After tomorrow, I’ll be over halfway done. Does that make you want to dance and sing?

Last night, my 5th-8th graders sang like angels, and hopefully delighted their audience. There was one little behavior issue involving less-than-professional comportment on the risers that I must deal with this morning. Students presenting poor posture and attitude on the risers is a rarity, and I was disappointed. But I will dispose of the problem forthwith. Bank on it.

My dastardly cold is finally starting to subside, thanks to DayQuil, NyQuil, and clean livin’. I plan to be back on track to Grammieville by one week from today. Once we get there, all gigs except for one (a fun one that involves a flash mob of sorts) will be history, and I can really start enjoying the holiday.

What about you? Do you have any plans to go away for the holiday? I  know a couple of you fiends (David, PK, maybe others) are having family in. That’s a good part about being the matriarch/patriarch, ja? I remember hitting the road every holiday when my kids were young; it wasn’t something one thought about — one just did it. Pack up the kids and go to Mom’s for Christmas. I loved doing it, and it never felt like work. Nowadays though…wow, I don’t know how we did all that. My own sons and their wives are constantly on the move with their kids at the holidays, hauling bunches of gear with them (especially Lars and Helen, whose children are much younger than the Js).

Wears me out thinking about it. But I surely do appreciate their willingness to do it.

OK, enough rumination for one morning — especially when I’m running 15 minutes late. But hey, I can see the weekend from here. Yay for some more couch time and finally hitting this cold out of the park.

And speaking of cold: five degrees outside this morning? Are ya jokin’ me?

Yeah, that was yesterday.

When my phone rang at 5:30 a.m., I knew it was a school delay. Apparently, there was ice all over the roads in the little village where I teach, and they decided to err on the side of caution and wait it out. Well…turns out, the wait was longer than expected.

I had just started to dry my hair after showering and getting dressed for school, when the phone rang again, with the automated message that school was closed for the day. Well, whaddya know about that? All dressed up and nowhere to go.

So, I got back into some jammies and snuggled up in front of the space heater, and had a latte while reading the news, posting to Facebook, and generally being lazy.

That lasted all of about one hour; then I was rarin’ to get stuff done.

I cleaned the parlor, wrote a rhythm section chart, and finished the sound plot and program for Wednesday night’s concert. All set to copy, fold, and distribute. It’s nice to get a day once in awhile to take care of minutiae like that. It’s stuff that would otherwise have me staying late after school, and frankly, with this miserable cough, I’d like to leave work at work as much as possible.

So today, we continue the Christmas Countdown. Not the Countdown to Christmas, mind; rather, the Countdown to No More Christmas Gigs. Number 2 of 5 happens tomorrow night. I’m looking forward to it, actually. Should be fun. Should be. Hmmm.

Right now, I’m just looking forward to coming back home tonight and getting all snuggly-rat on the couch, ate up with the NyQuil.

Fink*cough* out.

Yeah, that’s the Fink. Spelling is one of the 1.7 things in this world that comes easy to me. I won a spelling bee in the 8th grade; I thought it was the Academy Awards. My prize was a brand new paperback copy of The Andromeda Strain. It was the first real sci-fi novel I’d ever read (think an early version of Stephen King’s The Stand, but without the devil and the whole weirdness in Nebraska, and…well, maybe it’s totally different, so forget that) and I remember my ookiness at the crazy guy who drank Sterno. And he was completely immune to the virus. Bizarro.

Anyway, I love spelling, and I think it should be taught at *every* grade level, K-12. But that’s another whine for another week…

While waiting to leave for my gig last night (which went very well — one down, four to go), I stumbled upon the Oxford Dictionaries Spelling Challenge. Hmmm. Spelling challenge? Them’s fightin’ words. So I took it — eight times. Six of the eight ended in a perfect score; the others I blew by one error, misspelling plebeian and plebiscite. RATS.

Check this out, though. Here are the results of the six:

After only five or six times through it, I began to see repeated words. Huh? I mean, it helped me to get plebeian and plebiscite the second time around, but seriously? Over a million words in the English language, and you can come up with only a hundred to put on a “Fiendish”-ly difficult spelling test?

