Category: October 2019

A friend was planning to come stay with me for a few days this week (and by sort of coincidence, John has a business trip). But my friend has gotten sick and can’t come.

With three, nearly-empty days in front of me, I thought I’d get a lot of blog posting done. It’s now the third of my three days already. I started a few posts, but haven’t finished anything. So yikes, here’s a post! Maybe this one will get the others rolling.

And hopefully my friend will soon feel better and be able to come another time.

Meanwhile, here’s a balloon fiesta picture. More to come 🙂

The other day I took Larrisa to a children’s song and dance class sponsored by the Big Brother Big Sister program. Turns out it wasn’t just for the kids; us “Bigs” were expected to participate too.

My singing and dancing abilities are limited, to say the least. I can stay mostly on tune if I’m familiar with the song, particularly if I have the music score, which helps me to see what the song is going to do next, so I have time to anticipate it.

I survived the voice warm-up exercises, but then we moved on to singing something from The Lion King, and I was hopeless.

First of all, I don’t know that music so I could not go by memory. Secondly, movie songs are difficult. They don’t tend to be simple melodies. I forgot which exact songs we were trying to sing (there were a few of them) but they had sections that were more like dramatic speaking than singing – except not quite. Sort of like musical speaking-singing. The problem with those sections was it was very hard for me to tell what note was actually being sung (if any).

The instructor had originally imagined we would sing to YouTube instrumental accompaniment (like karaoke), but soon discovered that we were not up for the challenge. So she quickly searched YouTube for some examples of the songs that included the singing and showed the lyrics!

Well, I thought the singing was hard…but then we moved on to dance. Oh my gosh, did I suck at that! I did fine for the warm-up exercises (jumping jacks). I can do jumping jacks without getting confused – or at least most of the time.

Then suddenly we were learning a dance routine. For some reason, I can’t seem to remember routines. Imagine someone saying an entire paragraph in a foreign language and you have to say it all back to them, in the right order, with the right pronunciation. And then do it again, 10 minutes later. That’s me with dance routines.

This was a small class, so there wasn’t any hiding in the back. And the kids were mostly teenagers, so expectations were fairly advanced. Each big-sister, little-sister pair were expected to take turns doing the routine by ourselves while everyone else watched us.

The instructor must have taken pity on us at one point, because when it came time to do solos in front of the class (not even in pairs this time – a complete solo), she told us to just freestyle. That decreased the technical challenge, but did not decrease the emotional challenge. When is the last time you did a freestyle solo dance in front of a group of strangers? (Sober.)

All I could do was just try to maintain my humor and confidence. I wanted to be a role model, and I think it’s useful to know how maintain poise when challenged. I just tried to be a good sport and encourage the kids and ignore my own failures.

Sorry, I didn’t take any pictures. I was too busy trying to survive!

It’s a bit hard for me to believe, but apparently the Pleasanton California Police Department posted this funny message on Facebook (Laura sent it to me).

If I was still working at the Air Quality Bureau and posted something snarky and hilarious on their social media, I’d probably have been fired. My bosses didn’t have a sense of humor. We were the STATE after all.

Anyway, I think it’s pretty cool that they could get away with this post. Because it’s entertaining, more people are going to read it, which was their goal after all.

I don’t know how many of you read my blog, and I wouldn’t be surprised if not many do! It’s theme-less. Nothing exciting happens. It’s only mildly and occasionally humorous.

And yet I know I’d be interested in reading this type of blog by other people. I’m definitely tired of reading the national news. I’m not sure how to find more of this kind of blog though. Blogs that have themes can be searched for with keywords. But I’m not thinking it would work very well to search for “blogs by random people about their boring lives”, lol.

Somehow I think our lives would be saner if we went back to mostly only hearing everyday stories about our own small communities instead of being overwhelmed by the most extreme happenings around the world. So I’m going to keep at it – one insignificant voice lost in a sea of global momentousness.