Lessons Learned

1. There is not enough money in the world to compensate for helping with a middle school musical production. The kids begin squirrelly and progress to beyond squirrelly. Yesterday one of them lost his clothes. I found them on the floor backstage. I do not want to know why they were there.

2. Accompanying 45 middle school band students on their solos for festival can cause temporary deafness. Especially if they are playing saxophone or percussion. Also, some of them actually have musical sensitivity and talent. Scratch that. Two of them do. That's not a particularly compelling reason to continue accompanying them every year. However, when you and the band teacher got your undergrad degrees together, sometimes there are reasons long past that are. Sigh...I'll be doing this until I die...or go permanently deaf...

3. Flowers bloom in the spring even when the weather believes it's winter. We've had snow every day since Sunday, but also enough daytime warmth to melt the white stuff. And I have some pansies heroically blooming beside my dandelions (which I halfheartedly and unsuccessfully attempted to kill last week). My trees and bushes have continued to sprout leaves. Should the snow ever decide to leave for a few months, it will be gorgeous and green.

4. I have songbirds. My dad has crows. He lives three blocks from me so I don't know why there is a difference in bird residence, but I'll take it. I'm listening to blackbirds hailing the sunrise. He's listening to crows fighting over roadkill. Bad luck, Dad!

5. Since DJ moved back home, claiming my former guest room, we have had more company than we ever did during the three years he was gone. Our new guest room is my piano studio floor equipped with a queen-sized air mattress. There is no privacy in our house and Darrin and I are up for work by (or before, in my case) 5 a.m. We try to be quiet, but I'm guessing we're not particularly successful (we = me, because Darrin actually is quiet and doesn't run into things in the morning). When we told people we had a guest room, they would make a comment about how it might be nice to visit and we ended up about two visits per year. DJ moved home about a year ago. In that year alone, our air mattress has had five residents. It's almost as if when we say, "We don't have a lot of room--couch or air mattress, only," people are challenged to show us that they're tough enough to rough it a few nights in our house-without-a-guest-room. And since I like visitors, when DJ (and Adam and Tabitha) moves out, I'm thinking about continuing the rumor that we have no guest room just so people will keep coming.

6. I hate physical therapy. And I love it. But mostly I hate it. So I need to go do the work at the gym now. But I'd rather just go run outside and listen to the birds. But I can't do that until my physical therapist says I'm ready. So I hate her, too. And I love her.

Okay. Going to the icky gym now.