A Few Things Recently Learned

The Devious Snail came home from a trumpet lesson a couple of weeks ago and asked if I could play an accompaniment part for a trumpet solo he was thinking about playing at solo and ensemble contest. I fell in love with the piece, which had such a fun and interesting accompaniment, and best of all, I got to play deep and loud because I was playing with a trumpet. It was a lot of fun to learn this piece of music, and I’m so glad he decided to try it. I learned so much from one of his final run throughs with his trumpet teacher before the performance, about the trumpet, and about The Devious Snail himself. I ended up messing up the accompaniment a little bit at the performance, but we managed to still hang in there and finish well.

Mr. TOF is completing his History Day project on Van Phillips, the inventor of the the Cheetah Blade prosthetic limb. I have truly learned so, so much about the Cheetah Blade, prosthetic limbs, and the athletes who wear them. Leave it to History Day to educate me on obscure topics I knew hardly anything about! This is the seventh History Day project to come out of my house, and I’m always amazed at how much the whole family learns for each project. I relearn each time that History Day projects are an incredible amount of work, and so worth it in the end.

To help Mr. TOF with some History Day research, I ended up subscribing to The New York Times. I learned I really enjoy actually getting to read all the articles I normally just read the headlines for. In the past few years I have really come to appreciate some of the in depth writing from The New York Times on topics I don’t see on other news media that I usually use. Many of the big headline stories appear in multiple places, but there are some really well thought out articles in the New York Times on other interesting topics.

I recently attended a symphony concert where the whole orchestra had a little finger snap part that kept coming back. Percussionists really have the best finger snaps. Somehow they manage to snap their fingers with a whole loose body.

I learned to spell the word “de-escalate.”

At the piano, other than working on numerous accompaniments for upcoming performances for the big kids, I have been working on learning various Chopin preludes and a little piece of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”.

I learned that if you have an online cart full of many, many Darn Tough wool socks, and you need to reduce the number of socks by half, The Banana is your friend! She is such a shopper! I recently sent in a whole box of socks with holes to Darn Tough through the warranty program, and got a whole new box of socks in the mail! Yay! I love my Darn Tough socks.