Stage courage...

The little violinist was maybe 4 or 5 years old.
He was standing in front of an audience gathered to hear the graduates of a Suzuki program.
There were proud parents and siblings and grandparents like me who wanted to see their students play the music they'd learned over the past year.
It was beautiful music and well played.
(Every time I hear Suzuki students play, I am so impressed!
Suzuki is the method of teaching violin introduced by the Japanese musician Shinichi Suzuki. Suzuki introduces very young children to fine music that includes teaching discipline, endurance and a love for classical music.)
This young man was doing fine on his instrument when he suddenly broke into tears, his face crumpling as he worked his bow back and forth, back and forth.
We in the audience recognized his sad situation but could do nothing to comfort him.
We simply watched him soldier on, feeling badly for him but knowing his tears would pass and he would someday realize he'd overcome stage fright, played through the fear.
In the meantime, it was tough to watch this small musician play on while he grimaced and wiped his face with his sleeve.
I think he had everyone in the audience pulling for him and to his credit, he stuck it out.
Bravo!

This is a sample Suzuki lad, not the one who started crying.

Getting a steal...

We laughed when the teenage boy showed us the aisle of clearance toys that were selling for $5. Three for $5!
We told him the sign must be wrong, that it couldn't be.
"No, no," said the lad. "All of these from here to here $1.99 each or three for $5."
We took a closer look. The toys were all baby toys but decent toys and we had baby birthdays coming up.
We hesitantly worked through them.
There was a kind of Shape-O toy snail, a set of colorful stacking rings and a snap-together chain of little balls.
We started to make a pile of the three we might need to buy.
(We already had a birthday truck that came with a plastic toy drill for the birthday boy. That was a good price too but nothing like the toys on the clearance row.)
We asked the sales boy again.
"Are you sure this is right? This doesn't seem right."
"Yes! Yes!," It's a good deal!" the boy said earnestly, "This whole row, from here to here, is on the sale. My manager just wants to get rid of these."
Marc and I are both longtime skeptics so we took our time looking for what might be wrong here.
We looked for damage. We checked for problems. The brands were good. The boxes were intact. The colors were bright and we knew of several grandkids who would like these toys.
I started making a mental list.
If this were really a legitimate offer, I might be coming back for some early Christmas shopping.
(When you have 40 grandkids, you have to think ahead.)
Now, granted, the toys we were seeing were for babies and we only have a couple that age anymore but the prices of the toys and items around the rest of the store were pretty appealing too.
We took the toys up to the counter.
"Ok, we'll try to buy these," we said.
The boy started to ring them up.
The machine gave him trouble.
"Oh, of course," we surmised. "It's not going to be a real sale."
He got on the phone to his manager.
"Yes, yes. Ok, yes," he said.
We thought, here it comes but he nodded to the phone and started punching in numbers.
"Ok, $5," he said triumphantly.
Really?
We paid and we beat it, feeling like we robbed the place.

We might go back for more.

Skiing between cell towers...

It was Marc's opportunity to join the Cache Valley grandkids for a day of skiing.
Never mind that it was snowing heavily and Logan Canyon (along with American Fork Canyon, Little Cottonwood Canyon and a number of other popular canyon routes) were closed due to a number of avalanches.
He left our house around 7:30 a.m. to meet his daughter and her twin 9-year-old grandsons at Beaver Mountain at around 10-ish, I thought.
(I tossed my skis, along with my Olympic dreams, about 10 years ago, in favor of having working knees and original hips.)
I didn't worry overmuch until around noon when I started seeing news reports of multiple avalanches in the canyons.
Logan Canyon was reportedly closed.
Hmmm.
That is on the way to Beaver Mountain ski resort.
I knew the cell phone service was not good, in fact, pretty much non-existent where he should be.
But did he make it to the resort before the closure?
I did some detective work and found he had charged the lift pass so he must be on the hill.
I went on about my business at home.
But around 3 p.m. I started a new round of worries.
What if he was stuck? What if he was just taking his own sweet time? What if he didn't care that I was stressing about his well-being?
When should I expect to hear from him?
How heavy was the snow where he was skiing?
Couldn't he call from the road once he started home?
He was scheduled to drive by another household of grandkids in Tremonton on the way so I figured he could call from there...
Nothing.
I went from worrying to fuming.
Finally a call, from Bear Lake. What???
They'd started home and been re-routed to Bear Lake and around to Preston, Idaho.
He made it here at around 10 p.m., safe and sound but pretty tired of driving in the snow.
I was pretty worn out from all the anxiety.
I'm thinking next time he better pack a lunch or a bag.

Stripperbowl2020

It seemed to me that the Superbowl halftime antics were a bit over the top...and up the sides and way too close to the middle.
I thought maybe it was just the grandma in me that found the moves more risque than usual but I'm reading and discovering that I wasn't the only old lady offended by them.
Lots of Superbowl fans are complaining, a lot of them parents with young children.
It seems Jennifer Lopez and Shakira pushed the envelope for plenty of families who just wanted to tune in and see a football game and an entertaining halftime show.
It was more of a shocking show, can you say titilating?
Just when you think the ladies dancing can't be any more bold, they trim off some more costume. And shake their...uh...booty.
I think we are at the line here.
Why are we as an audience supposed to be okay with so much skin and so little modesty?
The "wardrobe malfunction" a while ago could possibly be passed off as an accident or an unintentional moment of bare skin.
But the show on Sunday was deliberately designed to be extra sexy.
I don't think I'm out of line to complain.
I didn't like watching the show with my husband.
I can't imagine explaining it to youngsters.
Please. Bring back decency.
That would be super.

