Hello blog, I've missed you

There are times when I say to myself "I should write that on my blog," and then I think "oh that's so boring. Who'd want to know about that?"

There's performance anxiety here, can you feel it?

This weekend was a typical gray, overcast Midwest weekend. We eked into the low 40's for about fifteen minutes, and then the weather decided we'd had too much fun and it started to snow. All of my southern Facebook friends posted photos of themselves wearing shorts and wondering if they should go swimming since it was only 78 degrees. I decided I hated all my southern-living Facebook friends and hid them for a while. That'll teach them.

I whipped out to the grocery store on Friday. I managed to use two whole coupons and spend $180 in food (for two weeks). At first I thought I should have gotten more for next to nothing, and then I came to the real conclusion that I didn't want to buy any of the things that I could get for next to nothing, and dammit I was buying what I wanted.

It was grocery catharsis and it felt GOOOOOD. I bought salmon and fresh mozzerella and GOOD bread and ORGANIC cereal. OMG. Who knew actually shopping for what you want could feel so good? Who needs a stay-cation? Get me to a Jewel!

(In retrospect that sounds pretty terrible for a super couponing fan, but sometimes you just say screw it.)

We got an email last week from my daughter's orchestra teacher with a recording of the kids playing something terribly complicated in preparation for this weekend's District-wide orchestra festival. It was pretty obvious he was sending this out as blackmail to get the kids to practice more.

No, seriously, I think we should encourage our kids, but let's not sugar coat this and give them all a goodie bag for showing up: they sucked. At one point a dear friend of mine listened to them play and mused they'd only possibly be ready if for the next week they all spent 40 hours in private lessons. Possibly.

In a panic I dashed off an email to the orchestra director begging to know what we could do to avoid the inevitable train wreck that was about to occur before a captive audience of parents who'd only two years ago banded together to save said orchestra program and raise nearly $200,000. I had a vision of two hundred parents shouting WTF? in unison.

I didn't get a reply until the day of the concert, when I was assured by the director that they sounded better (aka all the other kid's parents went Tiger Mother on their asses), and low and behold, the orchestra gods smiled upon us and they did not suck on Saturday and actually sounded pretty good. The violins, I don't know what piece they were playing, but the cellos, they rocked.

We had good hair. Just in case.