May Recap

 

Another breathtakingly fast month down here in northeast Texas. May is over before we really had a chance to get acquainted.

 

Other doings in the month were easily overshadowed by the high school graduation of Little One. My oldest daughter, a mere three-and-a-half years old when I started the blog. And who’s supplied more fodder for it than anything else, save the books I read I suppose.

 

We truly asked a lot from her when we moved 1,500 miles across country last July, a month before the start of her senior year in high school. She had to abandon friends she new for years and a comfortable school she’d been attending since sixth grade. Yet she survived, and even thrived. During the past ten months we visited a half-dozen colleges, and we’re overjoyed with her selection, as well as her future career as a teacher. She’s also started working in a trendy little bistro a few miles away and has reached out to another girl to room with her in the fall, who also hails from glorious New Jersey.

 

So family flew in and we had a long weekend of partying in her honor. Her graduation was at the Dallas Cowboy’s practice facility, and afterwards we booked a private room in a nearby eatery. Patch created a slide show of her big sister’s life to play on the big screen monitor above the dining table, from babyhood onto senior year. This was preceded and followed by gatherings at our home. All around, a good time was had by all.

 

May was also bittersweet in a related way: Little One played her final two concerts of her career. The penultimate at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra at the beginning of the month, blogged about earlier here, and the final just two weeks later. No longer shall goosebumps do a conga line up and down my arms as I listen to the symphonic sounds of the band she is in, aided and abetted by her clarinet skills. And to add insult to injury, Patch gave her final performance, too, in her middle school band as she decided she does not want to continue with the saxophone.

 

The wife has been flitting about across the country. She had a weeklong sales meeting in Los Angeles (hmm, I had originally typed “Lost Angeles”) mid-month. Today she and Little One are flying up to New Jersey for the latter’s prom at her old school. Two weeks after that the Mrs. is taking a work trip to Paris, France, a little over a decade since we both visited the City of Light.

 

Early in the month I moved my office upstairs, one floor above where it’s been for the first nine months down here. Smaller, but it has a powerful ceiling fan and more privacy, plus I’m closer to the printer. The job is coming along just fine. Each month it gets a little less stressful as I master my tasks and expand my sphere of influence at the corporation. In the process of moving, however, we decided to put a beloved desk out to the curb, alongside a dresser, a mattress, and a boxspring. I needed Patch’s muscle to help my old carcass get everything out the door.

 

Reading-wise I put away six books this month if you include finishing War and Peace, which I started mid-February. Let’s see … a UFO book, two science fiction paperbacks, a math book, and a true crime tell-all. Oh, and I read Tennessee Williams for the first time – A Streetcar Named Desire. This was almost its own phase in May. First Little One had to read it for an AP English class, then she passed it on to Patch, who devoured it then wholeheartedly pleaded with me to read it. Last Saturday we all watched the 1951 Marlon Brando – Vivian Leigh flick. Man, how my girls hated Stanley!

 

I also walked a whole bunch of times – maybe ten or twelve times, a mile-and-a-half each time – but I’m getting to the sad old age where walking alone does not melt away the belly fat. I gave up booze, I’m doing my cardio … looks like I’ll have to substitute salads for pasta and fruit for ice cream. Ugh. But all my shirts are getting uncomfortably tight, and I do have a certain vanity, if not a certain desire to see grandchildren.

 

On a strange side note, I have started listening to an unusual form of music, a type I’ve never listened to before. Not sure if it’ll stick, but I’ve been listening to it at night and when walking for nearly two weeks now. Care to guess what it is? It’s not classic rock, metal, grunge, jazz, jazz fusion, classical, or opera, all genres of music I’ve spent weeks and months and years immersed in. I don’t want to mention it just yet in the event this falls under the file “Passing Fad.” But if I stick with it and learn about it and really begin enjoying it beyond the curiosity phase, I’ll definitely blog in depth about it.

 

Well, that’s the May Recap. A fast month with A LOT of heavy duty events. Hopefully June will be a tad more relaxed or a tad less busy, or both.

 

May! You’re one of my favorites! Next year, stop on by when you’re not in a hurry and we’ll shoot the breeze.