Getting it wrong.

''It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.” Tolkien

I do not often get fraught about living on an island..but I was yesterday. Nothing is more fraught making than watching a boat pull out without you when you have to be somewhere by a particular time.

My less than numerical ability has taken a rather extensive hike so even had we been on the correct boat I had unintentionally cut things finer than I like. Leaving on the later boat had Ditz as well as me stressing. You see it wasn't only the boat we missed. It was the train as well. We got to watch that pull out of the station too.

I know perfectly well that once this happens there is nothing I can do but that does not stop my stomach from tying itself in knots & my will urge the train to go faster than the Railways designate. It also gave me far too much time to fret about Ditz bursting out all over from the uniform we paid a small fortune for at the beginning of the year & which Ditz has worn exactly 3 times! Ouch.

All this for one hour in at QPAC; one hour where I got to sit in the foyer of the playhouse reading, a playhouse we might never have found if not for the luminescent orange of the Vocal Manoeuvres shirts. God faithfully delivered us before they'd quite given up on us & just in time for Ditz to go into the orchestra hall with the rest of the ensemble.

4.30 ~ 5.30pm is a reasonable rehearsal time ~ until you realise it takes us 2 hours to get in to town, & 2 hours + to get back out again, which is dinner time however you look at it. Ditz was ravenous. She is at that stage where she is always ravenous & constantly eating. Given she was a rather picky eater as a kid & we had just missed another boat [it was that sort of a day :( ], I had to find food, the faster the better.

Chinese take~a~way went some way to mollifying her that I had refused to drive into town & had made her take the train. [Liddy driving everywhere is spoiling her.] However it was cheaper for us to go in by train once I calculated fuel & parking costs & the peak hour traffic & the train station was, as advertised, directly opposite QPAC.

Ditz is extremely aware of the time & costs involved in lugging her round to all these things & remembers to tell me how much she appreciates it. That goes a long way to compensating for having to endure an hour of Ditz on the train hamming it up with exaggerated faces & voices. *sigh* What the other passengers thought doesn't bear thinking about but even a little contact with the performance arts sends Ditz into a lather of imitation. Yes, I know it's fun & a full carriage is irresistibly a captive audience but honestly!