Guess I'm committed now.

Prior to accepting this job three years ago, my schedule in the Navy and working for PSNS didn't leave a lot of time for extracurricular activities.  Taking a week or two off for hunting, and a long weekend or two for family trips was about it...there was certainly no need to fill my evenings with anything other than sleeping.

However, with the new job, I have all kinds of free time.  More than once twice 43 times, my wife has told me I need to find SOMETHING to do with my time...get some kind of hobby.  The garden takes up some of my time...but getting too involved in gardening feels too much like manual labor. 

Way back in the mythical time and place known as high school, I was involved to some extent in drama, enjoying the musicals in particular.  Since then, I have occasionally looked at local community theater productions, and said, 'You know, I should audition for that', a statement to which my wife has agreed.  Then, I never do.

Then, I saw that in this upcoming season, the Mid-Columbia Musical Theater Company(formerly the Richland Light Opera) is putting on a performance of Les Miserables, which is, hands down, my favorite musical.  I told my wife 'if I don't audition for this one, I'll never audition for anything', a statement to which she has also agreed.  I went as far as making my wife go see a production of one of MCMT's spring shows to help me size up the competition. 

So, now...the moment of truth approaches.  Auditions for Les Mis aren't until the end of October...but I figured if I want to do this right, I should probably have some sort of practice audition prior to the one I really, really want to do.  To that end, there are auditions for 'Into the Woods' at the end of August which would be my only real opportunity at a 'warm up' before the big one.  To do those auditions, I had to go to the music store today and buy a song book, which luckily came with two CD's of piano accompaniments so I can practice with the piano, which is different than singing along with a full CD of something. 

Now that I have spent actual hard cash(and more than I planned on) on this song book(which has like 40 songs in it, including the one I was going to do for Les Mis in a few months), I had better not bail out on this course of action.