88 keys and a 5k

First off, a couple of thank-you's:

1) To Mike, Karen, Nicole, and Emily: Thanks for the article about Jon Lester. He's the Red Sox pitcher who had a type of NHL (different that mine), was treated, and came back a year later to win game 4 of the World Series last fall. The Boston Globe still has it archived in case you'd like to read it.

2) To Cindy, my colleague at Southern, for her icon suggestion. She sent a photo of James Brown and suggested that I could use that for those "I feel good" days. Since I anticipate feeling good (and using that same icon) for a while, I'm using it as my official profile photo. Look to the right and you'll see it. Click on the link to view the profile, and then on the audio clip option, and you'll hear Mr. Brown singing the song with that lyric ("I Got You").

This buys me some time to come up with other great soul songs to describe how I'm feeling. "Ain't No Way" when I'm feeling down? "Kung Fu Fighting" when I'm gearing up for a treatment? I'm sure my brother will offer some selections from his personal collection.

Thanks again Cindy. You won the contest.

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Back to our busy weekend. Saturday afternoon, the kids performed in the Connecticut Young Musicians Festival, a two weekend event held at Fairfield University. There are actually a bunch of festival events for different instruments all over the state, but piano is held at Fairfield.

The Festival is a judged, non-competitive event. Students are placed by their piano teachers at a certain level of achievement, and then play one required price and one optional piece. They are given scores from 1-5 by two judges. Each kid is in a group of roughly ten kids, so they're playing in a room with the two judges, plus the other kids in their group and all their families -- an audience of 25-30 people. It's non-competitive because they aren't given scores in relation to one another, only on their own performance (so everyone in the room could earn a 5).

It's a great thing. There's a little less pressure, given that they are only competing against themsleves, but it still gives them a chance to be in front of an audience and have that valuable experience. (Not that our kids are exactly shy, as most of you know.)

Catherine was scheduled to play from 2-3, and the boys were both in the same group (though at different levels) from 3:15-4:15. Unfortunately, we had some snow the night before, and while we along the coast were fine, the northern part of the state got hit harder. Apparently, not all of the judges were able to make it yet when they started at 9:00am, so they moved everything back an hour. Nobody knew that until we arrived, so we had an hour and a half to kill before Catherine started, having arrived at about 1:20.

The kids performed in one of Fairfield's classroom buildings, so we went up to the third floor and found an empty classroom and let the kids draw on the chalk board for an hour. (Leave it to the teachers to know that kids love chalkboards -- I think there's something "forbidden" in writing on the board, and that makes it more exciting.) This is some of their artwork:

Peter's picture of me as a Jedi Knight. (I'm saying "Duh.")

John's picture of me as a Sith Lord. Note the double-sided light saber. I'm also saying "Duh" in this one.

Catherine's picture of Princess Leia. It isn't of me, and I'm not saying "Duh," so I'm kind of happy about that.

Anyway, they eventually performed their pieces. They did well. This was Caterine's first time, and she didn't seem terribly nervous. John was performing for the second year, and he also did well. Peter's was his third performance, and he had by far the most challenging pieces to play in his group. He's a perfectionist, and he let a little early stumble throw him, but after watching himself on video, he realized he did a lot better than he thought. I agree.

We're working on getting some video up online for everyone (new camera, so we're learning how to do all of that). In the meantime, here are some pictures of the kids performing. Sorry, I haven't had a chance to edit them, so they're a little dark, and there's some punk's hat in the way of Catherine's picture:

Video soon, I promise.

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On Sunday morning, I ran the WPLR ShamRock and Roll 5k in downtown New Haven. This is a large race, about 1000 people every year. I met up with Andrew (you remember him from the East Rock 5k last month) and Ilene, another friend from work. Ilene and I knew Andrew was going to take off fast and beat us badly, so we didn't even bother to line up with him. Instead, Ilene and I agreed to run a fairly easy race -- we were shooting for about 10 minute miles. We knew with that having so many people at the start meant we'd be crowded in for the first five minutes and not be able to pass anyone anyway. Plus, we knew the course had some hills, and with the nice temperatures the day before, there would be some icy patches in the 25 degree chill of the morning.

I ended up finishing in 30 minutes, 31 seconds, a 9:50 per mile pace, just about what Ilene and I had agreed to run. Not my best, but I wasn't setting out for a PR, either, not like in East Rock. (For that race a month ago, my diagnosis was still pretty fresh, and I was running with pentcostal fire. Now I'm stable and on watch and wait, so this one was running with zen buddhism. Or something like that.)

I finished 586 out of 909 overall, 118 out of 136 in my age group (40-49). I'll take it. Here are the official results if you care to see them.

Mom and Dad were here for the weekend to see the kids perform, so it was nice that they got to see me race for the first time. The family all parked themselves on a hill about halfway into the race, so they saw me pass by twice. Here's a picture, as I went to the side of the road to get high fives from all of my fans:

I'm wearing my red "Relentless" shirt. Told you I looked darn good, didn't I?