I'm reading three books at once right now: Unhinged by Sarah Graves, which is just a pleasant mystery for reading on the porch after the doings of the day, the newest edition of Guerilla Marketing for work, and What to Eat by Marion Nestle.

What to Eat is an enormous tome. I don't think she's going to say anything new about what a person ought to eat, but if you are interested in economics, agribusiness, and so on, you will find this book fascinating. She begins with the one thing all nutritionists agree on, all the time: fresh produce. Eat it. But she talks about the economics of it, the cold chain, the reason marketing produce isn't worthwhile, why we should choose organic and locally grown produce, why we think fresh produce is expensive (it you think so, reexamine that belief -- the average cost of those five essential servings per day is 64 cents), why we in Hamburger-a-go-go-land don't eat fresh vegetables, and the truly startling information that one third of all the vegetables eaten in the United States are french fries, potato chips, and iceberg lettuce.

I had just heard that farmers at the beginning of the 20th century produced 2000 calories worth of food for every gram of oil used, whereas now that number has switched -- it now takes over 2000 grams of oil for factory farmers to produce one food calorie. The Omnivore's Dilemma put it more succinctly: we might as well just sit down to bowls of petroleum.

But the thing that particularly caught my attention was the explanation of how grocery stores work. Guerilla Marketing works with my own concept of marketing: be very good at what you do, and share that information with your customers.

This is not how grocery stores work. They have byzantine systems that ensure that what you pay them has very little connection with what you receive from them. And they make so little money from the foods that you should eat for health that they are really in the business of selling you unhealthful foods. Oh, and nonfood stuff, though Nestle is not discussing that. Nestle says that the problem of poor nutrition in this country is about the fact that there are no economic benefits to good nutrition. Not even to the insurance companies.

Our marketplaces are as complex as our medical system. Reading about either one makes me feel that it is too complex to do anything at all about.

My vegetable garden, the farmer's market, the local bakery, the meat market -- these things keep me out of the system to a large extent, and that seems good.

However, last night I found myself in a discussion of isolationism and World War II. The people talking were all old enough to remember it, so I kept quiet and listened.

They were talking about Roosevelt's attempts to get the United States to join in the war, and how hard it had been. They were saying that the American attitude of isolationism had been dangerous, and it was fortunate that we had entered the war before it reached "our shores." We never use the expression "our shores" except in the context of war.

I was surprised by this. One man said, "Even when Britain was brought to her knees, people resisted. Where did they think Hitler would go next?"

So when I read about our current system of agribusiness and my mind boggles, I may be entirely wrong to think that I can just opt out of it and that will help in some way. It seems impossible to sustain our economic system as it operates. When I read these things, it seems like spinning plates -- inevitably it will crash. My idea of relying as little as possible on the system may be untenable, just as American isolationism might have been untenable, for all I know.

I suppose this is why it is good to have a novel to read at the same time, in case of excessive mindboggling.

I might have mentioned that I have vacation next week. I believe that I was dithering about what to do with said vacation -- visit one or other of my daughters, hike the 187-mile trail here in the neighborhood, clean the garage...

I learned a day or two ago that #2 son, who had been my intended companion on whatever adventures we decided on, has finals that week. This was a grave shock. We have been hearing about June 1st being the last day of school for months. So I am the only one of the family with that week off.

Oh, and there was the day a couple of weeks ago that I learned that I have to work on June 2nd, and sing a solo on June 10th (I wanted that solo, though), so that I would not have even one full weekend of vacation.

Then, just now, I had a call from the carpet restretching guy.

If you read my blog and have total recall, you will know that the boys' bedroom furniture has been in the living room for about a week. The carpet guy wanted me to know that he won't get here for another week.

This means that the midpoint of my vacation will consist of staying at home waiting for the carpet guy.

