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Oh, and I completely forgot! Cordelia's high school competitive choir put out an album (digital only). The tracks are on YouTube. Cordelia sang the solo on one of the song, one called "Surprise Yourself." It's 3 minutes and 14 seconds long.

The album came out last October, and I think all of the songs are well done. The company they worked with for the production recently put together a Best of album drawing on all of the competitive choir albums they put out in 2021, and Cordelia's song is on it (the only one from Skyline Blues on it).

Anyway, Cordelia's song is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5UB92d_VB0

My daughter has a hell of a voice.

My sinuses decided to throw a hissy fit yesterday. They do this a couple of times a month for reasons I've never been able to pinpoint. It happens often enough that Scott and Cordelia just make sure that I have a box of tissues and a place to throw out the dirty ones. Generally speaking, the only thing that stops this is dehydrating myself, so I think I'll be drinking mostly black tea today.

I've taken Claritin, Benadryl, and Sudafed. I've also got the furnace fan running even when the furnace isn't, just in case it's a matter of unfiltered air from outside. I don't think it is because it snowed yesterday, but I figure that having the fan on won't hurt anything.

Over the weekend, I roasted chickpeas from a bag of dried chickpeas. It took a lot more time and effort than working from canned chickpeas does. I soaked them for six hours. The instructions on the bag said to simmer them, so I did. At the point when I could stick a fork through them, they still tasted raw, so I cooked them longer. That's really the part of the process that I think will make me keep going back to canned chickpeas because it needs regular checking/supervision.

At least I've established that I can used the dried if I need to.

Scott and Cordelia went driving for about an hour last night. They saw a lot of deer, and that's when it snowed, so it was kind of stressful for Cordelia, but I think it's good that she now has some experience with both of those things.

We need to look into having Cordelia take the SAT. Normally, that's done as the school district's standardized testing of the high school juniors and happens during the normal school day on the district's dime. That almost certainly won't happen this year. I haven't researched the options yet because, until we have a better idea of the time frame, planning something like that doesn't make any sense.

I'm currently exploring some of the public library's music downloads. I'm frustrated by the utter lack of cataloguing for all of the available downloads (books, music, video) because all I have to go on is cover image, artist name, and title. There aren't any genre tags or blurbs. The books are more difficult because I can't sample them easily and because they tend to be badly formatted. At least with the music, I can stream a song or two and move on.

I just don't think it's unreasonable for me to want some broad category information. I know that cataloguing is resource intensive and expensive and not a thing the library does in-house any more, but... Telling me if an album is jazz or classical harp music doesn't seem like a really large thing. Telling me if a book is horror or mystery or romance also doesn't seem like an unreasonable request.

I've also been listening to audiobooks, but I keep hitting unexpected sex scenes and really not wanting to share those with the rest of the household (no, earphones/earbuds are not an option). Audiobooks also don't accommodate skipping around in the story which is something that I do with paper books to decrease my anxiety.

Audio and video both tend to make me feel kind of trapped and unable to control my experience and interaction with the text. I'm apt to stop, walk away, and not come back for months which interacts badly with Overdrive and with getting DVDs from the library.

Scott's got vacation scheduled next week (to coincide with Cordelia's spring break). Right now, we're assuming that it will happen, but I think that could change if anyone at work gets sick. I'm also not convinced that Scott will be back on 1st shift after his vacation. He might be, but he also might not be. His plant being essential infrastructure means that they can reasonably ask for employees to do things that they wouldn't ordinarily.

I guess we'll see.

I've posted my H/C Exchange story. I've also gotten the Wayback Exchange story moving again. I'm not 100% sure that what I'm going to do is a thing the recipient will love, but it fits the prompt and doesn't include any DNWs. I just didn't get a very detailed request this time around, so I'm worried about missing lines that I don't know are there. My intention was to write very conservatively, but that's not what my write brain is giving me right now.

Scott took Cordelia to a concert in Detroit last night. Ben Platt, I think. Cordelia found out about the concert on Friday, on Instagram. We have the impression that the venue thought there wouldn't be many people because tickets sold at the last minute. Someone told Scott that it was because the singer recently lost his grandmother and might have needed to or wanted to be with his family. I think it's possible that the tickets simply weren't on sale earlier. It's also possible that the ticket sales took a hit from the proximity to AP tests. None of Cordelia's friends could go because of that.

