... That's where I am right now. No particular reason, except my dial-up connection at home is really slow, which can be annoying sometimes. OK, all the time, but usually I just put up with it. So, I brought my laptop with me when I went to chorus rehearsal tonight, and am blogging from a nearby hotspot, wondering if people driving by me on the street think I'm weird. But honestly, this can be almost as frustrating, because even though I'm like 2 feet away from the hotspot, the connection seems shakier than me trying to walk in f!@&-me pumps. Anyway, my friend Amy from one of my sometimes-jobs wrote and told me that if I wanted her to visit my blog I'd have to write more, so Amy, this one's for you.

Yes, about chorus -- I used to sing in community choruses all the time, or a lot of the time, when I lived in Maine. Went through junior high and high school and college (both times!) singing, then after I got into the grownup work world, sang for a few years with a group in Bangor called the New Renaissance Singers. I think that was my favorite, because I found the music very, I don't know, evocative, or something. Anyway, it spoke to me. Or rather, sang to me. And it gave me my first (and only, except for one verse in a production of "Godspell") solo, in one of our concerts (I think it was in a piece called "Pavane") and my first (and only) paying singing gig, as part of an octet that performed somewhere locally that Christmas season. (That smaller group also performed at Cumstock Hall at the Theater at Monmouth -- be still my heart! What a gorgeous and prestigious venue! Amy, I know you must have heard of that place.) None of which is to suggest that I can actually sing. I can contribute solidly to an alto section most of the time, but I'm way too unable to project, and breathe in all the right places, to reliably solo.

So anyway, since a few years before I moved to NH, I haven't sung in any kind of formal group at all, unless you count the Band of Five during an alcohol-soaked gathering of TopFive.com contributors in Vegas in like '99. But that was hardly formal, and was barely a group, and I only did one song, and I thought I knew that better than I actually did, so we don't count that, but someday I will have to put vanity aside and watch the tape. I think I cut out the singing when I started working at UMaine in '93; not sure if that's accurate, and if so, why, unless it's just that it always made me tired and work started early the next morning. But in any case, once I moved to NH and became an independent contractor, the work schedule was too unpredictable, and my personal life too drama- and depression-ridden, for me to be able to carve out time for a choral group.

But now that I'm minimally employed, I've got all kinds of time! So I've joined the Hampton Community Chorale. And joy of joys -- we're even singing one piece I've sung before, maybe even with the New Renaissance Singers -- "Lo, How  a Rose E'er Blooming." (Tonight, we also sang another -- "Gloucester Wassail" -- although I'm not certain it will be permanently in our repertoire.) So that's nice, as is the fact that someone I knew from my previous life as a correspondent is in the group. The rest of the music also is lovely, although some of it is verrrrrry difficult, and/or in foreign languages like French (such as a piece that also has "Pavane" in the title, although it's not the same piece I solo'ed in) and German! My previous directors would always have us hum the melody first before making us add the words in foreign-language pieces, but this director does not do that, so I find myself defaulting to the English line, catching myself and having to force myself to look at the foreign line. So far, I'm enjoying it, and I told someone tonight that as long as I can afford to put gas in the car to drive up here, I'd like to continue with the group. In other words, kind of a week-to-week thing.

It's been way too long -- 12 years -- since the last time I donated blood. Used to do it regularly, often at the earliest bloodmobile available after I became eligible again. I started when I was 17, a good habit I'm thankful Dad instilled in me. As I became entrenched in the working world, the intervals between donations lengthened, but I never stopped completely, either catching a bloodmobile or going to the Red Cross Blood Center in Bangor.

I intended to continue it once I moved to NH, really I did, but various personal dramas and a brutal work schedule made it difficult to fit into my day. I did donate once, the first December I lived in NH, before driving back to Maine for the holiday. Since then, whenever I've seen posters announcing blood drives I would tell myself, oh, I need to remember that, but somehow never did, except for once. After 9/11, when there was such a push to get people to donate and such an outpouring of people doing so, I did try, at St. Michael in Exeter, but the line was long, and I was under a time crunch, and well, it just never happened.

Broke the drought today. There was a Red Cross blood drive at the beach, which you might think would be perfect for me, given how much time I spend there. But the drive only went until 4 p.m. (tip to the Red Cross -- schedule the drives later and get people coming off the beach, AFTER they've been swimming) and I had other things to do before I could go to the beach for *fun*, so I ended up making a special trip to give blood. No big. What it meant , though, was circling around a couple of times to look for acceptable (free, on-street) parking and, finding none, circliing around a couple more times scouting for acceptable (close to the bloodmobile) *metered* parking. A satisfactory one opened up as I was about to give up. Then I had to estimate how long it would take so as not to pump in more quarters than necessary. I certainly hope whoever gets my blood appreciates the effort. (Tip for the Red Cross -- validate parking!)

