Category Archives: parenthood

memories, music, parenthood Leave a comment

Contest Season

My son will be performing at his first OMEA marching band competition this evening. One of the judges is a friend of a friend, according to the contest info sheet. He wouldn’t know me from Adam, but I recognize his name, at least. (One of my college roommates, Mary, joked that I was taking so long to get my Bachelors that I must be on the Proczyk Plan.)

Thinking of contest reminded me of the lead-up to one of my own competitions in high school, back in the early 1990’s. I clearly remember Mr. Wardeska pacing the band room, repeating over and over, “I can’t believe I’m going to be judged by Michael Cesario!” It all turned out awesome, as Mr. Cesario was impressed with the uniform design and the cohesiveness of the show, if I recall correctly.

I’m super proud of my son’s band, and super impressed that they’ve put together a contest show without regular after-school rehearsals. Tonight will be their first of two competitions this season, with the second being next weekend. No matter what rating they come out with tonight, I hope they’re proud of themselves.

I just hope the second trombone from the left isn’t the biggest tick tonight…

mental health, parenthood, the ongoing saga of my job Leave a comment

Week 15, 2026: Where My Head At?

I haven’t been regularly blogging for a while now, and it’s becoming more challenging for me to go back and find when a thing happened. Used to be that my blog was a digital scrapbook of sorts that I could access from anywhere, in parallel with Flickr.

So, as a gift to Future Me, here’s a brain dump of stuff that went on during the week ending 11 April 2026.

Stuck to a permission slip is a yellow sticky note with a hand-drawn piano keyboard. Above it are the words "Major scale" and the letters WWhWWWh to explain whole-steps and half-steps. Below the keyboard drawing is written the phrase "Triads on major scale" and the Roman numerals I ii iii IV V vi vii to denote major and minor chords.
Connor is showing an interest in music theory, so I spent some time before bed one evening explaining the relationship between triads and the major scale.
My hair is finally long enough to pull back and style, so I experimented with this one day before work.

I’ve been keeping a weekly planner/journal for several years, and I find it interesting to go back through prior months or years and see what ideas I had for vacations or what meals I experimented with or what internal crises felt hard enough that I needed to take pen to paper to figure them out. What’s also interesting is looking at how much I update for each day; it tends to slow down over the course of a week, and I can totally tell where I transitioned from actively present to treading water.

This week, that transition started on Tuesday and I was in full-on phoning-it-in mode by Wednesday.

Continue reading →