I am feeling very sorry for myself. I had just about adjusted to the idea of having a quiet week at home, with perhaps some day trips of some kind, and now I have the first half of the week in a continued state of being surrounded by random piles of furniture, the midpoint hanging around waiting for carpet guys (something which we have actually been doing since last Thursday)...

Maybe I will clean the garage after all.

Ozarque sent me a copy of Mother Earth News with a recipe in it for shampoo. I had all the ingredients on hand, so I whipped up a batch, and it is a very good shampoo. It leaves the hair soft and clean.

Here's the recipe:

10 ounces water
1-2 ounces liquid soap (I get mine from Brambleberry -- you can also get it at the health food store)
1 teaspoon glycerin or almond oil (I used almond oil)
20-35 drops essential oil

First boil up some herbs in the water (I used peppermint from my garden) and make a nice strong infusion -- that is to say, tea. Mix everything up. I used honey fragrance oil (from Sweetcakes) and went around all day smelling like mint and honey, but you could go with aromatherapy blends or use lavender for its antibacterial properties.

Why would you want to make your own shampoo? Shampoo is cheap. It seems hardly worth your time.

Well, for one thing, cheap shampoo is cheap because it is made from water and small amounts of cheap petroleum byproducts. It is then packaged in bottles made from petroleum and shipped -- using lots of fuel to transport that water and packaging -- to your store.

For another, it is cheaper yet to make your own. This is sort of like baking. If you never bake, and have to go out and buy butter, flour, sugars, oats, vanilla, cinnamon, nuts, raisins, and eggs before you can make any cookies, then you would find it cheaper to buy cookies from the girl scouts. If you have the stuff on hand, it is cheaper to bake your own. For me, grabbing the herbs from my garden and the tiny quantities of active ingredients from my crafts cupboard makes this excellent shampoo a bargain.

But just as having the basic ingredients for baking on hand makes it possible to bake lots of things, having some personal care ingredients on hand means you can make your own lip balm, hand or body lotion, foot scrub, bubble bath, and so forth any old time you need some. And the prices on those things can be staggering.

Making your own also means that you can give it the scent you want, or none at all. You can use herbs that have some healthful properties, if you are knowledgeable about that. If you are going to use collections of exotic herbs, you might want to get some ph paper to make sure that your shampoo ends up slightly acidic, since that is best for the resilience of your hair. I wouldn't worry about any herb traditionally used for hair care -- mint, lavender, rosemary, chamomile, sage.

Just in case you are now filled with a burning desire to make this shampoo, I must warn you not to make more than this at one time. Even though you boil the water and herbs, there are always chances of bacteria growth if you leave plant matter sitting around a long time. So make it and use it.

This has made me think about how my mother was telling me the other day that my brother doesn't trust anything homemade. Fresh eggs, homebrewed ale, stuff like that makes him nervous. He prefers to have things that have been made in a factory.

He wasn't there at the time, so we can only speculate on his reasoning. Perhaps he thinks that the government regulates commercial goods so that they are guaranteed to be safe. Or maybe he figures there are chemists checking everything out and making sure that the setting in which the stuff is made is clean and wholesome.

A very little research will disabuse a person of that notion.

  Here are the results of my PSD. The tank is B3383 in a cotton sateen. It called for purchased bias binding at the neck and arms, and I had already done the neck when it struck me that it would look much better with self-fabric binding. I cut bias binding for the arms, but was too lazy to redo the neck.

This is a very easy pattern. I cut it too large to begin with and had to redo the seams, and I added the step of cutting the bias strips, but it still took under two hours to finish completely.

It is not going to become a favorite pattern of mine, though. With no shaping at all, it tends toward the unibosom effect on me, and might be a better choice for someone with a more boyish figure. It will, however, be a great layering piece for the summer, as cool as a T-shirt but a little dressier.

This is piece # 5 of my SWAP Part II. You can see it on the right with pieces 1 and 2. 