Once I knew Scott and Cordelia would be out in the evening, I set up a write-in with a local friend. She got the better part of an exchange assignment done while I edited the H/C story and sweated blood over the Wayback story.

I'm considering signing up for the Turing exchange which is for stories centered on robots/AI. Sign ups end this evening (midnight Central, I think), so I still could. I just hate the process of writing requests. I'm considering nominating for the Nonconathon, but it's also an effort. I don't plan on signing up for it, just pinch hitting and treating, so I'd be nominating things in hopes that someone would be tempted into requesting them so that I could write them. I have some half written stories from last year was thinking that I should nominate those things as I likely could finish them if someone still wanted them.

I looked at the Not Prime Time pinch hits and was kind of relieved that nothing there seemed like a thing I could reasonably attempt. I may use more of last October's prompts to get myself writing when I stall. I'd like to finish the set, but I think there are some I need to swap out because I now look at them and just don't want to write them. Once I've done 31 prompts, I'll select another set. Or maybe write for one of the ancient bingo cards I've got tucked away.

I also have to back up more of my current WIP to the DreamWidth account I use for that. I keep intending to and then seeing the pile getting bigger and more daunting.

My hands are frustrating me because, while they don't hurt as much, the pain when I do things without the splints is sharper and more noticeably attributable to the lack of support. It means that I'm wearing the splints more because the difference is more noticeable. The frustrating part of that is that the splints-- all splints I've ever used on any body part-- hurt, too, just in different ways. I had been doing without at night and when only doing something like typing that shouldn't be a big stress because I really need to rest from the splints. This is no longer such a great idea.

I woke with a headache after about six hours of sleep and couldn't get back to sleep. Caffeine and an Amerge took care of the headache, but going back to bed after wasn't feasible.

My right index finger is hurting again after two days of not, so I don't know what's going on there. I still don't have a good way to remind myself not to move that joint. I tried an Ace bandage on Wednesday, and it only kind of helped. It also made other things hurt because compression shifts pretty much everything in the palm of my hand.

Cordelia's choir concert on Thursday wasn't quite as long as the one in December. I managed not to fall asleep (I didn't really think I would, but I kind of wanted to because I was exhausted).

There was one number that the A Capella Choir did that was actively heading me into migraine territory because they played games with the lighting. My eyes don't like sitting somewhere dark and looking at something bright. They like it even less when the level of light I'm looking at changes. For this number, they started with the stage lights off and brought them up gradually and then took them back down gradually during the course of the song. I think it was supposed to make us think that a day was passing. I kept my eyes closed through most of it, but it's very hard to do that when I'm in a space like that because it feels unsafe.

The nearby middle school had its 7th and 8th grade choirs in the concert, too, and they did some numbers apart from the high school choirs. Some of the middle school kids did solos, and my main take away was that it's horribly unfair to ask a boy that age to try to sing a solo. I also don't think that any of the middle school soloists actually knew how to support a singing breath with their abdominal muscles and diaphragms. I'm a bit sad about that because it's a thing that transfers to any sort of public speaking.

I set out my distance glasses to take with me to the concert but ended up accidentally leaving them behind because I ended up searching for my water bottle at the point when I should have picked them up to take them with me.

I'm thinking to increase my word count goal for the year. I'm at 78.5K words for the year to date, and my goal was 100K. Unless things go utterly pear shaped, I'm going to blow past that by the end of April/beginning of May. I think I'll just go to 150K to allow for me slowing down because that is a thing that could (and probably will) happen. I wrote more than half of what I've got now in January, and I think that will be atypical in terms of words per month. I can change the goal again later if I reach a point where 150K seems too large or too small.

I found out on Wednesday that the LTD review people hadn't received all of what my psychiatrist's office faxed them. The LTD people never compared the page count they were supposed to get with the page count that they should have gotten, so they assumed I just hadn't bothered to do that bit. Fortunately, once the person who called me actually looked at the fax sheet, she knew that that was the problem. I've mailed them a hardcopy of it (they won't accept attachments because I might be trying to infect their systems or some such), and my psychiatrist resent everything. My psychiatrist told me, after, that her fax machine kept trying to pull through everything I'd printed at home as one page (all ten pages of it). Neither of us could figure out why giving that we've got a pretty standard printer and were using standard 8.5 x 11 paper from OfficeMax.

