Oh, my aching brain!

Oh my, but I felt like my brain was going to explode Tuesday evening. But I digress...

First we need to back up to Sunday when D and I backed our respective (and very full!) vehicles out of the garage and headed south toward her college. After several (hot and humid!) hours of shoving (very!) heavy dorm furniture around (and, alas, pinching her poor finger in the process of hoisting a top bunk into place), lugging mountains of stuff (heavier with every armload!) up the dorm stairs and into her room, assembling a boxed bookcase, offering to take her out for a pizza supper and being turned down (imagine that!) and then finally turning her over to a group of her (oh, so happy to see her!) friends, I started my car northward and called home to give a "time of departure".

The rather brusque reply ("What took you so long?") set me off for a bit of a rather damp little pity party...until a previously unnoticed pizza place hove into my line of vision (and on the right side of the road, no less!) so I made a quick detour to the right and had that pizza supper after all. And I ate the whole thing, every bite, all ten inches of it, all by myself! Oh, yeah, I guess we did forget lunch, come to think of it. Oops.

So then I felt much better the rest of the way home and listened (again!) to the first three of the Pimsleur French CDs on the way home. Whew, that (repeat and work on the accent and then try to remember what they taught you 5 minutes ago when they ask you again, stuff) was enough of a mental workout to chase the blues for sure!

And Monday I did mountains of laundry and visited with B before she left to go back to Gram's. And Tuesday I decided to be lazy and read a book...it was lovely!

Then came Tuesday night (you thought I'd forgotten, didn't you? No way!). Tuesday night was band practice. Now to understand this, you have to know that it's been something like 35 years since I've played my flute in a band. Oh, I've played hymns around the piano and even the occasional special music for church but nothing (nothing!) that required strict counting and runs and trills or even reading all those high notes on ledger lines way up above the treble staff. So, I'd started practicing...from my old beginner flute book (not even the intermediate book, the beginner book...starting with lesson five!) but then D was trying to study at home and Gram and B were here (and I certainly didn't want to annoy them!) and (okay, I admit it!) I stopped practicing. Besides, when I went for the first time two weeks ago, I'd struggled along okay (not great, mind you, I was lost plenty and had to skip the runs and stuff but there was a flute teacher sitting beside me and she was very kind to help find me when I was lost and answer questions now and then). But I didn't practice the band music afterwards. Not once.

Then came Tuesday night. Band night. And the OC is all happy and excited to go to band and play his new clarinet ('cause he's played in bands now and then over the last quarter century!). And I'm feeling rather smug and thinking, "Yeah, I can do this. It'll all come back. I'll be fine. This'll be fun."

And then I walked through the door...

No flutes. None. Nada. There was not one single flute player there. Except me. What? ME? JUST ME???? Who will I listen to to know when to come in and how will I find out where I am when I am lost and...one of those songs has a solo flute part! YIKES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I survived. And the director was very patient with me. And nobody threw rotten tomatoes...and someone even said I was an inspiration that they would use to get a long-time-not-playing friend to come, too...but I came home with a very aching brain from the strain of all that concentration...and that is the story of how I did my small bit this last week to stave off incipient dementia...