Ah, well. Whaddya want for free? Bigger problems await me today, anyhow — me and my NyQuil-addled brain. Totally hung over from it, but it sure helps me make it through the night.

The only thing better than last night’s Ohio State loss would be a Browns loss today. Yes, you read that right, and fellow football heads know why. I want them to lose out. Nothing can be gained by winning now, except maybe a little man-pride at beating the Patriots — which is not going to happen. I plan to enjoy the surreal experience whilst coughing my fool head off on the couch.

But you know what? The vanilla latte I just made was fantastic.

Happy Sumday, fiends! Now go buy me a Chrispus gift.

Clearly.

Over the holidays, my normal annoyance of receiving other people’s purchase confirmation emails quadruples.

For those who don’t know, I was a beta tester for Gmail way back when, and I got the great username — just my first and last name @ gmail.com. Problem: every other woman in the English speaking world with the same name mistakenly uses it (forgetting that all-important extra number or letter in the address) for buying stuff online. And of course, their receipts come to me.

Usually, I just delete them, because it happens pretty much once a week, on average. But this particular receipt had some very personal information on it, so I decided to reply and tell the retailer that they had the wrong person. This actually took place, over a series of  four exchanges:

Me: Your customer has mistakenly listed my email as hers. Would you please notify her? I’m in Ohio — she’s in North Carolina.

Them: Thanks for contacting us. We will look into it.

Two days later, another message about this lady’s purchase comes to me. Instead of emailing, I called their customer service line.

Me: <Blah, blah, recount the situation.>

Them: Let me get into the computer and see if I can delete the email. ……….. There, it’s gone. Thanks for calling.

Next day, another purchase, another email. I emailed them *again*.

Me: I’ve emailed customer service AND called them, and this still isn’t fixed. I’m getting personal information about one of your customers — FROM YOU. I don’t think you want this. Please, notify this woman that she has entered the wrong address.

Them: Thank you for contacting us. We have updated her email address to <my.email.address.except.with.periods.between.the.two.names @ gmail.com>

Me: Um…that won’t work, either. Gmail does not recognize punctuation in their usernames, so what you have changed in your database *STILL* points to my address. I will continue to receive personal information about this woman from you. Is anyone listening?

MAILER-DAEMON – Mail Delivery Subsystem: Your message cannot be delivered. Reason: recipient rejected.

Is it the weekend yet?

As many of you know, I usually dread the end of Thanksgiving break, because it means only one thing: Christmastiiiiime is heeeeeere…

Truth be told — when I hear or read folks talking about how excited they are for the Christmas month, I feel kind of ooky. I think to myself, someday, I will say that, too. But hey, no complaints here. Or there shouldn’t be, anyway. It comes with the job, and I knew that going in. Besides, there are two lovely weeks on the other side of all these performances when I get to complain that I need to get back to work. Haha

So, here’s the deal. Gigs on the 7th, 11th, 13th, 17th and 22nd. That’s not too bad, actually. There have been fuller Decembers. I told the Thriller last night that I am going to improve my attitude from one of dread, stress and worry to a “let’s go get ’em!” mindset. That sounds like a plan, no? Thing is, I have to get past the “taking this stuff way too seriously” point. I want everything to be perfect — especially on my end. The kids will be loved no matter what. I stress over things like sound, lighting, kids passing out, mistakes/omissions in the printed program, kids showing up dressed appropriately, and of course, the biggy: the possibility of my causing something to fall apart.

I’ve been told by much wiser people than I to just “relax and enjoy it; all will be well.” I’m really, really going to see how and if that can be done, although anyone who directs or performs for a living will probably tell you that that kind of quasi-confidence (or complacency) can sometimes be a recipe for eventual disaster — and boy do I have stories to prove it.

So it’s the balance; finding the balance, Grasshoppa. I will enjoy the experience as much as I can. Fourteen days. Light the cannon fuse.