to do some basic stuff with it. I added keyframes for opacity (I use that for visual fade in/out of video clips when I want the fade to start/stop at locations other than the endpoints), and I adjusted size/position of each video clip as necessary. A few little visual effects here and there (curves to lighten, the kaleidoscope thing, etc), added text (using text templates I already had) etc. Then 17 minutes for AE to 'render' the video while I grabbed a snack from the kitchen, then about 1 minute to input that to Media Encoder to make the MP4, then logged into YouTube and uploaded it there.
I think it's probably easier to gin up these types of mood/emotional improv tunes, because they don't have to fit into any particular structure or style. So it's easier to relax and just play.
Whereas if a person was trying to create a more structured tune in a specific genre or style or for some particular specified purpose, there would be more interference from the rational mind (while playing) saying things like "that note doesn't match that chord" or "that phrase is too repetitive" or "that's just a scale, it's too boring" or "that's too complicated, good luck getting anyone to play that" or whatever other types of distractions that the logical side of the mind can offer. Such concerns can be useful in many settings, of course.