Another entry

I made awesome dinner tonight!  Chicken, rice and onions simmered in salsa verde, with whole wheat tortillas and refried beans.  In other news, I'm eating a lot of peanut butter.  I found an awesome natural peanut butter--generic, so I could afford it, even--and I can't stop eating it.  I had some on a toasted wheat round for lunch, along with an apple that also had peanut butter on it.  Watching TV tonight, since the cats were keeping my legs warm and I couldn't POSSIBLY do anything else, I ate another wheat round with peanut butter, and the very last of the Australian black licorice that a friend gave me for Christmas. 

I keep forgetting to mention that last week, the first week of No Dairy January, I lost three pounds.

Ah.  Anything else?  Right, my mood has been pretty blah.  The weather has kept me home since Saturday, and the days seem long and dark.  Other than cooking and practicing my horns, I haven't done much but watch TV and read.  I'm bored.  And annoyed--easily annoyed.  Right now I'm annoyed with my brass band for being wishy-washy about going to the national championships this year.  There's a few people in the band who started a movement last year...I know their intentions were...well, they wanted to improve the band.  They just wanted to do it by staging a coup and kicking people out.  That didn't happen, but the overall effect has put a bad taste in people's mouths and morale is pretty low.  This is my last season with the band, and we barely have any concerts scheduled. 

If we don't go to the championships, then, frankly, I have a lot of things on my plate right now, and I'm so tired of fighting.  I feel like quitting early.  I know I WON'T, but I want to.  My own closest friends are battling--not over whether to GO to the contest, but over whether we should have decided earlier.  I went to sleep last night after listening to one of them rant about it, and woke up to ranting from the other one.  The two of them are on the same side of the issue, but they still find reasons to fight about it, and this is how our board meetings have gone for the last three months.  I'm tired of it.

I'm also annoyed by my students.  Facebook is one of the best and one of the worst things ever to come along, in terms of keeping an eye on my students.  On the one hand, I know what they're doing, or at least what they say they're doing, instead of practicing.  On the other hand, this is information that I sometimes would rather not have.  I saw a lovely post from one of them this afternoon, saying how he was getting reacquainted with his euphonium today.  We have a lesson on Friday--our first in several months.  How is that worth my time?  I've picked up more students this term, and I might have to go back to a two-day schedule at the university--all so they can NOT TOUCH their instruments for months at a time? 

Damn this weather.  I don't usually get this frustrated until the end of the semester.