B-flat happiness

So can anyone tell me why this news story isn't getting more press than it is? If I could have things my way, it'd be on the front page of every paper and headlining every news show.
Torturing innocent people - um. NOT. OK. And initiated by the U.S.? Something I'd think was unbelievable, before about 4 or 5 years ago, I cannot understand why I saw it on page 5 of my local paper and not at all on the TV news. Have we gone nuts over here in the U.S.? Or are we just in a massive collective denial? And what's the difference between the two? I want to grab the shoulders of the U.S. and give them a mighty shake and shout at them to pay attention. I feel like I'm in the midst of a history book, and see the students of the future shaking their heads in amazement at the way we were too stupid to see what was happening. How do you wake up an entire country?

So on that lovely starting note, here's my happy story. I played the clarinet today!! The one I bought for Q still has not arrived (nor has it been SHIPPED yet, but that's a rant for another day). My officemate WONDERBOY loaned Q one of his in the interim, so I rushed home to try it out before the bus arrived. (!!!!) It felt like going home after 20 years. I remembered everything about it from the smell of the case when I opened it to the way the pieces felt as I put them together to the weight on my thumb to the march I memorized for HS band. I sounded, oh, a BIT worse than I did in HS, and my lip lasted about 5 minutes before giving out, but I was able to stumble my way through one of the Etudes that I played for state try-outs. I taught Q how to put it together and what a rudimentary embrasure looked like and he played a few notes. Fun! But O.M.G., it's going to be a loud, squeaky several years in a very very small house.

Here's another happy story: the high temperature today was somewhere in the low 70s. I'm smelling fall and the eminence of ski season.

The kids both had baseball games last night at the same time, at two adjacent fields, so I stood on the hill between the two with Roxy on her leash, able to watch either of my offspring with just a turn of my head. (By the way, E won the game ball for catching a pop fly and zipping the ball to 1st base to start a double play). I was at the highest point in the park, so I could look down and see the playground, and all of the ball fields with the lights just coming on, and the kids who were all colorful in their uniform shirts and white pants, and I could hear the crack of the bats and the shouts from the spectators and smell the air...I looked out at the horizon, which was blue, turning dark as the sun set, and saw rows of clouds off in the distance and listened to the laughter and shouts of all the children playing, and thought: Wow. This is so good. And it was.