I'm hoping that that's taken care of. It really didn't make the end of the week better.

The choir concert ran about two hours. We got there later than we meant to because of Scott needing to shower. We'd hoped he could manage it before he took Cordelia her dinner, but the cleaning lady wasn't done in the bathroom when Scott needed to start in order to squeeze it in. We were still a good ten minutes before they took the lights down in the auditorium.

Cordelia's choir was first. That's the kids who are taking choir to find out if they like it and/or to get that particular graduation requirement out of the way. They did five or six songs with both classes together; then each of the two classes did a song. Cordelia's class has no tenors or basses; the other class does.

The second choir to perform was, I think, the one that's going to Austria some time between now and the end of the school year. They were wearing gender neutral, matching attire, and it became obvious pretty quickly that the gender neutral part was deliberate. Their set was called 'Coming Out.' I had a brief moment of worry that the teacher/choir director would get fired before I remembered that it's been thirty years since I was in high school. Also, this is Ann Arbor rather than a tiny village (we had three stoplights! All the drivers' ed classes from nearby schools came to our village to practice dealing with stoplights).

They gave flowers to the woman who had made their jackets and trousers. She sewed all of those during the two weeks before the concert and, as the kids noted, doesn't even have a child in the choir.

Scott's parents were a little taken aback by what they considered 'unusual subject matter.' They didn't go so far as to say 'inappropriate,' for which I was grateful. They're both 75-ish and conservative, and they probably said unpleasant things about it when they were in their car on the way home, but that comment was all either of them said in public.

The third choir did a bunch of songs on a theme of motherhood. All of the members wore skirts and, from the sound, were all altos and sopranos. I have no idea how they identified, so I'm not going to say 'were all women.' The choir director asked, at the beginning of the year, that students and parents not make assumptions about that sort of thing. I think I mentioned that at the time because it surprised me in a happy way. It won't make being a queer teen all that much easier, but it makes me hope for actual support for those kids from the school, you know?

The fourth and last choir ( Cut for mention of suicide )

That fourth choir is called the A Capella Choir, and they were the only one of the three that had accompaniment for all of their songs. I was wondering if I'd remembered the meaning of 'a capella' incorrectly. Cordelia says not; she's a little bit offended (in a very 14 year old way) about them calling themselves A Capella while having drums, piano, and violin for their songs.

We all got to bed later than usual. Friday morning, I managed to keep myself going through Cordelia's dermatology appointment but more or less fell over as soon as I got home after. I tried to nap but couldn't actually sleep. I went to bed about 8 p.m. and slept until 1 a.m. Then I was awake until around 4 a.m. then slept for another two or three hours.

I didn't use the Flonase last night. I took a sudafed and a claritin instead. So far, my sinuses aren't freaking out about the change and actually feel better than they did this time yesterday.

My main take away from the concert at Cordelia's school last night is that large marching bands should never, ever play in small, acoustically well designed spaces. I had to cover my ears for all six of their numbers because the sound levels were physically painful. I could still hear the music well enough to follow, but I couldn't handle the noise. It didn't help that it was at the end of the concert, so we'd been in a crowded space for about four hours (there's was a pancake dinner before the concert).

I'd taken Ativan, but it didn't help as much as I'd hoped it would. I think that my stress levels in general are cranked way up. I had reflux issues by halfway through the concert, and it really can't have been what I ate.

The part of the choir that Cordelia's in did one song on their own and then participated in the Hallelujah Chorus and the school song with all of the rest of the choirs. The bulk of the concert was the advanced students singing about an hour of pieces from Handel's Messiah with orchestral accompaniment. (Cordelia complained that a lot of the kids in the orchestra had terrible posture and was pretty judgy about the instructor have allowed those kids to sit where that was obvious.)

We were supposed to hold our applause until the pieces by Handel were done, but by about three from the end, people started applauding. Scott and I agreed it was probably wishful thinking. Not that the performance was at all bad; it was just too damned long when only maybe 1/3 of the parents in the audience had kids in that choir or in the orchestra. (I should note that 'orchestra' here only includes instruments that can't be played while marching, strings and certain types of drums only. Anybody playing any other instrument has to march. I found myself wondering what they'd do with someone who wanted to go on with a 'band' instrument but who was physically unable to march.)

