Return from the Blahs, or I Love Maple Bread Right Now

The cherry trees are in bloom, the weather is warm enough that I can no longer leave my milk on the counter overnight, and I finished my taxes. Welcome, Spring.

 

I'm posting this while at work, but when I get home tonight I'll add photos of random things that I've been doing lately. Uploading photos to Facebook is so tedious. All the tagging and the captioning just takes too long.

 

Yesterday, for the first time in a week, I had company at the office. Teresa left for Australia last week, the day before all the staff changes on April 1^st. The honorably Kim-Chi has returned from her journey to the motherland, so now I have someone with whom to ack ack ack. We're going to prove to the rest of the new staff just how annoying I can be. Tee hee hee and har-de-har all the live long day. Also, I have had coffee but no breakfast. My hands tremble like nervous hamsters.

 

I am on a slow climb up from a serious case of the Blahs. The Blahs are those periods during which one has no motivation to do anything, and so withdraws from society and actively refuses to do anything that could be considered productive or good for oneself. I had a disabling period of blah during most of March. Dishes piled up, dirty laundry was strewn everywhere, I ate in my bed and spent my evenings watching crap on YouTube.

 

Recently, however, I have been doing at least one Very Productive Activity every other day. I did dishes. I did some laundry. I cleaned the newt and fish tanks. I responded to emails. Mind, once I take the time to sit down, usually when I'm too hungry to ignore my stomach anymore, all hope of productivity is lost. I tend to get fixated on things, be it entertainment or food or music, for a period of a month or so. My most recent fixations have resulted in the following: I eat maple bread toast for dinner at least four times per week, supplementing the carbohydrates with fresh mandarin oranges and carrots (or a head of locally grown lettuce, yesterday). I watch clip after clip of daytime dramas from Europe on YouTube while drinking rose wine [in moderation, Mom]. Then I go to bed. Suffice to say that my dreams are full of Dutch, Argentinean Spanish, and evil twins (which I do prefer over zombie apocalypse dreams).

 

In order to fully recover from the Blahs, I need to set a goal that doesn't involve exercising every day or learning Japanese (because that would just be setting myself up for failure). Don't worry, I don't need any suggestions. There's a man at my church who was classically trained as a tenor, and once he learned that I can tickle the ivories a bit he challenged me to play something for him. I worked up Rachmaninoff's "Prelude in G Minor" and played it after Sunday service last summer. It wasn't great, and the man was almost brutally honest about it, but he respected that I at least tried. He was supposed to return in kind. I requested a song in French, because Lordy knows I don't understand Italian.

 

Dear Keith (the tenor in question) travels back and forth between the U.S. and Japan, so there hasn't been an opportunity for him to fulfill his promises of song until now. He's back in town and I put the pressure on. He waffled and tried to get out of it, but I offered to help by playing the accompaniment for Camille Saint-Saens' "Claire de Lune." In fact, I as good as swore that I would work it up in three weeks so that he could sing it on Easter Sunday. There it is, folks. I have a goal: Camille Saint-Saens' "Claire de Lune" for voice and piano. I have until the 24^th to get it under my fingers.