Change Is Hard

…but change is certain.


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Behind

I rise from bed before the alarm after a restless night.  I’ve dreamed what could be the dramatic first scene in a book filled with the terror of survival.  The idea for a book if I were an author.  But I don’t like those kinds of books, call them scary and rush through the worst descriptions of fear.

No time for Katie this morning, I’m behind.  A little belly rub as I wake her from sleep.  She trots to the guest room where I have hung today’s work clothes.  She hops on the bed hoping for a little nap.  No time baby, no time.  I am behind.

I’m behind.  Behind, behind, behind pounds in my head, pounds under the conscious efforts getting ready for work.  Behind.  I remember the details of my dream as I’m in the shower.  No time to think about the dream.  No time.  I’m behind.

A quick shower, no time to linger in the warm steamy water.  I’m behind.  Katie curls up on the rug.  She has time.  Drying off I am glad my hair curls whether I mess with it or not.  No time.

Last night’s rehearsal went poorly.  I need to practice.  “You are all adults.” the conductor said.  “We don’t have time to work out the wrong notes here”   There are only four rehearsals  until our concert.  We don’t have time.  I am behind.

Work is overwhelming.  Hundreds of emails, problems.  Short staffed. Cranky people including me.  No time to stretch, relax the shoulders, take a deep breath.  I worked on Sunday and now I am behind.   I think of the problems I left on my desk as I rushed to band last night.  If I just move faster maybe I’ll be less behind.

I strap time on my wrist this morning and think that no one wears a watch anymore.   I can’t stop time.  It is streaking past me, falling into the abyss of the future.   I don’t know if I am the White Rabbit or Alice.

But I know that I’m behind.


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Are you sure it’s the end of summer?

Scott asked us to define the end of summer in photos.  What defines the end of summer for each of us?  You can join the fun because this assignment isn’t due until Wednesday at midnight.  Tell us what means the end of summer to you!  Meanwhile, come along and see my own transition to fall.   (Remember to click on the photos to see more detail.)

When I see that first leaf changing  on an otherwise green tree I usually rationalize that the tree is sick.  Or the leaf change is early because of the drought.  It’s not possible that summer is beginning the slippery slide into fall.  Certainly not yet.

The first bits of red.

As the light changes, becoming lower in the late afternoon sky, I appreciate the intense color and try not to think about what it all might mean.

The last of summer’s sun.

When the first bit of goldenrod begins to nod along the road and the asters bloom in brilliant purple I can still convince myself that there are weeks of warm weather ahead.

Purple compliments the season.

And when, on my morning commute, I come across the first of these….

The big yellow.

….I still rationalize.  Some school districts start early.   Don’t they?

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But when I stopped at my local grocery store this week and the bins of watermelons had been replaced by a giant pile of these…

Getting ready for Halloween!

…well.  Even I have to admit that these indicate summer has fled.  Fall is here, it’s time to quit fooling myself.  Until next year.  Because I’ll just know the reason those trees  turned so soon is because of the drought.

I’m sure of it.

Say goodbye to summer.


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97 years young

We attended a surprise birthday party for husband’s aunt Saturday.  Many people from her building and her family showed up at a local restaurant to help her celebrate.

Yes, she was surprised.

The birthday girl.

There was Chinese food, good conversation, family updates, smiles and hugs.

And cake.  Decorated in pink of course.  It’s her favorite color.

No room for 97 candles.

It was a good day.


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Randomness

It’s been a crazy busy few weeks at work with no end in sight.  There’s been even more stress lately as we’re short staffed.  People are are sick, on vacation and loaned to another department.  Yet the volume continues.  I need to find a way to get through the day without being overwhelmed.  Without getting angry.  Without getting kink in  my neck.

Message to the young lady in the blue Ford tailgating me on my commute to band practice tonight:  There are four lanes of traffic.  We’re all going the same speed.  There’s a car in front of me, one on either side of me.  Where did you want me to go?  When I could I moved one lane to the right, just to get out from in front of you.  You zoomed up behind the next car.  We were all going 75.  Why do you need to go faster?  I had a really bad day at work but just because you’ve got some sort of death wish doesn’t mean I want to go with you.

Rehearsal tonight was grueling.  We’re still sight reading pieces while we figure out what we’ll play for the Halloween concert.  Some pretty strange stuff.  Some really difficult stuff.  Some strange and difficult stuff.  Two hours nonstop.  At 8:50 p.m. the conductor stopped and started talking about the season concert dates.  We figured we were done and began to relax.  Then with only a few minutes left she asked us to read one more piece.  And as we were sighing and pulling the piece out of our folders she said “You may  have noticed that this arrangement is written a half step lower than the original composition.”  My stand mate and I both said sarcastically and at the exact same time – “Yea, we noticed that.” and then we both looked at each other and burst out laughing.  We laughed so hard that we were crying.  We laughed so hard that we missed the first 16 bars of the piece of music.  We giggled through the whole thing.  It wasn’t even that funny.  Guess you had to be there.

After a long day and a bad commute, a exhausting rehearsal, it was good to end the day with laughter.

Yes it was.


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Letting summer go

Scott, over at Views Infinitum, has posted a photo challenge – to capture the end of summer.  Or at least what represents the end of summer to each of us.

I’ll be keeping my eyes open to see what I might find.  For now, enjoy some tomatoes from my garden.  Now that it’s mid September the plants have decided to hand over a bit of goodness.

Garden bounty

Seems they always wait until the last minute.  Tomato plants are fickle that way.


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Music filled Saturday with some football too.

Heading to ‘The Big House.’

