My Shoulders Feel Lighter Today

I experienced a strange element this afternoon--one that I hadn't encountered in a while. It's called "free time"--perhaps you've heard of it? I've had traces of it on weekends every now and then, but rarely on a school day recently.

But with my colleague's return from sick leave yesterday, I'm back to normal duties at school for the first time in a few months. And it's the first time in nearly seven months that I'm neither nursing an injury or doing extra work. (Sure, I'm not quite 100% with the knee, but it's rarely a factor nowadays; update on that soon.) And while I enjoyed the extra work I was doing, the real challenge was, as I told said colleague a few weeks ago over lunch, trying to be him and trying to be me. There almost needs to be a few more hours in the day to pull that off, although everything turned out fine.

The free time thing won't last, of course; nature abhors a vacuum, and there's always something else for a musician to do: Practice more, write more (although, taking a walk through Watters Creek this afternoon, I was reminded how disappointed I am that they closed the Starbucks there; it had become my favorite place for writing last year). And I've already taken on an adjudication job for Saturday morning, because extra income is always good this time of year.

Now that I've experienced "free time," I'm hoping to get reacquainted with its cousin, "sleep." I've missed you lately, buddy. So I'll save the slew of unfinished blog posts for another time and call it a night.