Thursday, January 12, 2012

Orchestra sectionals, snow, and other aspects of wednesday

Wednesdays are generally long days at the university for me, and today was no exception. I did sleep in until almost 9:30 but was on the bus at 10am for my 11:30 20th century of music class. Breakfast went okay today, but after that eating was random. I basically have not been feeling any hunger cues for several weeks now...eating breakfast at 9:30, I then didn't really realize that I should eat until after 3pm, and that was only from looking at the clock and going "I guess I should eat lunch/dinner/something".

Thankfully, I was able to get in contact with both of my flute instructors...L.R by hanging around the room she was teaching in (her new favourite phrase to me is "Stop stressing about your stress test!"), and then L.Rd (yes, they do have the same initials, and very similar sounding first names just to make things confusing!) by phoning after orchestra.

Orchestra tonight was sectionals, and as a strange coincidence, we had the flute instructor who retired last year, J, come in to lead it. I say strange coincidence because of the conversation we had afterwards, which I figured we would end up having either before, during the break, or after. See, about a year and a half ago, J had surgery to replace one of his heart valves. Even though the flute world is small, J had not heard about my 'incident', but he knows now! As he said tonight, many people live their whole lives with leaky valves. I already knew that, but at the same time, it was reassuring to have some degree of calmness from someone who has dealt with what I might have wrong. Overall, today was a bad breathing day, which I think was made worse by the normal January temperatures. As I told my friends, if I ever start to run/rush/hurry/whatever in this cold of weather with my body the way it is right now, they must stop me! Case in point, I felt I was running a bit slow getting to orchestra this evening (I really wasn't though...), so I hurried-not even running-from the one music building over to the one that the choir rehearses in. Not even that far...basically a 5 minute WALK across campus, max. So that was maybe 3 minutes of moving quickly. BAD idea. I got into the building, and yikes, things were pretty crazy for a few minutes. I at least had time to get things closer to normal...glad that my friend D's mom was not there yet to see that! See, she is an emergency room doctor, and would probably have some words to chide me with!

I wish I could run...I MISS running. It used to be one of my stress-reducers, going to the gym, and running on the track, or biking for a while with a good book...or studying. And now, even with recovering quite a bit, things like more than one flight of stairs at a time is challenging, I can't run between buildings let alone run on a track, and carrying my backpack is hard. I have, in fact, resorted twice in the past week to dragging it around one of the music buildings...now, here's where everyone can scold me again when I say that my backpack was over 20 pounds when I weighed it the other day. I really have tried to weed things out, but my music folder weighs a fair amount, things like a water bottle and travel tea mug add up, I do have to have my notebooks and folders for class, pens, tea...today I needed to haul my Moonbeams One teacher's manual around so that I could lesson plan between Philosophy of Music and choir rehearsal. And I admit that that weighs quite a lot, but less than the Taruskin 20th century of Music textbook that I decided to leave at home.
Here's where clarification needs to come in that more than 20 pounds of a backpack is really not great for me...weighing in at 85 pounds yesterday, that's about 25% of my weight...much higher than the 10-15% that it should be limited to. Sigh. It's sad that I really only should be carrying 8-12 pounds...that's so little...

My back was bothering me a bit today, probably psychosomatic upon finding out how heavy my backpack was!

We had quite a bit of snow today, which is quite normal. Just abnormal for the winter we have been having so far. It's quite beautiful...until you have to go outside in it! Or have someone sit down beside you on the bus and start brushing the snow off their coat and onto you. Bus etiquette. Sometimes, riding the buses annoys me.

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