The shirt is a wearable muslin. I have a lovely piece of linen and had thought of making a camp shirt to wear over the tank or under the jacket or just by itself. This is S7231, and it turned out fine and I am in fact wearing it today. However, I cannot deny that it is boxy, and will be just as boxy if I make it in linen.

It looks fine with the solid color pieces of the SWAP, and I am proud of myself for having made all those buttonholes. I think that I have the hang of it, and will no longer have to reject patterns on the grounds that they have buttons.

My sons assure me that this fabric is goofy, and they may be right. It is a Mary Engelbreit fabric, part of a quilting cotton group from many years ago, and I am not going to claim that it is chic. Still, if you can't wear goofy camp shirts in the summer, when can you?

I recognize the weakness of that argument, I assure you.

After the sewing, I got together via Instant Messaging with #2 daughter and we finished up our story contest entry.

The Mt. Horeb Mustard Museum (I am not making this up) has an annual writing contest. last year it was a mystery, and #2 daughter and I were third runners up. This year it is a romance. I don;t read many romance novels, but I have read enough to think that I know the rules of the genre.

Essentially, there must be a hero and a heroine, and there must be some circumstance that keeps them apart. The whole book is the laying out of the circumstance and the overcoming of the obstacle.

Our hero and heroine are kept apart largely through being too busy and preoccupied by things like biofuel technology and gangsters to get around to falling in love.

That may not be a good enough working out of the formula to get us a place in the winners' circle. However, we do have all kinds of cool details, including the mysterious journal of a 19th century mustard farmer, a necklace that everyone thinks is just costume jewelry, and a cave.

Now I have to clean it up, print it out, fill out the forms, and get it in the mail. I hate doing that kind of stuff, but the deadline is too close for me to wait any longer. Hi ho, hi  ho.

  I came back to share my walk with you.

This is not the park I usually walk in, but the larger park a few miles further from my house.

The Empress was telling us recently about when they lived in Connecticut, they decided to take their daughter to the park one day and asked where they might find one.

Local people directed them to a bit of grass about ten feet square. They were nonplussed.

I grew up with big city parks that might house a zoo, a couple of museums, and a bandstand.

Our parks are between the two.

Large parts of the parks are just the usual scenery -- mostly deciduous mixed forest in a temperate to subtropical climate. I suppose there will come a time when our backyards will no longer look like that, and we will be very glad of the parks. Sigh.

In the meantime, the parks are very nice for cookouts and big frisbee games and public sings and free concerts. The symphony has a few concerts in this particular park, and Shakespeare in the Park takes place every few years.

There are also outdoor movies here in the summertime. This park has a swimming pool, and they usually show "Jaws" and things like that here while people swim.

There is also a castle in this park.

When my kids were little, we used to come here to play, and then go to the other side of the park where the playground is.

Now the boys come here for basketball mostly. There are also courts for tennis and a baseball field as well as walking and biking paths.

If you are not feeling athletic, you can play chess at the picnic tables.

The walking trail in this park is a nice paved mile loop around the perimeter of the park. A very civilized little walk, slightly hilly, with lots of opportunities to meet your friends and admire their dogs or children. Not at this hour of the morning, though.

One of my few memories of my father (he died when I was six years old) is a picnic we had in a park. A box of doughnuts and chocolate milk, as I recall. I have always liked breakfast picnics, but it is not common to see people out early with their children.

They are missing something.

There are also nice gardens along the path.

Our town wins prizes for its public gardens. Not bragging, you understand, just mentioning.

I have nothing to do with this. I don't even participate in the annual drive to fancy up the front gardens before the judges come around.

I just admire the results.

Here is the creek that the park was built around. Most of our local parks are built around creeks, for some reason. And it is customary to put big chunks of concrete into the creek.

I suppose this is for the convenience of the children and dogs who come down here to play.

However, there may be some important engineering reason for it, for all I know.