Saying goodbye once more...

I thought I'd said my goodbyes already.
When the Deseret News gave my husband and I the dreaded blue folders on the same day nearly 10 years ago, that was a hard goodbye.
It was unexpected on my part because I'd been at the newspaper for 17 years and I was comfortable in my position. (Marc had been there fewer years.)
In retrospect, we can see where the newspaper was trying to deal with shifting sands as the Internet took advertising and readers before the traditional news media could adjust.
We are all right but it's difficult to watch an industry die.
Then I was allowed to work until the end of the year and keep using my Deseret News email address and work as a freelancer after that.
I told myself to count my blessings. I had my health, my husband, my severance and the opportunity to write a little without commuting into Salt Lake.
I kept merrily on until last Tuesday.
For some reason, my gmail account wouldn't work with me. I got messages informing me that the account had been disabled.
I figured it was some kind of glitch that makes trouble whenever there's an update. (I have a love/hate relationship with updates!)
I contacted the systems person who had helped me in the past when something technical blocked my way.
He said the account had been shut off and headed me to the fellow responsible.
I'm apparently having to say goodbye once again.
I have a month to let everybody I've worked with over the past 40 years know my email address is now gone.
I'm no longer: haddoc@deseretnews.com.
I'm: haddocklady@gmail.com.
The good news is that I can use my whole last name: haddock with a "k."
The bad news is that it's like changing out a credit card...How do you know who needs to know? How do you head off the contacts who won't know where you have gone or why you are not answering an urgent email?
I'm strangely sad.
This brings back all the loss and frustration I felt when I was originally let go.
I feel like less of a person.
I hate change.
Welcome to my brave, new world!

A game of scam

We've been waiting since October for a game of Empire Monopoly for one of our granddaughters.
We own a game of it. We play it regularly with the kids and it has a lot of pluses.
It's fairly short. There are no hotels to buy and thus fairly little heartbreak.
The players can see what they have as they build up their properties in a stack.
When the stack reaches the top, the owner of the stack wins.
It's tangible.
We play it often and we introduced it to grandkids in Tremonton.
We wanted one for the family there, one granddaughter in particular.
The first sign of trouble was when the mom pulled it up on her phone to discover it was selling for $85. (We'd paid $15 for ours at Target.)
I was sure we could find it again for about that same amount so we started looking.
Nobody had it.
We started looking online.
No luck.
Then Marc found it. It was about $25 but by then we were ready to pay a bit more.
He ordered it and we started waiting.
It didn't come.
We complained.
The company said, "Oh, it has to clear customs. Be patient."
We waited some more.
We got the same message again and again.
The child's birthday came and went. Christmas came and went.
We swapped out a smaller, different game for the one she wanted.
We started getting ticked.
Now it's the end of January and apparently our game is still held up in customs because you know that foreign paper pretend money can be a problem.
I'm suspecting a scam, verified by the many other customer complaints Marc found on the website.
Nobody's order has cleared customs. Nobody is getting satisfaction.
Our granddaughter is losing confidence in us.
We suspect foul play. We believe we may have been hornswaggled!
I'm thinking we have all been playing a different game than we planned.
P.S. The name of the company is South Adventure, not accredited by the Better Business Bureau

Don't you dare resist!

We weren't going to cut in line.
We already knew we couldn't before anyone hollered at us.
We just wanted to see if we could get a glimpse of the new "Rise of the Resistance" ride at Disneyland.
It was about 9 p.m. and we had been at Disneyland for two days.
(Our granddaughter Emma was playing violin with the Harmony Suzuki Strings group and we had the tough duty of flying down to Anaheim to see her!) ((They were magnificent, by the way!))
The performance just happened to coincide with two big events for Anaheim, the convention for the National Association of Music Merchants and the opening of the new Star Wars ride.
That meant lots of traffic and a ton of people.
We didn't really have a lot of hope for getting to try out the new ride but we were surprised the passes were all gone within literally minutes.
The park opened at 8 a.m. and by 8:03, everything was swooped up.
The people who came at 3 in the morning to stand in line didn't get any.
The people who camped out didn't get any.
Disney tried out a new virtual queue app that kind of negated the old style of doing things which is good and bad.
The good news is no one has to do that stuff anymore.
The bad news is you literally have to be inside the park the minute it opens and have your passes and everybody in your group there!
That's not easy on a regular day and impossible when a convention like NAMM is in town. (The bus drivers and waiters all warned us that Jan. 17-19 would be a nightmare.)
So Marc and I didn't expect to get in.
We just wanted to walk by and share the vibe.
We had been to Galaxy's Edge early on Thursday and ridden on Smuggler's Run, even tried Blue Milk in the Cantina.
So now we were getting ready to pack it in but Marc wanted to be where the action was.
We got on the little funny train and rode over to the Star Wars area.
We walked along the path and tried to peek through the trees to see something alien and cool.
When we came across the lines of Star Wars fans, we started dodging strollers and such.
Apparently we stepped in front of the line because immediately there were alarms sounded.
The Disney line guards waved us back. The people who had waited hours shouted.
"Hey, OK! We don't mean to be here," we explained. "We're sorry."
I think hostile folks make up the Resistance.