I’ve been humming that "Lusty Month of May" song again. It really is a lovely day out, and I’ve made an attempt to clean off the detritus from my balcony. Lots of crackling brown oak leaves and dead branches. That’s one of the downsides of living on the third floor, everything falls from the trees and stays for the winter.

I have the mystery growth happening in the flower boxes again this year. I hope it’s the same as it was last year and turns out to be supertunias and snapdragons. One plant from last summer totally survived and is in bloom with these little red flowers that look like min-carnations. I already have some random pansies popping up in different spots.

It’s very cheerful to look out and see some color!

I’m going to wait and see what actually starts to grow and flower before I go out and buy too much, especially because the weathermen say that we’re going to have a drought this summer and I don’t want to watch a bunch of expensive stuff die of thirst.

School has been wild all week. The parents are all revved up, going into "my child is going to be lost/destroyed/freaked/ignored at the middle school" mode. It happens every year at this time, but this year I have more parents who are pains in the ass and nasty to deal with, so the meetings are endless. Often with no resolution.

I will be so happy to see this year end. Only 32 days left. I may weep with joy.

The only thing that I really want to be sure to accomplish is finishing "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone" with my reading boys. They are really enjoying it and I’m having a ton of fun with it as well. So I have to make sure I can finish it. There is one obstacle in my way – the two weeks of the MCAS testing that is coming up.

No time for classes during that time, just time to torture young kids with standardized testing.

We’re also in the middle of working on placements for next year and choosing which teachers I’ll be working with. I don’t have much say in the matter, there are just a couple that I pray I won’t have to deal with. The just can’t adapt to special ed kids and it makes for a long year with them!

I have also had a bit of a spring surprise.

I apparently have lost weight. I have no real idea of how that happened.

I thought that I had when I put on one of my denim skirts a couple of weeks ago and it felt loose. Then on Friday the Ice Princess came by and her first question was to ask me if I’d lost weight.

Well, yikes! I guess I have if people are noticing.

Then I used a favorite litmus test yesterday, I tried on some of my old jeans. And the ones that are a size smaller than what I’ve been wearing all winter (in some cases two sizes smaller – I had one pair that I had to wear on really bad days) fit! I mean I didn’t even have to lie on my back or jump up and down to zip them. I zipped them up like a normal pair.

Astounding.

I have tried to change a few things. First I started trying to drink water a few weeks before competition because it’s good for the vocal mechanism. I also started having Slim Fast bars for breakfast and lunch. I didn’t do that with the idea of "dieting" in mind, I did it because I eat breakfast in the car and too often resort to donuts or bagels and thought I needed to find a better alternative. I decided that I might as well do it for lunch, too because I’d been having packaged peanut butter crackers ort Nutri-bars and was having too many because I was hungry.

So I guess these things work.

And oddly I haven’t stopped eating ice cream, so I guess I’m still allowed to enjoy it. Not that I have it every night, but there are many when I head for that freezer!

So now I’m conscious of weight loss, and pleased, but I don’t’ think I want to do any sort of a "program". Sometimes I think that just undermines my good intentions and I start feeling deprived because I’m counting and measuring and trying to keep track of points or units. I think I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing and see what happens.

I’m not going to get on the scale, either, because I become obsessed with that, too, and start weighing myself ever four minutes. I think I’ll stick to my "jeans test", after all, that’s why I keep them in six different sizes!

I spent yesterday running errands. (Wearing my smaller jeans!) I traveled hither and yon seeing it was one of those errand days where the places that I needed to go were not even vaguely within close proximity to each other. I even bought everything that we could possibly need to celebrate the Fourth of July, from tablecloths, to paper plates, to wind spinners. I figured that I’d better buy the stuff when I saw it, because come July I won’t be able to find a thing!

I’ve actually found time to stamp a bit this weekend too. I made a couple of domino pins, sort of experimental, but not too bad. I’d like to fool around with some shrink plastic later tonight, but I don’t know if I’ll get as far as that.

But all in all it’s been semi-productive.