I heard a lecture once on the engineering of roads. It was not very exciting, but some bits of it stuck in my memory. It was surprising how many things about the building of roads turned out not to be aesthetic or practical matters, but issues connected with the continual heaving about of the earth, which always seems pretty sluggish to me. To engineers, it is like a bucking bronco, and building anything is like saddling the wretched creature.

In spite of this, we have enormous flower-shaped benches from which to watch the ball games.

There are bleachers, too, of course, but they were not interesting enough to get a picture.

If you only walk a mile, and stop for this many pictures, it might not count as half an hour of exercise. However, it is a holiday.

I will now attempt to  have my Personal Sewing Day (PSD) in spite of all the bedroom furniture's being in the living room. This will require resourcefulness, I fear.

Yesterday began with church, with delivery of Pampered Chef items, so I got to feel like the Good Fairy or Santa Claus or something, flitting about with my parcels for everyone. Then we had lunch with my parents and caught up with all the family news -- always nice.

In the afternoon, we came home and accomplished some serious lolling and knitting. I am doing the waist shaping on Cherry Bomb. This is supposed to keep it from being sacklike, a fashion faux pas. Another popular fashion faux pas is the Mom Jeans. Mom jeans have high waists, light wash, and tapered legs. I have owned my personal pair of Mom Jeans for a decade or so and wear them on all non-work occasions. I even used to wear them to church, back before I repented and started trying to dress well. Or at least better. But now they have a hole in them.

You know how after years of wear the knees become very thin, and then just split. That is what happened.

Naturally, I am wearing them today anyway. I plan to walk one of the greenways in town this morning, and then have a PSD punctuated by a bit of a feast for Memorial Day, so obviously I am not going to fool around with anything but jeans.

But I may have to buy a new pair of jeans. If so, I am resolved not to buy Mom Jeans again. I don't really get what's wrong with them, to tell you the truth. I don't think they look any worse on me than any other pair of pants. I am old enough that I remember the days before women's jeans. We had to go buy men's jeans,which had sizes like 28/30 and fitted only in a couple of spots on the body. If you bought a pair that fitted your bottom, then you had several inches of looseness at the waistline, which was how I wore mine. Some girls bought them to fit the waist, and had to call in other girls from the dorm to help them zip the things up past their bottoms.

We looked pretty bad in those. The advent of jeans actually cut for girls was a big exciting thing.

I will have to get my daughters to help me with the buying of jeans. Not today, however.

I worked with JJ yesterday. I hadn't seen her in quite a while, and was looking forward to it, since she is very funny and different from anyone else I know. However, she had just learned that she owes $8000 to the IRS, and that really will knock the antic humor right out of a girl, so we had quite a serious day.

We did an email campaign. You don't want to hear about that.

It is Memorial Day weekend. That Man and The Empress went to a family reunion-cum-camping trip, but we are staying home in the rain with our living room full of bedroom furniture. The blowers are gone, the plumbing is fixed, but the carpet cleaners won't come until Tuesday. This puts paid to my thought of having a Second Annual Sewing Marathon. Actually, that plan had flaws, since I worked yesterday and will have church and family lunch with my parents today.

Fortunately, we are having lunch in a restaurant. The great Peg Bracken recommends having people over when you are remodeling or otherwise have your house torn up, because they will think it is gallant of you and have low expectations of your housekeeping, but I would feel inhibited. I feel inhibited in the living room even all by myself. It is like being in the middle of a garage sale or something, and I was very dismayed that we would still be like this for the holiday weekend, but such is life.

Memorial Day weekend is the official start of the summer. One of them, at least.  There is also the last day of school, and I suppose the vernal equinox. I have another week of work and #2 son has another week of school, and then we will have vacation. Directly after my vacation, I will have a change in schedule, so that will be the beginning of the new season.