I call giving blood the poor woman's physical -- iron check, temperature check, blood-pressure check. The process is essentially still the same as it always was, with some technological advancements. I've failed the iron test sometimes in the past, and once or twice had to have my blood spun in the crit (I think that's what it's called) as a backup or whatever when it didn't float to the bottom of the fluid fast enough for their liking.  Now, of course, it's all digitized, and mine was 13-point-something, well above the 12-point-something needed to be eligible (guess taking myself out to breakfast wasn't such a bad idea, except maybe for my cholesterol).  My temp was 98.6 -- actually 98-point-freaking-6. I hate being so on-the-nose, but I like the '60s song. My blood pressure was 102/70, on the low side like I like. Despite my advanced weight (thankfully they didn't make me stand on a scale), I at least can continue to thumb my nose whenever Dad insists I should follow a high-blood-pressure diet just because he has to. But with those stats, I told the R.N. who processed me, I've never felt so bland. When it comes to giving blood, bland is good, she said, then launched into the excruciating series of questions about my health and, uh, let's just call it "history," that never fails to make me take stock of certain aspects of my life and end up feeling like I've wasted a lot of time -- now more than ever. Huh -- maybe there's another reason I've been avoiding these things.

That's the point where the poor woman's physical turns into the poor woman's therapy session. This time, I kept it down to one tissue, especially when the R.N., who was cool to commiserate with me instead of slapping me upside the head, related a personal tidbit of her own that put my own problems into perspective. Somewhat. That was a cool bonding moment.

But it wasn't all heavy. One of the other nurses was a dead ringer for Turk on "Scrubs," so I was enjoying that bit of eye candy, and joined in when he started singing along to "Maneater" on the radio. And there were a couple of cute younger men in the waiting area who actually acknowledged my presence without calling me "miss" (see the "call me ma'am" post). And of course, there was the free food and juice (the latter made me kinda glad I never had kids and  missed the whole juice box trend -- those things is complicated!). And on this occasion, there was a lovely view of the beach and, out the other window, better people-watching than I remember at other bloodmobiles. I told the staff they should have set up the cots on the roof of their little RV so we could catch a few rays while squeezing every few seconds. AND, they were giving away free Red Sox t-shirts.

It was after 5 before I got back to the beach for my more accustomed purpose. I wasn't supposed to get the needle stick area wet, so it's a good thing "swimming" to me usually just consists of "wading in up to my waist and letting the waves wash over me." But have you ever tried to do that and still keep your inner elbow dry?

Every time I hear this, I tell myself if I hear it one more time I'll scream.

This is me, screaming, after hearing it again tonight, a neighbor's reaction on the local news to a violent tragedy -- in this case, a double homicide in West Paris, Maine, very near where I spent my summers as a child. In fact, one of my best childhood friends spent part of her formative years there.

I'm tired of seeing people on the news after events like this saying something like, "This kind of thing isn't supposed to happen here." Often, they're people from somewhere else, somewhere more populous, somewhere with a higher crime rate, who came to these places thinking they could escape it completely. I'm tired of people thinking that moving to an area like Bangor or West Paris, Maine, or Exeter or Colebrook, NH, or Rushville freaking Indiana, will insulate them from the world's ugliness.

Here's a news flash: Ugliness is everywhere. The inner city doesn't have a monopoly on that. Beautiful, out-of-the-way places like Maine, New Hampshire and ... well, other beautiful, out-of-the-way places don't get a pass. Babies get cooked in ovens in Lewiston, Maine. Unstable people go on murderous rampages in Bangor, Maine, and across northern New Hampshire. (And some of those occurred in the '80s, even before the Intertubes!) Husbands kill wives, and wives husbands, and parents children, all over the place. Sure, the incidence might be lower here (hence, the higher crime rate where *you're* from), but we're part of the world, too. Violent crime doesn't leave a bag of burning dog poop on our front doorstep, ring the doorbell and run away snickering. It comes in, makes itself a sandwich and puts its feet up on the coffee table. Hell, sometimes it has a key 'cause it grew up here.

So if you're from, say, South Central Los Angeles, or Washington D.C., or Roxbury, Mass., and you're thinking it would be really nice to move to the greener grass, oh, by all means come. The air is cleaner, the sky bluer and water clearer. But just don't think for a minute that what you're trying to leave behind won't follow you over the rainbow.

"This kind of thing isn't supposed to happen here"? This kind of thing shouldn't happen ANYwhere.