My uterine biopsy results came in yesterday, and everything looks fine. Of course, if things go on as they have, we'll be doing it again in six months. The doctor says that, normally, she'd give me a dose of progesterone to clear things out but that, since that's not an option, all she could do is a D&C. I see that for this level of not-quite-a-problem as kind of like using a high powered rifle to shoot slugs off a rosebush. Overkill and probably harder on the rosebush than just leaving the damned slugs alone.

The other medical tests were mostly good. My A1c is down by 0.1% for no reason I can identify. That leaves it still 0.1% higher than where my doctor wants it. (5.6% is considered normal range. I'm at 5.7%.) My fasting blood sugar was fine. My triglycerides were higher than they should be, but pretty much everything else was where it ought to be.

I have an appointment with a nutritionist in two and a half hours. I really don't want to go because I'm very, very tired and because I really need to finish the UCon preparation. Maybe if I lie down for an hour and and set an alarm? That would give me half an hour to get ready to leave.

I actually managed to get my sister on the phone yesterday for her birthday. I can't remember the last time I called her and didn't end up with her voice mail. She was talking to her son off and on during the conversation (he's four or five years younger than Cordelia), telling him what to do to get their dog to do what he wanted. The first couple of comments in that direction were confusing because they didn't relate to what we were talking about. I'm used to talking to her when she's alone.

She told me that she has found a decent viola that's the right size for Cordelia. One of my sister's regulars at the frame shop she manages collects and refurbishes used string instruments, and she had asked him to keep an eye out for a reasonable viola in Cordelia's size and at a price that we could afford. The instrument in question is half an inch larger than the one Cordelia's been renting and doesn't include a bow, but both Cordelia and the instrument guy feel that half an inch shouldn't be a problem. My sister is paying for the viola and for shipping (she says it's to make up for years of missed birthdays and Christmas presents. I pointed out that she's sent more in that direction than our parents have).

At any rate, returning the rented viola will save us about $18 a month. Cordelia finds playing soothing and has been seeking out music online so that she can try new to her pieces. I think that she will keep playing even without taking orchestra. My sister says that the guy she's dealing with assures her that this is a good quality viola and would be good for taking orchestra again if Cordelia decides that she wants to do that.

I will probably return the viola to Shar when I go to Medequip for the c-PAP related stuff, assuming I can do that this week. They're relatively near each other. I'm not sure it's a distance I'd find walkable, but they're on the same street. I figure I can put my c-PAP into a backpack and carry the viola and gear in my hands.

Part of me wants very much to go back to bed now that Cordelia's off at camp, but I should do laundry, and I'm waiting for a couple of phone calls. Of course, falling asleep would pretty much guarantee the calls coming through, right? I've got about two and a half hours now when sleep would be possible. Later on, it won't be.

I have my music files back. It took a lot of time to get them to my laptop and still longer to figure out how to get iTunes to see them. I still don't have my playlists, and I'm kind of exhausted at the prospect of trying to rebuild them.

I've written about 900 words in the last twenty four hours. I started writing about 10:30 last night (when I needed to be in bed at 11:00). I'm not sure why the words tend to start flowing then. I've written more this morning, but I kind of desperately need more sleep, so I don't know how much more I'll write before I do that. All of the words are on the Not Prime Time story, so that's now over the minimum word count.

I had a headache all night, not bad enough to get up and do something about it but bad enough to be aware of it when I moved. My morning tea and breakfast seem to have either killed it or pushed it below the threshold of awareness.

Scott has purchased some motion sensitive night lights. He put one up just outside our bedroom because he's worried that we'll get hurt when we get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. I hate the damned thing already. He's got it right at my eye level which would also be Cordelia's eye level. That means that, when it comes on, it's a bright flash right in my eyes. I'm sure that problem never occurred to Scott because he's a foot taller than we are. The time I'm in the bathroom is just long enough for it to turn itself off, so it's another startling, painful flash of brightness when I head back to the bedroom.

We've lived here for more than twenty years, and I've never had problems going from bed to the bathroom in the dark, so I feel like Scott's bought a technological solution to a non-existent problem.

Scott and Cordelia both liked Wonder Woman, generally speaking. They didn't have any specifics that they didn't like, but they also didn't have specifics that they out and out loved.

