zirconium

3 happy things
1. Autumn Sky Poetry Daily featured my sonnet "Paean to the Pommel Horse Guys" on August 15.
2. I successfully auditioned for the Nashville Symphony Chorus. I'll finally get to sing Beethoven's 9th! (And also some Vivaldi, Ravel, Mahler, and Handel, among other things.) This has been on my bucket list since I was a teenager, and the timing has never worked out before now.
3. Several visits from my honorary big sister, her partner, and their menagerie.

3 vexations
1. I tested positive for COVID for the very first time on July 13. Odds are high that I caught it from the dancers at New London Assembly, as I masked for virtually everything at the festival -- including when singing in performance -- except for meals, and I had lunch with that crew right before five tested positive that afternoon.
2. It's a month and a half later and I'm still coughing violently several times a day. This is not a surprise (this is why I was so bloody vigilant for literal years). I'm on all my usual meds and hopeful that it will be gone by the time I go onstage for the Vivaldi, but it is literally tiresome.
3. Pilea mollis (Moon Valley) is structurally significantly different from Pilea peperomioides (money plant). I did not know this before dividing my formerly healthy Moon Valley plant, purchased a year and a month ago in Philadelphia. It was not an expensive starter, and screwing up is part of the learning curve, but still. *sniffle*

July 2023, in my Muehlenberg College dorm room

The same plant in August 2024, after a year in my sunroom

3 topics I plan to post more about later
1. The 2024 San Francisco Early Music Society Baroque Workshop
2. The 2024 Amherst Early Music Festival Spring Break Workshop and Summer Festival (week 2)
3. The other pilea, which also holds sentimental value (it was a farewell gift from a museum colleague).