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Marching Music Day 2023
Today is Marching Music Day, of all things. I did my fair share 🎷 of that way, way back when. Hopefully, it’s not raining on your parade today, wherever you are.
Look Up
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow. ~Gilbert K. Chesterton
I don’t remember getting rained on when I was in the marching band, but I definitely remember marching in the rain when I was in the Air Force.
Honestly, it’s not that bad. They give you covers to put on your hat and the uniform raincoat was decidedly waterproof. It even had a fuzzy liner you could zip in if you knew it was going to be cold.
Rainbows are nice, but groundwater and flourishing farmland is even better.
March is given to rain just as much as snow. In the slow transition out of ❄️ Winter ❄️, we get the sort of temperatures I find relatively comfy.
Frankly, I’m comfortable from the 20s on up to the mid-50s. Much above 55 and I’m boiling.
I wonder if my tolerance for heat will scale up with my age. If so, I might want to move to Florida when I get to be my parents’ age.
Nah
I can’t even imagine being cold when it’s cold by normal people’s standards and I’d feel kind of weird being the owner and CEO of Nerdsylvania Publishing if I wasn’t in Pennsylvania.
Whatever comes, I try to face it with a smile and a smidgen of hope. I hope you do, too.
Marching 🌹 Bands
Marching Bands of the 2019 Tournament of Roses Parade – January 1, 2019
It’s been quite some time since I played saxophone or marched in a band. It was fun while it lasted, but I had other interests in high school.
The band teacher at my elementary school was a phenomenally nice man and so was the band teacher at my junior high school. I’m sure the band teacher at my high school was too, but he scared the crap out of me. Dude looked like the devil. Put me right off of being in the band.
It didn’t require a hard push. I’d much rather have played D&D with my friends or hung around watching Ultraman and Star Blazers.
Sorry, that’s just how I roll.
Frankly, one of the perks of the house I grew up in was that parades always went directly in front of us. We could plant some lawn chairs on the front sidewalk and just wait for the show.
Utterly fantastic.
When it was too cold to go out for a parade, there was usually one on TV going on somewhere. Whether it was the Macy’s Day Parade or the Tournament of Roses or even the Mummers, the holidays weren’t the holidays without a parade to gawk at.
Doing It Right
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. ~John Updike
So, as much as I stopped enjoying my participation in public performing arts, I haven’t stopped enjoying my writing.
Having the time to do so? That’s another matter altogether.
I’ve been terribly busy since I finished Merry 🔔 Bells, and it really curdles my creative juices.
When all of your waking thought is distilled into writing code and solving software conundrums, it’s quite difficult to get any writing done.
What writing I can do is currently restricted to getting my Christmas All The Time monthlies together. Hopefully, if I can finally be done with this one huge project at work, I’ll have time and mental bandwidth to get those cranked out and scheduled.
All the while, The Sentinels Book One is still simmering in my psyche. Maybe a really long night’s sleep and absolutely nothing nagging at my attention will give me the clarity to figure out how to be both a plotter and a pantser, but that’s not going to be anytime soon.
I’ve got tons of deliverables at work and on Christmas All The Time. I won’t be able to have the kind of mental relaxation to think about anything else until those are done. I know I won’t be able to concentrate and knuckle down on the Christmas articles until I get the work items done.
Probably should have given up Catholic Guilt for Lent…
That’s is for the weekend. I hope you get some marching band music in your life. Those kids practice hard and it’s not easy to keep in step and play music at the same time. I know from experience…