Wallitner Weekly 38

Hello everyone!

A lot of productive things happened recently

I have made a terrible mistake. I found a poem that I really like. Thankfully its in the public domain, but it has put a serious damper on my plan to complete abandoned pieces before starting new ones. The first two lines read: “Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep.” The interesting thing about the poem is the author has never been confirmed. It has several different alleged writers, but nothing is truly certain. If you’d like to read the full poem, its title is the first line, “Do not stand at my grave and weep”.

I’ve got lots of plans for next week too!

I have come up with a plan for how to re-do the poem portion of my website, now I just have to do it. I also am going to have a chat with my trumpet playing friend soon about his solo I am writing as well as some other future projects we might be doing.

Ive also gotta find the time to write a 2 minute long percussion ensemble piece for an elementary school/middle school percussion ensemble. The challenge of writing for such young musicians is they don’t have nearly as much experience as the people I usually write for. So I’ll need to write something that they can be successful with, but that also sounds good. We’ll see how well I do.

Ideas strike from the strangest places.

In case you haven’t noticed Ive been struggling to write this section of the weekly for the last few entries. I try not to ramble, but the best way to fill a page with letters is to just write and a lot of times what comes out doesn’t make a ton of sense.

I was going to title this section as: I have officially run out of things to say. But then I was looking around my office and I saw the sword that I bought. Yes, I bought a sword. You know why? I thought it looked cool at the renaissance fair, that’s why.

In case I haven’t told this story before, for my fiancee’s birthday, we went to a renaissance fair. It was a lot of fun and we dressed up in our best renaissance garb (In my case, jeans and a T-shirt). While we were there, we saw some people that looked like actual knights and warriors and it was super cool! I even saw a Hurdy-gurdy player! If you don’t know what a hurdy-gurdy is, you’ll have to google it because my explanation of the instrument would not do it justice.

Anyways, we’re at this fair and I saw a vendor who was selling swords and daggers, so my fiancee bought a dagger and I bought a sword. My sword has a dragon on the hilt and its super cool. If you don’t think its super cool, then I would have to challenge you to a duel BYOS (bring your own sword).

We then spent the rest of the day showered in compliments such as “wow that’s a super cool sword” and “Woah! where did you get that dagger?!” It was the perfect amount of birthday attention and far less embarrassing than a pointy, multi-colored hat. And now my fiancee and I can boast to our students about our very modest sword/dagger collection.

That day was a lot of fun and now I think about it every time I see this sword. But that adventure was in August and its now March, so I have since tucked my sword in the corner of my office. My days of questing long since passed.

I guess what Im trying to say is when you do something fun, get a souvenir. It doesn’t have to be something as drastic as a sword, but something you wouldn’t get anywhere else. My dad used to, and probably still does, get those stretched out pennies from places he’d visit. You know where you put a penny and a quarter into the machine and it stretches it out and then gets like a stamp on it that says “National park” or something.

I don’t think souvenir is the right word though. They’re more like trophies. Im not saying fill your drawers with fancy pennies every time you go to the grocery store. But the big events, the first times, deserve a physical memory to look at and think back on. That way when you sit down to write your allegedly “weekly” newsletter for the thirty eighth time, you have something to look at for inspiration.

The moral of the story is, when you go out of your comfort zone, bring a weapon, you might need it… Not because leaving your comfort zone is dangerous, but because seeing it later might make you laugh.