I will be working with the Youth Choir at church. In between the Youth Choir and handbell practice is a summer women's Bible study on "Living Beyond Yourself." I have been invited to join that, and I intend to do so. My Tuesday class is over for the summer, and the Summer Reading Challenge (beginning June 1st, so you still have time to sign up) hardly counts as study, so I will benefit from that opportunity. It is a group of women whom I know a little bit and would like to know more.

I have had "Make grownup friends" on my yearly list of goals for several years now -- since the year my daughters grew up and moved away. I've been successful with it each year, but I think it is worth repeating. It is easy to lose touch with friends if you are busy and don't make it a priority. It is easy to let your family be your whole social circle. It is easy to be mere acquaintances with people you like for years on end. And it is not always easy to make friends once you are an adult. You can't go to bars and pick up women to be friends with.

In addition to these intellectual and musical adventures, I am going to do a 12-week "Fit for Life" program at my gym, since I always have trouble keeping up with healthy habits in the summer. And then Blessing has persuaded me to work with her through a workbook that promises to teach the reader how to be "a wild and succulent woman." We have not seen this workbook, but the idea appeals to her a lot and I am always up for adventures.

I should therefore end the summer a fit, well-read, wild and succulent woman who lives beyond herself, with improved musical skills.

Usually I end the summer a bit of a wreck. This summer will be worse, since I will have a couple of computer hours every day followed by a drive to an eight-hour dose of back to school and another drive, at rush hour, to my house where I will be met with "What's for dinner?"

I have already decided to put a lot of meals in the freezer before this begins. There is a book called Once a Month Cooking that lets you put a whole bunch of meals in your freezer in one day, and I have this mega cooking session on my calendar.

All those things are for the future. Today is one of the best kinds of summer days. It is raining softly, the flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, it is in the 70s, and the outside world is just generally cooperating.

Everything good you're heard about May is true.

  I should clarify that my quarrel with the guys in my house is not about what they eat. Sure, I would like my sons to choose healthy food all the time. I would also like them to go to church, sing in the choir, and clean their rooms regularly without being reminded.

Let us return to the real world. The thing is that we eat together. Breakfast and dinner, and lunches on weekends, are all family meals. So what they eat, I eat, and vice versa. I feel that they get enough junk food from school day lunches, and could eat healthy food without harm for two meals a day. They disagree.

Now, I have tried a divide-and-conquer approach. I bought frozen sausage biscuits from the Schwan's man for  them, so that I could have steel cut oats and raisins for breakfast and they could microwave themselves some saturated fat and simple carbs. This worked well for a couple of days, and then they began agitating for waffles and banana bread.

I have also tried compromise. I would make quesadillas with both whole-grain and white flour tortillas, so they had a choice. I would serve beef one day and fish the next. I would put small amounts of vegetables into a recipe. They saw this as evidence that they were winning, and were all the more adamant the next day.

I have also said, "This is how the doctor says I should eat, and if you don't like it, you can fix your own meals." They tell me that I am an unnatural mother. Also that it is wasteful for me to cook things they will not eat.

What my boys would like me to do is to make waffles and sausage for them, and cook steel-cut oats for myself. They don't care whether or not I eat cookies, as long as I keep them supplied. I have informed them that I am not willing to cook two meals at a time.

 But if I am honest, I must admit that if I bake them cookies, I will eat cookies. If I make them waffles and sausage, I will eat that instead of my nice oatmeal. If we order in pizza, I will eat it. 

I read once about a conference of nutritionists where they set out plates of fresh fruit and plates of chocolate chip cookies, and the cookie plates emptied long before the fruit. Humans like meatitude and sweetitude. For most of our history, that was not an issue, since those things were not available most of the time. Folks had their porridge and went out to work long hours of manual labor, and if they got the chance for a feast, they could eat freely and enjoy it without giving their lipids profiles a thought.

Of course, they also generally died before they got old enough to worry about it.

