You can gut The Ugliest Kitchen On Earth and replace it with a brand spanking new gorgeous custom kitchen but there is no guarantee that you will eradicate mus musculus. So, I walked in the door yesterday afternoon (toadily roto) and a fine specimen of mus musculus was scurrying across the kitchen. (Yes, it was a scurry mouse, not a puffalump mouse. There *is* a difference.)

I actually made a noise kind of like EEK! when I saw the scurry mouse. I am not afraid of mouses at all (and this one was really cute). It was more an EEK! of surprise than fear! But I do not want them in my house pooping all over everything and chewing through my kitchen radio waaarrrrs. So. Three of them throughout the night. Once I woke up to hear the GG snap the trap. And one when I got home from work. I wish it was easier for me to dispatch aminals but alas it is not and so I waited for the GG to get home and deal with it. It was underneath the trap, therefore I couldn’t really see it unless I got up close.

Watch out! MacMu Blindside coming up! National Petroleum Radio was running along in the background and somebody was reviewing a book. A book by a guy whose last name is Dybeck. I don’t know this person and I don’t know what the book is about (and I wish I could get myself back into reading books but I have been too distracted lately and that is not a good thing but it is what it is) but Mrs. Dybeck was my second childhood piano teacher. I’m sure she is dead and I don’t know if there’s a relationship there.

My history with the piano… As a young child, I never met a musical instrument I wasn’t fascinated with. I remember banging on on the pianos at my grandparents’ and aunt and uncle’s houses when I was three years old. Don’t get me wrong. I was not Mozart. I’m sure my “playing” was totally obnoxious. But I loved pianos and eventually my parents managed to buy one. I forget how old I was then but I could read words and I taught myself to read music and so I self-taught my way through book 3 and part of book 4 of the Leila Fletcher books. I had a little trouble figuring out dotted quarter notes and the like but Uber Kayak Woman (who did take lessons) set me straight on that. I doubt she remembers that but I will never forget it.

After about a year of this kind of noodling around, The Commander said, “You are going to take piano lessons.” I protested vehemently but I got signed up with Mrs. Diecke and actually piano lessons were fun because she introduced me to all kinds of interesting music that I wouldn’t ever have found on my own.

Alas, I got to be in junior high and somehow taking piano lessons wasn’t very cool any more and I wasn’t cool and so I decided to quit after 7th grade. Sometimes I wonder if Mrs. Diecke was sad that I quit but most likely she understood the trauma I was going through. Oddly enough, by that time I was an acclaimed student flute player and 8th grade was the *only* year I had a real professional flute player as a teacher but that would be a whole ‘nother story (she got me all kinds of challenging music and taught me how to flutter tongue and I loved her!).

Anyway, I quit piano lessons but I still played and then all of a sudden, I was a high school junior and I had gained at least a wee bit of self-confidence and I decided to take piano lessons again. The Deicke’s had left town by then (and my grandparents had bought their house), so I signed up with another popular piano teacher, Mrs. Dybeck. The Comm was ecstatic that I wanted to take lessons again! And I could even *drive* to my piano lessons! Mrs. Dybeck charged $1.50 a lesson. The Comm said something like, “That’s not enough money” and paid her $2.00 a lesson. I loved Mrs. Dybeck. I remember a few times awkwardly confessing that I hadn’t practiced a whole lot but I loved playing the piano so those times were not frequent and Mrs. Dybeck knew it.

I played piano in college too but my major was flute and my piano teacher was a lecherous old fart who gained my confidence and then tried to hit on me. I think he was in his 30s then but I was 20 and I thought he looked like a warty old toad. The result? I quit taking piano lessons again. This kind of lecherous behavior happens more often than you might think, at least in music departments but I thank Zeus that none of my *flute* teachers *ever* did that to me.

So, I don’t play instruments any more but getting totally entangled in all of the aspects of playing musical instruments and analyzing classical music pieces was a TOTALLY WONDERFUL preparation for an IT career as a systems analyst in the online banking biz. I couldn’t explain that if I tried but it’s true. We need to keep music and all of the other arts in the schools!

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