I Am Super Gross

Today is Day #2 home sick from work.  I think I have the flu or something.  My tonsils are swollen; the lymph nodes in my poor little neck are swollen and sensitive to the touch; my nose is in competition with Niagara Falls for fluid output per second; my body is all achy; and guess what time I finally drifted off to sleep last "night" in my discomfort?  Some time after 5:00 a.m.  I am usually a very dainty, feminine sweater; last night I would have put Andy Roddick to shame.  It was literally one of the worst nights of sleep in my entire life.

Then at 7:45 a.m. my body said to wake up or I'd be late for work.  I called my boss letting her know that I'm super gross and had slept for an invigorating total of about 2 hours.  She was amazingly understanding, but my body didn't get the memo that we could now sleep all day.  I tried to fall asleep for a little while, and then just as I'd sort of drifted off the piano tuning man showed up.  I was too excited to ask him questions to stay in bed. (The piano was made in 1954, is structurally good, hadn't been tuned in 5-10 years, is a good beginner piano, has only 80 keys -- oh well, no biggie for now.)

Also, I can't taste anything.  I just polished off a bowl of Ramen and thought it wasn't salty enough.  I have a sleep-deprivation headache, but my body is just insisting that noon is an inappropriate time to go to bed and will not let me sleep!  So here I am, just being gross.  I think I'll go lay on the couch and watch some X-Files while my cat and dog pretend to be mountain goats and imagine that I am the most desirable mountain peak to be conquered.

p.s.  Happy Leap Day!

Quarter, Quarter, Haaaalf Note

I had my first piano lesson today!  It was quite exciting if I do say so myself.  I learned some basic stuff:

• How to hold my hands over the keys (pretend I'm holding a bubble or a tennis ball)
• Push down more with my wrist than my fingers
• How to sit at the piano (how far away, posture, etc)

Also, I need to memorize where the notes are.  No more counting from C.  (For example: A = C - 2)  That is what I have been doing.  So next time I have to be able to point out to her and play all the different notes and to verbally describe where they are located.  What good, fundamental stuff!

Also counting, which is the bane of my (very small) musical existence.  Back when I took piano lessons as a kid and in music classes in K-12 (ha! Who am I kidding? K-8) counting has always confused me to no end.  I'm great at math!  But this musical counting business is tough stuff!  Ms. B. gave me a sticker with a soda can on it and it said:

• C count
• O out
• L loud
• A always

Part of my homework is to play some notes in the book and count out loud: "quarter, quarter, haaaalf note, haaaalf note, quarter, quarter."  It sounds simple enough, but I assure you that this is going to get very difficult, especially when I'm not hitting the same note over and over again.  Did I mention that our piano came with a lovely metronome?  Maybe that will help.  It's a very neat one with a pendulum; I can slide the doo-hicky up and down, and it has fancy words like "andante."  It also tells me that andante, for example, is between number x and number y.  (I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head). 

So this week I will practice sitting and using my wrist correctly, figuring out where all the notes besides C are, and (yikes) counting.

Haaaalf Note, Quarter, Quarter!

Let's Get Musical, Musical!

I wanna get musical!

So Stephen and I bought a piano!  An older couple was selling it on craigslist for pretty cheap (as far as pianos go).  I've been pondering taking up a musical instrument for some time now, and Stephen (as always) was super supportive.  I'd like to work my brain in new and exciting ways!  For a little while I was thinking banjo or fiddle (small, portable, love me some folk), but calluses sound unpleasant, and I don't know about learning all the different ways to put my fingers.  I can see all the keys on a piano at the same time.  Also, I took piano lessons for a short while when I was a kid.  I refused to practice, and my mom would say things like, "Do you know how much money I'm spending on lessons!"  But at least the piano is not completely foreign territory.

I was hoping to do a smart thing and have it inspected before buying it.  I'd even found a legit guy who does inspections for $25.  But, the couple selling the piano had other folks in the wings waiting on it, and they weren't keen on waiting for us to schedule an inspection.  I don't blame them at all.  So, I played all the keys and they made lovely enough sounds to me.  (Which for my discerning ear is anything other than "clunk" or silence).  All the keys came back up to the same height.  We peeked at the strings.  They were all there!  It was a little dusty in there and some of the soft hitter things had little indents in them, but I don't know if that is bad or not.  Either way, for the price of the piano I figured I could replace some little soft whatever-they're-called if need be.  We wrote a check, shook hands, and we'll be picking it up tomorrow!  Hopefully we made a good decision.  Even if we didn't, it's been a blast being spontaneous.

A super huge, giant thanks to K.Q. for giving me some pointers on how to check out a piano!