We had such a great day!  Saturday afternoon we parked near the University of Michigan’s Hill Auditorium, then walked thirty minutes south, enjoying the sunshine, the students partying in the street, the crowds, the tailgaters, to the stadium where we sat in a VIP box, guests of the School of Education, to watch Michigan beat Massachusetts.

I’ve never been in a VIP box before.  Let me tell you, that’s the way to watch football!  Of course I don’t really get football, though I do enjoy a good long run down the field.  Don’t tell anyone, but I don’t really care which team passes long or runs, it’s just fun to watch.

For me, a college football game is all about the band.  Yes, the band; that group of kids who puts everything they’ve got into providing entertainment and pumping up the crowd.

The band over on the other side kept us in the game.

While other people were chatting before the game I was watching the pregame show.  While others went to the restroom at halftime I was watching the band.  While others were cheering and booing ref calls I was watching the band across the way in the stand as they chanted, shouted, danced and blew their lips out creating excitement.  Yep.  Love football…because of the band.

The “M” marches toward the sideline.

In the middle of the fourth quarter we had to leave the game to walk the 30 minutes back up to the main campus.  We had symphony tickets.   It was the opening night of this year’s season and the Ann Arbor symphony was playing Beethoven.

Hill Auditorium.

As I settled into my seat I jokingly told my Aunt that it would probably be inappropriate to stand up, pump my fist in the air and shout “GO BLUE!” in the middle of Symphony No. 9…right? She thought probably it would not be good.  Apparently I was not the only one feeling the dichotomy of experiences that day, as during the introduction remarks the speaker actually commented on how cool it was to watch a football game then walk across town to hear a symphony.  Then he yelled  “GO BLUE!”  And the audience applauded in response.

The program opened with the National Anthem, the second time I’d heard it that day.  It was played by the full orchestra and sung loud and clear by the audience.  Then most of the orchestra stood up and left, stage left.

The symphony played Twelve Contradances next.  Twelve short pieces,played by a smaller, mostly string subset of the full orchestra.   Each movement is a slightly different version of music to keep your toes tapping..composed in 1802.  As I was listening I noticed a man sitting a couple of rows back from the conductor.  He was sitting quietly, not moving, no instrument that I could see, hands folded in his lap.  I thought maybe he had played with the full orchestra and just forgot to leave with the rest of them.    Then in movement #8 he picked up a tambourine and played it expertly till the end of the movement.  When movement #9 began he again sat, stoically, hands folded in his lap for the rest of the piece.

Ah! Perfido, Op. 65 was sung by  soprano Laura Aikin who has a beautiful and powerful voice.   The music was written to the verse of a poem written by Pietro Metastasio and was all about cruel love.

Symphony and choirs

The last half of the program was Beethoven’s Symphony #9,  Choral, or most of us think of it, Ode to Joy.  It was played by the full orchestra, and sung (in the 4th movement) by 4 soloists and a huge choir.

The first movement was full and lush, my favorite way to listen to a symphony.  The second movement was fun and fast with some amazing oboe, french horn, bassoon and tympani work.  The third movement was a sweet chorale and I was beginning to struggle to keep my eyes open.

All that was overshadowed by the drama of the fourth movement.   It began with notes you’ve all heard in commercials.  Then moved to the cellos and basses, wonderful seamless building of the familiar Ode to Joy melody, followed with the tune repeated in the violas and then the gentle violins.  By now we were all humming along as the sound built and built, bigger, more and more lush until the choir stood up and the sound became wonderfully overwhelming.

The crowd was on their feet before the last note hit the ceiling, cheering and applauding.  Sort of like at football.  We clapped till our hands ached.  The artists on stage grinned like kids.

Yes our day was full.  Full of joy.


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Attention all WordPress users

I’m going to need a little help.  I’ve been trying, admittedly sporadically, to get this blog setup finished.  I’m trying to get my blogroll to appear on the right.  As you can clearly see the list of blogs I follow only indicates a WordPress blog.  Which, by the way, I don’t follow.

I have a lot of your blogs all lined up on my links page, and I’ve moved the little widget thingy over to the right side bar place.  Which is how the “blogs I follow” title showed up.  But obviously that title is not connected to my list of links.

I tried to study the WordPress link that does show up there, to see what was different about it than the rest of the links I have ready and waiting to go…but don’t see anything.

I think this is the limit of my computer tech abilities.  So all of you out there that work with WordPress…if you have any hints I’d appreciate it.   I know someone out there will know how to do this.  And that it’s probably something stupidly simple.

Katie says “Please help my mama, as she spends all her spare time, and she has so little of that, working on this stupid blog.  She should be spending it playing with me!”


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Nothing to say

Today on the 11th anniversary of the attack on America I find I have no cohesive thoughts.  Yet I can not let the day go by without saying something.  Maybe it’s a day for each of us to have our own thoughts and our own memories. Surely this day is not as difficult for those of us who lost no immediate family members, no close friends, no acquaintances as it is for those who did.  But we were all changed that day.

We all lost some of our complacency, some of our tenacity, our feeling of being immune to the sort of hate we’d all seen on TV in news reports from some other part of the world.  We lost that safe feeling.  But only for a moment.  Because even as the second plane hit, before we realized the magnitude of what was happening, we were already gathering ourselves.  I remember telling my staff that “they might be able to kill some of us, but they can’t get us all.”  And reassuring them that we were safe there at work, encouraging them to check on their family and friends, letting them hang together is a quiet group gaining comfort and strength from each other.

We all changed that day, and change is hard.  But not so hard that we can’t all take a moment to remember those whose lives changed the most; the family and friends of the almost 3000 people that died.  And especially those 3000 people themselves.  For them, change was the most profound.

We are strong.  And we will never forget.