On the way home last night she asked to listen to some music. I put an old car tape of ours in, and we listened together as we drove down M-99, away from Lansing.
There was some Lorena McKennitt, and some Neil Diamond and Garth Brooks, which made me think of Jeff. That's his music. Then there was "Kiss him Goodbye," from the Nylons. I sang blissfully along, not thinking much about it.
Then I saw in the rearview that Kirstin was sobbing. I turned it down and asked her what was wrong, worried that she might be getting sick or something. It's unlike her to cry out of the blue like that.
That song reminds her of Alex, and she misses Alex. It made her cry.
It was heartbreaking. I couldn't even give her a hug, because we were driving down the road, and both belted in. I talked to her, and told her we'd have to talk to Alex's parents and see if we couldn't get together with her soon.
It's going to be tough, though. Alex is going to be in Bath every night of the week with Jeff. I don't mind driving her out there, but I'm not sure he really wants two kids to keep track of while he's directing rehearsal.
Alex and Kirstin used to love to sing in the car when we were driving together, which was often. They sang "That Don't Impress Me Much", a Shania Twain song, and giggled for hours. The Nylons were favorites; they loved the "Chain Gang song", and of course "Kiss him Goodbye." It was fun for me, too, because it reminded me of when I was a little girl. My sisters and I used to sing in the car together all the time. There's something endearing in the sounds of little girls' voices, mixing together dischordantly and intermingled with giggles. I miss that, too.
The rest of yesterday was just plain unremarkable. We had a really tough bell choir rehearsal last night, and are playing several peices this Saturday at the LAMB festival. That's a difficult performance, because it's a conference for bell choirs. That means the people there will actually have some technical skill and be able to actually tell the difference between our semi-bad, semi-good, and fucking brilliant performances. In the past few weeks we've had a lot of our choir members out of town, so it's going to be pretty hard to put in a "fucking brilliant". I'm hoping for "reasonably clean" I think.
We're playing a really tough, TOUGH peice as a feature in the concert, and while I love it, and think it sounds neat, I don't feel ready yet. I practiced last night while Forest was reading Rainbow Six.
Poor fellow is about 100 pages from the end, and quite in suspense. Still, last night he was too tired to stay up and read, and this morning he was still dead. I'm trying my darnedest not to be a worrywart.
We're not going to get to play D&D this week, because we've got tickets to see Jekyll & Hyde at Wharton. I don't really know anything about the show, other than it's musical theatre, and I tend to enjoy watching those, as long as they aren't Rogers and Hammerstein. Then again, R&H isn't all bad, if you only see each show once. More than once and you start to feel like you've just been sugar-coated.
Tonight is my TKD test for Master Kim. I feel pretty out of it. I practiced this weekend as usual, but we didn't have class last week for spring break, and I definitely didn't get that great a workout. I also followed Forest's advice, and instead of working things to death, I didn't push it, and tried to get my brain out of my body's territory. I feel like I didn't work very hard, but he thinks it's the right thing to do, so I'm operating on faith. I am not worried I'll forget anything. I know all the moves cold. I can (and do) do them in my sleep. It's just a matter of performance. Will I get all the little things right, or will I have a lousy sidekick? Will I keep the timing right? Will I remember not to fall into old bad habits, like soft punches and pointed toes?
I'm not going to dwell on it terribly, or at least I'm going to try to keep my mind off it. Testing for Master Kim makes me more nervous than it used to, because I've known him so long, I wouldn't want to let him down. Funny thing about that is, Master Kim isn't going to be let down! He knows exactly how I'll test, most likely, and won't be suprised by it at all. He will be quiet, and nod his head, and at the end he'll have a list of things to say, he always does. There's no such thing as a perfect test, even when you get a 4.0. Master Kim's been teaching for 40 years. One single test is not a big deal to him, and it won't be to me, either.
My secretary is getting positively enormous with child.
And this morning my cat peed on Forest's jeans, reminding me that I'm glad I don't have any more kids.
I just put up a new site, it's a portal designed for Michigan Public Health professionals. Wheee, I know. It has a targeted search engine on it that I populated myself, which was a bit of an adventure. It's called Healthline. Actually, it's kind of a neat story, if you're into that sort of thing. Healthline started as a BBS back in 1992, and local health departments all over the state use it to collaborate with each other.
It had an old terminal mode ANSI interface, and people connected to it at 300 BPS initially. Then it moved to telnet, then to a client/server app called "World Group", made by this hideous company called Galacticomm. They recently sold out, and we're in the process of moving Healthline away from the client/server and onto the web. Right now the web presence is all connected back to the old C/S stuff, and actually, there are still people using all the previous versions, including the terminal mode BBS; but I hope soon to get rid of Galacticomm altogether. It's an ancient btrieve system, and I despise working with it.
Anyway, I need to work with it right now. See ya.
