Alas, no banjo. Someone beat me to it. Who knew there was such a banjo demand in these parts?

Instead I am practicing guitar more. I'm so impatient, I want to skip ahead to learn everything at once instead of practicing the basics. I'm trying to spend 15 minutes a day on just basic stuff on days when I have time, and then as much time as I want noodling around. I dusted off some old songs of mine, and they sound okay, or anyway not as embarassing as I felt they were earlier. I have a couple that I need to hook up with some chords, but I think I'll wait until I'm better able to mess around and jam with chords, or I'll end up with 5 songs all in E or A. And I don't mean like, a song in E with all the various chords that go with, I mean a song that's ALL E, Em, A, and Am. I have one such song already, and it sounds nice, but it should be like, different from my other ones. Hee.

I'm getting better at figuring out what people are playing and joining in, but it's still really frustrating for me. Last night The Wandering Filksingers who sometimes drop by came to our family jam. They are fun people and have lots of fun songs, but it's also .. I struggle, it's very emotional for some reason. They play much better than I do, but so does the rest of boy's family. However they're not used to slowin' down and indulging my beginner guitar questions and I'm too timid or insecure to press the issue since they're also kind of sarcastic a lot of the time - one of 'em's a stand-up comic who can't seem to turn it off.. anyway. I asked one fellow what key he was in as he played a different version of one of my favourite songs and he said "Heh! Three guesses and the first two don't count." Maybe he thought I was jokin', but I wasn't. I almost wanted to cry. Boy's brother knew I was actually lost and told me what key it was, but I still couldn't follow. Oh well. One of these years I'll be just fine at joinin' in. I learned some new chords last night to spice things up with, that was cool. Here's the deal, I know how this works: I will practice, and then things will come easier and easier. Just got to practice.

Last class today! It's a review class, so I think I'll just go pick up my last assignment and my midterm and split. Last friday was supposed to be a review class too, but the teacher caught me knitting in class (well, it's a question & answer session, I wasn't takin' any notes, so..) and ANYWAY she was so amused by this. She spent like 20 minutes talking about how she knit a sweater once, and how everyone in europe knits but not here, and then a student who was from germany was like "yeah! I used to get together and knit every saturday night with my friends, but no one knits here!" and they were asking me where I got my wool (heh, my yarn was from safeway, but I managed to remember some wool shops in town.) Meanwhile this poor guy is desperately trying to ask a question about organic chemistry, but the teacher just keeps talking about knitting. It was hilarious. But anyway, I'm going to try to avoid class today, lest I get her talking about like, macram� or something and dash everyone's hope for an actual review.

WAIT TODAY is MONDAY, that's all tomorrow. Doh. Here I thought it was all so close. Well it is close, but shoot. Hmph.

So uh.. today.. some work and.. stuff. Yeah.

I have been making itemized schedules every morning at work. Consequently, I have been doing work every day. I don't finish everything on my list, but most of it. This is an improvement over having a to-do list with no due dates on it, and just being behind all the time, and also being convinced I had not enough work to do and was a worthless goldbricker. Now when I write down estimated times for everything I can see that I generally have plenty of work to do in a day and I should stop searching for more. And that I HAVE been doing some work but because it's "routine" I wasn't mentally counting it as working. So yeah. Once again my mental self-evaluations were too mean. Sometimes I think "well good, I should be mean, that's the basis of my work ethic," but no, I think it's just an unfortunate feature of my work ethic, not the driving force behind it.

I get a little calmer every year. I'm still a bundle of nerves, but maybe next year and next year and next year I'll be more relaxed. When I'm retirement age maybe I'll finally be calm enough to enjoy it. Nature makes the fish happy when the trucks drive over them, etc. etc.

Well. Back to my to-do list!