update on things

I made it. Jazz Fest is done, I'm done teaching at Menomonie, and I finished my arrangement for my recital. Now I just have to get through the next week and a half, and then I'm home free.

I took pictures all day Friday for Jazz Fest. It was a little annoying because I was there to take all the posed group pictures, but hardly any of the groups wanted a pic. That's okay though because I was warned that it would probably be like that. I took advantage of my free time to roam around and take pictures of groups while they were performing. Overall it was a fun time, and it went very smoothly. Benny Green was awesome - I wish I'd had time to talk to him. I went to the jam session after the concert, enjoyed some beer and pizza, and took some more pictures. I wasn't able to attend any of the stuff on Saturday (including the party), which made me sad, but I'll get over it.

I spent all day Saturday at the indoor drumline championships in Minnesota. Menomonie competed and got 12th place in our class (out of 13 - yay, we weren't last!). Our placement may not have seemed very good, but considering we basically re-built the program from scratch this year, I think we did pretty well. I'm really going to miss working with the students. When we got back to Menomonie and were ready to head home, one of the students came up to Matt and me and gave us a heartfelt thanks for "not giving up" on them. Hearing that surprised me and made me a little sad for the students. Here is a group that is so used to instructors leaving them, they consider that to be the norm. They are all good kids - talented, hard-working, and very smart. The thought of "giving up" never even crossed my mind. But because their other instructors all ended up leaving, they took it personally each time and thought it was because of something they did wrong. I am not going to pass blame here, because in the past I think there were some contract issues, and I don't really know what happened. But talking with that student made me realize how much they ended up suffering due to problems between the instructors and the higher-ups. Anyway, I hope this season was less stressful and more enjoyable for them.

Now that that stuff is over, I have more free time. Now I can go to a bunch of recitals, and practice for my recital, and work on my group presentations for classes, and edit all the Jazz Fest photos.... Okay, so I don't really have free time.

I had a check-up with my knee doctor today, and told him that my knee has been progressively getting worse. He was surprised to hear that. I should be doing pretty well by now, but I'm not. It's frustrating. It has been getting noticeably worse every day for at least the past couple of weeks. The doc ordered an MRI, which I'm having done on Saturday, and then I'll see him again a week from today. I went to physical therapy after my appointment, and my therapist was also surprised/disappointed to hear how badly my knee is doing. He said it's pointless to even try and do any PT until we get the MRI results. I'm in quite a bit of pain tonight - probably from all the poking & prodding. Hopefully we can get this figured out, so we can figure out how to make it better...