This week is going to be sporadically busy. Tomorrow afternoon, I have a mammogram and an appointment with radiation oncology. My SIL is coming with me. Last year was so horribly stressful that I thought I'd better have company. I don't expect any problems, but... Wednesday evening is our biweekly game night. Thursday, Cordelia's eighth grade graduation is in the morning. My parents are coming for that. In the evening, there's a picnic for all of the eighth grade families. I think there's enough space in there for me not to end up brain fried. I hope so anyway.

I woke this morning with a headache. I think it’s gone now, after a meal and some tea, but it wasn’t fun. I’ve been sneezing off and on all morning, and it’s now more on than off. I wish I could figure out what was going on with that. It does mean that I’m not even going to attempt to nap this morning.

Scott will be working Saturday, not Sunday. I’m not sure why I read his text as saying 'Sunday' because it quite clearly says ’Saturday.' Right now, it’s scheduled as a 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. day, and we’re hopeful that it will stay that way. Cordelia is having friends over this evening, and it would be beyond inconvenient if Scott needed to go to bed at 8:00 given that they like to stay past 10:00.

We all survived the concert. Scott’s parents and I left after Cordelia’s school performed, so we were only there about half an hour after the music began. Students weren’t supposed to leave until after the entire thing was over, so Scott stayed.

The main floor of the auditorium was reserved for the students and teachers. There are two upper levels, the mezzanine and the balcony. I went to the balcony, the third floor, to find four seats together for us while Scott was looking for parking. I suspected that the mezzanine, being lower down, would fill faster, and when I got to the third floor, there were only a scattering of people. The balcony filled to about 3/4 full by the time the event started, so I think getting there early was a good idea.

The balcony is extremely steep and decidedly not a good place for someone with vertigo. I don’t have that, and I still felt a bit like it would be extraordinarily easy to fall (in spite of sitting halfway up). The seats are high backs, higher than the top of my head (I’m 5’2"). There wasn’t a lot of leg room at all.

I spent a lot of time looking at the ceiling in an effort to pretend that I wasn’t surrounded by people. This kind of underlines for me why I don’t tend to go to plays or concerts even though Ann Arbor has many opportunities for each. I had taken an Ativan, but I still felt trapped and tense and not at all happy to be there. Leaving was an immense relief.

They brought the house lights up in between each performance so that the kids could safely get off and on the stage. The two intermissions we saw were about five minutes long, quite enough time for leaving or for finding a seat.

Cordelia’s school went second. The school that went first was the one she would have attended if we hadn’t kept her at her current school. The Clague orchestra quite filled the stage and sounded pretty good (I’m sure that, if I knew anything about this sort of music, I’d find nits to pick, but I don’t, so I didn’t).

Cordelia’s school was second and performed with the orchestra from the other small middle school in the district, and together, they had between half as many and two thirds as many kids as Clague had. They played two pieces. I think the first one was a poor choice because it sounded… weak? Maybe that’s the right word. The sound wasn’t enough to fill the performance space or to make us feel drawn into a smaller space. I felt that the second piece worked better for the space.

Both schools had guests from their school bands, a handful of brasses and woodwinds and a drummer or two. Oddly, one of the pieces that Clague played was on the program later by one of the high schools. I couldn’t help wondering who thought that was a good idea. There were five schools in between, but it’s still comparing a middle school orchestra to a high school orchestra.

My goals for today are a bit of cooking, some laundry, and answering or deleting a lot of email. There’s a library book I would really like to finish (and I think I can) and some library DVDs I’d like to get through (unlikely). I think, though, I might start with a shower and see if that helps the sneezing any. Sometimes, it does.

Drat. I apparently can’t use the tape player in the basement to check these unlabeled tapes. I tried it with one that I was sure had something on it and couldn’t get any sound even though the player was moving the tape along. I’m not sure that I was doing everything correctly. I haven’t used the player in a decade. It’s a combination tape player, CD player, and radio, and I couldn’t find anything on the box itself that would let me switch between modes. That might have been the problem. There’s a remote that could change modes, but it hadn’t been touched in so long that the batteries in it burst. I’m not sure it’s salvageable.

I might have one more option for this, but I’m not certain it will work or that I’m willing to try to find the device I’d need. Maybe my friend will take these mystery tapes as is? Several of them are in the middle of the spool, so there must be something there. I just haven’t the slightest clue what. Finding out seems like it could be fun.