Things are different for us, because we are surrounded by readily-available lavish  foods all the time, and have to make special efforts to come by any hard physical work. In the absence of alternatives, we can certainly enjoy eating only fruits and vegetables, whole grains, lean meats, and nonfat dairy products. These foods are good, and they taste good when prepared well. As long as they don't have to compete for our attention with French pastry, we don't have to feel deprived when we eat only these foods.

Unfortunately, my boys do not agree. My husband howls, "I need FAT!" And it is true, actually, that he does. The doctor told him to eat ice cream. They no longer even test his cholesterol, since he has the lipid profile of a 16 year old.

And of course my boys are engaged in hard physical work or play for much of their day. #1 son's summer job is gardening and maintenance. #2 son is a gymnast. At 15 and 18, they can certainly eat whatever they want without any immediate health concerns.

They may have gotten lucky with their genes, too, and ended up with their dad's tendency rather than mine.  So there is an element of truth to their claims that I am  being selfish when I cook healthy foods. "I would rather you had high triglycerides," #2 son has confided, "than that we would have to eat that stuff."

So this is the food conflict.

Today I am going to work, and everyone else has the day off. I can take my whole wheat peanut butter sandwich and carrot sticks, and they can eat whatever they want, and we won't have to quarrel over it again till dinner time.

  Yesterday I spent the day preparing for the upcoming workshops, with various plumber and insurance adjuster interruptions.

Today and tomorrow I will be at the store.

I will be nurturing a fantasy involving coming home to find that the blowers have been removed, the carpets cleaned, and the furniture put back into the bedrooms (which will of course be a marvel of tidiness, since we took everything out of them).

Oh, and someone will have gone grocery shopping and done the laundry that piled up while the plumbing was hors de combat.

I know it is unlikely, but the thought of it will sustain me.

The workshops are filling up, business is perking up, The Empress allowed as how the website seems to be driving traffic to the store even if the online orders aren't pouring in, and the gardens are waking up from their unusually long winter slumbers.

So, once I tore myself away from the computer and fed the family ("Whole grain pasta again!" they shouted crossly. "You're stealing our childhoods!" Though #2 son admitted that the fresh hot whole-grain bread was good. #1 son continued to maintain that I was starving them. However, he did, when I said, "You need to quit being rude and disrespectful to me," say, "Okay," so it could have been worse. The continual battle at our house over healthy food has been affected by my stress level, which has been reaching the point at which I say, "Oh, what the heck, eat hot dogs and pizza and ice cream," so that I have slid back considerably in the battle, in addition to gaining a few pounds. I had gotten them to where they no longer complained about whole grains, saving their fire power for vegetables and fish, but I have lost that beachhead. Or whatever military metaphor would be correct there. I have also obviously lost control of my parentheses here. I had better start that sentence over)...

Once I had torn myself away from the computer and fed the family, I went to my bedroom with a book and knitting.

I had tried the porch first, but had been eaten alive by mosquitoes. My bedroom, though, is not filled with furniture from other rooms, so it is a bit of a haven.

I finished up the first skein for the front of Cherry Bomb, and thought about the words of Barbara Walker.

If you are a knitter, you probably have at least one of Barbara Walker's stitch collections on your shelf. Many of the people who style themselves designers actually just take one of those stitches, knit up a rectangle of it, and call it a pattern. (I have two copies of the first collection, myself, and would be happy to swap one of them with someone who has an extra copy of one of the others. Uh-oh, parentheses getting out of hand again...)

Anyway, Barbara said that you should never knit a garment that was completely plain. Everything you knit, she said, should have some extra touch of color or texture or design that a machine could not do.

I am no longer sure that she is right, now that I have learned to think in terms of wardrobe and wearability. But her words were on my mind. Cherry Bomb is plain stockinette. It is designed with garter stitch edgings, something I consider a mistake. So I replaced the bottom edging with ribbing, and was planning to do the same with the top edgings.

Thinking of Barbara's words, though, I contemplated alternatives. A picot edge?  A thin crocheted lace edging?

