There’s nothing like a day off in the middle of the week to perk you up, I thought.

Sleeping in. Finally getting that workout I had been too busy for for so long.

No more feeling old for me. Spring had arrived, I thought, and I feel perky and youthful. Besides the only alternatives to getting older are dying or getting that weird Hollywood-actress-Madame-Tussaud-wax-person-with-a-concussion look.

Face it, James Dean never got to sit in the middle of an orchestra hugging a cello vibrating madly with a roomful of music, which is pretty cool, as I discovered Wednesday evening.

I remember reading Meike’s blog years ago when she was writing about playing in an orchestra, and I wondered if I would ever be good enough on the cello to experience that.

And, now, eh, I’m not exactly good enough, but there I am in the middle of it. That’s pretty cool. I just play the bass part when things get fiddly. I gather that’s legitimate.

Anyway, I went outside and smelled the air and looked at the flowers.

I played with the tortoise.

Well, not exactly played. I was upstairs in my office and heard some bumping noise and thought the cats wanted in (they knock) and checked but it wasn’t them. Then I saw the kitchen door was open, and couldn’t find the tortoise and thought maybe she had staged a daring escape. I couldn’t find her anywhere. I even looked in the cellar, in case she had gotten frisky and tumbled down the stairs.

I found a book Gamma had been looking for under the kitchen bench.

I found the tortoise in the living room. She was trying to burrow through the door, she had been knocking on it with her shell.

What the hell, I thought, I’ll make a day of it: I called my haircut person and made an appointment. Not with her, she had the afternoon off. But with the new woman.

We negotiated my haircut, including safe word. She did a good job. She didn’t talk as much as my regular person. So, not being a conversationalist myself, it was a pretty quiet haircut. Buzzing and snipping, mostly. She asked me if I wanted my sideburns trimmed. I had just had a nightmare about my sideburns, where this guy was obsessed with their length, so I told her to go ahead and do whatever she wanted to them. So now I have medium, normal sideburns.

Then she said, “should I trim your eyebrows while I’m at it?”

“…,” I said.

“Uh…” I said.

“Cause, you know, you got a few long ones in there.”

“Sure,” I said.

When I got home, I couldn’t find the tortoise again. The kitchen door was somehow open again, so I looked in all the usual places — reception hall, billiards room, ballroom, gallery 1, gallery 2, kitchen, dining room, dungeon, torture chamber.

I finally found her in the library/music room, snuggled in a corner behind my cello.