Fa La La La La...

For some reason, there's a major part of my life every holiday season that I rarely talk about. Perhaps because it is something I've done for so long, I never think about my involvement. I sing in my mom's Dickens caroling group, at malls and events, somewhere between 1-3 weekends a year in December. They've been rehearsing in my house since I was 8, and I've been singing with them since I was 13.

This year in particular, it actually is notable that I'm doing this. My schedule is so absurd with student teaching, volunteer soccer coaching, writing about soccer on the side, occasionally trying to spend time at home... add that to the fact that I sang a grand total of two gigs last year and haven't sung in a professional or choral context since then (aside from running a kid's choir at my work, which doesn't really count) and I was thinking, "this is insane, my voice won't survive, I don't have time to drive down there any weekend, why would I do that?" The answer turned out to be money. I haven't been making any as a student teacher and loans only go so far, and inevitably the end of the semester is when that reality starts to set in.

Which is why my Thanksgiving break started with a mad dash to get my voice back to something vaguely resembling good again. The first rehearsals were... rough, to say the least. Not only was I practicing ensemble pieces on my own without any support, I was practicing with a pitch pipe app instead of a piano. The cats were very confused. They kept sitting on the music, which was generally unhelpful and hilarious and made it difficult to focus on the notes.

I powered through, got my voice to a point where I could jump back in to a group and hold my own. Which is good because I sang two three-hour gigs last weekend. And another 7 hours this weekend, one of which is already finished thankfully.

I feel like I had a point to this whole thought, but I have no idea what it was now, hours after I started writing. This is your brain on low sleep, high busyness quota, or something like that.

Until tomorrow.