On the Bijoux Blouse, I replaced the garter stitch with seed stitch, which made a very pretty texture, but Cherry Bomb has just four rows of edging, which isn't enough to get the full effect with seed stitch.

The point of edgings, by the way, is to avoid the rolling edge that plain bound-off stockinette gives you. A couple of years ago, some designer were just leaving the rolling edge and calling it a design feature, but mostly you want something more finished looking. Garter stitch was of course designed to make a stretchy top for your stockings (which were made in stockinette, or stocking stitch as they say in the UK), and doesn't make a firm edge at all. And ribbing is the obvious, standard finishing, but it hardly counts as some special touch, does it?

A little time with my Barbara Walker compendium is obviously called for.

If you ever find yourself in some predicament involving plumbing or other home repair issues, you may find it cheering to read the novels of Sarah Graves. Her heroine not only has worse plumbing problems than I or anyone else I've ever known, but also finds dead bodies while she spackles. So you feel better by comparison.

I don't find that I feel better by comparison when I contemplate the worse problems of other real people. My sadness on their behalf gets in the way, not to mention the fact that you don't really feel happier about not having functional floors just because you know there are people who have no ceiling either, and then you also have to feel guilty about your lack of appreciativeness on top of not having functional floors. But fictional characters, that's different. I can definitely feel good about the fact that my house might have flooded and the plumbers still haven't finished, but hey, there weren't any dead bodies in it at the time.

I did spend some time yesterday reading and knitting and reminding myself that things could certainly be worse. The ladies at Book Club were very supportive, too. I did not have the chance to do any sewing, since the sewing table is squashed between mattresses and desks and the place where it lives -- electric outlet and all -- is occupied by an enormous noisy blower.

I did do some thinking about my SWAP.

Marji finished her SWAP for the contest, and it looks great. I don't know why her woven shells look so good, when mine look as though I had pulled a flour sack over my head. Well, except that she sews much better than I do. You can see all the contestants' SWAPS right here.

My SWAP got derailed in early spring. There is an official SWAPalong going on over at sewingpattenrreview and it has links to all kinds of story boards, in case you want some inspiration. Excellent fiberosity blogger Erika B. is taking part and giving details at her blog, so you could also check out her summer wardrobe. It is looking good. This SWAPalong runs from May 1 to July 31, and I had a split-second of thinking about joining in, seeing as how I had only made three pieces -- that is, the number I would have finished in May if I had started May 1 and not had so many parties and visits instead of sewing. It only lasted for a split second.

Next came musical adventures. We got a good plan together for the youth choir, and the real choir director agreed to order music and scope out percussion instruments for us. We have our to-do lists ready, and that is half the battle.

I have reached the point in bell choir at which I can play the majority of the notes at the right time as long as I am only playing middle C. In choir, we are singing "Down to the River to Pray." (Read about it from a musical point of view here.) I love this song. I have sung the solo before, and I fancy that I sing it well. So when the director asked whether anyone would like to sing the solo, I leapt right in there. There was about one second's opportunity, and I heard people drawing in breath preparing to speak, and I jumped in with my desire to sing it before anyone else had a chance.

I don't usually behave this way. When solos are assigned, I nearly always get the alto solos, and sometimes the soprano and tenor ones, too. If anyone else actually wants to sing a solo, I encourage them to take it. My position is normally that I will do whatever I am asked to do in the way of singing,  but only if no one else wants it.

Not in this case. I love that song.

Oh, well.

After choir, Partygirl and I went for a walk in the park. I had walked on the treadmill yesterday morning, but that is different. You're walking up artificial hills at speed, making sure to be red-faced and bug-eyed by the end of your thirty minutes. Partygirl and I just moseyed along enjoying the sunset and chatting about... hmm, let me see... annulment, gallbladders, florists, vases, weddings, smoking, graduation, aging, kitchen utensils, and the underground economy of women.

It was a nice day, overall.