Now I just have to find somewhere to take lessons ... and the Google search begins!

You are dust, and to dust you shall return

Mumford & Sons - Sigh No More

Serve God, love me, and mend

This is not the end

Live unbruised, we are friends

I'm sorry

Sigh no more, no more

One foot on sea, one on shore

My heart was never pure

You know me

And man is a giddy thing

Oh man is a giddy thing

Oh man is a giddy thing

Oh man is a giddy thing

Love it will not betray you

Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free

Be more like the man you were made to be

There is a design, an alignment, a cry

Of my heart to see

The beauty of love as it was made to be

May this Lenten season of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving help me to open my eyes to the beauty of love as it is meant to be.

How About Quarter-Life Awakening?

I do appreciate the concern of several folks who have inquired about my "crisis."  Perhaps I have chosen a poor description.  Really, I'm just standing up and taking a more active role in my own life.  I don't want to wake up, go to work, come home, eat, watch tv, go to bed, and repeat.  I want to try new things and appreciate each day as an opportunity as opposed to something to "get through."

Things I would like to do:

• bake more
• try new recipes
• be craftsy, or at least try
• be more physically active
• do more nice things for my husband

I'm totally open to ideas!  Feel free to share a recipe, craft, activity, or other idea for me to try!

Stream of Reminiscence

I visisted an old lady that is a friend of mine yesterday.  When we aren't reading Gone with the Wind, we like to listen to old-timey music.  Here is one of my favorites that we listen to:

As I was posting this video, the old-timey record made me think of Ghost World:

Every time I hear that song in the Heineken commercial, I think, "Hey Heineken guy, Ghost World beat you to that about 10 years ago."  But it's still nice and catchy.  I'd like to rent that movie and watch it with my hubby; he's never seen it.  My friend A. and I watched it for the first time in the 8th grade. 

I can almost guarantee that I am wearing sandals with socks in the picture.  For some reason there was a year that I wore sandals and socks the whole winter.  There were a few years where I wore nothing but black, gray, and dark blue.  Oh adolescence!  The branch was at a park a couple of blocks from  my house, and we walked it to my front yard where we "planted" it.  We were quite the team, and we'll always, always be friends.  We've been through too much to ever drift apart.

Musically, I think Everclear, Tori Amos, and Our Lady Peace totally dominated my adolescence, and they all remind me of good times with A.  She introduced me to Tori Amos.  When she moved away, I got to visit her a couple of times, and on my first plane ride home she gave me Under the Pink.  I listened to it on my discman the whole plane ride back.  I think this will always be my favorite track from that album:

If you enjoy Tori Amos, I would highly recommend reading this.  I genuinely appreciate the message of both acknowledging victimization and experiencing hope.  And I do think that "some things only she knows," whether she is the collective power of women, our Blessed Mother, Mary Magdalene, the feminine divine that is so often oppressed, etc.  This song makes me feel really good and really hopeful.

What lovely reminiscing :)

Trying New Things, or My Quarter Life Crisis

I think this blog is kind of an experiment.  We'll see if it works!

I'm finding myself feeling concerned about "the Facebook" for a number of reasons:

• I don't know what douchey Zuckerberg is going to do with my personal information.  It creeps me out.  I'm pretty sure that if I leave FB, he'll still keep all my info.  But it's the principle of the thing.
• I suck at keeping in touch with people.  Big time.  FB makes it easy for me to "feel" in touch without actually picking up a phone or writing a good old-fashioned letter.  I don't like that.
• While I "feel" in touch with FB, I am only keeping up with a person as much as they would like to show all their FB friends.  For some folks, this is way more than I care to know.  For most others, I'm sure I'm missing out on things in their lives and not actually being a real-life, actual friend to them.

So, my exit from Facebook and the start of this blog are pieces of some changes I'm trying to make in my life.

This blog will serve 2 main purposes for me:

1. A place to keep folks up-to-date who are interested in what's going on my life but maybe like me aren't great at keeping in touch (NO judgment will come from me there).  Or, if I like you well enough to have sent you the link to this and you're wondering why but would still like to stalk me, that's okay too.
2. I'm working on being more positive and organized.  As the title of this blog might suggest, I'm going to try to keep this thing mostly positive.*  That doesn't mean I won't be real.  It just means I need practice at not being a pessimist-realist. I think I can be generally positive and still be a realist.  We'll see.  I'm a hot-head, so I'll still be grumpy sometimes.  Which is okay.  (Check out that realistic goal I just described!  Hell yes!)

So, that's the experiment in a nut-shell.  Feel free to follow my journey (or be a part of it!) if you'd like :-)

*Also, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is one of my favorite movies of all time and has an awesome soundtrack.