Living Out Loud volume 25: Always learning

in ,

Christmas of 2008, Rich got me a gift certificate for guitar lessons. I still have the certificate but don't know a single chord yet, having never taken a lesson. My excuse was that in January of 2009 I got pregnant, which meant I slept the first three months and then had an ever expanding belly the next six months which made it hard to fit a guitar in my lap. And then we had a kid and ... well, guitar lessons haven't been a priority. Our newborn is now a toddler and has discovered that we have a guitar in the corner of the guest room. He now runs to it constantly and demands we play for him. Rich only knows three songs, and I swear if I hear Dust in the Wind one more time, that guitar is going to be dust in the wind.

This got me thinking about if and when I'll learn to play the guitar myself. My old boss Harry had a project (campaign? philosophy? all of the above?) called Always Learning. To paraphrase him, "what joy to awake each morning with so much to learn."

Rich and I were chatting about German intelligence in World War II (you know, like you do) and while I remembered who Turing was, I didn't know anything about the term Operation Overlord and had forgotten most of the statistics for Normandy. I'm sure I had a class on that at some point in my teenage years, but it's all completely out of my head so that it may as well never happened. I told Rich I could probably calculate a standard deviation with a little trial and error, but can't tell you when the War of the Roses happened. Maybe I should find a history book to peruse.

This leads me to our theme for Living Out Loud this month. Tell us something you've always wanted to learn. If you could go back to school, money and time not-withstanding, what would you choose? Is there something you'd love to master but haven't figured out the logistics of who will show you? Do you think you'll make time to learn these things soon or is it something you're saving for "when you retire"? A friend of mine is teaching herself to sew. Another friend has gone back to community college taking one class a semester for fun.

Details include:

  • Write something personal about yourself using the previous paragraphs as a guideline. Do not feel that you have to address each prompt above. The spirit of this project is to share something about yourself; I'm just throwing out ideas.
  • Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org. Remember, if you don't email me, I'm likely to forget to include you in the recap!
  • If you do not have a blog to host your story, you can email me the story directly and I will add it here as a guest post giving you credit. The more the merrier!
  • The due date for entries is Sunday, February 13th (the second Sunday of the month) at 5pm Eastern.
  • Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner. The winner will receive some sort of prize to be determined but all participants will receive fame and glory and a link on our Living Out Loud blogroll.

Note that the first Sunday of February is the Super Bowl and since our household has one HUGE Steelers fan (Rich) and one half-assed Packers fan (me) we'll be watching the game so I'm giving us all an extension til the 13th. So that gives us all a good two weeks to ponder our entries.

Remember, what joy to awake with so much to learn!