Saturday 2nd February - Warning! warning! Overload alert...

I've had a really fun day today. Madness, utter madness, to take on an extra day's work with everything else going on, but when a colleague asked me, I couldn't resist. She's great to work with, and I knew she'd do all the serious planning, and do it really, really well, so I said "yes" to helping to run a Percussion Workshop for nearly thirty young children, aged seven, give or take a year.

Whoah! On Thursday I checked my diary, and discovered that the Workshop, so far in the future when I agreed to help, was the day after tomorrow! But she'd done the hard graft, and I just turned up (with my amplifier, boomwhackers, resources, mp3 player, spare percussion instruments, packed lunch, extra drink, box of tissues for snotty children and packet of kitchen paper in case of spills at lunch time - Baa Baa Black Sheep FOUR bags full of gear).

So I collected her, and her four bags full, waited while she had a precautionary painkiller ("waking up on the morning of a percussion workshop with a headache doesn't seem fair") and that was the last moment of peace and quiet until 3 pm.

It was a fun, fun, fun day (as far as I am concerned). I can quite see that very few grown adults would regard sitting on the floor playing "the cup game", flapping their arms around singing "The Penguin Song", moving around to music like an elephant or a can-can-dancing tortoise (Carnival of the Animals), directing thirty children armed with loaded boomwhackers ("NO whacking ANYONE ELSE, do you hear?")

(random picture from the internet to show what boomwhackers are - this isn't the class I was teaching)
http://www.musick8.com/boomwhackers/bwphotodisplay.php?num=1&photo=goss.jpg

Yeah - fun fun fun and I really did enjoy myself. The course ended at 3pm after a show to parents, and I then had half an hour to pack up, load the car, and zoom round to a nearby church hall for a tea and coffee and biscuits and powerpoint presentation on France, for the forthcoming Womens' World Day of Prayer event. That went OK too; my laptop behaved and connected sweetly to their projection system, there weren't too many unpronounceable words in the script that comes with the presentation, and someone was able to take over when I succumbed to a fit of coughing two-thirds of the way through.

          

Home then, after dropping a friend off in the next village, and rattle in the latest weekly issue of www.themusicjungle.co.uk - my weekly music magazine (oh alright, blog), and bung some salmon into the oven (line roasting dish with large piece of foil, glug in a little olive oil, dump in the salmoin fillets, salt, pepper, lemon except mine was a solid as a stone so I didn't bother, seal foil to enclose salmon in a parcel, roast at 170 for 30 mins, serve with curly kale and new potatoes) and relax in front of the telly.

Oh, did I miss out the bit where I backed into someone else's car in the car park after the music workshop, and remodelled - slightly but significantly altered - the shape of their driver and passenger door? I know I LOOKED through the mirror as a backed out, but I clearly didn't SEE properly. I was properly upset - no, I didn't cry, not that kind of upset. But it was a stupid thing to do, and made me late for the French thingy, and will have caused no end of nuisance and botheration for the other car owner. I left a note, and we've been in contact, and, all things considered, they were very reasonable. But they really didn't need the hassle. Tomorrow, in daylight, I'll check out the damage to my car. I think it's just a but scuffed on the corner of the bumper.
OVERLOAD ALERT - MESSAGE RECEIVED AND UNDERSTOOD. Sort of. After all, I have said "Yes" to another workshop at the end of March - they are such fun, fun, fun....